I was looking for some pictures I had and in my searching I came across these videos I took back in 2009 during the ARRL June VHF QSO Party, from my family’s place in EN39 - Nestor Falls, Ontario, Canada.

Aurora opening EN39 June VHF QSO Party 2009 – SSB

Aurora opening EN39 June VHF QSO Party 2009 – CW

The story behind these videos is I was working the June VHF QSO Party (one of the biggest VHF contests, if not THE biggest, of the year). Obviously I was trying to rack up as many contacts as I could during the contest period. I heard a 0 station calling and tracked his grid square to central Minnesota. Now, from where I was up in Canada he was DUE SOUTH of me. So I hit the rotator and put my antennas due south. The crazy part – his signal was GONE. NADA. Nothing. I thought I just went crazy. So I re-checked my findings and spun the antennas back around where they were before. His signal came back. Well, I sat there and let the antennas go around more.

Guess where his signal strength peaked?

His strength peaked OVER S9 with the antennas DUE NORTH!

OK, so how can that be? I know the location of the station I am listening to is due south of my QTH but I can’t hear them with my antennas due south… yet when the antennas are due north I can? I’ve never heard anything like this before, or since.

I am an avid VHF’er. During this same contest I worked a west coast station AND an east coast station, back to back in the log, and more surprising – they were both on the same frequency. I pointed one direction and got the one guy then spun the antennas 180deg and got the other guy. Pretty cool!

This is the kind of stuff that really intrigues me with Ham radio. Its awesome – in the most literal sense of the word.

Please see EDIT below.

I have received several QSL requests from my trip to EN39. If you are reading this and have not received a QSL card yet DON’T WORRY! Any QSL request I have received with an SASE will be returned.

I am re-configuring my card. In the past I have made a card unique to the trip in which the contact was made. I have decided to bulk-order cards this round so I don’t have to worry about making them any more. This will be a more “generic” card than in years past.

As of this writing (29 July 2011) I am just about ready to send out the file for a proof print. If all is good I will go ahead and have the bulk order run. Once I receive the cards I will fill them out and send them according to the cards/SASE’s I have received.
Thanks for your patience!

If you are yet to send a card/SASE – I am good on QRZ. I look forward to confirming our QSO, provided I have logged the contact.

EDIT:

I received my order of cards 9/1/11! I spent an hour or so filling out cards this evening and will begin sending them out tomorrow 9/2/11. Thank you for your patience!

I have been hard at work on a new mobile install – this time a 2011 Ford F-350 with the 6.7L engine. A few pre-post notes: the truck is VERY quiet on HF (with a resonant antenna), the install has been quite easy, and I am pretty happy with the results thus far.

I am in the process of making a new mount for my screwdriver antenna and I need a better face plate mount. When I get the last two items done I will post up. In the mean time I will start the process (LONG process) of typing the post.

Floating in the lake:

MVI_8335

If you didn’t find the video link above already – click on it.

I’ve used Pelican cases now for a couple years and they’re GREAT! I’d say this one loaded up weighs between 80 and 100lbs and I bet I could still sit on it with it floating.  We were packing up the boat heading home from my Canada trip and I couldn’t resist throwing it all in the lake.

For those that are familiar you know I have operated over several years in the past from my family’s place in Ontario, Canada. I missed out on going last year but I am headed back again this year!

Please see my last trip report (combined with Field Day) back in 2009. There are also a couple reports I did – Operation “Red Buoy” and Operation “Red Buoy 2″ while I was there. I will have to get there and see if the “red buoy” is still my internet hotspot. If not, no worries. I’ll just rough it for a few days.

In past years I have run all 3 bands - 6m, 2m, and 70cm. However, the bulk of my contacts has always been on 6m so this year I am simplifying things and just running 6m. I will also have some HF gear, but in terms of VHF I will be pretty much confined to 6m this trip.

This years trip will be July 2-10, and having a radio on the air from the 3-9 as I have time. You can catch me on the following frequency ranges:

SSB – 50.125 to 50.150, unless the band is crowded I may creep up to 50.200

CW – 50.080 to 50.100

PLEASE pass this along to anyone and everyone that has some VHF interest. I always enjoy the pile ups.  

See you on the band!

I read a couple articles in the recent (Jan 2011) QST Magazine that I found note-worthy and figured I would post up here again to brush the dust off of my blog. I really don’t have much time to post these days. Actually, I don’t have much time to think about what to post about.

