I made a thing!

Actually, I made two things:

The first is a quarter wave ground plane antenna for the 2m ham radio band.

It’s based on the instructions in this video by K7AGE

The second is a semi-portable PVC pole/stand to get the antenna about 8ft in the air.

My initial plan was to raise the antenna up 12ft, but my quick-and-dirty design made with lengths of ¾in PVC wasn’t stable enough to stand on its own. I have ideas for fixing that, but this shorter version worked well enough to participate in a ham net on a local repeater tonight.

I’m going to see if I can hit a couple of repeaters down in the Bay Area later this week using this set up.

W7RAB 73

New system

after a couple of bumps (easily solved by replacing new IDE cable for the cd-r and dvd drives with one that works.) My new system is up and running. Now begins the long process of downloading and installing apps and patches, adn tweaking settings.

Firefox was first (after norton antivirus.) NWN and CoH are next up. (MMM 8 months of patches for an mmo over 56k…) I think I’ll be checking out open office as well as some other non-microsoft “productivity” apps.

-Hool

uhm – when did g-blog start serving google ads?

gossip – I have a screen shot of one of your recent blog entires with an ad from google in the sidebar. Is that intentional, or has some piece of ad serving software managed to get itself installed on my work machine?

[Spoilers] [/Spoilers]
in spoilers because it’s big. and I apologize for the poor quality of the image, I dont have a decent screen shot taker here. that was created in paint…

I must be losing my touch

It’s been a very long time (too long) since I last built a computer from scratch, and even then I did not have to research or purchase the components. My boss just said: “here are the parts for your workstation. Put it together.”

So I want to build a new machine and I’m not even sure where to start looking. Does anyone have any suggestions for finding good prices on components for a decent gaming system? At the minimum I’ll be needing a new motherboard, processor, RAM, and case (along with the requisite cables/connectors/cooling/power….) I can cannibalize my current system for other needed pieces (video, cdrom, hd, etc) for the time being, seeing as how I’m on a tight budget. (I’ve got about $300 to get me started.)

Edited on Dec 7th 2004, 01:56 by Hooloovoo