So if you click on this picture to blow it up you will see the cut off branch, and the antenna wire, amazingly enough the branch found a way to retain my antenna, literally we are in battle. when the trimmed section of branch fell, I was astounded to see it go down over the opposite side of my antenna, so that when as it descended it pushed the wire back into the remaining portion of branch! Wow!
Really, I thought, no biggy, I'll just bounce and jostle and it'll pop right off the end of that stick and I'll be in business! Well, it didn't go down quite like that. I jostled, I bounced, I pulled, and I begged, and that branch just held on. So I pulled harder, and the wire broke. :(
So the branch, although having been cleanly severed by this astute weapon:
has won yet another battle.
Needless to say the contacts that appear in my log for today are being made on a sloper. I'll have to fire the backyard end of the antenna back up into the trees again. I may take the opportunity to rearrange a bit and get the front yard end more in line with where it should be, and possibly even change the length of the antenna a bit, I think that possibly 132' total length is not that great of a length, maybe a little shorter would be a bit better. Any suggestions?
Also I read an article in QST today about PSKimmer and I fired that up, it is running now on my 706mkIIg with the Signalink USB, but unfortunately I can't get the http://pskreporter.info page to come up, apparently everyone else did the same thing today after just reading the same article in QST and the webpage has been overrun with requests. Maybe tomorrow it'll calm down some or later tonight, I'd really like to see that map.
73
Good DX and Good Luck
Catch you in the ether
