Quite the AD today!

[Dave VK6KV]

Hi All,

We had quite the day today, despite the weather looking ordinary in the AM.

Jim came out and finished up the welding on our tower, it should be up for a good few years' more service.

Mark and I built and tuned a couple of "naked" 2m coax dipoles (aka, flowerpots, aka pogos). Managed to get a nice dip at about 146MHz, and at-or-below 1.5:1 across 144 to 148MHz. Using generic RG58C/U coax, we ended up with a smidge under 425mm of top (exposed centre dielectric), 430mm of full coax to top of coil, and 9 turns on a 55mm long piece of 25mm PN9 retic pipe (approx 34mm outside diameter). I made mine with about an 8m tail, Mark decided to put a 10cm tail and BNC female on, then made up a 10m BNC male to PL259 male "extension" feedline cable out of RF200 low-loss coax. He's going to revitalise his 10m pogo, and terminate it with a short tail too, so he can use the same feedline cable and just change the antenna on top for different bands.

We lit up the newly donated IC761 and found that most of the front panel functions appeared to do their thing, but as it fairly typical of these rigs, the vacuum fluoro VFO display was out of service, so no way to know what the frequency was. Probably worth going through looking for swollen elecros and checking a few rails on the display/logic boards. Fortunately we have the full service manual.

I showed off the Ham College inspired DTMF decoder teaching tool - everyone agreed it was a great idea for demonstrating what we mean by "remote control".

And right near closing time we were graced by a visit from Mike, a former resident/caretaker of the operators' cottage in the 80s/90s who had many good stories to tell. I sincerely hope we get to see and hear more of Mike. He's been researching not just Wireless Hill history, but also as far back as Telegraph in the 1880's from Perth to Broome and on to Java, Singapore, Malaysia and the world.

Cheers, Dave VK6KV