Monthly Archives: October 2016

Another year, another antenna

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Actually, this year it’s an antenna farm in the attic. After moving out of Boulder this summer from a townhouse to a free-standing house, I needed a new antenna setup.

I now have a pair of X50 antennas (one east, one west) for VHF/UHF along with a west-facing M2 UHF yagi for TV (the 440-6SS, 6 elements and about 36″ long). I used an upside-down dish mount arm to hang it up.

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I can receive the WØBCR TV repeater in Chautauqua Park at -62 dBm with a very clean signal (at a distance of 16 miles), better than the direct reception I had when I was located in Boulder.

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Until someone builds a house behind me, I have line of sight to Chautauqua as well as to NCAR (for the BARC voice repeater and the KCØDS D-star repeater).

For the X50 antennas, I pre-made a mount that I took into the attic in one piece:

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which I then nailed down to the rafters:

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I also installed an HF loop using an SGC-237 autocoupler, but I haven’t got it working yet.

BARCFest 2016

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I demonstrated the digital quad box for BARCFest attendees and attracted lots of interest. I had two TV backpack transmitters of my own placed in corners of the building, plus a signal from Jim KH6HTV showing home video, plus a video input from a stationary drone camera belonging to Allen KØARK (the receiver is the white device on the far left of the table; it is connected directly into the HDMI switch).

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On the right I have a laptop receiving the video stream over an Ethernet network, using a Monarch HD streaming appliance (the silver part in the middle of the quad box).

The embedded HDMI switch makes it easy to substitute video sources into the quad processor as well as choose which images are shown on monitors or fed into the streaming device.