Ahh--okay.  If you were happy with the performance of the Hustler on 2m then I'd say you'd be happy with something like the Diamond X300 for both 2m/70cm, or the bigger version, the X510.  For longevity of the fiberglass I've heard of people spraying various paints on it, and as long as it's not a metallic paint that should help some.  I haven't done that myself though.

If you want gain without fiberglass, you could always go with a DB-224E and the 70cm version and switch between the two.   

Mike

I understand what you're saying, but he said he's all about performance.  He's also said he's not happy with the performance of a vertical dipole at 32 ft, which should be more than adequate for "repeater work".  So clearly he's interested in more than something that's simply adequate for hitting nearby repeaters.  That tells me that RG 8x losses might be relevant.  So while I'm sure you've seen it mentioned too often, please don't jump down my throat.

Mike

I missed this--50 ft of RG8x is going to be very lossy, especially on 70cm.  I'd start by replacing that with LMR-400.  Regardless of what antenna you replace your Hustler with, you're still going to have that feedline loss.

Mike

I have to ask--what problems did you have with your fiberglass radome Hustler that turned you off to them?

I've been extremely happy with the performance of my Diamond X300, and it's just a basic fiberglass radome vertical.  It's survived two 100+ mph wind storms, and many 50-70 mph storms, so durability doesn't seem to be any problem.

Mike

This doesn't really relate to ham radio in the RV, and it's not in the same league as AA4PB's, but I'll throw out a recent experience I had.

My wife and I were just chatting in the shack/office/computer room one Friday evening a couple weeks ago while I had my 2m base parked on one of the local repeaters.  All of a sudden a guy comes on and says he's got an "explosion and a structure fire" near a particular intersection.  It took me a second, but I replied back, ID'd myself and asked him if he had a cell phone.  He said that he didn't.  At this point I wasn't sure if it was legit, because I had a hard time believing a person would carry around an HT with him, but no cell phone.

Anyhow, the emotion in his voice seemed real and I figured the safest course was to take the report at face value, and I called 911.  He stayed with me as I relayed questions from the Fire dispatcher to determine the nature and scope of the explosion/fire.  I ended up losing contact with him after the first police car pulled up, unfortunately, but I definitely count it as a success.  

Mike

Here we go--the Adak Wullenweber's remains are still visible in Google Maps here:

   51.94266, -176.60047

Nothing very interesting, just a big cleared circular field where the antenna array used to be.

Mike

Yep, no Hungarian freedom fighters here.   

So if you commuted to/from Adak via Reeve, then you probably have the honor of being among the last people on Earth to fly on a revenue flight in a Lockheed Electra!

I think Adak also had a Wullenweber antenna.  The last one of those is still operational at Elmendorf, but I haven't actually seen it in person.

The antenna in the two images is one I've seen at many Air Force and other Gov't sites.  We have a couple at Elmendorf here in AK, and the one in the images I posted is at the Davidsonville, MD transmitter site for the HFGCS.  I think it's manufactured by Rockwell/Collins, but I may be wrong on that.

In the overhead image I included the scale so you can get a sense of the size of the thing--it's about 20 feet from tip to tip on the shortest elements, and about 100 feet for the longest.

Sorry--inside family joke.  Most of the people in my family drink coffee by the gallon and when I set up the tibor.org domain I just created a little placeholder page and thought that would be appropriate.

I think that's got to be the biggest rotatable log periodic I've ever seen any pictures of--the shortest element width is almost 20 ft. and the longest is about 100 ft, very roughly speaking, based on Google maps' scale measure.

Note that the overhead photo shows the array pointing to the relative lower left.  Also the two boom ends that have angled supports, and the third (lower left) has a straight support. 

Maybe I'm missing something, but where does the connection to drones from HF come from?  Is it simply because The Truth Hurts blog has noticed Rockwell/Collins has done work associated with drones, also happens to have a couple HF transmitter sites and jumped to a conclusion?

http://koalive.com/thetruthhurts/2013/03/05/possible-drone-control-site-in-iowa/

Rockwell/Collins I think is/was also the primary contractor for SCOPE Command--seems far more likely to me that the Oxford Junction site has some kind of peripheral association to that.

I'm thinking this is a very large log periodic, using wire for the elements, but I'm not sure:

http://www.tibor.org/antenna.html

Neither my wallet nor my yard can support an antenna like this, but I was just curious. 

Thanks,
Mike

I'd be happy to provide the AK contact, but do I have to do eQSL?  I'm completely unfamiliar with it.

Mike

I hear these myself from time to time, and I can tell you exactly what they are not:

1.  Ionosondes (aka chirpsounders)
2.  Any form of radar

Ionosondes sweep a given frequency range very quickly, which is why you typically just hear a chirp as it sweeps past your frequency.  Any slow moving signal traversing a relatively small slice of the HF bands would have no practical value in a sounder role.

Over The Horizon Radars operating on HF also do not exhibit any of the mentioned characteristics.  OTHR might hop around in frequency, but they certainly don't lazily migrate up or down in frequency and then fade out.  CODAR is another form of radar using HF, but it also doesn't do what Tanakasan's signal is doing.  Do some searches on Youtube--there are many examples of OTHR and CODAR signals as well as ionosondes.  You can hear what they sound like and compare them to what you're hearing.

One basic but important question is whether the signal exhibits fading as any non-local signal would.  If it doesn't, that's almost a dead giveaway that it's locally generated noise.  And noise is almost certainly what it is.

Mike

RF was definitely affecting my digital multimeter, causing the erroneous reading of 70v ac. I should've suspected this was the case, especially considering that my meter is a cheap Home Depot special, but for some reason it just didn't occur to me.

As I've mentioned before, this is a very temporary situation until I get the 240v line run.

Thanks for all the great feedback,
Mike