Dan, KB6NU, teaching at a recent one-day Tech class at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum.

Starting May 23, I will be teaching a General Class course at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. We will be using my No-Nonsense General Class License Study Guide and covering the topics in exactly the same order as the study guide covers them:

• May 23: G5 – Electrical Principles
• May 30: G6 – Circuit Components
• June 6:  G7 – Practical Circuits
• June 13: G8 – Signals and emissions
• June 20: G9 – Antennas and Feedlines
• June 27: G3 – Radio Wave Propagation
• July 11: G4 – Amateur Radio Practices
• July 18: G2 – Operating Procedures
• July 25: G1 – Commission Rules and G0 – Electrical and RF Safety

The classes will start at 6:30pm and run until 8:00pm, when the museum closes. There is no charge for the  class. If you do plan on attending, please e-mail me, so that I can arrange to have a room big enough for the group.

73, Dan KB6NU

One of my first contacts was with W5STR, the club station for the Small Town Amateur Radio Service (STARS), a club in Arkansas. The club was operating from a campground in Toad Suck, AK. Yes, you read that right–the place they were operating from is named Toad Suck, a place that a recent poll says has the “most unfortunate name” in the U.S.

As you may know, I’m a sucker (pun intended) for odd place names. That being the case, I had to find out how Toad Suck got its name. According to their website:

Long ago, steamboats traveled the Arkansas River when the water was at the right depth. When it wasn’t, the captains and their crew tied up to wait where the Toad Suck Lock and Dam now spans the river. While they waited, they refreshed themselves at the local tavern there, to the dismay of the folks living nearby, who said: “They suck on the bottle ’til they swell up like toads.” Hence, the name Toad Suck. The tavern is long gone, but the legend lives on.

I love it.

Heikki, OG3077F, has contacted stations in all 3,077 counties in the U.S.

Next, I worked Heikki, OG3077F. On his QSL card, found on QRZ.Com and shown above, Heikki says, “I applied for this special callsign to commemorate my contacts with all 3,077 U.S. counties, all on CW, which took me 24 years to complete. I started chasing U.S. counties in 1987, which I met Bud, W0UBT, in Minnesota. He gave me the USA County Record Book, as a gift, and upon my return to Finland, I started to fill it up. Many thanks to all of my local and international county hunter riends for all of your support throughout all of these years.”

Finally, I worked 20 stations in the Polish DX contest. One of the stations I worked was SP9ATE, whose QSL card will be a nice addition to my collection of QSLs from stations whose callsigns spell words. I almost worked SP9GEM, but after many attempts to get him to copy my callsign, he gave up and went on to the next QSO.

Pre-registration is required, and there is a $10 fee to take the class, but the fee will be waived for anyone under the age of 18. We often fill the class and have to put people on the waiting list. So, if you would like to take this class, send a check or money order to reserve your spot to:

Dan Romanchik, KB6NU
1325 Orkney Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

You can also pay by sending money via PayPal to cwgeek@kb6nu.com.

Prospective students should download the study guide IMMEDIATELY. Read through it a couple of times and take some online practice tests (URLs for practice test websites can be found in the study guide) before coming to class. Studying beforehand greatly increase the chances that you’ll pass the test.

If you have any questions, please e-mail Dan, KB6NU or phone him at 734-930-6564.

Operating the station on Saturday were:

• Dan, KB6NU
• Jack, N8PMG
• Jameson, KD8PIJ
• Dinesh, AB3DC
• Mark, W8MP

Since the museum is only open from 1500Z – 2200Z, we were only able to operate for seven hours on Saturday. We spent all of our time on 20m phone, with our beam pointed southwest, concentrating on working mostly U.S. stations. We had originally intended to operate on 14.287 MHz, but quickly had to change frequencies, as that portion of the band was occupied by participants in the Mississippi QSO party. Before moving, though, we were able to contact Pertti, EA7GSU, who was operating the event in Spain.

We finally ended up on 14.227 MHz and made a total of 110 contacts on Saturday. This included 29 states and four DX contacts.

On Sunday, we only operated for a couple of hours and made another 27 contacts. While we made fewer contacts on Sunday, the contacts that we did make were more poignant than the ones on Saturday.

