Fernebo Bloggen

Dead owl

Fernebo Contest Station was attacked by suicide terrorist Owl Thursday night. Apparently the owl was using the stations high voltage transformer as a dinner table, and while feasting on a mouse and a squirrel accidentally touched the power line. The dinner resulted that all three high voltage fuses burned, and the station lost its power.

The electrician on duty described the accident as a once in a lifetime event, and assured that the death of the owl was instant. Funeral services will be announced later.

Service of the SM3XIK-1 APRS Internet gateway was resumed at 21:30UTC Saturday nigth.

The past weekend was also dedicated to K4M hunting for some of the FCT members. Unfortunately wrong antenna was selected, and (again) the 4 square phase box was burned. This time beyond repair. Since similar things, transmitting on the wrong antenna has happened many times now, a major re-design will be done to the antenna switching control. Also restricted access for some operators to the amplifier room migth apply. A new switchbox was ordered from North America on Sunday, and is already at ARLANDA.

Yesterday a planning meeting for the upcoming new 24 pack switch was held, with project chief programmer SM0SVX (known from the Sourceforge project SvxLink). The logical part will be handled by an ATMEL processor.

After some 2500 qsos during the weekend, the week started nicely with some amplifier work.
Yesterday the complete pi-L circuit was mounted and also measured with a network analyzer. Both capacitors, C1 and C2, seams to be large enough for 7MHz.

Today the G3SEK boards has been mounted, and also the transformer for the control board. Some planning was also done for the coming work:

OUTPUT Antenna relay to be mounted.
RF Choke, missing bolt.
Parasitic chokes, howto?
Mount 24volt PS (for the FAN)
Feed-through capacitors to cathode box.
Buy decoupling capacitors for RF choke (HV, ELFA)

Some EPO work:

Connection plate DC-blocker/C1
Connection plate C2
Find INPUT Antenna relay

Some previous posts here at Fernebo Bloggen pointed to a very interesting site with lots of photos of BIG amps. The be able to read the text, press this link:

http://honyaku.yahoofs.jp/url_result?ctw_=sT,eCR-JE,bT,hT,uaHR0cDovL3d3dy5iZWFyLWVsLmNvbS8=,qlang=ja|for=0|sp=-5|fs=100%|fb=0|fi=0|fc=FF0000|db=T|eid=CR-EJ,k97e8f2275d402ae9bbb305667342cedd,t20080830062251

To translate other text in Japaneese, use this tool:

http://honyaku.yahoo.co.jp/transtext

Thanks to Yoko, for this information.

The power amplifier project suddenly started to move in the right direction last week. The Tetrode control boards was ordered from GM3SEK Ian, and received this Monday. A visit to Metallvaruhuset i Spånga to pick up aluminium and some extra tools was installed in the amplifier garage.

Very soon the components for the Pi-tank is needed. Still have no components for that yet.

The best picture gallery for PA builders so far: http://www.bear-el.com/

The persons and equipment in this article are NOT related with SK3W.

The weekend was dedicated to take care of our amplifier graveyard. One amp, discovered faulty during CQWW SSB, was now discovered working, only three lamps broken. The LONG LONG ago broken AL-1200 is also working, and rewired to our low line voltage.  Remains to have a test run…