KD3Y

LOL Jim, I was going to see my ham pal the other day and passed the NOAA site and the National Weather Service. The guy was getting ready to launch the balloon for that evening so I turned around and pulled in and talked with him. The balloon was about 3 feet diameter but he said once it gets to altitude (it's made of a latex material that expands easily) it expands to several times it's size at sea level. The one they use carries a tail on it about 8 feet long that has a parachute and the sensor gear tied to it. Eventually the balloon bursts and the little parachute deplys and the computer falls back to earth. The balloon is tracked by GPS and they map the wind currents and the temperatures, humidity, and some other data sent to the NWS. The computers are disposable, they don't reuse them. I asked the guy if they ever had any issues with aircraft and he said no. He said they don't issue a NOTAM becuase all the pilots at MCAS Cherry Point and Camp LeJune and the pilots at Marine Corps ALF Bogue are all aware of their daily balloon activity. Our club uses the center for our SkyWarn program. We had a meeting the other week and that place is impressive. They have a "safe room" and the floors and walls are made of 6 feet of reinforced concrete so they can stay there through hurricanes or tornadoes, etc. They also put in showers and a kitchen last year so they would be able to remain on site during storms and not have to travel back and forth during storms. Basically the NWS employees are present there through every storm. Inside the "war room" they have a large room with about 100 TV's on the walls and they monitor weather from all over the U.S. It's impressive to see all those screens on the wall with real-time radar on the screens. I wanted to snap a few pics the other week when we had our meeting but I didn't know if they's appreciate me taking photos of what is actually a federal Gov't building. What our club does at the NOAA center is, we have a station there with HF, 2 meter, 444, and Marine VHF radios. During times of storms (usually hurricanes for our area), our volunteer mans those radios and he can communicate with a volunteer ham at the EOC, volunteer hams at the town halls & VFD's, to pass along weather information if the TV and cell towers are down. We use HF and digital to communicate with other NWS centers, mainly the one in Miami. For some reason the Miami NOAA center is important to the NOAA center here in my town. That might be a good video presentation for HC? Interview the guy who launches the balloons twice per day. Here at the NWS in Newport they launch two per day, 0600 & 1800 hrs. 73 de Anthony, KD3Y

Welcome to the group. Glad to have you here with us John. ~Anthony, kd3y

Yeah I'm not buying it. "...with a payload the size of three schoolbusses..." isnt't a pico balloon. Somebody is lying. Either the "paylod the size of three schoolbuses" is BS, or the "just a pico balloon" is BS. I'm actually expected to believe we have pilots flying defending this nation in top secret aircraft armed with doomsday weapons and equipped with stae-of-the-art top secret electronics interogation systems, yet they can't tell a weather balloon from a "spy" balloon. Nope. I'll pass, thank you. My IQ is higher than the group of people they're trying to convince. We launch TWO of these each day from the NOAA office up the road. We launch one at 6am and one at 6pm. They go up several thousand feet and send back meteorological data to the NWS at our NOAA office. "Weather balloons" have a payload about the size of a pack of cigarettes (not three school buses) and they're disposable. We hardly ever get them back and the one person per year that finds one and calls the 800 number are told they are safe to throw in the trash. So far we've only lost two, one that got hung on the 105.9 FM 500-foot radio tower when it came back down, and one that came back down in the Craven County Electrical Coop substation and took out the local grid for half a day a few yeras back. The locals were not amused with NWS operations that day. Any pilot ho has amassed the credintials and training to fly a Raptor certainly has had training on what a weather balloon looks like. If he doesn't, it's time to look at what we are hiring to defend our country. Surely the ASVAB requirements are higher than that for our military professionals.

Thanks Andy. That answers my question. You're awesome, man.

Thanks Tom. You know what they say about the Lord looking after fools and drunks. I don't drink so that narrows it down a bit. 😁

As you know, it's going to vary according to conditions and individual equipment used. But mostly the "coverage circles" are close. The circles aren't to any scale, but the Downeast linked repeater system does form a chain. All of the repeaters are on towers so coverage is quite good in a flat coastal area with no mentionable obstructions. The K4GRW repeater is on a 360 foot tower. The W3ENK repeater is on a 500 foot tower. The repeaters on Hatteras Island are on a 170 foot tower. The Coastal Linked system is here: https://k4obx.org/nets More information, and probably more accurate information than my artwork, can be found here https://www.qsl.net/n4aay/repeater.html and here as well: https://carolina440.net

I made my dipole so that the the center piece can be interchanged. If I'm out portable and I want a 10 meter or 20 meter dipole, I can just take off the legs and replace them with another pre-made set of legs cut to the right length. The legs just hook on to the hooks and the wires attach to the center piece with wingnuts, so changing bands only takes a minute. Saves the expense of having to build a center piece all over for every band. I figured no need to build three center pieces when all that changes on the dipole is the length of the wire. With the traditional "home made" dipole, you have to cut the wire or solder on new wire to change the band. This way I can just keep a 10-meter, 20-meter, and 40-meter set of pre-made legs rolled up in the storage box and use whatever band I want with my radio if I'm at a park doing POTA or for CERT or whatever. All I have to do is swap out the leg sections.

