What? No in-person Homebrew Night??
It has been a while since I attended an in-person homebrew night, and it looks like it will be a while longer. So here’s a few of the things from around the shack, more along the line of the old “hints and kinks” than stuff getting built.
There be alligators …
I got in a bunch of alligator clip leads. I could see that thirty leads would soon become a ball of spaghetti after the first time I used a few. I don’t have one of those fancy lead holders I remember from my time in labs. Looking around I did have lots of cardboard, since everything arrives at the door in a box these days. It turns out that if you clip both sides of the lead to a square of cardboard, and alternate the wires so every second one runs behind the board, they are much less prone to tangling. When not in use, the whole thing can be hung on the wall with one nail. Thicker cardboard with notches cut out of it would work for BNC and other short jumper cables too.
User-friendly SWR …
For a long time I was wondering if I could re-work one of those cheap SWR meters from the CB era, with a single scale to be more user-friendly, like the cross needle versions available now. It turns out that you “sorta” can. You can buy a cross needle meter movement on line for a reasonable price. You can then run a line from the forward and reverse pickup on one of those old SWR bridges to each of the two meter movements in the new meter. Unfortunately, while the new cross needle bridges have a consistant response across the spectrum, allowing a “set and forget” calibration, the old el-cheapo bridges don’t respond the same way. This means that my modified SWR bridge will show me when the SWR is folding back the power from the rig, and will let me see when the SWR has been minimised, it WON’T tell me what the actual SWR reading is. Win some, lose some. It was a fun experiment and the old time bridge wasn’t doing anything useful around here anyway.
Fatal attraction …
There are probably a few other things around the shack that I have done, that I don’t even notice any more, or are not generally applicable, such as replacing the microphone clips with magnets, or for that matter, replacing the rubber feet on some of my gear with magnets, since my shack is mostly steel shelving. Since most of you have wooden desks or the like, that won’t work so well.
Speaking of magnets, the most recent brainwave around here was to add a magnet to the bottom of the projectiles that I use with the launcher to put wires into trees. It seems that the projectile goes up, over and down, until it stops about 25 feet from the ground.
Rather than try to snag it with a pole and hook, this year I’m using a magnet on the pole instead of a hook, which mostly batted the projectile around instead of grabbing it. Of course, the glue gun didn’t work. So I dismantled the thing. Ever try to dismantle a hot glue gun? Hint: if it isn’t HOT, it has glued itself together. If it is hot, you WILL get a few burns until you remember your heat RESISTANT gloves. After drilling out the glue gun the project went OK until I had my next idea. Instead of using a washer on the projectile to retrieve the thing, why not use another magnet. More stick more good, right. Yeah, but only IF you get the magnet the right way around. Now I need an unglue gun. Eventually, it all came out right, but don’t believe everything works right first time around like it says in those magazine articles.
73
Keep doin’ makin’ tryin’ stuff
mk
Last Updated on 2023-04-19 by AdminOARC