I received in the mail My 13 colony certificate for this years special event. Managed to achieve a clean sweep and contact the William Penn station but not the United Kingdom. I think that's five years in a row I've participated and I always enjoy chasing the stations around.
Recently I was asked to help setup and program a new scanner for Our system operations center. I didn't have enough time at work so I brought it home and played with it. During the setup of the new scanner I was reminded of a scanner antenna I bought used at a recent swapfest and never put in the air.Its a disconne type ,an Icom AH-7000, and it seemed to be in great shape.
I still have an old pipe on My pole building and a piece of "spare" RG-8u from the pipe to inside My shack so this should be easy to put in service. The coax has not been used for many years so I did a simple test with My MFJ-259b antenna analyzer by putting a dummy load on the pole building end and tested from inside My shack. Coax looks good so I mounted the antenna and again checked with the analyzer although it only goes to about 170Mhz and this wideband antenna should cover from 25Mhz-1300Mhz receive. The setup looks fine for the frequencies I can test and it will only be used as a receive antenna so I'm good to go!
Using an external antenna, especially when My scanner is located in the basement, makes a nice improvement. The little telescoping antenna provided with the scanner if used on the first floor or above does do a good job which surprised Me.
I hope to find time to give a quick explanation of programming the Uniden BCD996P2 scanner soon in a future blog post.
73---Tim
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