Topic 1:

There is an absolutely FANTASTIC article in the “Getting on the Air” section of QST called “Feeding a Balanced Antenna with Coax Cable”. I have talked so much in the past on balanced vs. unbalanced feed lines, tuners, and baluns. This article is one of the better ones I have read – and I learned a bit myself as well.

One thing is for sure with Ham radio – you can never learn everything. There are so many “big pictures” to be broken down in to the puzzle pieces that are the makeup of those pictures that learning is a never ending process. A great place to start understanding feed lines, balanced antennas, and baluns is page 61 in the January 2011 QST. It doesn’t tell you everything, but from everything else I have learned this article brings in a whole bunch of puzzle pieces for a pretty good overview in understanding what is going on by using the classic dipole-fed-with-coax model (haven’t we all see enough of that example? NOPE!).

Topic 2:

Bringing up one of the inherent problems with getting newcomers in to the Ham radio world, Eric KL7AJ depicts an interesting approach to snagging the interest, and holding it, in his article “Put the Mad Scientist Back Into Ham Radio.” A note-worthy idea Eric presents is to “scare” people, lets think the younger generations here, in to getting some excitement out of Ham radio. As Eric puts it as the article begins – “In our day, it was our job to create emergencies. The new EmComm oriented hams are intent on “fixing” emergencies”.

Within the context of the article – when was the last time something “bad” happened in an “experiment”? I, for one, have ”let the magic smoke out” of a few things – one of which being the multi-meter I blew up with over 1000 volts. All those experiments lead to a more thorough understanding, and when one goes awry I ask the question “why” and try to reason what I can to fixing the problem, or better yet – preventing it. What better experience than to experience it? Of course, there are lines that should never be crossed (IE, be careful and don’t do things that are really dumb where you will most certainly be hurt or killed).

In addition to Eric’s perspective a lot of what I think about in relation to Ham radio is why things work to begin with. Most of what I get myself in to doesn’t have much risk, let alone a problem to begin with. I don’t need that risk to experience thrill. My thrill is connecting the many dots of theories and knowledge to paint a picture. I seem to find myself lost in scattered dots, and segments, so the more connections I can bridge to tie more of the dots and segments together the better off I feel. The icing on the cake is bridging a connection and making something actually work.

This brings me up to topic 3:

An interesting perspective I have on the world today is the lack of understanding, or care of understanding, that seemingly a lot of people possess.

One quote I have and use, and you may have seen it posted other places, is:

 ”To truly solve a problem you must first understand the problem.”

OK, so lets break it down. Identify the problem. What is the problem? Something that isn’t happening or doing what it is supposed to. So what are the causes? Here is where most people stop.

How are the causes of a problem resolved? Well, you have to understand them to know. That brings me to the key to my 3ord topic – one must ask the question “why”.

To truly solve a problem you must first understand the problem. Can you see how many ways a problem can be broken down? Think of a connect-the-dots session shaped like a pyramid – made out of lines and dots that arrive at the top to a singular point, or should I say, the “main idea” or “big picture”. This is an identical model to the composition of a problem solution. Starting at the base, and you can dig as deep as you want here to as many details as you want, you find every singular component of the workings of something. As you move up the “pyramid” you combine the segments of the workings of other bigger details and you eventually understand the major components/functionality of something.

Most people start at the top of that pyramid and burn out as they try to work down, some never jump past a level or two. Again, the key component here is the “why” question. It leads to endless segmenting.

This is all just a big process, or model. As weird as you may see me being, I love the question “why”. If something sparks my interest and I have a desire to understand something, even if there is no problem to begin with, I will ask “why” until I satisfy myself. Well, sometimes I don’t satisfy myself – I just build some clusters of segments and store them away to tap later.

Getting back to electronics, Ham radio, and the modern world - the greatest gift Ham radio has given me, and for which I am so engrossed in it, is it is a perfect environment to grow clusters of how things work. Go to a university and, not that there aren’t any, find the engineering students that have a medium, of some type, to apply what it is that they are learning, or have “learned”. How many people can you find? What is their background? What interests did they have as a kid and can you environmentally piece together why they are where they are? 

Being a college graduate myself, not in engineering, and after being in an industry for nearly a full year now, I see two surrounding perspectives of sitting in a ripe environment to explore and build segments:

The first perspective is beneficial as it allows me to dig deeper than most people ever would in my industry. There is a lot I have figured out, and a lot of it is also just a redirection of what I have previously known to a new area. It is a two-way street. I can apply what I already know asking the “why” question to bridge clusters of segments and I can ask the “why” question even more to learn new things and build new segments.

