My new shack ... ready for rock'n roll

My spotter is up and running and uploading to RBN. So far only only on 20m and 15m. I will add more bands. Using a RSPduo with CWskimmer. Really a nice small receiver. Antenna is another EFHW, 40m long. So I have now two. One for the tranceiver and one for the RSPduo receiver.

I have two 40m EFHW starting at the same pole and using the same pole as counterpoise. They are almost perpendicular to each other and on 12m height. Some stations I hear on any antenna with the same reading, others are on one S5 on the other I hear nothing at all. >>next post

This confirms the sharp lobes in the chaotic radiation pattern on the higher bands. When I tramsmit on one antenna, I can use the other as receiving g antenna for my SDR receivers. Surprisingly the two antennas are well decoupled despite the shared counterpoise. >> next post

100W transmitting is about -10dB on the receiving side. (S9+60dB). This is strong but not a thread to the receiver. I made a switch-over, with an ordinary power switch, which allows me to swap the antennas between tranceiver and sdr.

Done with the concept work. I decided to mount the yagis on my landrover so I can drive to the beach and take advantage of good ground gain. The antennas are in aluminium the rest is PVC piping.

Retro style is fun

youtu.be/QQiGvN0DC4k?fe…

My homemade tower is almost finished. It will reach a height of 20m. All works are done by my welding trainees who started their course just 2 month ago. Next will be the antenna. A 4 element 5 band quad. A real monster, occupying 9x9x9m space

youtu.be/JIQirQORJ_A?fe…

The tower is at his final place and cranked up

One element of the quad is up. 4 more to go. After several failed trials for the spreaders I finally use two parallel PVC pipes, wrapped with cotton gauze, soaked in epoxy, then painted. Now strong enough and will survive the Mombasa sun for a while.

Modifying my analog and manual rotator controller so that it can connect to the log4om logging software.

After a long period of rain, finally a sunny day and half of the antena is up.

A customer peeped in my shack. ... "What is this here?" ... "From here I control all the nuclear launches" ... "ooh, wow .... we have that in Kenya?" ... I hope I do not get deported.

I learned CW mainly in the army and therefore used to write all down. Tiresome, I learn head-copy now. Single words no problem, even at 35, but can't keep several words in my head. I therefore made this small app to slowly increase the number of words.

Now as the quad antenna is soon ready .... here the other 10dB gain. Almost ready to switch on .... and hopefully not roasting too many transistors until its stable. The cooling system is a bit unconventional 😂😂 ... I had to use what is available on Aliexpress.

My Power Amplifier is complete and working. Did not yet find the courage to go to the limits. The DC supply stands on the floor. All info about the amplifier status is on an external display on top of the tranceivers.

Say again that HAM radio is for the rich ... 70$ tranceiver, 30$ key and 40$ EFHW antenna. With 4W from Kenya heard all over Europe and even 12000km WZ7I. One CQ call and already in a pile up .... CW is king ...