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Biography: Far more than you probably ever wanted to know about KG6YTZ
Or, "How And Why I Got Into Ham Radio,
And What I Did Once I Got My License"

Greetings and 73 from Ken Harris, holder of U.S. amateur radio call sign KG6YTZ. Here's a bunch of generally trivial information about myself and some of my various hobbies, up to and including ham radio [surprise, surprise!]. Various links and images will be provided for your mouse-jockeying pleasure. Bring your own snacks — it's a long page. [Verbosity follows! You have been warned. Twice.]

Part One: Biographical Babble
[And as if this isn't enough, click here for my old CMI Software bio]

Part 2:  "Frankenstation"
Part 3:  "Going Mobile"
Part 4:  "The YuTZ puts up a J-Pole"
Part 5:  "What's with that flag?"

1966: "Whoops, there he is!"

One truly memorable week in the second grade, circa 1973: Substitute teacher brings in some 6V lantern batteries, light bulbs, motors, and other assorted widgets and proceeds to demonstrate some of the things that electricity can do. A geek is born! No, let me rephrase that... A naturally curious child has his interest in science, and how things work, permanently stimulated. It was around this time that I also developed a deep interest in astronomy.

Christmas, 1976: Received one of those Radio Shack crystal radio kits. I never did have much of an antenna connected to it, and I'm sure I didn't have a proper ground, but I was able to receive a couple of local "blowtorch" radio stations, KFI 640 and KTNQ 1020, without batteries and — most significantly — using a receiver, albeit a very simple one, that I built all by myself. Not that there was really anything even remotely difficult about putting one of those kits together...

1977: The Hardy Boys book "The Shortwave Mystery" becomes one of my all-time favorites.

Circa 1977 or 1978: Received a pair of old toy walkie-talkies, crystalled for CB channel 14. Made a contact with a CB'er on a base a couple of blocks away. That was my first experience with 2-way radio.

February 1979: A rainy night in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles. I was tuning around with a plain old basic Sears AM table radio just to see what I could hear. I carefully dialed in on a weak signal and, after a couple of minutes, heard the station I.D. and had my mind thoroughly blown: WWL in New Orleans. That was my first DX experience. I would go on to log broadcasts from various locations in the western U.S.: Salt Lake City UT, KCBS and KFRC in San Francisco CA, KFRE [?] in Fresno [?] CA, KBOI in Boise ID, KOA in Denver CO, KOB [now KKOB] in Albuquerque NM, and most recently, KOMO in Seattle WA. I believe I may once have pulled in a Texas station, but I couldn't confirm it.

WWL New Orleans remains my best MW broadcast DX catch even to this day, but most of the above stations are still frequently audible here, as is KDWN in Las Vegas NV. The AM broadcast band is so crowded here that most of the truly good DX is likely to be buried by local signals, so I have no idea what might otherwise be audible.

At around the same time, on the trailing edge of the 1970's CB radio craze, my local Radio Shack had several models of CB radios on display, connected and on the air. I used to fiddle around with those things occasionally, using "The Kid" for a handle — well, I certainly wasn't exactly old then! — and "the approved temporary call sign" of KKH91732 [K, your initials, your ZIP code]. This was back when CB'ers still needed licenses. However, it would not be until 1987 that I finally owned a radio of my own, and by then the licensing requirement had been dropped.

It was also during the late 1970's that Radio Shack introduced their first TRS-80 computer, so I got completely hooked on computers as well. I used to hang out there, teaching myself BASIC programming and just generally goofing off on the computers for as long as the management would tolerate me. Is that nerdly enough for you? Just for the record, I was not the only junior geek-in-training who did that, either!

Circa 1982: At the suggestion of the General Manager of radio station KWKW, who had been in the audience at a talent show in which I had performed a self-written stand-up comedy routine — very badly, in my opinion, when I think about it — I enrolled as a student at Columbia School of Broadcasting. Short version of a long story: I decided that I was better at production than on the microphone [I enjoy putting together music compilations]; otherwise, I didn't really get much more out of it than a nagging student loan debt, some training as an announcer, and the ability to back-cue a record.

August 1987: Worked as a security guard [Dec. 1986 to May 1988] at a battery factory in City of Industry, California. That means truckers, and truckers mean CB radio. The bug bit me again. I bought my first CB, a Radio Shack TRC-412 handheld "emergency" radio with a tiny, pitiful, inefficient mag-mount mobile antenna. At first, I used the handle "Crazy H," but the sunspot cycle was nearing its peak then and there was a LOT of noise on the band. People had a hard time copying that handle, especially with the weak signal, misunderstanding it as various combinations of "Crazy 8's," "Lazy Ace," and so on. I would later adopt a new handle.

