Well, I’ve had my mobile HF rig for a couple of weeks now and I’ve made some contacts on HF, though most of them have been while stationary rather than while actually driving. Coming back into Ottawa from a friend’s cottage on Sunday, however, I was almost able to work a station in Denver, but the band faded before we could establish a QSO. Oh well.

One of the major problems I had to overcome was interference from the various electronic bits that make my Tracker go. I resolved most of them with a pair of clip-on ferrite cores mounted on the power leads right up by the radio. It’s amazing how effective they are. Without them, I had QRM from the vehicle measuring about S6 or S7 — basically blotting everything out. With them, it’s virtually eliminated and using the noise blanker feature in the radio anything left over is pretty much eliminated. Not bad for $3.50, eh?

I’ve also sent off my first batch of QSL cards (click the picture to see a larger version). Most of them were to lighthouses and lightships that were taking part in an on-the-air event a couple of weekends ago, mostly to US stations. One card, however, went off to Portugal for a station that I talked to from the cottage that was on a dxpedition to one of the islands in the Azores.

I know we’re about halfway through the diving season here this year, but I just got out for my first dive of the season this afternoon. I headed down to Cardinal, Ontario with my dive buddy and we dove on the wreck of the Conestoga. Our bottom time was about 50 minutes. The water was a balmy 76F and the viz wasn’t bad at all. I was quite surprised in the lack of significant zebra mussels on the wreck. My dive buddy and I were wondering whether the zebra mussel population is being reduced by being eaten by the gobies and/or the zebra mussels having been a little too efficient in their filtering of the water meaning they’re basically dying off for lack of food.

When I have a moment, I’ll see if I can post a picture of the dive profile from my dive computer.

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4. So far, everything seems ok. The dates appear to be correctly formatted, unlike the problem some people saw with the last upgrade.

Generally speaking, I’ve had very few problems with upgrades since I started using WordPress, so one annoyance every couple of years is below my threshold of getting upset. 🙂

If you think back, you’ll recall that some scientists were trying to bring back space dust collected by a probe. Well, they’ve taken lots of pictures of the aerogel they were collecting the dust in and now everyone can get involved helping them find dust particles. If you visit the Stardust@home website, you too can participate! Unlike SETI@home, Stardust@home has people actually looking at pictures rather than running a screensaver that crunches numbers when you’re not otherwise using your computer. There’s more information on the Planetary Society’s website, too.
It just launched yesterday, and it appears that their servers are a tad overloaded right now, so I haven’t been able to get into the website to register and try looking for space dust, yet.

It’s always a good day when you receive a new toy. In my case, my new Yaesu FT-857 arrived this afternoon in amongst the chaos being caused by a flaky smoke detector in the apartment building being triggered by the excessive heat and humidity. It’s a multi-mode mobile HF/VHF/UHF transceiver. This will allow me to take full advantage of my amateur radio license that I briefly mentioned a few days ago.

Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the wiring I had installed when I re-installed my Kenwood mobile radio a couple of weeks ago, so I didn’t have to spend another two hours fishing wires from the battery through the firewall into the passenger compartment.

Currently, I have my mobile VHF/UHF antenna connected to it, but I don’t have the ATAS-120 auto-tuning HF antenna installed, yet. It seems there are two viable options. One is to buy a mount to put it on the roof, either attached to the roof rack or to the rain gutter somehow. The other is to mount it on the back door, either hooked to the bottom edge of the door or to the spare tire, similar to my bike rack. Mounting it on the back door is more preferable because it would probably have enough clearance to avoid hitting things on the ceiling of my parking garage. If I mount it on the roof, it would probably perform better but there would be a hassle everytime I wanted to enter a parking garage. So, I’m going to explore what options are available to mount it on the spare so that when it’s fully retracted it’s go enough clearance.

If you’ve already gone through the process of mounting an ATAS-120 on a GM Tracker (or Suzuki Sidekick), please let me know. 🙂