Alright, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Sorry. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing things though. First, there’s been christmas, my birthday, and a whole bunch of other stuff that gets stuffed into winter break. Then there’s the start of the new quarter. Some new ham radio stuff that’s been going down. The aquisition of a dog. (doesn’t that sound formal.) Anyway, there’s more than enough for a fairly extensive blog post. So quit your whining about me not being around, and paying attention to you. I’ve got a dog to do that now.
Winter break was good. I did pretty well in my classes, but it’s always nice to have a little vacation from them. I turned 21 over the break. Nothing special there. No party, etc. I know. I’m SOOOO boring. The girl and I went on a little two day get away to Leavenworth. That was pretty fun, however, there was dissapointingly little snow… I managed to come out of the gift season with some new camping gear, a wii, and a motorcycle. All of which have been / will be quite useful / fun. After the break I went and took the written test for my motorcycle endorsement, which means I have three months to take the driving test. Here’s a pic of me on the bike taking her for our first ride.
The new quarter has treated my pretty well so far. I’ve got a fun ESS (Earth & Space Sciences) class where we’re building rockets, then taking them down to Black Rock, Nevada to shoot them off during spring break. The goal for this quarter is 20,000ft and Mach 2. I’ve been primarily working on the antennas to go into the rockets. (One of the rockets is to be made of carbon fiber, which is somewhat conductive, which poses interesting problems in using a radio transmitter inside the tube.) I’ve also been working on upgrading the ground control system as the current one has a few issues in stability and power output.
The girl and I got a dog. Her name is Buggy, but I just call her Bugs. She’s a chiwahwa / terrier mix, and I know what you’re thinking, but she doesn’t bark hardly at all and is very well behaved. Those were my requirements in getting a dog. Somehow the girl managed to find one that magically fit those. We adopted her after she was brought to Seattle to save her from a kill shelter in California.
No, the lump on her head isn’t cancer. The vet checked it out, and said that it’s just a fat deposit and she was probably born with it.
I’ve been increasingly exploring some of the interesting things that you can do as a HAM radio operator besides chatting with people from varying distances. Lately I’ve been exploring satellite communications. There have been groups of HAMs that will put together a small satellite, and get NASA or some other country’s space agency to put it up on the cheap. These satellites act like normal ground based repeaters, which allow someone to talk on the repeater’s input frequency, and the repeater will re-broadcast it on the output frequency. This allows people to talk to people from distances they wouldn’t normally be able to reach. In the case of a satellite, if the conditions are right, and the satellite is passing over the right areas, you can cover the continental U.S. These types of communication offer interesting challenges in terms of signal strengths and antenna designs. My normal antenna has not been performing very well for this and I decided to build a new antenna that would suit this situation better.
I chose to use a Yagi / Uda antenna. Yagi and Uda refer to the names of the two guys who originally designed the type of antenna. The design focuses the radio waves in one direction, giving you what’s called “gain.” This means that you have a better chance of reaching your target, and you have a better chance of hearing them as well. Anyway, I needed to cover both the 2 Meter band and the 70 Centimeter band with the same antenna, so after some searching on the internetz for ideas (http://www.mydarc.de/df8gh/modejbyagi.htm), and a lot of time with some modeling software, I managed to turn this…
…into this…
If you want to know more about this specific build, I plan to put up a page about it’s info and construction in the projects section here pretty soon.
Anyway, that’s what’s been going on. Hope it was worth the wait.
Diggin’ the bike! Just be careful, we’ll need you to save the planet later… :)