The Ohio Valley Experimenters Club

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…

Step one when building a tower is finding a good place to put it. I did that, so step two is DIGGING A HOLE.

Now there are 3 main ways to dig a hole in the crust of our planet, but the most efficient one is to rent a backhoe and pay a man or woman to do it for you. Well I am cheap and slightly overweight, so the next best way is with shovels and a lot of hard labor. I dug this hole over the period of a year. I dug half one day in August of 2017, and the other half today!  Shovels opted for were a round nose, square nose, and a non-shovel, the “spud bar”. Little known fact of the spud bar, it will destroy you. A few hours of using it to bash rocks, and break dirt will turn even the manliest of men into a crying toddler, much like myself. That aside, your manly essence after using one of these things will waft through the countryside, meaning all the single ladies will be bangin at your door. Married men look out, you’ll have some splainin to do… read more

Well with a little bit of free time on my hands I decided that it was time to move to the other side of the basement and set up a much more well organized and layed out shack/lab space for my projects.

The bench area has been my first area of concern, mostly so that I can secure comms and music before anything else. Without comms and music, working in the shack is a rather boring prospect. To hold me over, I have the trusty Motorola Radius SP50 mounted to the bench  so that the club repeater can be actively monitored. My bookshelf speakers and monitor have been mounted to the wall an effort to keep the bench as clean as possible. The bookshelf speakers obviously supply the music.

A shelf has been mounted under the bench in a continued effort to keep the top of the bench as clean as possible. The shelf houses the audio amplifier which drives everything from the computer audio/radios/turntable into my speakers, and keeps wires off of the floor. read more