Saturday, June 24, 2006

Field day 2006


Ending miles today 91978 - which means about 83 miles today...a guess since I don't know the starting miles, but I do know I drove to Burnsville and bought gas. 12.9 from Home to the SA at CR42 and CR11 according to mapquest.

After buying gas I headed down to the Field Day site for TCRC (Burnsville group). Their site is just north of Farmington on Hwy 3. Looked around there and talked to a few folks and decided to head out and get ahead of the weather over to Hastings (SEMARC group). Not too long after I got to Hastings it did start to rain and was able to put the bike under the shelter there. It rained a fair amount, but not a downpour and no hail...and just a few wind gusts.

Talked with KC0FMI, N0UC, KX0N, W0FH, WB0OND and a few others I've forgotten calls and names for.

Had a delicious bar-b-cue dinner, cake and coffee too. Got out of there when the rain stopped and headed home to find the skies clearing nicely! Took a few pics with the phone and need to get those posted.

No operating, but did listen in while some of the guys worked some phone anyway.

Oh yeah! Almost forgot ....put the HT on the bike today with a mag mount on a sheet of metal I fastened to the luggage rack on the bike's trunk. Worked great! Very little ignition noise. I once tried using the HT on my belt, but ignition noise was terrible and made it useless.

On the Larsen NMO-MM mount, I put a little quarter wave sort of dual-bander thing. I was able to fasten the holster for the FT-50 to the bike in a great spot that allowed me to view the display.

I ran the coax under the seat up to the radio. Initially, I tried listening with the speaker mic, but need more full audio response and more level without distortion at highway speed.
So I popped into radio shack and bought a cable so I could take the audio out of the speaker/mics headphone jack and pump it into my FM Broadcast modulator. I ususally use that modulator to play mp3s off memory sticks. It has a line level input and I used the new cable to connect from the headphone jack on the speaker mike to the modulator. It worked great! The audio over the bike's FM radio system was very easy to hear (though I need a mono to stereo adapter so it comes out of both speakers instead of just one!). I didn't use the radio to transmit, but did listen to 2m and 440 all day. Lots of weather stuff going on, so it was nice to be able to stay up to date with the weather nets.

Al...thanks for the antenna mount from the "GLV" goodie box! It worked great.

Only a minor issue..the stupid modulator puts out some garbage in the 2meter band (kind of all over), but was able to minimize that by picking the right frequency for the FM band and positioning the modulator properly.

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