I got excited today and moved the tribander, improved its radial situation, made it work so much better and found out why it became a dummy load. The 1:1 balun I had on it to stop rf in the shack on 10m was full of water.

It went from having 1 wire radial each for 20, 15 and 10m, to having 4 horizontal aluminium radials 2.5m long each and 4 wire radials 5m long each.

I am not so worried about 15m, the 40m quarter wave does a great job there, but getting 10 and 20 working better is the aim here. Under 2:1 swr would be fine enough. The 20m radials are not optimized yet, so the plot will change somewhat mostly i am trying to improve the 20m situation.

And here is the final business. Its not super high in the air, about 5m to the base of the antenna, but its good enough until I can build a tower that will support and rotate a yagi, The vertical will end up becoming a 2 element yagi, I have the traps already thanks to a mate.

And just to prove its working, the RBN plot.

So yesterday I got back into programming the control software for my home brew rig. One thing that I needed to tackle, among all the other things I got done, was to display and format the VFO frequency. Now anyone who has used some of the original authors code and or a derivative of the various Arduino VFO’s you can find on the web, will know that how they format and display the frequency as say 7.000.230 is not very readable. In fact, it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to work out which digit is being divided down for and what the remainder is to be displayed. So I set about to doing this my way so that my display code is much more readable and that it was obvious which digit was being calculated and displayed.

So, I created a function that takes two parameters and returns the remainder. N is the digit to be split off the number and int_ToSplit is the actual displayed VFO frequency. So if the VFO was 7,125.000 and you wanted to know the digit in the thousands column, all you have to do is Do_SplitInt(3, 7125000), where 3 is the 4th column from the right, C being every count starts at 0 and all.

From here its just a matter of wrapping it up in a sprintf call and using some variables and the actual formatting when using a TFT display where you have to give X and Y coordinates to position each number becomes rather trivial.

Geepers creepers batman, its been nearly a month since I have posted anything here. Its not that I have not had plenty to post about, its just I have been so busy with stuff around here that I have not even thought about posting anything.

So, here was dinner, chicken pot pie with greens in garlic and butter. I pretty much grew all the vege in the garden and made the puff pastry from scratch. Cooked the pie in the fireplace oven for that firey goodness LOL.

Well hope to get back to posting about better things than this, when all I have been doing is painting walls and renovating the bathroom after discovering the shower was leaking. So regrouted the shower floor and sealed it, ripped up all the floor tiles and now am waiting on new flooring to arrive to lay. The joys of home ownership LOL.

Piece out.

This guy has been very hard to photo. Satin bower birds are kind of secretive and do not like being close to people. This guy has his bower in my neighbors yard, he has been coming to the figs for weeks to feed, but have not gotten a better picture than these.

The plants are powering on.