2017 highlights, 2018 goals

A traditional post for many years on my blog. A review of 2017 and preview on 2018. This year has gone in a flash, too fast, too many things happen. Another radio friend lost, I guess this will happen more often when you get older. But at least I did place the antenna tower finally after almost 10 years. When I moved to this house in 2008 I thought it would take a year or two to get the tower up again but besides the hobby other things occupied my time and the tower was the last thing that was on my mind. The "emergency" antennas worked reasonable well making the tower less important.
This was not a good year DX wise, only three new DXCC worked and three new on WSPR. I did work some interesting new ones on 60m, so it wasn't that bad. But I have been experimenting a lot more compared to previous years. I started with a power supply, did some FSQ and JTDX experiments, made a GPS timer working though it still has some hickups, measured the loss in PL259 connectors, failed a RaDAR activation, did various magnetic loop experiments that finally resulted in a very good usable portable magloop, did some tests with a WSPR transmitter kit and modified it a little and created another KISS digimode audio interface. Finally did some maintenance and repairs on both the Create as the Kenpro rotor. This year truly became a "maker" year and I learned a lot from the experiences. Did I meet my goal for this year, yes I did!

The tower is up again and now there is the challenge to reroute coax and cables to the new tower. I already took care over the Kenpro rotor that will be mounted in the mast again. There will be a small cabinet at the base of the mast that already has the lightning protectors and a galvanic separator mounted inside. I'm thinking about mounting the Alu tape multiband vertical on top of the antenna tower, it will be at a feedpoint height of about 16 meter which is 7 meters above the height I use now. It will not have the three radials I use now but a 7 meter wire as opposite capacity hanging outside the mast to make it a vertical dipole. I might try the mast as radiator as well, see what works best for me? The plan is to mount at least a 5 elem. beam for the 6m band. And till I have any idea about a multiband beam I mount a 5 element 10m beam as well below the 6m beam. At least, that's the idea and my goal for 2018...

Wishing all my readers a very healthy, prosperous and DX full new year!

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