First posted 12/23/2024
The double hamstick dipole situation on my roof was great, but a fairly sizable hailstorm in late spring resulted in almost everyone in our neighborhood needing a new roof (fortunately the antennas & PVC structure survived the high winds without issue!). Sure enough, our roof needed to be replaced and I cut the RG-58 cables inside the attic for the roofing crew to easily do their thing. Instead of recrimping the cables back together, I decided this was a sign that I should splurge on some LMR400 to the two dipoles, while keeping my 220mhz + dual-band antennas on RG-58. The PVC antenna mounting structure is a little more crooked than it was upon initial install nowadays, but everything is holding up pretty well, and I finally got my QRZ USA50 award thanks to the following three improvements!
Improvement #1: 8ft Grounding Rod + Lightning Arrestors
For both safety reasons and efforts to keep RF out of the shack, I thought it would be a great idea to buy a cheaper 8ft grounding rod and outdoor grounding cable in an effort to ground my radios and antennas via lightning arrestors. I’ve read some reports online about how the hamsticks blowing in the wind can make for some messy static electricity issues, and while my electrical engineering knowledge is minimal, I’m hoping the better grounding makes this a non-issue. If you know better about this, please let me know in the comments!
Improvement #2: MFJ-915 RF Isolator
There were times where I’d tune up the 10m hamstick dipole to 20m, send some FT8 traffic out at 10W from the Xiegu G90, and I’d immediately see my desktop computer’s wired internet connection break during transmissions. After reading up online about what other hams have been doing to fight this, it seems that having some flavor of balun as close to the dipoles as possible would be helpful. For the sake of time, I went with two MFJ-915 units coming directly off the antennas instead of making my own baluns. I no longer have that “wired internet breaks when transmitting on certain frequencies” issue, and while I’m not 100% sure if it’s thanks to the MFJ-915 or the better grounding, I’m very happy that problem has gone away!
Improvement #3: Rooftop Enclosure Box
I didn’t want my chimney to be a big mess of lightning arrestors, grounding cables & all kinds of places for water to enter my UHF connectors. So I thought it’d be nice to get an enclosure box very similar to those used by cable TV installers up there. I wish I got something slightly larger, but it got the job done! While there wasn’t a good way to hide the MFJ-915 units, this box is doing a great job of hiding everything else cabling-related:
What’s Next?
When I first bought all the stuff for these improvements, my goal was to quickly get QRZ USA50 and ARRL Worked All States awards. Once that new LMR400 cable was installed, I had no problems quickly getting the QSOs needed for QRZ USA50! The improvement over RG58 on my feedline distance (about 50 feet) was absolutely worth the extra cost in my opinion.
Initially I planned on spending the time to get ARRL Worked All States before writing this blog post. Between all the IPv6 stuff at the top of my Everything Else page and my duties on W9ANL’s board, it has become clear to me that obtaining more ham radio awards isn’t something I can squeeze in to the schedule these days. We’ve been doing some super cool stuff over at W9ANL, which all goes to https://blogs.anl.gov/amateur-radio/ in lieu of this blog. I’m excited for some fun projects we have coming in the pipeline for 2025, even if it means way less in the ham radio category on kd9cpb.com!
As of this writing, I have at least 4 more states I’d need to log in LoTW via the double dipoles (QRZ USA50 allows DMR jumbospot-fueled contacts, hence why I’ve received theirs already), and the idea of spending more hours chasing certain callsigns in WSJT-X just doesn’t spark joy for me nowadays. Ideally, I’ll get WAS unexpectedly from getting some FT8 QSOs just for fun every once in a while. Recently I saw an email from some Illinois Ham Radio listserv about wcars.radio doing some things I find highly interesting here in Chicagoland (Meshtastic, DMR linked to ASL, etc.) and I’ll probably try to spend more time in 2025 tinkering with those things in lieu of more HF activity via the double dipoles.
Now all that being said, I’m super satisfied with how these improvements turned out, and I hope to be bouncing more waves off the ionosphere with them after I get a few more home improvement & W9ANL projects checked off the list (fingers crossed that’ll be sooner rather than later in 2025!)
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