[Space] Productive day at the ham store

Christie Dudley longobord at gmail.com
Sun Jan 24 02:28:16 UTC 2010


Who knew you could do so much in the 1/2 hour before the store closed...

So I went and bought my first radio. Awww.  I need a few parts for between
the radio and the laptop, but I have to get those online.  It's a dual
channel so I can also use it to communicate with the other team as well.

I also talked to the guy at the store about antennas.  He agreed that we
would do best with a 1/4 wave antenna for "straight up".  He even suggested
mounting it sideways, although I think that would be a problem on our
balloon.  We might try that on a subsequent run, depending on how things go.
 I got two - one for my car and one for the balloon.  I also got the cables
necessary to connect them up to the radios.  We'll need to cut both the
antennas and the payload cable - we don't want to have all 17' on the
balloon.  The antenna needs to be cut to the length to best match our
specific frequency.

The irony?  The antennas were cheap; the cables were not.

Also while I was there, there was another guy buying a radio who when I
started talking about the balloons mentioned that he had friends who had
just started launching balloons.  It wasn't the other group, as those folks
had no radio, but managed to recover their payload after about a week by
calling the phone they left in it.  I got his contact info and will be
talking to him quite a bit.

Christie
_______
Getting to the bottom of the hill is convenient. The view from the top of
the hill is stunning. Where would you choose to live?
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