Or arriving at the driveway chain, it was apparent something wasn’t quite right – one end of the chain was on the ground and the other end wasn’t padlocked to the eye bolt. It was soon evident that someone had forcefully tried to open some of the padlocks leaving one end of the chain uncoupled and the other end hanging only by the slip hook. One padlock was still just attached – it had been forced partly open and bent. Despite being one of the lower quality locks; it still took 3 pairs of molegrips to bend the padlock loop to remove it from the chain ( somewhat akin to: How many radio amateurs does it take to change a light bulb? ). A short length of additional chain and a padlock from Dave L’s “Bunnings Mobile” CRV, has put the chain back in place for now.
Congratulations to Mark, ZL1MRT who has had a paper published in the ARRL QEX Magazine, Mar-Apr 2024 edition. Marks paper titled ” Morse-Coded Binary Over CW (MCB/CW)” describes in detail his development of a “one-to-one mapping between the alphabetic Morse character codes and a corresponding set of twenty-six variable-length binary codes that facilitates the efficient exchange of binary-coded messages over CW”. For those of you who were wondering – now you know.
Mid afternoon, Dave, ZL1DRV popped his head in and suggested that the 80m dipole “was a bit low”. Indeed, a significant part of it was “grounded”, as a result of a support rope having parted. Probably the rope had rubbed through, where it ran across a branch of a tree ( something we have experienced previously with the 40m dipole )! So out with the ladder and up the tree went Dave, to rescue the fixed rope. After rejoining the severed rope ends, it was back up the tree to raise the antenna and tie it off. A relatively simply repair, but the rope appears due for replacement and we should sleeve the new rope against future abrasion.