Did my time "in the mud" until late November, when I acquired a Cobra 148 in trade for an old Fanon Courier base that I had bought a little while before and couldn't really use, being in an apartment. When the 148 was installed in the car and coupled with a generic no-name knockoff of a Van Ordt Pow-R-Stik from the local CB shop, I was finally truly audible. At the time, I had a 1969 Olds Cutlass Supreme, which my friend "Blue Knight" [not a cop; he just drove a blue Ford pickup] told me had the "Crossfire V8" engine. He suggested Crossfire for a handle; I liked it, and I kept it. My handle has been Crossfire ever since, and when I got my first real computer [the Timex/Sinclair doesn't count] and got online in October 1990, it became my handle in cyberspace as well.

Left: My 1969 Cutlass with the "Crossfire V8" engine, circa summer 1988. Look closely, and you can see the CB antenna sticking up from the trunk lid. Unfortunately, the old beast was totalled in an accident not long after this picture was taken. It was in desperate need of restoration anyway, but you can't really tell from this particular shot.

I was part of a group of night-owls on channel 28, and late-night [or, often, early-morning] ragchews on the channel and coffee meets at Denny's or Winchell's were common and often done on the spur of the moment. Virtually all of that group is gone now, either SK or just plain off the air for whatever reason. I know of only three of us who remain active on any band, amateur or otherwise — myself, Bigfoot [Jim, now KI6EQA], and Pomona Red [Lou]. "Pomona Red" goes by other handles these days and might also have his ham ticket now — I could swear I once heard him operating on 70cm [WIN System? PAPA System?] from the San Diego area.

During my years in the security business, I know I had at least one co-worker who was a ham — Michael Mackenroth KA6UIT.

Sometime in 1987 or '88: Bought a Regency HX-1000 scanner from a co-worker, and wound up spending more time listening to 2m and 70cm than anything else. I still listen mainly to the ham bands, at least the ones my scanners and receivers can tune — they do tend to be somewhat more entertaining than listening to the Highway Patrol checking license plates.

In the 1990's — actually from May 1991 to June 2002* — I ran a dialup bulletin board called ModeMANIA BBS [pronounced like "modem mania" but as all one word]. Another local BBS operator was a ham — Mark Melvin, then KE6MP ["Mighty Pilot"], now AE6MP — and he encouraged me to get licensed. [We hams do tend to do that, don't we?] He gave me a couple of study guides, and I learned a bit from those, but not quite enough to earn my license. Not yet...

* Here's a link to even more autobiographical babble, old text from my CMI Sotware pages formerly hosted on AOL, as told from the BBS side of things.

Early 1996: After much prodding and prompting from my sister, and being completely dissatisfied with the cruddy low-paying jobs I had been working [ten years as a security guard was about nine years too many], I signed up to take the TELCOM 2A and 2B classes at Pasadena City College. These were the requisites for an internship — or a paid "board-op" position, the same work my sister was doing at the time — at the college's radio station, KPCC FM 89.3.

TELCOM 2A focused more on the basics of production and editing — something I had been wanting to learn anyway — but the TELCOM 2B curriculum expanded on that and added some basic antenna and RF theory, some of which I was already somewhat familiar with, from my time on CB and from those study guides. It was knowledge that would prove useful later on.

I later learned that my TELCOM 2B instructor is a ham — Stan Coutant AA6SC. Our former chief engineer is also a ham, as is our current chief engineer. I guess I'm not really surprised.

At the risk of sounding like I'm tooting my own horn here... My TELCOM 2A and 2B instructors decided that I was talented enough to be added to the regular station payroll — which was really the reason why I was taking those courses anyway — so in the middle of October 1996, while I was actually still taking TELCOM 2B, I became a paid master control operator at KPCC. I am still working there today.

Spring 2002: I had been off the air from 11m for several years, mainly due to a string of problems with the old Cobra 148, but I had never really lost the radio "bug." My friend Jim [then "Bigfoot/686," now KI6EQA] introduced me to a local group of sideband operators, and we had frequent Wednesday evening gatherings at The Hat, a popular local pastrami restaurant. I bought a "new" rig from a member of the group, and between myself and another friend who had the necessary tools and work space, we managed to work out a way to mount the radio in my Ciera, using some bits from a Radio Shack universal bracket kit in addition to the CB's own bracket. I returned to CB, but I never was as active as I had been in the late 80's. Very few of the old group still remained, and the old home channel has become a cesspool. I migrated from AM to mostly sideband operation.