The second perspective is negative, and this touches on the modern world part of the equation, in that the “why” question is not embraced. To put that another way, I see the majority of people aren’t very open to questions related to the workings of things. There is a threshold a lot of people have and once you hit that threshold and surpass it, whether in knowledge or they just don’t want you to know, they close up. That makes it hard to get a thorough understanding of how and why certain things are. On top of all of it – it makes it very difficult to solve a problem.

With the key to my 3ord point being the “why” question, the “big picture” to my 3ord point is this:

You have to have the state of mind to build your understanding off of. It is a continuous building cycle. The more you experience and the more you ask the “why” question the more questions you’ll have and the better understanding at which you should, eventually, arrive. If you don’t have the state of mind to think through that process you will never gain an understanding. It has to make sense, partially, enough to provoke asking a “why” question directed towards what you don’t understand in an effort to understand it. I think most people loose interest very quickly.

If all we do is continuously evolve in technology to where we are expanding beyond what once was we loose the background and the reasoning as to why something is. How many devices do we have today that are throw-away’s – as in if it quits working we throw it out? What about those devices that if it quits working we hire someone else to fix it? If a device is truly a throw-away,what got  us to that point? What about those devices that are not throw-aways? Your vehicle for example. If it needs an oil change, what do most of us do? On the other side of the equation, how do you know it needs an oil change, or do you know?

I know – program a computer and a sensor to tell you!

Why can’t you know yourself?

Have you ever asked a question to try and solve a problem when there are people that know, somewhere, but after searching the only one available to ask the question to, and that person should be a higher level than what is normally attainable, ignores the question and shifts the topic of discussion because they don’t know? I think most people would never experience that (not including school or any other environment where, if you ask enough people, you hit the one that knows) because most people don’t have the ability to get to the point where they have the state of mind to ask the question in the first place.

In my example, which I won’t detail here because it really doesn’t matter, I solved a problem after everyone within my industry I asked questions to (I had lots of them, naturally) zipped up tighter than a drum or ignored the questions. My guess is none of those I asked knew, they just didn’t say so. Those that did know were in a ”black box” and, no matter how many people I went to, could not get in to the “black box”.

I guarantee 99.9999% of the very few that have questions rejected on that level give up the process – whether that is hiring out the work or throwing out the scenario in which the problem is present and replace it. Ham radio taught me otherwise – it is a constant learning environment where questions are asked, answered, and those that aren’t readily answered are researched, possibly experimented, until there is an answer. It is the outside-the-box thinking.

If more people carry the same perspective on understanding there are a lot of things in this world that would work much better. Of course, most people don’t have the state of mind. I bet video games, being on the computer all the time (gaming, facebooking), watching movies, and partying (some drinking too much) are great outlets to further the thought processes of our kids. Some may make us more well-rounded people, but they don’t kick-start the problem solving model (the pyramid model I mentioned earlier).  The further technology advances the more we loose the basics that created those technologies in the first place. How are people to be effective problem solvers if they don’t know the background and don’t have the state of mind?

I was on the road for a couple hours today on a work trip so I fired up the HF and played around a bit. I noticed when I first flipped the rig over to HF my noise floor (on 20 meters) was about S3-S4 when it was low, dropping beyond that occasionally. However, the noise floor would pop way up over S9 occasionally.

Most of my driving today was way out in the country so I got a great opportunity to get in to some real quiet RF environments. To my surprise the noise floor became non-existant in places. All of the noise I was picking up from before was power line noise and other crap flying around around/near town.

I thought my antenna came un-plugged or my attenuator was on because the noise was so low. I had my antenna connection pop out of the tuner (check my post on the mobile installation and the HF antenna/tuner – just a wire plugged in to the center pin on the tuner) last week once so I knew that was a possibility this time around. A quick spin of the dial revealed activity on the band so my antenna was surely connected!

When I get a chance I will still do the grounding. I am not sure when I will get around to it though, maybe in a few months. I have a cap on order so once I get through a few of these “bumps in the road” I can apply a little more of myself to my mobile install. For now it is working much better than I could have asked for anyway. Cool stuff!

