CHCCS ARDF
2017-10-08, Fall #3, 80m Classic
Carolina North Forest - East
antenna icon
Equipment Notes

Island Creative Time
The family website of Kelly and Patrick Sears




← Back to event report.

Mostly the equipment was the same as in our last few 80 m classics. The homing beacon and foxes were set to put out 1.5 W into a 50 ohm load and were hooked up to a 6 m vertical with three 3 m radials. They all had either an antenna tuner or a transformer attached. That's all as usual.

During the last event, one of our antenna tuners broke. That was the reason for Fox #1 being weak during the Oct-1 event. For the Oct-8 event, the tuner was replaced with a transformer built just this last week. So we're back to having just the right number of tuners or transformers. Another problem averted was one of the radial systems having a wire rip out during course. We had a single spare. Phew ☺

We did have a few problems during this event also. Several of the antennas and radial systems have lost their banana plugs and have corrosion visible. We didn't notice major changes in signal strength. Time is short, so we'll do a temporary patch job to get through the season.

The course timing system was not out for testing. We had some problems with at the last event and the start time was too busy to set it up during this event. Mostly time was taken up with dealing with Fox 5 which didn't come on with the others. A field fix worked and we didn't have to replace it. Happy day ☺

Overall the equipment is holding up well. As we approach the end of the season, we've accumulated wear on the equipment and haven't had time to fix it. So, we may need to start setup a bit earlier to account for field fixes during the next couple events. One reason that we haven't been able to keep up with equipment fixes is because we've been also building totally new equipment for foxoring!

Yes! The next event will definitely be foxoring! We're still building the equipment but we're confident we'll be done by Oct-22. It's very exciting to be running one of these events for the first time ☺

Pictures

Here are a few pictures of our preparation. Clicking pictures will bring up larger versions.

Streamers for the first course setting run. There are two course setting runs: One on the day before the event to put up the antennas, and one on the morning of the event to hook up the transmitters and set the orienteering flags and punches. The pictures show the streamers we put up so we can find the antennas again the next day. There are two streamers for each location. One goes on the antenna. The other goes were we'll be able to see it more easily. They each have a label with our contact information and the event date. In the picture, we just replaced all the 2017-10-01 dates with 2017-10-08.

Transmitters in their charging station. We can trickle charge six transmitters at a time. The case has to be opened to plug the charger in. Much improvement is needed here but it works.

Five fox transmitters ready to be synchronized to the WWVB clock. The transmitters get turned on exactly when the minute turns to 1 or 6. One person can turn on two transmitters at a time. So a single person can synchronize all transmitters in a bit over 10 minutes. Each one knows which fox it is (from jumpers on the PCB) and adjusts its transmitting schedule accordingly. They are ready to go but we won't turn them on until about 8 AM. They also have an internal delay of a couple hours.

← Back to event report.





All the pictures we took are free to use as you wish. The web page (text and layout) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Link to License. This means that you can copy anything you want, use it and alter it as you want, as long as you give credit to us for the original work, provide a link to the license, and explain any changes you made. We try to make sure all other content we display is also available to use. But check the sources we list before using them.