It's my 40 m dipole. I made it from some PVC fittings and 14 gauge copper wire. Managed to get it up 26 feet into the pine trees. Connected with RG-213 and no balun. Everybody told me I needed a Balun but it works fine without one. I seem to get good coverage on 40-meters from Panama to Canada and west to about Texas. I want to rotate it so it's NE/SW and see if I get better coverage west. My Yaesu FT-890 has the auto tuner but I tuned it to 40m center freq. I ran my coax thru smurf tube becasue I found out squirrels like the taste of coax. It was cheaper to buy a 50 ft roll of smurf tube tfor $25 than to replace coax every few months. I since spray painted the smurf tube black so it doesn't stick out so much.

It was a fun jab at them boys out there, Jim. No actually hate intended. Matter of fact, I got a buddy who is a Special Forces instructor at Bragg. We met in the wonderful land of Fort Benning in '88 and served together. One of the best pals I've ever had from Kommiefornia. His family owned some kind of mine up in the mountains. I forgot what ot was they mined, but he'd go up there as a teen and camp for weeks at the family mine and they'd dynamite the mine and go in with power hammers and take out whatever it was they were mining (lithium maybe). THEN the wonderful state of Kommiefornia changed the laws because the property was adjacent to some "protected area" and his family was banned fom using explosives or power hammers to mine. All they could use to mine was shovels and picks like they did 100 years ago. He settled in North Carolina after he got out of the military. Cause, well, you know North Carolina is the best state in the union and is where God would live if he was down here. 🙂 Plus my boy can own his machine guns and suppressors here in NC. 100% legal in NC.

Welcome to North Carolina. If you are ever visiting "down east" as the locals call it, you will have access to the 2-meter/70-cm linked repeater system. Our club also has a 6-meter repeater and a digital repeater on the same tower. Our club-owned repeater for Carteret County is located on the 360-foot tower beside WalMart in Morehead City and is open to the public with the following settings. I get several contacts every summer from tourists who are visiting the Crystal Coast. Last year it was a tourist who was visiting from Raleigh and was on an upper floor of his hotel with his HT trying to see whom he could contact. Another time there was a Navy pilot from Princeton who was underway. He sent me a cool Navy Aviation QSL card! If GMRS is your thing, the Newport GMRS repeater is located on the tower in Newport and has a 40+ mile coverage area. Our W4YMI digital repeater is on the air at 444.975 MHz (+), color code 1. The area 2-meter analog repeater (K4GRW) operates on 145.450 MHz with an offset of - 0.6, tone 100. The area 70-centimeter analog repeater (W3ENK) operates on 444.825 MHz with an offset of +5, tone 88.5. The area 6-meter repeater (KF4IXW) operates on 53.090 MHz with an offset of -1, tone 162.2. 73 de Anthony, KD3Y VP, Carteret County Amateur Radio Society

Welcome to the group, Billy. Glad to have you on board.

Absolutely. That's one thing some "volunteers" forget. Our services are at the will and pleasure of the event leadership, we don't try to "run the show" so to speak. That's why communication with the event staff beforehand is so important so we understand what they want from us, so we know when to act and when to sit down and shut up. Volunteers are invited to help in an event and they can be "fired" anytime the staff leadership makes that call.

Yessir. It's located on the same tower as the county FIRE/EMS/LE repeater thus has a 1,000 gallon diesel backup generator. So when everything else goes down during a storm, our repeater is still up. The county isn't going to let the FIRE/EMS/LE coms go down if they can help it. When the hurricanes have all the roads flooded and blocked with debris, that generator is the first thing to get fuel when it can be trucked or flown in. I've been out 15 miles offshore on the boat diving and I have hit the repeater on my boofang and talked to others in the county. It's a great back-up in case the Marine VHF radio fails. I'm told the club wanted that element pointed out across the Atlantic when they installed the repeater just for emergency coms for anyone on the water.