My interest in scanners and radio — and my desire to own a "wide coverage" receiver such as an Alinco DJ-X10 — had led me in early 2003 to a web site called Strong Signals, run by Rich Wells N2MCA and assisted by Mike Agner KA3JJZ. It was on Strong Signals that I made the acquaintance of a local ham who gave me a nice old fully-functional Electra Bearcat 101 scanner. That got me back into scanning [and listening to hams!] and soon led to the purchase of a Uniden Bearcat BC245XLT handheld. I have developed software — the definitive software, if I may say so — to generate programming codes for the Bearcat 101. I have also been working on software to control the BC245, but I don't know whether I'll ever get around to releasing that one.

I was an active user on Strong Signals, had my interest in ham radio rekindled — it was during this time that I also bought a Realistic DX-160 receiver and a Kaito KA-1102 handheld receiver — and around February of 2005, I started running the practice tests on QRZ. I did well on the Technician class tests, always at least well enough to get a "pass assured" on them. It also helped that I now had several ham friends on 11m sideband — KE6WMG and KD6FYP deserve special mentions here.

I decided I was ready to go take a real test, so I contacted my local VE, Dave Mangels AC6WO [SK March 24th, 2006]. I passed my Technician on March 16th, 2005, found that I had been granted KG6YTZ* a few days later, and that was that.

March 21st, 2005: After all those years, I was now a licensed ham.

* "Funetics" for YTZ: Yapping, Tapping, and Zapping. Yoo-Hoo, Twinkies, and Zingers. Around the holidays... Yams, Turkey, and Zinfandel. Credits to WA4BRL for inspiring the "Yapping, Tapping, Zapping" thing.

Endless thanks to all those who have been directly or indirectly involved in my becoming a ham: That 2nd grade substitute teacher; the 5th grade teacher and the principal who encouraged my interest in electronics [even if that principal was otherwise a detestable old S.O.B.]; mom for buying me the crystal radio, my sister for getting me into the radio business; Mark Melvin AE6MP for the books and the encouragement; Stan Coutant AA6SC for teaching some good basic theory; John Piniero KD6FYP for selling me the DX-160 receiver and — along with "Mikey" Cook KE6WMG — really getting me fired up about getting my ticket; the family VE team of Dave Mangels AC6WO [SK], his wife Fran AD6DC, and their son Gary AD6CD; and last but certainly NOT least, Robert Reed WA2ZOU, Ken Simpson W8EK, and Tyrone "Ty" Powe KG6GZL for selling me the equipment to get me on the air.

Extra thanks and 73 to George Colman N6SNS for being my very first ham radio contact, on the 145.20 N6AH repeater in Arcadia, CA. 73 as well to MI3RBM, for my first international contact [on the 146.985 KE6TZG Keller Peak repeater] and for my first two QSL cards, bringing the current size of my QSL collection to... two cards. [So it was Echolink. So sue me. I used a radio on my end. The QSL's were his idea.]

ARRL's obituary for Dave Mangels AC6WO:

David F. Mangels, AC6WO, SK: Author and Amateur Radio instructor Dave Mangels, AC6WO, of Temple City, California, died March 24. He was 63. An ARRL member, instructor and volunteer examiner, Mangels taught Amateur Radio licensing classes for a fee at the Technician, General and Amateur Extra levels. In 2001, CQ Communications published his book The Mobile DXer—Your Practical Guide to Successful Mobile DXing. Mangels had 302 DXCC entities confirmed on SSB, no doubt many of them worked while he was operating mobile or portable. Survivors include his wife, Fran, AD6DC, and a son, Gary, AD6CD.

Text Copyright © 2006 by ARRL.

Okay, now for the fun stuff:
The KG6YTZ Frankenstation

I call it the Frankenstation because it's cobbled together from various odd parts and somehow brought to life. The Frankenstation prototype consisted of my Yaesu FT-11R 2m HT connected to a "portable ARES/RACES dipole kit" attached to an interior bedroom [a.k.a. "shack"] wall, with a cheap but functional Workman wattmeter/SWR bridge in line. [Hey, you have to tune the antenna, don't you?]

The dipole elements are black-coated telescoping whips and, according to the manufacturer [Antenna World], are tuneable from 138 MHz through UHF. I went with the dipole for a couple of reasons — one, being in a rented ground-floor apartment with no balcony or patio severely limits your antenna options [or so I thought!], and two, it was still bound to get out far better than any duck I could plug into the HT. With the dipole and a speaker mic plugged in, I could almost imagine that I was operating a somewhat proper fixed station.

Believe it or not, that little sucker works pretty well, given the circumstances. It's certainly no blowtorch on simplex, but when it comes to repeater work, the general rule-of-thumb is that if I can hear it, I can usually hit it, and usually with a good signal.

