[10m] Small set-back for the KO6BB/B beacon

[Philip KO6BB]

Hi All,

The latest project that I've been working on for about a month has a small
setback.  I'm building a 10 Meter CW beacon.  I gutted a JC Penny 40 Channel
CB of it's receive and audio circuitry, replaced the final and driver with
slightly beefier units, beefed up the final heatsink, changed one Xtal,
added some "keying" circuitry with an RS-232 opto coupler interface and I
get about 7 Watts of CW out of it. It works well.

It will be keyed from an OLD NEC Pentium laptop running Win95A.  It doesn't
have enough horsepower or memory (24MB RAM) to use for anything except
logging and other older, simple programs.  I have a very nice DOS beacon
keyer program that runs well on it, let's you set up about any message/ID
pattern that you want and can alternately key at two different speeds
(presently set about 16 and 6 WPM).  The message I presently have stored in
it reads "VVV VVV VVV DE KO6BB/B KO6BB/B GRID CM97SF  K".  To prevent wear
on the Hard-drive I will unplug the drive (slides in) and run the DOS
program from a floppy.  Both the Radio and computer will run 24/7 off the
station battery (kept on constant charge).

Anyway, the setback I had concerns the dedicated beacon antenna.  I
"salvaged" an old Cushcraft Ringo CB antenna, figuring on retuning it for
10M.  All the fastening hardware was heavily rusted, was cut off and
replaced with stainless steel hardware.  The "ring" was stress broken right
at the mounting bolt.  I flattened a half inch and reconnected it.  Since
the ring is adjustable, and the frequency is now higher I figured that
wouldn't hurt it any. After reassembly, adjusting the length according to
the Cushcraft instructions etc. I checked it with a friends MFJ antenna
analyzer.  It was nicely tuned to 24.6 MCs!  I collapsed some of the
sections to shorten the antenna.  NO effect on antenna tuning!! It's been
checked and rechecked, just doesn't make any sense, other than that perhaps
the CBer had already shortened the ring or something. . .  I'm apparently
seeing the resonant point of the ring rather than the antenna proper.  In
any case,  I gave up on getting that thing tuned to 10M.  I'm keeping the
aluminum though.  If I remove the ring and add radials (or use it over my
metal roof) it can be made into a 1/4 wave vertical for any one band from
20-10M.  I'm going to try to get a Solarcon A-99 (1/2 wave fiberglass
vertical) for the 10M beacon, hopefully later this month.

73 de Phil,  KO6BB
DX begins at the noise floor!

THE BEACONEER'S LAIR:   http://www.geocities.com/ko6bb/
MY RADIO-LOGS:       http://www.geocities.com/ko6bb/Logs/
QSL GALLERY: http://photobucket.com/albums/f306/KO6BB/
Merced, Central California,    37.3N  120.48W  CM97sh