The Mosely successfully hoisted to the top of the tower. No death to be reported, which makes it a success in my book. More to come later….
Operation “Don”t Thud” 1.0
How to Grow A Rohn 25G Tower PART 2
Welcome back! If you are reading this, you are either here intentionally or the Google machine sent you here by mistake. Either way be sure to sit down and strap in because this is going to be an exhilarating experience!
So my fancy book readings told me that due to the magical properties of concrete, you should build a box out of rebar and pour the concrete around it. Concrete has great strength in compression, but doesn’t have nearly as much strength when tension is applied. To remedy this, we add the magical properties of steel. Steel is STRONG in tension, so by building a box out of the stuff and pouring concrete around it, the steel takes the tension and “the crete” takes the compression. By putting some blocks/bricks/books/bills under the rebar cube, it will ensure that the box sits off the gravel base and no rebar ends extend out past the edges of your concrete cube. This is important so that moisture doesn’t rot away the rebar over the years, thus compromising your tower cube and possibly the tower’s structural integrity itself.
2018 Hamvention, ~Fin~
Well it looks like Hamvention just came to a close for the 2018 year. All prizes have been handed out, and all hams will start filing out of the building. Thanks to all of the DARA members that worked hard to put it on, everyone that attended, and to our OVEC members that were able to participate in the badge printing process to help fund the club for another year.
A special thanks goes out to our Vice President Ben, N8BD, for keeping everything moving in a forward direction and helping to resolve any issues that came up over the duration of the event.
HAMVENTION 2018!
Hey folks! It’s that time of the year again, and we are at it again printing badges to fund our club for this year’s events. Want your own custom printed ID badge? It comes with a picture of yourself on the front, two radio related logos, your name, callsign, AND a current copy of your reference license printed on the back! HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY SAY NO TO THAT?!
Come see us in the Flea Market for yours TODAY(and Saturday, and Sunday)!
73!
KD8FYT
How to Grow A Rohn 25G Tower
Well as with all flowers, spring is the best time to get them in the ground, and a Rohn tower is no different. You must make sure to plant no sooner than the final frost, or there is risk of your antennae wilting and falling off the tower.
Joking aside, we have lived in this house for 5 years and my Rohn tower has done nothing more than sit under the deck and collect more tower sections as I take other towers down. This is all well and good, but as an amateur radio operator I should probably have a place to put my antennas. So let it begin…
Repeater Live Feed Functional!
Well as with many things, getting the live audio feed from the repeater working ended up being a fiddly process, but it was a learning experience every step of the way. Feel free to check it out on the right side of this page!
The current setup is a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, with an older scanner feeding the audio into the Pi, and then being uploaded using DarkIce to the Broadcastify servers. This offers a pretty small physical footprint, with low power usage, and makes it relatively bulletproof. In the future I look forward to getting everything reconfigured utilizing a USB SDR receiver, which will eliminate the need for the external scanner and the required power, since the USB SDR stick will be powered off of the Pi itself!