My very own Military Radar Unit!!!

Tony KC6QHP was cleaning out his garage. This thing is missing its nomenclature plate, so who knows what it is. Probably not good for much except for an awesome Halloween yard prop, have to figure out how to run the positioning servos. Heavy as heck, needs to be lightened!

TRW swap meet report for 2/25/12

I was good, I only spent $21, here's $13 worth, a BC-610 coil and a box of FT-243 crystals.

Have a closer look, some of 'em are actually pretty good:



;)

Chino Hills swap meet report, 2/18/12

I wrestled a wave guide relay away from KN6VR before he could buy it. ;) That, and a questionable Rubidium oscillator for $35. Got some 900 Mhz stuff from 'RMJ. (PA, antenna, filter.) A few mystery attenuators.

A good test for my APRS tracker.

The GPS goes on the dash, the tiny trak, HT, and battery go in the passenger door cup holder. Got a little tiny MFJ 2m mag mount antenna. Thats the whole tracker system! Here was my busy day of driving yesterday.



SoCal has pretty darn good APRS digipeater coverage. You can see that from Chino Hills (swap meet, more later!) I like to backtrack the 71 back to the 60 to get back to the 57, hate the 91 traffic, even on a Saturday morning.

APRS tracker!

Got it wired up and running this weekend, need to either put it in the mobile, or in a back pack and do some moving around.

Desert Rats Ham Fest, Palm Springs, 1/28/12

I went as both a swap seller, and a SBMS microwave demonstrator. The latter got me an awesome parking spot. ;) The 10 Gig demo didn't go so well, I was not able to QSO with Mel up in Upland. However, it was certainly a sellers market, I probably grossed higher at this swap than any I ever sold at. Too bad I spent a lot of it at the 'fest. ;) Finally got a Bird 43 meter. Also picked up a  Byonics APRS tracker and GPS combo. Also got some badly needed RF adapters, a pair of UHF Moto Sabers that look very promising, and some more land-mobile junk that I hope to bash into a toy repeater (read: academic project) someday soon. Didn't win anything with my $20 worth of lottery tickets!

Sold my SX-99, the 4-1000 amp RF deck, and the biggest sale of the day was the DX-100B. Here's a couple pix right before it goes away, It felt as good selling this thing as it did the red truck. ;) Not that it was a pig by any means, its just heavy as hell and I've wanted to sell it for a long time. Too pretty for my junky collection!

Junior in the background in that last one, more:

Sorta silly I didn't take more pics there. Busy day. I've enjoyed this 'fest two years now, so I anticipate heading back next January. I volunteer myself to do some more thorough microwave coordination next year also!

Microwave radio parts at an unlikely place.

The "U-Pick-Parts" junkyard in Sunland. There's always Ford Exploders in there, and I needed a "new" plastic intake plenum-tube thing. After retrieving what I needed from a '94 that incredibly did indeed look worse than my '93, I figured I'd double back to where I saw a bunch of taxi cabs and look for radio bits and NMO antennas. Nothing. Saw a row of big-rig truck cabs.

One had a funny radome-looking thing mounted up high. I mean, really high, it was about 9 feet up off the ground. I got up under it and looked, and saw what I had hoped, Qualcomm! So this was what an omni-track looks like when its not in pieces in an old cardboard box at an SBMS meeting. ;)

So I moved a big truck wheel underneath of it, and held on to that spring thats on the back of the cab that holds the air brake lines, and removed the thing. At $17, it will be the most expensive one ever converted to Ham use! Fun convincing the cashier it was "just" a fancy antenna.

under that rotating antenna:

Now its starting to look familiar!