Later, I bought a "battery eliminator" for the HT so I could run it from my power supply. [The FT-11R has no built-in DC jack.] The battery eliminator is basically a Yaesu FBA-14 dry cell housing containing regulation circuitry, with a coiled 12V "cigarette lighter" cord at the bottom. [Why not on the side?] With that cord sticking out from the bottom of the HT, and a coax jumper and speaker mic plugged in at the top, the little HT looked like a brick on life support. That's how the Frankenstation name was inspired.

I also have one of those MFJ dual-band 2m/440 mag-mounts on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen ["the east shack"]. I had been using it with my HT and my BC245XLT scanner, but it is now connected to my Azden PCS-5000, which has been moved to the kitchen, having been replaced by a new Icom IC2100 as my primary rig in the bedroom ["the west shack"].

These two antennas — and the short wavelengths of the 2m band — also finally enabled me to have something I never had on CB: An actual, halfway decent, working fixed station capable of actually transmitting beyond a 2-mile radius from indoors. In my 11m days, I was almost exclusively mobile — my "indoor base" experiments never worked out very well, and I was never able to get any kind of real antenna up in the air.

By the way, speaking of that "battery eliminator" gadget, there's an interesting little story connected to that...

When the thing finally arrived in the mail, I eagerly attached it to the HT, plugged it into an accessory socket wired to the power supply, switched on the supply, hit the power button on the HT, and got... NOTHING. No juice. Didn't work. Nothing I tried would make it work.

I was ready to contact the company that sells them [that's E.H. Yost, in case you're wondering] and report a defective item, but before I did that, I decided I'd poke around it with my new multimeter and see if I could figure out what the problem might be.

As I said, no juice. No continuity on the positive side, apparently. I got out a small flat screwdriver and checked to see whether I could open the housing to look for, say, a broken wire or a bad solder joint. That didn't work, and I didn't want to force it [I was still considering returning it], so I turned my attention to the "cigarette lighter plug" end of things. THAT popped open easily enough, and if you know anything about these plugs, you must be thinking "blown fuse." And you'd be absolutely right. But why did it blow...?

It seems that, the way this plug is designed, there is NO INSULATION between the end-to-end fuse and spring down the center and the bare metal negative conductors which parallel them. That spring allows the fuse to wiggle around and short out against the negative conductors! Take a good look at this pic [spring to the left, fuse to the right], and you can see the dead short just waiting to happen. ZAP! The poor little fuse never had a chance — it must've blown about a microsecond after I switched on the power supply.

I wondered, how to keep that from happening again? I thought about wrapping the ground conductors internally with electrician's tape, but they would not come out easily — note the giant glob of silicon rubber [?] holding everything together — and the space was too tight to work in otherwise. I thought about putting some kind of insulating material — like a small slip of cardboard from a cereal box — in the channel where the fuse and the spring rest. Then I thought of another solution: PLASTIC TUBING! Put a sleeve around the fuse! If I could find a short length of tube or hose of the right internal and external diameters... Hmmm. Might have to get out the yellow pages and call around a bit for that one.

I'll just wrap things up with four little words: A COMMON SODA STRAW! About 1-1/4 inches cut from a plain old ordinary drinking straw, containing the spring, fuse, and cap, ensures that this thing will not short out again. I should mention that to the manufacturer, or whomever the short-sighted dimbulbs are who make those plugs. I'm mentioning it here because I consider it a successful amateur radio-related diagnosis and repair — not to mention a good preventative modification — using a true home-brew solution in good ham radio fashion.

July 19th, 2005: I got an opportunity to help handle some emergency traffic when KG6ZTR got stranded in the brush near Mt. Baldy. Accounts of the incident found their way to the ARRL and Amateur Radio NewsLine bulletin services. Click here for the story.

And now, back to the Frankenstation...

Shortly into my brief "HT-as-fixed-station" phase, I acquired an Azden PCS-5000 2m rig, and that took the place of the HT. Here's my radio table [which began life as a TV cart and has also served as a computer desk].

The equipment is: 1] A Jetsons "Astro" clock, countdown timer, and Christmas ornament [seriously!] from Sprint PCS and Cartoon Network via Radio Shack, received in December 1999 and pre-programmed to count down to Y2K. 2] Workman lighted VHF/UHF cross-needle wattmeter and SWR bridge. 3] Radio Shack PRO-2037 scanner [below the clock], one of three operating scanners in my arsenal. 4] Azden PCS-5000, below the wattmeter. 5] Realistic DX-160 "general coverage" receiver [150 kHz to 30 MHz, AM and CW/SSB] and speaker. 6] Radio Shack 2.5A power supply [you work with what you have, and I've had this little beast for years]. You can also see the Azden's hand mic and its cable in the lower right. This is a somewhat older pic which doesn't show the new Icom IC2100 and the Tripp-Lite 7A supply. There is a more recent pic toward the bottom of the page.

