The Ek’s Files

It’s makin’ me wait…

Sorry–couldn’t resist.

I’m anticipating a lot of things right now. Mostly, I’m longing for warmer temperatures and longer days. For a lot of reasons. Many things are on the workbench, waiting for meteorological conditions to be more favorable.

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Anyone who’s been reading this blog (and I can probably count that number on one hand) knows that I’ve been thinking about a new (to me) antenna design. Being in a covenant-restricted neighborhood, I can’t erect a permanent obvious-looking antenna. But the neighborhood covenants are not extremely restrictive, I have nice neighbors, and there doesn’t appear to be any actual HOA that actively searches for covenant violations, so I figure I can get away with an antenna with a reasonably small visual footprint that I only put up when I want to play radio. To top things off, I have no trees or other readily available antenna supports, so whatever I end up using must be free-standing. The obvious choice, at least to me, is a vertical antenna.

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I have a couple of things on the workbench right now (at least mentally, if not physically). First, since so many of you like to use my digital setting circles project with your Palm OS PDA, I’m investigating how to make my Palm T|X (with the Palm Multi-connector) work with either my digital setting circles or my serial sender (part of the GOLog project). I found some connectors for the T|X at www.gomadic.com, but my interface circuits require some modification to work with the T|X (because the T|X uses 3.3V TTL-like signals for serial communications, but my interface circuits use 5V). Stay tuned–I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I’m also working on a new vertical HF antenna for the ham shack. Hopefully, it’ll cover 10, 15, 20, and 40 meters and be less than 13 feet tall. I’m investigating using coax traps for 10, 15, and 20, and maybe a linear loading scheme for 40. It’s kinda slow going on this one, but stay tuned if you’re interested.

Don’t forget, you can subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed at http://blog.eksfiles.net/?feed=rss2. This’ll make it easy to find out when I post about any progress on these projects.