View looking north

Winter Wonderland

Winter as arrived!

Empanadas

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law showed me how she makes traditional Chilean empanadas. Well I decided to scale down the receipe in order to let my bread machine do all the mixing, and of-course replaced the meat filling with something Anita would find acceptable - I diced some cheese, green peppers, and onion, all bathed in some tomato purée. I'm very please with the result ... The pastry turned out perfect and the filling was tasty :-)

CH update

Finally we have a stable heating system! It turns out that our pellet boiler electronics is very sensitive to any voltage changes. The first indications of abnormal behavior was that it would frequently shut itself down and display an error message (alarm pellet) - which at first made everyone think that it was a configuration problem (52 parameters can be set on this thing).

But in the end, the problem was traced to small dips in voltage every time the water pump or refrigerator kicked in. So I fitted a domestic voltage stabilizer and that seems to have done the trick!

Oh and another leak was discovered last week; which was traced down to a drywall screw that had been driven right into the center of a 3/4" pipe! Fortunately it was fairly easy to repair, I just need to patch the drywall I cut open to expose the leak.

Central Heating Woes :-(

Last week a small puddle appeared in the hallway. Closer inspection confirmed my fear that the water was coming from the heating system distribution pipes. Damm! I had to rip into the wood clad ceiling to fix the problem; fortunately not too much of it had to be removed - just as well as it is pretty difficult to do without causing a lot of damage! Anyway, after locating the leaking joint I semi-drained the heating system in order to re-solder.

Refilled, purged of air and tested - all appears to be OK. I really hope this is the last leak I have to deal with! Oh and of-course I had to fit new wood panels to close up the ceiling and refit the cornice. In all,  2 days to complete.

Tower preparation

The successful resolution of QRM re-kindled my enthusiasm to erect my antenna farm! Here the final section of my lattice tower is being painted. Once installed the tower will stand around 15m; but before I do that I need to add the supporting components in order to fit the antenna rotator.

There's quite a lot of science surrounding optimum antenna performance on HF; higher isn't necessarily better - it really boils down to what you what to achieve, the type of antenna, and the topography of your particular location.

G3TXQ has a detailed explanation on his website http://www.karinya.net/g3txq/hexbeam/height_2/

Quite honestly, 50ft is already scary high for antenna maintenance! .... and according to G3TXQ his study has shown that "if we can get the antenna up around the 40ft-50ft mark we will be within 1dB of the optimum height for short-haul and medium-haul paths on all bands 20m thru 10m. And we will probably accept the "half S point" penalty that our modest height suffers on the long-haul paths" 


- that's good enough for me!