09/01 – Recent Events

It has been a busy two weeks around the shack. I’ve been too busy to post but I want to update everyone and catch tings up before I get too far behind.

First we have a visit from tropical storm Fay who hit Florida a total of 4 times and just would’ t go away. It was a slow moving storm and dumped 25 – 20 inches on some parts of Florida. St Johns county activated their emergency operations center (EOC) and opened 3 shelters. I spent 7 hours handling communications form one of the shelters plus numerous other hours working the repeaters from home in support of the EOC. We had several of our ARES members that were activated and put in long hours. Everything went well and while we had damage from wind and flooding in the area things could have gone a lot worse.

Then this weekend my friend Doug (N4FPS) came over and helped me build a J-pole 2 meter antenna out of an old scanner antenna that I wasn’t using. I don’t have an antenna analyzer so Doug brought his so that we could tune the antenna and it turned out well.

We also hung an 80-40-20-10 meter trapped dipole up in the trees in my back yard. That was a fun exercise. We hung it as an inverted V with the legs running north and south. The vertex i sup at about 40 feet and the two ends are around 13 feet. It seem to be working well but I haven’t made too many contacts yet. I also put up a temporary mount for the J-pole and now I have two BHF radios in the shack so that I can monitor and work the ARES repeaters in St. Augustine and Jacksonville at the same time.

I may need that ability soon as hurricane Hannah is out in the Caribbean and headed this way. Current forecast has the eye hitting about 175 miles north of me but 5 day forecasts have a away of changing. Time will tell what Hannah does and Eric too (following in Hannah’s path)