In March 2020 I was told that everyone would work at home for a couple weeks to help stop the spread of the Coronavirus. I set up my computer and a spare monitor on the kitchen table and my daughters had their school computers on either side and we all worked together. A couple weeks turned into a couple more and a couple more. Eventually the school year ended. My wife suggested I get an old computer cart we had in the basement and put it in our bedroom and work from there so I could close the door when I had meetings so it would be quieter for me. After a couple months working from that location I was presented with the option to just work from home full time. I signed up for a time to go into the office and cleared everything out of my cubicle. Using some 2x4s and laminate shelving I built a workspace in the basement. To do this I had to disassemble my radio area. However moving everything into my new workspace I was able to move the computer cart back downstairs and use that to set up my radio again. This arrangement is much nicer than the card table I had been using.
Sometime in April (I think) I also bought a new radio! I had been saving a little each paycheck and finally had squirreled enough away to buy a new Icom IC-7300. I also had been waiting for the annual Spring rebate. I was finally able to return the Kenwood TS-130SE I had been borrowing.
Just the other weekend I good advantage of some excellent weather to modify the 20m dipole I installed in my garage to add legs for 10m and 6m to convert it to a fan dipole. I also raised the feed point to the top of the roof to make it an inverted-V as I had originally intended. It tunes up nicely on 20m, on 10m I have to adjust the one capacitor as I move up the band even switch inductors but can tune the entire band. Six meters is proving a bit more problematic. It is such a wide band with 4 MHz of breadth compared to less than 1 MHz for the entirety of the 20m band. The online inverted-V dipole calculator I used shows a total difference from the bottom of the band to the top of the band of only a couple inches of wire. I cut it for 52.000 MHz but, ironically, find that around that frequency, as well as one other spot, I cannot get it to tune lower than a two for SWR. I think that I may have to get myself a birthday present this January and purchase an LDG IT-100 automatic tuner.
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KA0SQL
KA0SQL 