Lots of antenna work this weekend.

Or at least the "ground" work laid.  I had always wanted to run coax from the office inside the house to the roof, to be able to use a couple of radios inside, as an alternative to the shack. This weekend I started on it, did the hard part by installing a little conduit in the office closet ceiling into the attic space. From there, its easy, we have lots of roof vents.


Here's part of the finished product:



What it looks like from the attic side, assuming it wasn't now buried with insulation, and a little silicone:




Self-portrait with fiberglass... there was only room to crawl in on my belly, the roof slopes sharply here.



All in all I ran three strings of RG-59... yeah, yeah, 1.5:1 minimum SWR, big deal! I had a free spool of it!

Anyway, One run for 2m/440, another for 900Mhz, and the third will eventually be for a very modest HF antenna of some simple design. At the moment, I have a 2m/440 mag mount temporarily stuck on top of the roof AC unit. Hope to put a dual-band ground plane on the 5' pole I mounted today. Also on that pole, I have a WA6VJB 900Mhz PCB yagi, enclosed in a "custom" freezer-bag radome. ;) I'm serious! But yes, its temporary until another good 900 Mhz yagi shows up. More information on this antenna can be found here. Its the 900 to 930 Mhz version.

Here's a crummy picture as the sun decided to split on me as I was finishing up :



It works, chatted with KD6WLY on his repeater on Santiago! He was able to inform me that I was putting -99dB into the repeater, some 56 miles away with my ~15 moto GTX. (I am NOT impressed with this radio, BTW. Crummy audio out of that little speaker, etc.)

In other antenna stuff, I started the 900 Mhz install into the old Explorer. HRO surprised me and had a very reasonable price on a Larsen High-frequency NMO mount kit. (Using their funny little FME fitting, I bought one N adapter, and one mini-uhf adapter.)

Always nice to have an excuse to buy a new hole saw!





I don't know, I don't think I can go into parking garages now. ;)



I still have to mount a Spectra on the transmission hump. Have to fabricate some brackets, and change the power wiring a little. I want to have a toggle switch between the radios (The Spectra, and a trash-picked 2m/440 Alinco) and the battery, so when the truck sits during the week, they aren't discharging the battery. Never investigated the Alinco, but I do know the Spectra draws a little bit of current when powered off.