"I'm on a Mexican radio???" — KG6YTZ

Sep. - Oct. 2005: Going Mobile
Wherein the CB comes out and the 2m rig goes in...

September, 2005: Six months as a licensed amateur, and still no ham rig in the car — only the CB, the Azden at home, and the HT for "not at home." Well, I was a bit tired of that! I had the HT and the MFJ mag-mount antenna, of course, but if you're familiar with the Yaesu FT-11R, you probably know that "loud and clear audio" is NOT a phrase which describes its speaker, which doubles as the mic. Granted, some hams do use HT's as mobile rigs, but in my case, using that Yaesu as a mobile was quite simply not an option.

As for the CB, I really just didn't use it very much any more. As I've already mentioned, virtually all of the old group from the late 1980's is gone, and by this time, I didn't use that radio very much at all except for casual listening and short AM conversations here and there, monitoring trucker traffic chatter on Ch.19 [on those infrequent occasions when I was actually on the freeway], and occasional sideband chats in a group which, almost without exception, also has their ham tickets.

So, it was time to start hunting around for a decent mobile rig. I'll admit that my original plan was to run two radios in the mobile — I didn't feel like yanking out the CB just yet, even though I wasn't doing very much more than listening with it — and after hitting a few dead ends in the search for a 2m rig, I got a very nice surprise... Details later.

After eliminating several models as being undesirable for one reason or another — for instance, the Realistic HTX-252 has nowhere near enough memory for this region as far as I'm concerned — I had been trying to decide between an Icom IC2100 and, as I recall, a Yaesu FT2500. I downloaded the manuals for the two rigs in Adobe PDF format and started comparing features.

I determined that I preferred the Icom over the Yaesu — a decision based mainly on the relative numbers of available memories, but also on the apparent lack of any "keypad QSY" capability in the Yaesu's hand mic. The mounting position in the car was going to be low enough already, and I didn't want anything that I absolutely had to bend down to operate, nothing that couldn't be safely operated from the hand mic while driving.

Indeed, that was the primary factor behind my decision not to put the Azden in the car — bad ergonomics for mobile operation, too many tiny buttons too close together, and no truly useful controls on the hand mic. All of the important stuff, with the exception of VFO up/down, is accessible only from the front panel. At the very least, that rig has no way to directly access programmed memories — or even just step through them — via any hand mic control, unless you count the PRI button which recalls memory A0. I consider that unacceptable in a mobile. Besides, that would have left me without a rig for the fixed station unless I wanted to go back to running the HT into the dipole. Needless to say, I didn't want to do that. I didn't have the hardware for the Azden anyway.

I was discussing this whole "searching for a mobile rig" thing on the N6USO repeater one Sunday afternoon around the middle of September. One of the regulars had already told me that he had an IC2100 that he might have been willing to sell to me if I couldn't find anything else. I was definitely considering it and, actually, was ready to finalize the deal, especially after I found that I had misunderstood another regular whose friend didn't actually have a Yaesu FT2500 for sale after all.

Not long after the end of that QSO, after I had gone from the radio back to the computer, I thought I heard someone calling me. I wasn't sure, though, and was going to ignore it, but I decided I should check and see if someone actually was breaking for me. It doesn't happen very often. I didn't recognize the voice or the call sign, but he said he had a near-new IC2100 that he would be willing to sell. He seemed to know me, but I couldn't figure out how or why. Check your e-mail, he said. I wondered, how the heck did he have my e-mail address? Must've looked me up on QRZ...

You know how fate plays goofy tricks on you sometimes? It turned out that I should have known who this guy was, because he was the user from Strong Signals who — back in February of 2003 — had given me the old Bearcat 101 scanner! Odd twist of fate indeed... A not-very-active ham, whom I had met only once, happened to be listening in the right place at the right time and had just exactly what I was looking for. And that, boys and girls, is how I came to acquire a virtually new Icom IC2100 for the mobile.

I've mentioned that I was planning to stack the 2m and CB rigs in the mobile. With that in mind, I bought a bracket to match the CB, and with a little drilling and the addition of some screws, nuts, and fender washers, I attached the Icom's bracket to the second CB bracket. I had planned for that whole assembly to go over the existing CB bracket, with the Icom hanging below the CB, and the CB's mounting knobs holding it all together.

If I had gone through with that plan, the installation would have looked like this. I thought it was a pretty slick idea. But, because of certain power, antenna, and "too many dangling coiled cords" logistics, I decided to just pull the CB out and put the Icom in its place. Getting the original CB bracket installed was enough of a hassle that I didn't feel like trying to put another bracket in, so I retained the original CB bracket — and the coax and antenna mount — and after another trip to the hardware store for more screws, nuts, and washers, the mobile Frankenbracket was born:

That cylindrical gizmoid to the right is an accessory power socket — very useful for such things as MP3 CD players and cell phone car cords. Indeed, it was my Philips eXpanium MP3 CD player that I had in mind when I got the idea to include this socket in the CB bracket installation — it's a road trip convenience. This was shortly before I was planning to take a trip to Las Vegas.