The history of our repeater is here: http://w4ymi.org/repeater.html

I guess my club is lucky in that we own and maintain our own repeater, actually the only one in the area, on a 300 foot tower. So it isn't an issue for us. Simplex just doesn't do well for any large event for us, but the repeater offers good coverage for the entire county. We don't have to be concerned with "tying up someones repeater" with our special event we're participating in.

I've had nothing but good experiences so far with public service events. My club provided coms for a 70 mile triathlon last year. We had hams at all the first aid stations, a ham mobile to drive the race route to pick up broken down bikers and worn out runners, and a ham assigned to the race coordinator to give him updates and information as the race progressed. It was the first time I got to actually use my receiver hitch mast setup on my truck. It worked a whole lot better than a handy talky with a rubber duck. I had a local shop weld me an aluminium tube mount to fit in my trucks receiver hitch so I could mount a j-pole on a 16 ft mast. Then I can usually sit on the tailgate and operate from a mobile radio powered from a solar-charged battery. We also provided coms for a large bluegrass festival last fall. Hams were stationed at points were the roads we blocked off for traffic control, hams were walking around providing first aid and to assist visitors, and a ham was assigned to the event staff to pass along information that was relayed from the other hams. Normally with some event like that where they close streets for the event, whomever is running the show issues us some kind of pass so we are considered "staff" and can pass the road blocks where the general public isn't allowed to enter. Coordination with event coordinators and clear communication goes a long way in things like that so the event staff knows what we expect from them, and so we know what they expect from us. So far as the toilet situation, well it is what it is. After about the first 2 hours, the porta-potties are so nasty I just don't bother. It pays to leave the coffee mug at home in that situation. We try to have enough volunteers so that if one ham assigned to a fixed post where he can't just leave, he can call one of the roving hams to come take his spot for a few minutes while he finds a toilet. We usually try to rotate thru the fixed posts in shifts so that no one spends more than 2 hours on a post. That gives everyone the opportunity to have a restroom break, get something to eat, or just rest for a little bit. Having one ham assigned to a fixed post for 5 or 6 hours is just too much.

Wouldn't be surprised to see a large influx of pirating and just plain bootlegging if that yearly fee stuff happens. I have one of them weirdo tin-foil-hat buddies who hates everything government. Well, most things government. He's happy to send the BATF a fee to own his machine guns and supressors. I can't talk to him on the bands because he's usually using some call sign he's stolen from the FCC online database He seems to have gotten away with it for the last decade, so I suspect it isn't serious enough for the FCC to bother enforcing. We "pay for a drivers license" because they's a DMV office in every town here in NC that provides us a service. That costs money above and beyond what is budgeted from the tax payer treasury. I can walk into a building and speak to a human and get a license tag or renew my DL or take the written exam or register to vote or get a veterans designation stamped on my DL or get my motorcycle endorsement or any other number of services that I can't do remotely. I just got back from the DMV an hour ago. I had to go renew my handicapped placard for my vehicle. The FCC doesn't provide me a service, they restrict my freedoms until I pay a tax, so that's the difference as I see it. If you claim the FCC provides a service my making regulations, that's also false. All winter long the deer hunters are riding all over Carteret County using Marine VHF radios to find their deer dogs. FCC doesn't give one damn that they're violating regulations by using a VHF marine mobile radio in their trucks as a CB radio. As soon as you put your boat in the water and turn on the radio you'll hear... "Hey Fred did you see my ****** Dog? The brown one with white ****** splotches on him? He was over by Mill Creek road but now the ********** collar isn't sending a *********** signal. Is the ********** with your pack? The ******* has a ******* blue collar on." Coast Guard says it isn't their problem cause it isn't happening on the water. Local LE says it's a federal regulation, not their problem. FCC apparently doesn't care, but they make the regulations. So I don't see anything the FCC does for me but tell me what I can't do.

