A week and a half after the Great Extraction and I still feel like someone punched me in the jaw. And kept punching. It would really feel great if that guy would run out of steam. Which finally he seems to be doing. I stopped the Vicodin last weekend and have been relying on my industrial-strength naproxens (that I normally take twice a day to relieve arthritis pain) to help me through this recovery. The bad thing about that is that I really DON’T want to be taking 500mg of naproxen four (or more) times a day — that shit is not good for my kidneys. But I guess in the very short term it will be OK, particularly if I keep hydrated.
The other thing was that, Friday night into Saturday morning, I seem to have developed a severe case of dysentery. We still don’t know what the hell I ate, but it ranked right up there with a colonoscopy prep.* Sorry, TMI.
Anyway that’s why I haven’t been writing much; I just haven’t felt like it. It’s been kind of a chore just to get through the days at work. I haven’t even felt like keying up the old 2 meters and yakking with the guys on 700. And even though my Yaesu FT-450D showed up last Monday, I’ve only gotten to getting it out of the box and hooking it up to the power supply to make sure it wasn’t DOA. (It wasn’t.)
I really don’t know quite what to do about an antenna. I could throw a long wire up in the trees, but I have to be careful about that; the path between the two best trees in the yard for that purpose crosses the path of my IPL service drop, so that’s pretty much going to be a non-starter. I could do a V-shaped dipole of about 120 feet in length between those two trees and a tree in the front yard, but the tree in the front yard will be lucky if it makes it through another winter.
Id est:
(The graphic is oriented with north at the top.) In theory I could put a multi-band vertical at the north-east side of the house because I can get above the neighbor’s tree there. (It’s not obvious from the picture, but those branches aren’t up very high.) Or I could run a ~120′ wire between the tree in the back and the tree in the front. Or I could ignore the chance of dropping the wire on the service drop to the house and put a long bent dipole between the tree in the back, the tree on the southwest, and the tree in the front (with the feedline connecting in the SW corner). The latter really doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, though — and not just because as a former electrician I have a strong and healthy respect for electricity. It’s just a dumb idea to hang wire where it could fall on other wire.
I guess I could ask the neighbor if I could put one end of a dipole up in his tree that’s practically on the property line. He’s a 25-year-old kid, he probably wouldn’t care.
Ah well.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll write about the 90-year-old WWII vet I met today.
EDIT 7/8: I just realized that the east leg of that triangle is about 120 feet long, not 60 feet like I was thinking it was. I really did not feel good last night. So technically, it looks like there’s enough space there to run something like a Hy-Power 3B4016L multi-band dipole along that line to get 40, 75 and 160 meters (I assume that the 75 meter portion is tunable to 80, but I’m just looking at how long the antennas are, not their technical specs). Or an Alpha-Delta DX-LB+ trap dipole that gets me 10, 15, 20, 40, 80 and 160 in 100 feet.
Of course Bobbi will probably tell me to throw a piece of #12 copper wire up there, tune it, and stop whining 🙂 And use CW instead of phone while I’m at it 🙂
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* Although generally I don’t vomit during a colo prep.
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll write about the 90-year-old WWII vet I met today.”
Do that.