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.

In the process of rewiring the shack to facilitate additional radios I had found my new MFJ wattmeter had a loose rattle inside. Come to find one of the plastic prongs holding the actually meter broke off. How!? I’ve been nothing but careful with it and have never pushed or touched the actual meter face.

And then…. I added a new Ameritron wet dummy load (the paint can type), and found that the parts used to hold the 50 ohm resistor in place was shorting the center pin to shield. Wow, great. after a little engineering and removing the “cage” from the resistor enclosure, the dummy short was finally a dummy load.

Is this the kind of stuff I’m going to have to worry about when I got to buy my 811h and MFJ auto tuner?