That's a cool link Jim. The only experience I've had with airplanes is jumping out of them (usually covered in puke from the cherry sitting beside me). Now that there ejection seat simulator, I wouldn't mind a ride on that. "If your parachute fails to open, immediately after contact with the ground, you will snap to the position of parade rest and give a loud and boisterous AIRBORNE!" ~ Fort Benning University of Gravity, 1988 (magna cum laude) 🙂

Question came up yesterday from a mismatch in my log book. Scenario is this, the operator lives in Colorado, is sitting in colorado, but is using remote control to operate a transmitter located in Galveston, TX. So operator is in CO but the signal is actually coming from TX. When I logged the QSO on QRZ the entry was Colorado (as that's whats on his license and QRZ into). Seems to me that is sort of cheating. It's not an RS report from CO to NC, it's actually an RS report from TX to NC. I logged it as a CO to NC QSO in my paper log book but I can't change it on QRZ . Not a big thing but I'm just OCD like that. How would you normally consider that QSO? CO to NC or TX to NC? If I am trying to earn the "Worked all States" award, I actually didn't contact Colorado, I contacted Texas. My professor in law school said one time decades ago, "If you apply the answer to a problem in it's extreme, and it still passes the logic test, then the answer is valid." So using that theory, if the operator was sitting in Qatar on the other side of the world from me, remotely controlling a station located in Galveston TX, I wouldn't consider that RS report from Western Asia to NC to be valid as it's actually a signal report from TX to NC. 4/5 of that QSO from Qatar to NC is an email, literally, as it's going over VOIP, not over RF. I'm not interested in how far I can send an email. What say you?

Just some background for any interested of how it works Here's the vessel we use to test scuba cylinders. The scuba cylinder goes into the blue vessel thats filled with water. The 1-inch thick lid is bolted on, then the scuba cylinder is pressurized with water. The pump can pressurize a cylinder up to 11,000 PSI but most scuba/oxygen cylinders DOT specs is 5,000 PSI to 7,500 PSI. A steel cylinder, when pressurized with 7,000 PSI will swell a tiny bit from the pressure. We measure on a set of gauges how much water the swelling displaces. If that amount exceeds DOT specifications, it indicates the molecules in the metal have become too elastic, the cylinder fails DOT testing and is condemned, and isn't legal to ever use again. If the swelling is within DOT specs, after the pressure is held inside the scuba cylinder for a DOT specified time, usually about 3 minutes, then the water is removed from the scuba cylinder and it returns to ambient pressure. When the pressure inside the cylinder returns to ambient, the scuba cylinder is suppose to return back to it's normal size. If the cylinder doesn't return to normal size, it indicates the molecules in the steel have become hard and brittle, and the cylinder fails DOT testing, is condemned, and cannot be used again. Generally speaking, a pressurized cylinder is suppose to expand and return back to normal but within a specification. It has to expand, but not too much. Meaning the molecules in the metal are not too elastic but are neither too brittle. Too elastic metal, a cylinder will simply blow apart from over expansion, and too brittle, the metal will crack under pressure and blow apart. When we get a cylinder that looks "janky" and we think it may fail, we test that one last. Reason is, as the pump is pumping the cylinder up to 7,000 PSI and the cylinder bursts, the pressure will go from several thousand PSI to zero instantly. While the cylinder can't "explode" since it's filled with water not gas, the sudden drop in PSI will damage the impeller in the water pump and the pump will have to be rebuilt. Rebuilding the pump takes about 4~6 hours and will put us behind for the day. If we blown out the pump at the end of the day we can stay overnight to repair it and it doesn't cost us daytime. Price is $25 per cylinder and we can test 5 in an hour, so 4~6 hours of downtime during the day would cost us $400~$700 of loss revenue for the day if we blew the pump early in the day. We test Scuba cyinders, LP gas cylinders, medical oxygen cylinders for the hospitals/doctors in the area, and cylinders the fire department uses. Here in the U.S. all cylinders have to be re-tested using this procedure every 5 years to ensure they are safe to use. MCAS Cherry Point and Fort Bragg has their own facilities that they test their cylinders that the Marines/Navy uses. This might interest you Jim. I had the pleasure of seeing a cylilnder at Fort Bragg that the Special Operations guys use. It was a titanium cylinder that could hold 10,000 PSI for special forces use. It had NO markings on it at all. While it is illegal in the U.S. to have a pressurized cylinder without DOT approval No and DOT specs stamped on it, the military has special exemption. That way, if for some reason the cylinder had to be abandonned on a mission, it would have no markings on it to indicate what country/what military it came from. Delta Force could abandon the cylinder, or if their guy was caught with it, it wouldn't compromise the mission.

