1. No need to show my passport or go through the hassles of airport security when I want to talk to people in other countries.
2. I've accumulated enough electronics know-how to spot gimmicks when I see them.
3. I can have all the radios I want, with NO BILLS!!! 

Ed Lemus, KE6VRK, and I talked briefly about compiling a history of the individual ham bands: when they were allocated, why they are where they are in the spectrum, stuff like that.

I know for example that 80m was probably well in use when WW2 began, 220 mhz was allocated some time around 1970, our TV sets don't have a Channel 1 because that's our 6m band, etc etc.

I wonder if there is a practical way for KE6VRK and I to learn this history without looking through zillions of old issues of CQ and QST? How about it, old timers?

It varies... something as small as a case for a pair of HTs is probably about $20, but for me to charge $100 it would have to be the size of a large suitcase.

The key is I use wood recycled from pallets... most of the cases I've built have been of red oak, ad this is available in the largest quantities, though poplar is lighter and takes stain more uniformly (pine and other softwoods IMO are for making storage crates). All the exterior parts of my cases are between 3/16" and 3/8" thick, and I switched from oil to water-based varnish 2 years ago because there's no odor and the color stays closer to natural. KE6VRK wanted  his case stained royal blue, and luckily there are these tubes called Tints-All that come in all sorts of colors and mix with just about everything except silicone.

Anyhow, that's enough of my sales pitch for now... Memorial Day might find me building my first multi-HT case.

Another of my hobbies is woodworking... I get tired of carrying my 3 HTs around loose in my toolkit, so I have plans to use my woodworking skills to design and build a nice little hardwood attache case to fit all 3 plus their manuals and a few adapters. Would enough hams want these kinds of customade hardwood carrying cases to make it economical for me to sell them on the side? I've already built a small carrying case for Ed Lemus, KE6VRK, for the detachable control head of his mobile, and he loves it...

Strange, I salvaged a lot of slug-tuned coils of every size imaginable from discarded electronic circuits over the years. I'd gladly mail you a couple dozen of them that you could pull apart and rewind.

A few years ago, I bought a sack of 100 of just such coils from All Electronics near downtown LA.

Neither my budget nor the placement of my station allow for a tower, so naturally the next best alternative is a mast. I can't afford a rotator---at least until I can get one of my books published and sold---but there was a problem of how to secure the mast with guy wires while it will still be rotatable.

Well, I hit on the idea of a 2-piece stainless steel collar... the lower half clamps firmly onto the mast and has a disc for a bearing race. The top half is essentially an inverted cup with a bearing race disc which slips down to overlap the lower half, and it will have 3 trunnions on the outside for the guy wire cables. The whole thing will be welded together with 308L stainless MIG wire. Instead of trying to locate ball bearings (which can rust or gum up), I found assorted sizes of stainless steel balls on Amazon to fit between the upper and lower halves of my creation. Granted, there will be some corrosion over the years, but nowhere near as bad as I'd have to deal with from steel and aluminum components. There aren't too many things a body can't make with a lathe and a welder. 

The only thing left to do after that is to calibrate the mast with Polaris, and I'll be ready to enjoy my 3 homebrew beams.

While cleaning my garage a couple of months ago, I found an old 2m Isopole vertical I bought new about 25 years ago. It's still in good working condition but needs ground radials. I'd be willing to part with it since I put up my Diamond a couple of years ago. 

Don't forget about bankruptcy & liquidation stores. Over the years, I obtained plenty of goodies dirt cheap from an outfit which unfortunately went out of business 3 years ago. I used to find all sorts of aluminum pipe and rods, spools of wire and cable, stainless fasteners, and all sorts of useful things they'd obtained from small factories which closed down. You'd go broke buying all this stuff new.

Use a center punch to make a small pit in the metal first. Those split-point cobalt bits seem to drill through metal faster than the regular-point HSS bits. Cobalt bits are expensive, but IME they keep their edge 3x as long as HSS.

If you need to use a hole saw on sheet metal, make sure it's clamped pretty firmly to the drill press bed, use the lowest speed, keep the teeth lubricated, and don't use the hole saw on tough metals such as stainless which will dull the teeth.

The DE section of the 440 took me long enough... I didn't have any ceramic standoffs like the original design requires, but I *did* have some pieces of acrylic plastic in my junk box... so I fashioned the "hot island" from that instead.

Of course, now I have to test the thing...

I finally finished building three homebrew antennas from a couple of different ARRL books. You can see them at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/74980413@N06/

As I write this, I just got done making the elements for a couple of 33cm loop yagis for Ed Lemus, KE6VRK, and myself.

I still have enough metal left over to build at least 6 more of these yagis, if anyone is interested. 

Well, I DID finally get it to work (I watched 2 hams having a QSO on 80m), but the MFJ *IS* very finicky, even though both the hams were horrible spellers...

BTW the previous owner had very sloppily bored a cluster of random holes in the top of the box with a 1/4" bit and stuck the speaker onto one of the chips with a piece of carpet tape... I clamped the lid onto my machine and cut a proper circle with a hole saw, then inserted a piece of brass screen and a piece of felt between the speaker and the lid with a pair of screws to get rid of that jury-rigged look... some of these guys may be stellar on the air, but I'd never let them near any of my metalworking equipment! :-D

I bought it used at the TRW swap meet, got it home, wired a mike element to a plug and tried to get it to work... I pushed the buttons and got it to go through the menus, but couldn't get it to display anything that looked like words or prosigns... mostly just long strings of T's and a few M's.

Then I looked online for some kind of instructions and found them... apparently the MFJ-462B is finicky about the pitch of the received CW audio signal it's supposed to lock onto. This time I'm going to do like the instructions say and try wiring the receiver's audio output directly to the reader and adjust the RIT to see if I can get it to lock...

BTW I have no idea why the guy who sold it to me installed a 100-ohm mini speaker inside the box...

Anyone else have experience with this unit?

That's true, but parroting isn't learning. Some of the stuff they cover in those exams turned out pretty useful for me.


Well, VEs are always needed... that would be a big help to ham radio...