Oh yeah! I'll take the underground bunker when the s#@%t hits the fan... To bad we ain't got one here; DOE!
Got the GRLevel3 website in the favorites list for now for safe keeping. I defiantly want to update my software but you know how it goes, money, money, money....
Ok; question of the day...
Here on Oahu I use the Molokai radar for my main radar site. Kauai is my back up. It's not as good.
How come when I see a storm move over the radar site I can still see it? Isn't there a cone of silence? A big cone of silence...
This baffles me. After working on 27 MHz (CB) Omni/ beam antennas and then we worked our way up to 107.3 MHz.. We know about the cone of silence or null that's over or under an antenna.What's there you say? What were we doing at 107.3 Nothing until we built and operated a nice li'll FM stereo broadcast station. Known as the KHKU project; Kaneohe's first and only (at the time) FM stereo broadcast station. Hey a quality FM signal is hard to get around all these mountains. Even a class C broadcast station with an ERP of 100,000 watt's are blocked by the Koolau Maintains. So we just took the liberty and remedied that situation for our area. Besides we always wanted to know how's it done; know what I mean. They always said that necessity is the mother of invention, he he heee....
What was our ERP you ask?
Are you ready for this?
It was only a fraction of the power of the big guys at 36 watts ERP. We got 5 to 10 miles and we only compressed our audio to a 2:1 ratio. Most commercial stations compress up to 5, 6, 7 or so :1... This destroys the dynamic range and stereo separation. They do it to make the audio louder instead of sounding like it's coming out of the bushes.. If you have a good clean and clear signal, you do not want a lot of audio compression.
Did I mention that we had 45 dB stereo separation.. The average receiver of the day had 35 or less dB of separation so with our low audio compression, killer high stereo separation and of course if your in the cardioid radiation pattern of our polar plot, you had clear, quiet in the back ground, majorly separated FM stereo signal that can rival that of the CD and it's coming from miles away. YEAH BABEE!! We were rock'n!!! The antenna for the KHKU Project was a vertically polarized dual bay stacked phase array. I really wish I took pictures of it but I never did, damn! The swr was measured on a Bird meter. It was 1.2: 1...…. The swr was checked at the two phasing line feeds and at the rf amps output. No matter were we put the Bird meter in the transmission line, the line showed 1.2:1. No faked out readings... That totally explains why we had good range with such low power. It's all in the antenna folks! LOL!!!
After that little stunt, we moved up again to the UHF band. You see at the time cell phones were very expensive. My brother was working security. Sometimes he was 3 miles away and sometimes he was about 9 miles away. For the most part he had to get to a phone or sometimes use a hand held radio that worked like crap to contact whoever.
We took that opportunity to improve communications (in the short range of about 10 miles) without the big cell bill of the time. Remember we got those pesky three thousand foot mountains and all the suck out of the valleys in between. It's hell on radio, especially if the frequency is high.
This calls for a coaxial colinear phased array.
I can't believe how well this antenna worked. Even over all this rough terrain. A wide band antenna tuned to 462 MHz at center. The swr was and still is, 1.0:1...… Gain is 3.2 dbd...
What we did was modify the antenna of one of three handheld radios we were using. This became the base station. The Cobra radio we were using was capable of unscrewing the short whip antenna. That left a nice juicy SMA connector. No mutilation in the upcoming transmission line, Nice!
If you connect and of course impedance match an antenna like that to a handheld radio; the results can be awesome!
Remember; it's all in the antenna! You must impedance match it or all bets are off. Loss of power and fried finals will be the result.
Now it's on to 2.4 GHz.
I don't see any use for this band.. It should be band along with all the crazy people that attempt to use this evil voo-doo band. Ok I've had a few,,,, see you guys tomorrow; ha!!!!