Welcome to the group Robert, from Coastal North Carolina. Glad to have you with us. ~Anthony, KD3Y

I believe the topic has been discussed on eHam before (https://www.eham.net/article/21921) Theres some good points there and some of the comments are pure bull from people who have no idea what they are talking about. PVC is engineered to hold water, which isn't compressable, not gas, which compresses and then rapidly expands. Think of a water ballon. When you fill a ballon with air then stick a needle to it, it pops violently...loud bang. When you fill a balloon with water and poke it with a needle, it just collapses, no boom. Thats because gas compresses. Liquid doesn't. That's the physics of why a bottle jack the size of a coke bottle can lift 20 tons, we fill bottle jacks with oil, not air. Household water pressure is normally 40 PSI so you can pressurize a PVC pipe with water in your house, and if the pipe breaks, it simply leaks, it doesn't explode and fly apart. But if you pressurize that PVC pipe with 40 PSI of gas, when it breaks, it explodes and sends PVC fragments everywhere. When we test our SCUBA cyliners, DOT requires us to pressurize the aluminum cylinders to 5,000 PSI and most steel cylinders to 7,000 PSI. Sometimes they fail. We test them by submerging them in a water-filled sealed steel vault, then pumping them full of water, up to 7,000 PSI and hold for several minutes. When they fail DOT recertification and burst, nothing much happens...they don't explode (water doesn't compress). There's a "thud" noise and the PSI gauge goes from 7,000PSI to 0 almost instantly. If we filled them with air and they failed, they'd blow the whole buildng apart...gas expands violently. There was a guy here in NC a few years ago who had stored his scuba cylinders full in his garage with 3,000 PSI of gas in them. He was in his garage and knocked one over when he bumped it with his leg. The resulting explosion killed him, his wife who was in the house lived but lost her legs, it blew the garage off the house, and the concusion shattered the windows in the next door neighbors houses. Compressed gas is nothing to play with. When I became club secretary (and webmaster) there was a PDF instruction for how to build a PVC "line launcher" on our website one of the members had drawn up years ago. The first thing I did was remove it. As soon as some Internet dude builds one and uses our clubs plans and blows his face off, our club wouldn't be able to afford the lawyer to defend the lawsuit. Have you seen these soda machines at Bed, Bath, and Beyond? The little cannister of nitrogen is about the size of a can of hairspray. It's what puts the fizz in the soda you can make at home with this machine. That cylinder has to be DOT approved, bear a DOT stamp, be requalified every 5 years by a DOT licensed tester, and it's classified as HazMat and illegal to refill. That little can will literally blow your kitchen away if it fails. I mean, if I was in some emergency situation and my life depended on me using a tater gun to get a resuce line to safety, sure, what would I have to lose in that scenario. But my opinion is, ham radio isn't worth blowing my face off and spending $200,000 on plastic surgery if I survived just to get an antenna line over a tree limb. When PVC filled with gas fails, it fails violently.

Nah no tater guns for me. I'm a DOT cyliner inspector and I've seen what an exploding pressurized vessel can do. Instant release of compressed gas is no fun a'tall. PVC isn't rated for pressurized gas. My face is too beautiful to be messed up with scars from PVC shrapnel. Heck, something like that would end the income from my part time job as a Chipendales model. I watched a guy at the dive shop remove the valve on a scuba cyllinder that had only about 50 PSI left in it. He thougth the cylinder was empty. When that last thread let go as he was unscrewing it, the valve flew past his face, thru the sheetrock ceiling, thru the subfloor of the upstairs, and lodged in the second floor ceiling. If that 1/2 lb of brass had hit his face you can pretty much guess what it would've done. If DOT heard I was pressuriing PVC pipe with compressed gas, the DOT inspector would be over here with his ID badge and clipboard faster than a fat girl can eat a twinkie. I've done enough handyman work with PVC to know it's brittle, it gets more brittle as it gasses off over the years, cold weather makes it even more brittle, glued joints often fail, and it's not a DOT approved container to hold pressurized gas. Any container over 2" diameter and that holds over 12 PSI must be DOT approved and must be recertified every 5 years. That's why all the tater guns you see on field day are home made. No manufacturer can get DOT approval for a PVC bomb, and if they did, the lawyers would bankrupt them within a year. I've seen a few hams who offer the plans for sale to build your own. Usually have some disclaimer about they aren't responsible for the results. One word..."Strict liability". You can disclaim negligence in the U.S. but you can't disclaim gross negligence. I know a lot of hams use them. There's one in our CERT trailer that's probably 10 years old. When it explodes, the club doesn't have a large enough insurance policy to cover what my attorney is coming for.

All the way to San Diego ... 59/59 on 100 watts and a homemade dipole. 40 meters was wierd last night. I've been waiting on that one for six months now! http://www.kd3y.com/logbook.html

Never have found cats to be the friendliest of animals to have around the house. I found a stray cat one time and tried to tame him. Thing was mean as a snake. I Fed him, took care of him, thing was ungrateful as could be. Never would let me pet him.