On the Air--Finally

Finally, our guests from Minnesota have left for their trip back. We had a couple of hours this afternoon to scope things out, so we started to explore the possibility of putting up an antenna for my ham radio. I was also able to find a door in the bedroom with a large enough gap to get the coax through the closed and locked door. This is very important, because we need to keep the mosquitoes out. One side of the apartment is all screened windows and the screens are integral to the window frames. Short of drilling a hole in the window frame, there was no way to get out that side of the apartment. The other side had greater promise: two balconies with screen doors leading to the balconies and just enough gap at the side of the door to let coax through. Additionally all of the windows have heavy bars across them so we can use the bars to anchor one end of the antenna.I paced off the distance between our balcony and the next building and it was just about right to put up a wire antenna across the gap. We had to get a ladder and open a 100 lb hatch door on the adjacent building but got one end of the wire up on a vent pipe. The other end attaches to the balcony railing on our bedroom. We got all that up and what should pop up in the middle is a 20' tree. (Who put that there?) After much pulling from the ground and the balcony, Dale, Caleb and I got the antenna over the top of the tree. The mini-G5RV fits exactly between the two apartment buildings with 2 feet of clothesline at each end. I had to set up in the master bedroom but it doesn't really interfere with the rest of the room since there is already a chair and table at that end. I will put up pictures in a couple of days.

Now I needed a 12 volt power supply to power the radio. Low and behold, there in pantry was a combination car battery booster/air compressor. It has a small 12 battery that is trickle charged from 110 Volts. I clipped my power cables to the booster and voila we have a complete radio system using things we found in the pantry: 20 meters of clothes line and a battery booster. I made one voice contact with VU3WIJ in India and turned things off to charge the battery.