As for power to the Icom, I bought a plug set to match the rig, cut the plug off the CB power cable — no, I don't really consider that a symbolic act, just a necessity in order to complete the installation — and put the Icom plug on the end. That cable had been hooked to an unused 20A circuit on the back of the fuse block when we installed the CB, so it's certainly enough to supply the Icom. [Yes, I do realize that the car needed to be vacuumed when I took these pics, and thanks for noticing.]

Here's a driver's-eye view — more-or-less — of the whole installation, with the cell phone plugged into the accessory socket. I'm sure you can see how running two radios would have made for an ugly tangled mess of cords! The Icom actually sits in a sort of cage formed by two CB radio brackets while its own bracket supports it from below. That does tend to muffle the sound from the downward-firing speaker just a little bit [see above pic], so I later added the MFJ speaker that I had won in a raffle at N6USO's pizza party in July 2005.

As luck would have it, the holes I drilled in the second CB bracket turned out to be spaced very nicely for that MFJ speaker's bracket. I really didn't plan it that way; it just happened. I just had to file the holes in the speaker's bracket a tiny bit so the screws could fit through. Here's a shot taken late in the Frankenbracket planning stages, before the radio actually went into the car [but after I decided to pull the CB], showing how the MFJ speaker sits below the Icom.

And then there was the matter of the antenna. I had purchased a glass-mount VHF/UHF antenna and had every intention of using it, but I wound up changing my mind for a variety of reasons [mainly that installing one radio would be easier than installing two radios], sold that antenna, and went with a different setup. Since I had decided to just pull out the CB and no longer planned to run both 2m and CB antennas, I kept the existing mount and coax from the CB antenna installation — a standard 3/8x24 threaded base — and bought a Hustler SF-2, a stainless steel 5/8-wave whip. I also reused the old CB antenna's quick-disconnect, seen at the base of the antenna below the white coil section. Of course, that added some length to the antenna, for which it was necessary to compensate by trimming the whip — by somewhere around three inches, as it turned out — before I could even think about transmitting with it. KE6WMG and his MFJ antenna analyzer to the rescue. One short Sunday morning visit to his shack — nice antenna farm, by the way! — and we got that puppy dialed in. KG6YTZ, MOBILE!

July, 2006: Here's a newer pic of my radio table. The Tripp-Lite supply is at the bottom right. The Azden and the 2.5A supply have been moved to the kitchen ["the east shack"], replaced here by an Icom IC2100H. Also visible is what appears to be a JetStream JTSP10 speaker. [It also appears to be identical to the SP10 speaker which Icom seems to believe to be worth upwards of $60. They must be insane. This thing was dirt-cheap on eBay.]

Some technical notes about this photo, for those of you who might be interested... I recently bought an HP PhotoSmart C618 digital camera [also sold as the Pentax EI-200] to replace my old Vivitar ViviCam 3500, because two tiny broken battery door latches have rendered the ViviCam useless. The HP is also an older model, but it definitely kicks the snot out of the Vivitar. This pic was taken almost entirely with manual settings on the C618 — mounted on a tripod, taken at night using only incandescent room light [no flash], manual focus, and aperture priority, which let the camera determine the exposure time. [I decided that using shutter priority, manually setting the exposure while letting the camera determine the aperture, was not giving me the results I wanted.] The down-side, if there is any, is that this caused some over-exposure of the various lighted panels [scanner, watt meter, Icom]. The color seems to be very accurate, certainly more so than in the older pic above, although as with nearly all of my pics, there have been some adjustments done in Picture Window Pro.

I don't consider myself a real photographer, but even I can tell that the C618 is far superior to the ViviCam 3500, and those manual modes are teaching me a few tricks. Check out my sister's site for some truly good stuff. Award-winning stuff, taken with truly good equipment. Tell her I sent you.

April 2007: The YuTZ puts up a J-Pole

I didn't think it would ever happen. I really didn't. I assumed that, since I'm in an apartment, there was no way that the management would ever let me put any radio antenna up on the roof, so I never really even thought about asking. I just plugged along with the indoor and mobile stuff and figured that this was as good as it was going to get. Then came the day when I just happened to get it into my head to casually mention to the manager that I have a ham radio license [right here in my wallet] and asked whether it might be okay to put up an antenna. I made sure to emphasize that it would not be one of those gigantic CB verticals he might have seen with radials sticking out all over the place, that the higher frequencies I was using meant that the antennas for them are rather small [much smaller than those big CB antennas, just in case he didn't hear that the first time], and that I was pretty sure I hadn't been ripping up anyone's TV over the past two years of indoor operation.

