DX RX

The Doctor of DX prescribes the
answers to your problems, low and
high, near and far.

A how to of what for, by Mike(aka Billy)Graham, NE1V

LESSONS

This past weekend, if anything, brought back memories of lectures heard, articles read and experiences gained from other storms, drills, field days, etc. It also brought back a recurring case of lower back pain, a whopper of a headache, and a nasty cold. What started out on Saturday, December 7th, as a beautiful wintry scene that morning as I drove to the club breakfast had, by 9 PM, turned into a “white nightmare”. It was easy to see, driving home that night from the annual radio club Christmas party, that problems were “a brewin’”. Many trees were bowed over double and others had limbs drooping very heavily. As I drove the short few miles to Merrimack, I could occasionally see what I thought was either lightning or power lines popping. At the house, the next few hours resembled a small range war…….limbs and trees snapping and falling, and the sky lighting up occasionally.

I soon discovered that a number of problems were starting to make themselves felt at my QTH. Number one – the dipoles had come down. Not to worry….piece of cake. More unfortunately, I found that my PC had been running at the time of the main outage. I lost the FAT Table on my “D” drive and all of the Word Processing files there, including this month’s article for the newsletter. Oh well, I wanted to write about storms anyway. I was fortunate, in that I did have a good supply of batteries and candles on hand. But by 1 AM Sunday it was very plainly obvious that we were having a major weather event and it might take a spell to get power back. I ensured that the kids understood not to open the refrigerator or freezer doors anymore than necessary and to keep all outside doors closed.

Sunday morning, 8 December, and the sky was beautiful. Inside temperature is only 60 F……not too bad. Water temperature in the fish tank (180 gallon fresh water aquarium) is down to 64 F. I wonder if the fish will make it through this? Well, more important things to worry about……like getting that huge oak limb from off my car. Lessee here, where is the chainsaw? Oh yeah…here we go. Now all I need is an extension cord…the chainsaw is ELECTRIC! Something basically wrong with that scenario. Call Ed, K2TE……he’s got a saw. He can come over in several hours. In the meantime, clear the nine zillion tons of snow and ice from my driveway. After Ed arrives and assists, I get on the phone again, looking for a generator which I swore three years ago I was going to buy. As luck would have it, Home Depot has a load of 160 that just arrived from Salem. I got there in barely the nick of time to get one……probably at somewhat inflated prices. A nice 4KW job though, with a BIG gas tank, enough to run the generator at least 10 hours non-stop.

Once the generator was powered up, and once I had made a “jury rig” hot-wire into my gas furnace, things began to become a little less stressed. I actually got to sit down Sunday evening for a few minutes. By carefully monitoring which appliances were connected to the generator, I was able to get the reefer and freezer re-cooled, the fishtank re-warmed, the house warmed, hot water for showers for the Graham menagerie, and power to the TV to see what the prognosis for the outage was.

In my area, power was restored about mid- day Monday, but lost again about 8 PM Monday night for another four hours. Lesson #2…….don’t secure the generator in Merrimack for at least 12 hours after power is restored. By now I was a frozen, pooped wreck. I could feel the tightening in my chest, my legs were rubber, my breathing sounded like a 1910 Franklin, and I was coughing frantically. Oh great news……just in time for the holidays, and with company coming next weekend, no less.

Well, the upshot of the entire three days is that I’ve had three days in bed (nasty cold mostly) to think about everything that transpired and to work on what, if anything I can do to “ease the pain” in the future. As luck would have it, I had a most interesting conversation on the evening of the club Christmas party with Rich, W1HZN, “Mr. Nashua Power & Light”. As we spoke of cabbages and kings and other silly things, we also discussed the relative merits of various home emergency power equipment and what and how to install. I’ll clean up the furnace “hot-wire” act later in the year, and make some runs of Romex 12-2 to various strategic places in the home (near the furnace, the freezer, upstairs in the kitchen, and next to the rig…..of course), and put them on some sort of switching or isolation system. The 4K generator is really a nice one and I think would be more than adequate but for homes which do not have any heating source other than electric (ala K2TE). I’ll make sure that I have plenty of 30 weight oil and fresh unleaded fuel on hand. I’ll make sure that I have plenty of batteries and candles available and strategically located. I’ll recheck all my insulation on refrigerator and freezer and around doors and windows, etc. And next winter we’ll have record warmth!!! Ah, but the security of knowing I’m ready! Yes sir, worth it…every hack and cough (I quit smoking to boot).

DX NEWS

Thanks to the Ohio Penn DX Packet Cluster OPDX Bulletin Service for most of the following:

Peter, ON6TT, who had been operating as 5X1T, is now QRT (as of November 27th). He reported making over 13K QSO’s since the end of May. On December 26th he will be joining the Heard Island expedition on Reunion Island. The group callsign on Reunion will be TO0R. Any QSLs for 5X1T go to ON5NT (any donations included will be forwarded to the Heard Island group).

BV9P - Pratas Is. Rumor central has it that Bolon, VB5AF, President of CTARL and TAMSAT, has plans for an operation in late March, 1997.

VK0 - HEARD ISLAND - UPDATE

Bob, KK6EK, states: “The Heard Island DXpedition team is in the final stages of preparations. Some of us leave for Europe in less than a month. The team will assemble on Reunion Island around January 1st, and set sail on January 3rd. After a stop at Crozet, we expect to be put ashore on Heard Island around January 12th, and come on the air a day or so later. Barring catastrophe, we should be QRV for a little more than two weeks. All the latest news and details about the DXpedition are contained in our web pages: http://www.ccnet.com/~cordell/HI.

See ya next month with a feature on one of our top DX Guns. 73 es keep ur feet dry.

de NE1V

Back to In this issue...