Hello VHFers
You know the drill. It is Tuesday and you should be applying RF wax to
your feedlines to get ready for 222 Activity Night. This evening
promises to be a special evening for a bunch of reasons. Reason #1 is
that Terry, W8ZN will be at his remote hideaway in the hills of FM09 and
will be making noise with his 1500 watt Larcan amplificator. From
there, he can work the midwest as well as a fair distance down south
too. As if that was not reason enough for the East Coast & Midwest boys
to get on and make noise, I have it on good authority that W1ZC in Mason
NH will be on after a long hiatus due to water filling up his yagi
feedline . He has a new antenna and I am sure that he wants to work as
many stations as possible to check out the new antenna. Reason #3 is
that there may be a pile of plasma similar to what the ghost busters
were busting, heading for the Earth and it is scheduled to reach us late
this evening. My advice to all is to not give up at 9 o'clock, but hang
around in hopes of catching some aurora. I hear that there was an
aurora late Sunday evening. Not sure if it made it to 222, but the
latest stream is more lined up with the Earth, so please pay attention
this evening. I also hear that N1DPM has his new 222 yagi up on his
recently revised tower, and I am sure that Fred wants to make a few
contacts to check out his antenna. The return loss is so low on Fred's
antenna, that he is getting nose bleeds from it. So Tuesday is a very
special night it seems!
For my part, I need to get a 144 yagi up on some sort of pole so I can
monitor that band to check for auroras. I'll be working on that today in
between a few other VHF projects. I made some progress on my fallen 144
MHz tower that has been hung up in trees about 35 ft off the ground
since last Summer. I removed a largish white pine yesterday after re
routing a few guy wires, and managed to drop the whole tower so it is
now only 12 ft off the ground, and wedged against another huge white
pine. Now I can remove many of the cables, power dividers, and yagis
that were previously un reachable, and I can now saw up what remains of
the Rohn 45. That thing is UGLY!
There is another exciting bit of 222 MHz news for this evening, as KA6U
will be blazing away on 222 EME from North Dakota between 2300 and 0000
UT looking for contacts. Years ago, in the 1980's, I worked Ron K0ALL
in North Dakota on SSB meteor scatter and it was my easiest 220 MS
contact by far. We completed in under 2 minutes and the burst lasted
more than a minute. It was the largest meteor burn on 220 MHz that I
ever heard and it was over a 1300 mile path. Ron and I rag chewed on
that burn! Contrast that with today where we can get full calls and a
report on a 0.3 second ping using FSK441 or MSK144! I will be listening
skyward between 2300 and 0000 UT for another N Dakota QSO. EME on 222
is a hoot and easily done with two small yagis or one big yagi. I have
worked single yagi stations on their moonrise, so start thinking about
how you can add to your state and grid totals with EME. KA6U is now
traveling around the entire US with 144, 222, 432 and 1296 setups!
Gotta go. I hope to see many stations on 222 this evening.
73
Dave K1WHS
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