"Storm Watch"

Newsletter of NZ1U – The Barnstormers Contest Group

"The Barnstormers News"                                                                        Volume 7 No.4, October 15, 2002

 

10 Days and counting… and working…and hoping…

October 26th is rushing upon us. We have had a few really busy weekend work parties and great progress has been made. As always, I begin to worry as the list still seems long. Add everyone’s busy work and home schedule into the mix and I begin to worry. My list was long and I still plan to complete all the projects as time goes by. I suspect we will have a small handicap for CQWW SSB but hopefully more will be completed by CW weekend a month later.

The 40 Meter 4-Square actually is progressing well. It will be nip and tuck whether we get this up for SSB. This will be a last minute finish but the cement has been poured, the Comtek box is waiting and we will see how we do. Just in case, we moved the 2 element Mosley back to the top of the windmill tower this weekend. We at least have an antenna we can rotate for 40M. The "Dallas" had to take a back seat for more important things but we have completed about 90% of the element work. The boom will be next. We have dug the hole for the cement foundation which will hold the mount for the new prop pitch.

The 20M rotor had to be swapped out and we put in a weak rotor. We will have to limp along with this for SSB and hopefully we can rebuild the old rotor and reinstall if the weather holds.

Multiband Dunestar Bandpass filters and Top Ten decoder has been added to Station #3.

New computers at every station.  All are Pentium IIs.

KB1H Packetcluster Node……..

This project robbed some of our precious time. We were forced to hurry as K1EA is taking down some of his node equipment as he builds a new house. We now have Internet backbone and also Internet access in the barn. We also buried a coax for cable TV but that is yet to be terminated. Thanks to everyone for help on this. I sent around a picture of the "Chain Gang".

 

CQWW SSB

Though I will try to send out one more newsletter before the contest, a few things here. The crew for the SSB weekend looks like KB1H, NB1U, KB1DFB, N1XS, N1BU, K1EBY, AA1CE, and KE1LI. Did I forget you and you plan on coming over? Please send me a note if so. We will be Multi/Multi again. Not our class but good practice. One of our goals will be to keep three chairs filled all 48 hours. We are trying to get Station #4 set up to be a complete station with amplifier. I suspect we can pick up multipliers on 10 meters Friday night from this operating position.

Of course I will have my goals set and a nice Excel spreadsheet to see how we are doing compared to last year.

As always we have to stress running QSOs. 10 Meters has been fairly good the last 3-4 weeks so there might be a nice European run in the mornings. I have not been keeping tabs on 15 meters. Anyone out there want to monitor 15 meters the next 7-10 days to get a feel what we should expect?

I will be ordering the Port-O-Potty for the month. We have also added a DVD player so bring your favorite movie if you like. We still have the old Sony TV though and RF knocks it off the shelf!

Get ready to kick some butt and better last years score!

 

http://www.qsl.net/kb1h/

I hope you have had time to check out the work Mark, NB1U, did on the web site over the last month or so. I am sure we will get nice comments from guest.

 

73 Dick – KB1H