Grain, Cabbage, Ham Shack Setup With New Radio

5:00am I was out the door and on the road to town to pickup 2 1/2 barrels of grain yesterday while it was still fully dark. I make sure to bring my headlamp with me now that it is winter and seemingly always dark. Despite my headlamp it was still dark. I made it home in time for our morning constitutional, ie soaking.

After I got my NaNo writing done I headed out to empty the barrels of grain. I had a bit of work to do first though. I have to spread the grain out on all my garden spots and the pole beans still had wires gathered and strung in each row. It wasn't too hard but took a bit to wind each row into a coil, the wire did not want to play nice. It finally acquiesced and coiled okay, next spring will be a pain to untangle the mess, but that is for future me to deal with...

With the wires coiled I could back the trailer in and spread out the grain. The animals looked forlornly over the fence so I threw some shovels full into the pen for them. The birds then spent the rest of the day scratching around in the grain while it rained off and on.

I went and picked J up from school as it continued to rain. We made it out of the parking lot fairly quickly, rainy days we seem to be able to manage that but on the sunny days it can take forever. We got home and the boys wandered off. A little after 3:00pm R came up to the house with a package, my radio!

He stayed around to watch the unboxing.

Ahhhh, that new radio look and smell! Fresh electronics!

The new radio got assembled and set on its shelf to await the delivery of the power supply. I got the power wires setup on the radio and ready to plug into the power supply.

The radio has an internal speaker that I have read is not the greatest so I took a spare speaker from our entertainment system and mounted it beneath the shelf. I found a 3.5mm headphone jack and clipped the wire to use. I fixed the speaker wire to the underside of the shelf.

The mic holder got attached to the edge of the shelf by the speaker. It works out nicely as it keeps the cord out of my view of my upper monitor.

Between the rains I got into the garden and got the only 2 cabbage to even attempt to make heads from this year. I did not plant a lot so I did not get a lot. I had the seeds in in spring and they grew through the summer but got hit with bugs which stunted them dramatically. Once the weather changed and it got cold they sluffed most of the bugs and started to grow again. They aren't big or dense but it is greens at a time that the majority of the garden is toasted.

I had made dinner and we were in the middle of eating when I saw UPS dropping the packages at the gate. I finished and ran out to haul them in. We got our cover rocker lift for the tub a few days early and I got my power supply, switch, and lightning surge protector.

The surge protector got coupled directly to the switch and then the setup was mounted beneath the shelf.

The power supply is nice and compact, only 6 inches wide, so there is ample space on the shelf for both units. I have room to space them for air flow but still room on the edge of the shelf.

My radio the Yaesu FT-991A has 2 antenna inputs on the back of it, one for UHF/VHF and the other for HF. My antenna is a discone that is able to work from 26MHz to 1.2GHz so I needed to use the switch for this instead of my original purpose to be able to use my SDR with the antenna. Things work out nicely sometimes and this was one such situation. I had gotten a pair of 12" cables and they both worked to couple the switch to the radio antenna inputs. Now if I want to work the lower bands I just switch to the HF antenna input and go scan.

I fought with the radio a bit trying to figure out getting sound from it and finally landed on the NOAA weather station at 162.4 MHz to which the radio exploded in sound. I was rather giddy to have it up an rolling and spent the evening in celebratory soaking.

The radio and power supply in their new home. I feel ready to make contacts now that I have a radio that can transmit at proper power levels. I am unable to get my computer to talk to it yet which will be an important step to figure out but for now I am at least up and running. Steep learning curve but a fun one for sure.

Today I have to find hay for the animals which will likely require a 30+ mile drive. We are between storms now so I have a chance. R's birthday is tomorrow so we are going to be getting ready for that as well. I am 5 days into NaNo and am nearly a 1000 words ahead of my minimum and should be able to keep myself a day ahead.