I also bent my face plate mount where I want it. Now I can actually read the display when I am driving and not have to lean way over. I have enough space to lift the console lid and the knobs are within easy reach with my arm resting on the console – more comfortable than my other truck. The only thing I wish I had in this truck that my other one did was an arm rest that folds out of the seat. The only place I have to rest my arm is the console lid – which is comfortable, but it is a bit far compared to being right next to the seat.

The current face plate mount works OK. The biggest improvement I can make to it now is to extend it about 3/4″. The reason is I am using one of the stock screws (that holds on some of the front parts of the console container to the “frame”) to hold the mount. This works but the single screw allows too much movement as the mount likes to move around it. I can tighten the screw down and make it not move a whole lot, but it works its way loose. By extending the mount I can fold the back part down and around the plastic that the screw goes in to. This will lock it in place so it can’t move – sort of like a coat hanger over the top of a door. The “lip” latches on and holds it from moving. Combined with the screw this would be a pretty bomb-proof method.

Again, not one hole has been poked in the truck (as of yet) in this whole process!

If you read my last post you know that I ran the audio from my FT-857D to the sound system in the truck. There is an auxiliary audio jack (1/8″ stereo jack) on the dash board - normally used for music (IPOD, MP3 player, etc). I utilized it for my ham radio instead!

The way I had the audio run in to the system was through the headphone jack on the side of the face plate of the FT-857D. This was a bit cumbersome as the plug stuck out from the faceplate and the audio had to be adjusted by the volume control on the rig.

My updated method is to use the accessory plug on the back of the FT-857D. I used the 6 pin plug. There is a constant level audio port on there – the 1200 baud Data Out pin. Ground the shield of your cable to the GND pin and the center to the data out and you have constant audio! The 9600 port gave me constant audio, but it was un-squelched. The 1200 baud port was squelched and works OK.

The only improvement I could make to this set up is to increase the intensity of the constant level audio. As it sits right now the audio is a lot softer than it was if I adjusted the volume knob through the headphone jack. It is better than needing to worry about where the volume knob is though so I am happy with it. I just need to turn up the truck’s volume knob a bit more than I would otherwise. I don’ t know if there is a way around it other than putting a line level amplifier on the  system (too much work).

This is all a continuous experiment and work-in-progress! I am sure there will be a point in time when I am content with what I have done. I can live with the audio. There is definitely a lot more work to do though.  

I do have a cap for the truck on order. This will play in to how some of my gear is installed (antennas, cables, etc). So stay tuned for more. The dealer gave me a 3 week estimate on when it will come in so we’ll see what happens. Routing the wires out of it to the HF antenna might be a bit of a challenge. I will surely post about my progress in that area as it happens.

It is a 2010 F250 lariat crew cab short bed with the 6.4L Power Stroke Diesel engine. Of course its 4×4 also.

My mobile installation includes my regular FT-857D for now. It does everything – VHF/UHF/HF all modes.

The antennas for my installation right now are a dual band whip with a lip mount on the hood and a 102″ whip with an LDG Z-11Pro tuner for HF. I had the lip mount on the top of one of my back doors in my old truck. That was problematic. I fought pinched coax issues and it was just a pain in the butt. So I decided to put the antenna on the hood. It is a lower profile as well – if I am going to need to park in a parking garage I can take the HF antenna off and still have my normal VHF/UHF comms. The drawback is lower efficiency. For daily driving it won’t be an issue at all. I can hit my usual repeater on 5 watts all day long as it is.

The HF side of things will need some work. I have the antenna hooked up and running but this is where most of my effort from now on will be spent. The reasoning is I have a lot of grounding work to do. Based on running HF in my last truck I learned how much of a difference grounding makes in a mobile installation (also referred to as “bonding”). The single most important ground I found, going towards reducing RFI from the vehicle running, is the exhaust pipe to the frame. The reason is that the ground towards the rear of the truck will cut off the radiation properties of the exhaust pipe. If you think about it – the rubber isolators to keep the pipe “quiet” make nice RF insulators. The length of the exhaust pipe also makes a GREAT radiator of any RF generated at the engine (injectors, spark plugs, coils, motors, etc). Grounding the pipe kills the radiation. The second most important grounds (plural) are the cab and bed together, hood (if it doesn’t already have good grounding) to cab, and all of that to the frame. This will kill ground loops and give you a solid RF ground. An issue a lot of people have with mobile installs is that the RF from the radio starts to play havoc with the computers on the vehicle. The other issue is RF can get back in to the radio. When you ground everything well you improve the performance of the radio system enormously.