Actually, he already knew that I had been running some kind of radio equipment from inside the apartment — I had mentioned it before, and he has also seen it — and nobody was complaining about any weird interference. "Sure, that's okay," he responded, much to my surprise. His reasoning, as it turns out, is that pretty much everybody in the building already has either cable or satellite TV anyway, so there are already a bunch of those little dishes around the whole perimeter of the roof, and of course all of those cable and satellite installations also have coax fed through the walls. One more antenna on a roof full of dishes didn't matter to him, and one more hole through the wall can simply be plastered over when I move out, so that didn't matter either.

Well, I was a happy ham! I immediately started shopping around for an antenna and some coax, eventually deciding on 75 feet of LMR-400 from Texas Towers and the Arrow OSJ-146/440 dual-band J-Pole, which had always been highly recommended to me by KG6PSM. Here's a shot of the J-Pole, assembled and ready to go up. I have to give a lot of credit to NØIMW of Arrow Antennas for this design — it's a very solid, sturdy antenna.

Once I had the antenna assembled [which only takes a few minutes, a couple of small wrenches, and a bit of graphite grease], and the coax and connectors finally arrived, I contacted KE6WMG — a tower monkey with plenty of installation experience, an extensive set of tools, and a good tall ladder — and made arrangements to have him help me get that antenna up in the air. We made a quick trip to Home Depot for something to use as a mast [about six feet of steel pipe of the type used in chain-link fencing, complete with the tapered end] and some hardware to attach it to the building, and in a couple of hours, I finally had a truly decent outdoor antenna. The tip of the antenna is about 30 feet above ground level. The red rectangle in this pic outlines the antenna, which doesn't really show up well at this image size. My apartment is the two windows and the screen door at the bottom left of this shot; the indoor dipole is just behind the bedroom window on the left.

My first contact with the new antenna was through the 147.090 AA6DP repeater on Catalina Island, but I was able to hear the other station fairly well on the reverse, and as I recall, he was somewhere in Orange County. At any rate, he was a good distance away from me, definitely much further than I had ever worked on 2m simplex. Since then, I have found that I have pretty good coverage over large areas of Southern California, even into areas that I would not have expected — simplex and repeaters into the San Fernando Valley, including repeaters all the way up in Santa Clarita, and I once worked someone [sorry, OM, I've forgotten your call] who said he was on a 5W handheld in the hills above Sylmar. I have also reached the 146.640 repeater on Mt. Otay, which is somewhere around the San Diego/Mexican border area, on 25W from the Azden. Yeah, I'm liking this J-Pole! There are still some areas that I can't work very well on simplex, mainly along the foothills of "the Inland Empire" [the local nickname for San Bernardino and Riverside counties], but that's due more to terrain than anything else.

Here's a zoomed shot of the J-Pole and mast sticking up above the roof. It's actually on the other side of the building, so this shot doesn't quite show the whole setup. The tree trunk on the right is a palm tree, one of several in the courtyard here. They're very tall, and might make some pretty decent masts if they didn't bend so much in the wind... ;->

I've had a few different rigs connected to that antenna. I started with the Azden, figuring at the time that I'd keep the higher power of the IC2100 in the bedroom, where the dipole needs all the help it can get. [Even 50W into the dipole still doesn't work as well as 5W into the J-Pole., at least not over any real distance, although most nearby repeaters are still easily reachable.] Here's a shot of the Azden on the bar in the kitchen. The mic is a Darome Model 439 which I picked up cheap on eBay; it is connected to the rig via a custom cable built by WA2ZOU. This mic has no preamp, but it's the right impedance for the rig, although I did have to open up the Azden and bring up the mic gain. I also have a pair of these Pyramid PSV-200 supplies, running things in the kitchen and the bedroom.

Shortly after the J-Pole went up, I happened to make a simplex contact [a quick "Hello" response to his ID which turned into a 3-hour ragchew!] with a local who happened to have a Kenwood TR-751A, "surplus to his needs," which said he would be willing to lend me for a bit so I could try some 2m sideband. Here's the Kenwood on the bar. I still have the option to buy it from him, so there's a chance that this rig might make a reappearance in the east shack soon. At the moment, it's back in the hands of its owner.

