[TowerTalk] 80m 4Square Comtek box

[Jim Lux]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yo3ctk" <yo3ctk at alltrom.ro>
To: "Jan Erik Holm" <sm2ekm at telia.com>
Cc: "'towertalk'" <towertalk at contesting.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 5:34 AM
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] 80m 4Square Comtek box


> Jim,
>
> With all due respect, some people <have to> spend money on industrial
> products because they <don't have> enough time for homebrew, but at the
same
> time they want to improve their stations.
>
> I assume all your equipment is homebrew, including transceivers, and that
> you have learned <lots> of technical stuff in the process. Good for you.
> Alas, some of us are just "ignorant" appliance operators.
>
> 73 de Mike, YO3CTK

To combine a couple recent threads:

But Mike, I've been trying to convince my wife to let me fire up that
furnace in the back yard so I can smelt my own oxygen free high conductivity
copper for my "audiophile grade" Marconi antenna.   All you folks with the
factory assembled multielement antennas (out of aluminum, for gosh sakes)
should take a step towards returning to the one true method.  I'm also on
the track of some precision machined iron filings for my coherer, and I'm in
the process of negotiating a contract for a world class "tapper" who will
periodically tap it to keep sensitivity high. I'm also waiting for the STA
to come through for my damped wave transmitter.  That new-fangled Poulsen
arc is just not worth it.

But realistically... I'm much like Mike.  Not enough time to build things
from scratch, and I decry the lack of suitable building blocks for such
projects.  I'd love to have LDG make a specialized version of their high
power tuner that isn't a autotuner, but is a computer controlled LC network.
I'd love someone to manufacture reasonably inexpensive ($100) antenna
current probes.

I cringe every time there's some neat construction project idea in QEX or
QST and it starts out with "so I used this XYZ that I found at a hamfest 20
years ago".  Scrounging is great, but if you want new people to come into
the hobby and participate in the technical side, you need to provide a way
for them to do it without having to build everything themselves or spend
countless hours in surplus shops and hamfests.  I'll note that many of these
things are not available commercially at any price.

At least for microwave stuff, I can conceivably buy connectorized components
from any variety of vendors and "rack and stack" it.  Not so for high power
HF.