What is the voltage at the zorch point? You can calculate that by guestimating the electrical length of the antenna at that point and Id guess it is pretty high.
How about melting some polystyrene rod once you remove the moo goo?
Apparently, all I need to do, is
keep the damn thing dry. Last night, coming back to Houston from East of Shreveport, LA, I broke in with Grant/W4BVT and the Tron/WA1HLR and managed to carry on with those two from the Texas/LA state line until they signed. John/KX5JT broke in about the time the Tron was signing and Timmy said "I hear John in there, but your signal was louder than his is!"
I was a cool, dry night - 75m at 3.885 was awesome - I was running ~175w of carrier output and worked
WA1HLR in Maine
W4BVT in Virginia
KX5JT in South Louisiana
K4KYV in Woodlawn, TX, with compliments on the mobile signal, from all.
Don said he'd been listening to us for a while before broke in because he was working on some project, using both hands, but was listening for an hour or more. Tim and I are known for making buzzardly transmissions ;-)
~shrug~
Some days you're the bug...
Somedays, you're the windshield.
You give me an interesting idea, though, Carl...
Do you (or anyone reading) have a source for air-dux type coil-support rods? I think I'm gonna make my own, out of 10ga wire, space it at 6 t.p.i, make it 10" long and 6" in diameter.
Hmmm.. I think I found what I'm looking for...
#6160 COIL
The #6160 coil is 6 inches in diameter and is wound with 12 Ga. wire at 6 turns per inch. It is 10 inches long and will give excellent performance on 160 meters.
A 20 inch capacity hat and a whip at least 78 inches long will be required.
Operation on 75 and 40 meters will be possible but tuning oh the higher bands may be troublesome because of the excessive shorted turns.
Yup - sounds like what I need. Was gonna go with that, until I looked a bit farther...
LOADING COILS # 6160 Coil (80 - 160) --------- $300.00 (Special Order)
# 6160 Coil (80 - 160) --------- $300.00 (Special Order) http://www.maintradingcompany.com/main/page_texas_bugcatcher.html
Wowzers!
Back to winding my own...
anyone have a source for Air-dux style glass support rods?