Here's a more-or-less current pic from the bar — one of my IC2100's now functions as my primary rig, with the Azden and the Darome mic having been moved back to the bedroom, where they are seldom used now. What this pic doesn't show is the latest addition to the east shack, an old Turner +3 mic which had been doing nothing but gathering dust in the closet for years. That mic had been wired for my old Cobra 148GTL CB, but I ordered another custom interface pigtail from WA2ZOU so I could connect it to the Icom. Rather than rewire the mic with a modular plug [a job for which I do not have the tools anyway], I decided to adapt it from the Cobra 5-pin round to the Icom modular instead, which also means that, using custom pigtails, I can later adapt it for other rigs as well — that Kenwood, for example. :-)

I know, my shacks might seem to change around quite a bit, so in summary, here's what I'm running right now [as of March 2009]:

In the kitchen ["east shack"], I have a Pyramid PSV-200 supply [I own two], one of my Icom IC2100's, the Workman meter, one of my JetStream JTSP-10 speakers, and the antenna is the J-Pole. The mag-mount is still on the refrigerator, but I no longer need to use it for indoor transmitting. Once in a while I'll plug it into my BC245XLT handheld scanner, though.

In the bedroom ["west shack"], I have another PSV-200 supply, the Azden PCS-5000 with a Darome Model 439 mic and the other JTSP-10, and the indoor dipole. That setup also includes the DX-160 receiver [to which I recently added about 30 feet of antenna wire] and the PRO-2037 scanner.

I also bought a new Yaesu/Vertex VX-150 recently, mainly because it has a better set of features and more power than the old FT-11R, but I generally don't use it very often.

The Oldsmobile died on me in late December 2006, and I now have a '95 Lincoln Mark VIII. I installed one of the IC-2100's in February 2008, but I haven't gotten around to taking any pics of that setup yet, aside from getting a few shots of the antenna mount while we were working on the installation. [p.s.: Trying to attaching the bracket to the side of the center console was an absolute nightmare. I don't ever want to go through a mess like that again, and I'm sure KE6WMG doesn't either. Trying to get nuts and washers into a narrow blind space using needle-nose pliers is NOT easy!]

Okay, but what's with that flag?

If you've seen my postings on QRZ, you might be wondering just what the heck my avatar is. What flag is that? Where are you from? Isn't KG6YTZ a California call?

The goofy answer: It is the flag of the state of East Dakota, and oddly enough, it is identical to the flag of the far-off nation of Slavistovakia, whose chief exports are refrigerator magnets and phlegm.

The serious answer: Have you ever heard of vexillology, the study of flags? It's a minor interest of mine, and has been ever since I was a tiny tot, circa the early 1970's, when some breakfast cereal [Honeycomb?] was including "flags of the world" stickers in every box. ["Collect 'em all! Buy our cereal!"] I'd say I'm interested in the artistic aspects more than anything else. I remember being particularly fascinated by the flags of Brazil and Panama, and "those funny squiggles" all over the flag of Saudi Arabia.

Many vexillologists create their own personal flags. This is mine.

The symbology is more or less obvious — sun, sky, grass/earth. The white stripe can represent clouds, it can represent a ray of light shining down, it can represent the contrail of a rocket launched into space or even into to the future [I also really enjoy astronomy, and this is sort of my favorite interpretation], or if you look at the whole thing another way, the sun could be reflecting off a blue ocean, and the white stripe could represent the surf breaking against the green land. If you interpret it that way, the entire flag could represent California. The 8-pointed star could also represent points of the compass, and its placement in the "northwestern" corner of the flag could represent my own location in the northern hemisphere, western United States. [In amateur radio terms, my location is within grid square DM04xc, approximately 118 degrees west by 34 degrees north.]

The short and truly serious real answer is that, hey, I just like the way this flag looks. Basically, it's just a personal flag for no place in particular, and it's mainly just the result of some time spent goofing around in Paint Shop.

By the way, I recently found that my personal flag bears a passing resemblance to the flag of Namibia. This was purely accidental, I swear, but I'm not changing my flag now. What's the difference? Well, the Namibian flag has a broad diagonal red stripe which doesn't taper, there are thin white stripes on either side of that, and the star/sun is different [12 points in a ring around a solid circle], a slightly darker shade of yellow, and placed a bit lower and more to the right.

Well, that's all for now, I think. I hope you've been taking notes — there will be a pop-quiz on the second Tuesday of next week. :-> KG6YTZ, clear. -.-

By the way, if you're still awake and feel like reading more, click here for my old CMI Software bio.

This page is Copyright © 2006-2009 by Ken Harris KG6YTZ
Last update: 03/20/2009

All graphics and text Copyright © 1988-2009 by Ken Harris, except:
• Bearcat 101 user manual cover illustration
• HTML Gear guest book button
• Namibian flag [from allstates-flag.com]
• Portrait at top of page [photo by Hector Figueroa KE6VRL]
• MapLoco visitor map
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