We fared well from Irene this weekend at my QTH in Pottstown, PA. There were a number of trees down in and around the area and I was surprised we never lost power. Those to the North and South weren’t so lucky.

Laurie and I prepared as best we could in the days leading up to Irene’s arrival by guying down the hexbeam on the roof, the vertical in the front yard and re-routing the 160m vee in the backyard. We had borrowed generators from two hams in our club would provide some security to my neighbor and myself to power our refrigerators and sump pumps.

I went to sleep around 10pm to the sounds of an EAS warning indicating a tornado watch for Montgomery County, PA and awoke at 2AM on Sunday to the sound of the wind tossing debris against the house. I also found that the movement of the tree snapped the 160m antenna at the insulator and the local Pottstown repeater had been on emergency battery backup. Later in the morning while fixing the 160m antenna between wind gusts, I was pleased to find the 2m antenna stack on the military masts you buy at hamfests was up and my 5 element yagi still aligned on W3OK up north and the hexbeam still at home on the roof.

Yesterday the outcome of the storm’s wrath would be abundantly clear, having received an email from a ham who serves spots to my DX cluster, had lost everything in the hurricane. By everything, he meant everything.

Even though the storms have passed and the sun is shining over the Philadelphia suburbs, there are still a number of residents in the surrounding areas without power and a number of roads are closed, including mine.

For some, the recovery begins.

While at Dayton this weekend, I picked up an Icom T90A from the AES table. After thinking about it overnight, I changed my mind and decided having handheld D-Star capabilities would be a better decision, and returned the radio back to AES the following day. While I completely understood and had no problem with the 15% restocking fee, I was however faced with a hostile reaction from 2 AES employees at the show, who made me feel more like a criminal than a member of the ham community. If I would’ve known this is how I would be treated, I would’ve kept the radio and given it to Laurie.

Needless to say after the many purchases I have made with AES over the course of the last 11 years, I will no longer be giving them any further business.

I’ve been listening to some ham radio related podcasts and I just realized that Amateur Radio Newsline is the only one updating content. What happened to Ted Randall’s QSO Radio show and This week in Amateur Radio (TWIAR)? Ted’s last update was 11/26/2009 and TWIAR was 2/21/2010.

While the weather was clear today, I swapped out the existing rotor with the new Yaesu G-800SA I recently acquired. The mounting went well and it turns a good degree faster than the Channel Master rotor that was up there.

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A new addition is on it’s way to the N3QO station, a used Mosley TA-33 beam. I’ve been told about Mosley antennas over the course of the last year, but much like the hexbeam, I overlooked it. Probably because I didn’t see them in the magazines or supply catalogs. Most recently after speaking with a local ham on 160m and assuming his beam was a Cushcraft A3S, I was again re-introduced to the Mosley TA-33. From what I’ve been hearing, this particular design has been around 40-50 years and it’s the one design other vendors seem to copy.

So this weekend, we travel down to Maryland to pickup our new addition. It needs a few little parts here and there, but I’m anticipating a large jump in performance from the ever popular hexbeam that graces these pages. Of course I’ll post my findings once the new antenna is installed.

This also creates the requirement to replace the existing TV style rotor with a Yaesu G800SA or better. I’m choosing the 800 as my baseline because of the planned additions to grace the mast that the Mosley is expected to populate.

More updates soon..

It’s like Christmas in January here at the N3QO station. Dave, K3GMT made a station donation of an Astatic D-104 microphone for Laurie’s Heathkit Rig. After wiring it up and cleaning up the switches, it makes for some nice compressed audio and matches the rig nicely.

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This morning on my way to work I was successful at receiving WT3Q’s DX packet cluster which displayed perfectly on my TM-D700. I had a weak signal some of the way causing dropped packets, but overall it worked well. I plan on spinning up an RF node in Pottstown in the next couple weeks to hopefully fill in the shadowed areas.

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It’s been a little bit since the last update and alot has happened. With our current residence in Allentown, PA getting worse and worse, we decided to move and everything has happened very quickly. Last Saturday we walked through a house in North Pottstown (Lower Pottsgrove) area and fell in love with the place immediately. Just a week later we were practically moved into the new place.

I feel like I’m in a little bit of radio isolation with not being able to hear my club’s repeater with my HT, and the HF rigs are still all packed away. I can’t wait to get started on the first antenna installation. Not sure which one it’ll be yet. I have a ton of room for the vertical installation in the backyard and a pseudo-flat roof for my beam on the house.

As for the shack itself, I’m in between work spaces. I decided to donate my desks to the DLARC club station (we need it bad) and need to build the console I have in my head for the radios.

Should be an interesting next couple for weeks/months. Plenty of pictures and posts to follow I’m sure.

This morning I was scanning the 10m band to see if there was any activity and I was surprised to hear what sounded like a 10 meter repeater covering the NYC area on 29.615Mhz AM.