K4SPB's blog

Antenna Swap

Submitted by K4SPB on Sun, 2026-07-05 12:54

We sustained heavy storm damage to many trees last night including the ones that supported the HF RMS’ antenna. I’ve swapped to the butterfly in the attic and reduced RF power to mitigate interference inside while I work on repairs. Will update the blog when I am back to normal.

Removing 17m

Submitted by K4SPB on Thu, 2026-02-26 14:36

In the past 12 months the RMS has had 123 connections on 17M band (18mhz). This accounts for 11% of all connections but is 25% of the scan time. I'm removing it to increase the scan rotation. Available bands now are 80m, 40m, and 20m.
The antenna is an off center fed dipole so it's limited by harmonics. I plan to switch this to something that will cover the WARC bands soon enabling 30m and 15m.
de K4SPB

Windows 11 Problems

Submitted by K4SPB on Mon, 2025-10-20 05:51

It has been nonstop with issues since starting the Win 11 upgrade ~10 days ago. First it was bloatware dragging down the CPU. Now I can't access my audio devices. Unfortunately that means only Pactor is working because that's an external modem unlike Vara and Packet. That should have been an easy fix except every time I try to access the privacy>microphone menu, settings crashes. I'm doing an automatic repair install now.
IF that doesnt work, the next step will be a full reinstall which means about 3 days of tweaking settings until we are live again.

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