My first contact on Sunday was with a gentleman who was spending the winter in Florida, but whose hometown was Standish, Michigan. He told me that his mother had polio, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s, they would put her on a bus for Ann Arbor, where she would receive treatments. While there’s no way to be sure, I think that this ham’s mother was taking part in some of the research leading to the Salk vaccine in 1955. That research took place right here at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

I also talked to hams that had direct experience with polio. One was a polio survivor himself. Another’s wife was a polio survivor. A third was a physician who had been to Africa and had treated polio victims there.

It was a real treat to combine two activities that I enjoy so much–amateur radio and Rotary–and it felt good to know that in some small way I was furthering the work of the End Polio Now campaign. I hope that next year we will once again operate this special event and get even more Rotarians and amateur radio operators to participate.

Today, Dan and I installed toroids in different places at the Omni VII and I’m pleased to report that putting a clamp-on unit on the coax cable as it enters the receiver reduced the noise level from S6 to S5. That may not seem like a lot until you consider that the forward gain of our three-element beam is 6 dB, which is the equivalent of an S-unit, a fourfold signal gain.

I’m searching around for more ideas to lower the noise even more. Stay tuned!

Ovide K8EV

“No,” I replied, “what’s up?”

“Part of the antenna’s missing,” he said. “It must have come off during the high winds we had last week.” I drove by the next day, and sure enough, we were missing half the reflector.

Jack, WT8N, who was majorly responsible for us getting the beam up in the air in the first place, jumped right on this. He got up onto the roof, found the missing element, and organized a work party to re-attach it.

The work party was this afternoon. Jack; Ovide, K8EV; yours truly; and Jerry, head of maintenance for the museum and the son of a ham headed up to the roof to lower the antenna and fix the antenna.

Lowering the antenna proved easier than I expected. We unbolted the tilt-over tower from the mounting bracket and it came down relatively easily. Re-attaching the errant element was also pretty straightforward. All the bolts were there. It looks like we just didn’t tighten it down well enough the first time.

Tilting the tower back up proved to be a little more difficult. We first tried it with two men pushing and two men pulling on one of the guy wires. When that didn’t work, we tried three guys pushing it, and one pulling. That didn’t work either.

Ovide then went in search of another helper. He returned shortly thereafter with one young museum employee, and with four guys pushing, we finally got the tower into an upright position. We inserted and tightened the bolts, and now we’re back in business with all of the elements in the right position. Overall, this took just an hour to do.

Despite missing half of the reflector, the beam seemed to work just fine. It tuned up just fine, and was still quite directional. I’m sure with the complete reflector, it works even better, though. If I knew more about antenna modeling, I’d run a simulation and figure out how much directionality we were actually using.

Has anyone done this? If you have, or have some idea what the effect of losing half of a reflector has on a three-element Yagi, I’d like to hear from you.

It was instructive to put some 6, 7, and 8 year olds on the air.  The 6 year-old had a really short attention span and wanted to diddle with the knobs on the TenTec–I deflected him to the PC where he amused himself by going to places that I had never dreamed you could get to on QRZ.COM.  The 7 year-old focused on the radio OK but couldn’t sustain a conversation with Denis.  The 8 year-old learned to operate the TX SW appropriately and had a nice QSO with Denis about New Mexico’s geography and wild animals, the cost of Denis’ radio equipment, who Denis talks to, what Denis likes to do, etc.

I was busy to the point of near distraction this morning, trying to pay attention to the radio operation (glad we found the lock-down instruction for the tuning knob!) and answering questions from various people who stopped by to chat.

I am a member of the Ann Arbor Rotary Club. The Rotary Club was founded in Chicago on February 23, 1905, and in commemoration of that event–and to promote awareness of the Rotary Club’s End Polio Now campaign–I’ll be calling CQ Polio on Saturday, 2/15/12 at WA2HOM.

I plan to operate primarily on 20m phone on or about 14.280, plus or minus QRM. If you’re in the Ann Arbor, MI area, I’d like to invite you to come down and help me. I plan to be there from 10am until at least 4pm EST (1500 – 2100Z).

If you’re not in the are, I’d like to invite you to work us. We’ll send out a commemorative certificate to anyone who’d like one.

If you’d like to know more about Rotary, you can go to www.rotary.org.  If you’d like to know more about the End Polio Now campaign in particular, go to  End Polio Now section of the Rotary website.