OK – on to the installation. The first thing I will say is that everything I have done so far has been 100 times EASIER than in my 2003 Chevy Silverado. For those of you who are a bit fearful of poking holes in a brand new vehicle – this installation has made NOT A SINGLE HOLE. All of my wires have been run through existing openings. Even better – the only parts I have had to remove for the installation are access panels to factory wiring channels. In my last truck I did a lot of work pulling out the rear seat and running wires under the carpet/insulation. No need here in the Super Duty. Everything is easy to access for the most part. The hardest part – figuring out how to do it!

My first step was to put on my dual band antenna. Here are a few pictures of what I am dealing with:

The mount has been adjusted to keep the antenna vertical, or close to it. The adjustments in the mount are detented so I can’t get it precisely where I want it. I ended up with a bit of forward lean. I figured the antenna would go back to vertical when on the road so that wasn’t too bad.

The coax is run back towards the firewall right under the black plastic where the windshield wipers are. I took out one screw to give me the space I needed to route the coax/connector through. Then I ran the coax down the door jam (on the OUTSIDE of the hinges – towards the front of the truck, not the cab). This is not the ideal way to do this, but it works for now. The better route would be to get the coax through the firewall as I routed the power cable (later down the page).

Once the coax was past the hinges I ran it on the outside of the weather stripping until I got to the separation between the weather stripping. As you can see the factory wiring channel is exposed.

I like the design of the weather stripping Ford has used. It is really robust. It slides over top a crease in the sheet metal and is a very solid hold.

This is what everything looks like all said and done. The coax is run all the way to the rear behind the seat to plug in to the rig.

Here you can see, somewhat, the radio under the back seat. Its a real trick getting it in and out. I am glad the FT-857D is as skinny as it is! Otherwise it would be a no-go for sure. The black flat thingy in the front is the FoldFlat Storage plate. When the seat is up you can fold this out and it makes a nice hard flat floor for carrying something like a TV box or a dresser.

Edit: I figured I would mention this also. You may note that the radio is not bolted in. I don’t have the hard mount installed, and likely will not (in the near future anyway). The reason is that I use the FT-857D SO much. It is my grab-and-go radio. If I permanently install it in the truck it would take me as long to get it out as it will to put it in. I don’t have it grounded yet, but that is coming as with the other grounding I am going to do on the truck itself. Having the remote cables and mount for the face plate (a clip-in style) is as far as my permanent installation is going to get.

I may get another rig for the truck at some point. Maybe an IC-7000, I like the IF-DSP and color screen. Then again, I already know the FT-857D really well from operating one for so long. It would make having a do-everything grab-n’-go radio MUCH easier. I have a go-kit for this FT-857D (Pelican case) that has been used maybe 3 times since I made it because I always have to tear the rig out of the truck to use it.

I actually did the hard-wired power after I put the antennas on, but I’ll toss it in the middle here.

The power wires are 10 gauge stranded (from Lowes). I ran them down the drivers side wiring channel from the firewall to the back of the cab.

The positive side passes through a 50 amp circuit breaker. I have been using these in all of my mobile installs and they work pretty well. I have had a  couple of them go bad, though. They are supposed to be water proof but I think the under-the-hood environment takes its toll after a few years. This was one of the good ones I had left. The negative lead is straight to the battery. After all, if it grounds out it goes to the same place anyway – the truck is a standard negative ground chassis.

There are actually two batteries in this beast – one on each side. This one is on the drivers side.

The wires go back up towards the firewall to the following pass-through.

I tried to get them through the boot but it is just too tight for this size of wire. Plus, the boot is real hard to get to. I can’t reach it other than my finger tips from under the hood unless I start removing stuff. The engine compartment is JAM PACKED. They didn’t waste any space in this at all. That being said – some more major engine work with the 6.4L diesel requires the cab to be removed for just this reason – you physically can’t reach everything.

The wires are resting against the plastic “clip”, not the metal. Even if the insulation is worn through the positive wire won’t ground out unless it contacts the negative wire next to it (I doubt that could happen, and I would say wearing through the wires to begin with is a slim chance as there isn’t anywhere for the wires to rub/move – tight fit). I will keep an eye on it though.

The pannel here is to the left of the emergency brake. The power cable is just routed through and on in to the wiring channel. Again, everything in this truck is SO easy to get in to!

