After a contentious Special Exemption meeting where 5 of my neighbors made their case why this tower permit should not be granted, I am in possession of the tower permit. We submitted this permit application near the end of May 2018 and due to the hoops Madeira Beach required me to jump, we were granted the permit mid September. I applied for the tower permit at the same time we are building the house as the tower is house bracket’ed in two places. The top bracket is built into the…
Posts published in “Hardware”
The final step in the saga of the tower permit is for the Special Magistrate to review the application for special exemption. This seems to be just to cross the T’s for the way the City of Madeira Beach has setup for amateur radio tower’s to be reviewed. That meeting is Monday August 27th. http://madeirabeachfl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Special-Magistrate-Special-Exception-Complete-Packet.pdf
The Madeira Beach Planning Commission met tonight and approved the tower project. This now moves to the Special Magistrate to just verify it meets the Special Exception process on August 27th. During the presentation tonight, the planning director and two commissioners mentioned how thorough the packet of material I presented was. It does make one wonder what they normally get for these things. The planning directory also mentioned that the city may want to review this whole process to simplify it. After my tower is permitted and our house is…
Madeira Beach has scheduled my tower permit on the Planning Commission agenda. The city staff has recommended approval. After the planning commission approval, it goes to the Special Magistrate at the end of August. Here is a link to the agenda packet with my info for those interested.
To catch up, we are rebuilding our house in Madeira Beach. We lifted the house to avoid future flooding (the house has been flooded 6 times so far since 1985). As part of this project, I am installing a new shack and tower. The tower will be 45 feet of Rohn 55G house-bracketed to the house in two places. I have engineered drawings showing the system to support the house bracket. The tower will be free standing. In Madeira Beach, Florida, the city has some confusing language regarding amateur…
In an effort to involve more of our club members, I had the idea to allow users of the St. Petersburg ARC (SPARC) web page to see in real-time, the status of the contesting efforts at the club station. My vision is something like this… Using the TR4W or N1MM+ contesting software’s feature where contact and radio info is broadcast to the network via UDP, I have a Raspberry Pi-based collector of this information running at the station. This info is parsed using code from a few other projects that…
Updated 8/4/2016 – Any items not crossed-out are still available. I am selling some surplus gear. All prices are for local pickup. Actual shipping paid by the buyer. I could also meet in the Tampa Bay area. Microham DB-37 cable for Icom $40 Microham USB sound card interface (with an icom cable) ($65) Icom ID-1 1.2 Ghz Analog/DStar radio. Includes data mode via Ethernet connection to send 128kbs data via DStar. Have microphone, manuals and cables. I have a second one if you want to make a pair for a remote…
I ran across a very good blog on building a station. This chap built it from soup to nuts including the room, adding A/C, generator, two contesting operating positions and more. There are many good ideas in his station building series. Look here for more.
I have been reading about JT-9 recently. It seems that since Joe Large has discontinued support for JT-65HF (due to health issues), JT9 is filling the bill. Has anyone tried JT9 yet? What about the new integration with JT-Alert? I think I will have to give it a try this week. I also fond out that JT-1 is the typical mode used on HF. You can also use JT9-30 which means each interaction sis 30 minutes. Surely, this cannot mean we transmit for 30 minutes at a time. That is…