Today I spent some time playing around with my new mini 9-section shockcord whip.  I started out on 10m and used the standard mini-buddipole parts.  Versatee –> 2×11″ arms each side –> coil –> standard whip.  I set this up as a horizontal dipole, with the coils tapped in 1.5 turns on each side.  Whips fully extended.  I fed the Versatee with the TRSB at 1:1, with 25′ of RG-8X coax.  The antenna performed really well with low SWR, and I was easily able to work a Brazil station.

Next up was 12 meters with the shockcord as a vertical.  I put the 9-section whip on the versatee, with the stinger retracted and no accessory arms, no co

Yesterday I did some craigslist shopping to get the pieces and parts needed to add racks to my truck topper. I was going to weld up custom racks but liked the flexibilty of these commercial track systems. The towers and crossbars I found are Thule, but the tracks I found are Yakima. Everything I found online suggested the tracks are identical, but that is not true!  The plates used in the Thule system are too thick to nest correctly in the Yakima tracks. Using them like that could lead to serious failure. So, I machined the plates down a little to fit correctly. 

This was my first year as a vendor at the Northern Colorado Amateur Radio Hamfest.  I did pretty well with 1 table and a bunch of junk!  I managed to sell almost everything I brought, and made enough money to fund a kegging system for my homebrew beer endeavors.