This is the rear channel. The front one was shown earlier (with the coax for the dual bander passing through the split weather stripping in the center). If you look close around the seat belt anchor you can see the rest of the wire coiled up. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

OK, so moving on to the HF side of things – at least what I have now.

Here is the mount. It is nothing special - just a piece of wood cut from a 2×4, aluminum bar, and a 3/8″x24 mount (the hard mount with a bolt, not an SO-239). The wire hooks in to it with a ring terminal on the bottom then it is all sealed up with my favorite stuff – Plasti-Dip!

The lead to the antenna is just a solder blob on the end of the wire press-fit in the center pin of the Antenna SO-239 on the tuner. Nothing fancy and it works. Bannana plugs also work. At the house I use an old PL-259 and a short piece of 14g solid wire with a spade connector on it for connecting random wires. It is the best method I’ve come up with, I was just lazy here and re-used an earlier experiment (this whole antenna set up).

The coax and power lead can be see going back to the cab.

This is the vent that the wires go to behind the passenger side rear seat. The liner was a pain to get off – it is held in with a couple of the push clips. They take a lot of work to get out. Be careful – it is possible to break them.

Here is a better shot. The motor there is the drive for the rear window.

The PL-259 was a trick to work through the vent opening. I managed to do it. There is plenty of room but the cable and connector come in sideways to the back of the cab so you have to bend it 90deg to fit through the opening. The string helps out with that – note it is wrapped around the center pin too, not just the part right against the jacket.

There is a slot in the liner right next to the vent so I just poked the wires through. Pretty nice!  You can see one of the push pin type clips to the upper left of the latch looking thing against the liner (the round thing). The latch is an access panel for a car seat anchor. There are 3 of the anchors and each one has a clip/pin near it.

On to the normal, non-torn up INSIDE!

Click on the picture to enlarge it. The FT-857D is wired in to the sound system in the truck. I have an audio cable from the headphone jack (with a toroid choke to keep RF out) to the AUX port on the dash. If you take a look at the touch screen the bar on the bottom right (white with a blue-ish tint) is the input meter. Its the same thing on any kind of input audio device – keep the bars from peaking and the audio is nice and clean. Once the bars peak the input is over-driven and the audio gets distorted.

I believe there is a constant level audio port on the accessory plug on the back of the FT-857D for digital modes. I will dig up the manual and see if I can hard-wire that in to the truck. That way I don’t have to deal with the audio cable how I have it here, as well as not have to worry about where the volume knob is on the rig.

There is also a speed compensated audio control. This is nice – no need to touch the knobs going down the road! The only drawback is when my phone rings – it cuts out all audio sources and turns in to my phone. It is great for hands-free operation but if I am in the middle of a conversation on the radio it drops the radio audio.

Note the use of the existing screw for mounting. No holes drilled (in the truck, yet…)

The metal mount I used needs to be adjusted or replaced entirely. Having the display angled like that is hard to see. This definitely needs some improvement.

This truck is a real dream. I had the opportunity to get it and it was too good to pass up. My fuel mileage (again, its a diesel) has been around 16mpg so far (3.55 gears). This is with a non-broken in engine. I expected to be around 13-14mpg so I am more than happy with the performance thus far. My highway mileage is closer to 18mpg but daily driving I’ve been around 16. Not too bad for a truck thats over 8500lbs. Once I hit 5-10,000 miles the engine will start to pick up a few mpg . All the parts have to be merried together nice – piston rings seated in the cylinders, etc.

That about wrapps it up! Stay tuned for more improvements/adjustments as I make them.

I just got a new truck on Friday and have been working on getting my FT-857D installed. I won’t get everything done here for a while. My screw driver antenna is going to be coming later. I may get a whole new one for this truck. The one I have right now got ripped off the truck by a tree the weekend before Hamvention so the mount is a bit bent out of shape. It has also been on every vehicle I have driven since I got my drivers license  – may be time to get a new one anyway! In the mean time, I will toss together what I can. Hopefully I can have enough progress and pictures of my install for a post in the next week.

My antenna selection right now is a dual bander on the hood and a whip with a tuner for HF. The hood mount was chosen because I didn’t want to mess with the coax and the door swinging if I mounted it on the top of a door (where I put it on my last truck). It is opening up a whole can of worms with pinched coax and water leakage. The whip and tuner is the same experiment I did on my last truck (check some posts back around this past spring – 2010 – as I documented that one pretty well).

In any event, I have been taking pictures along the way so I will get those up here in another post. Stay tuned for more!