December 2024 Antenna Designs

After having relocated back to North Pole AK in the Alaskan Interior (15 miles south of Fairbanks) last summer, I got the station operational with the same doublet (except 90 ft flat top at 65 ft, ends hang vertical 20 ft), and three element LFA Yagi for 6m at 30 ft height.

Since we have two acres and it's the middle of winter, time to think about antennas!

Goals

• Antenna feeder / lightning grounding points are away from house.
• Antennas are located away from house as far as reasonable.
• Lower and upper HF band antennas.
• VHF / 6m array.
• IRLP node antenna mast mounted (currently in attic).

Low Band DX Delta Loop

80m inverted delta loop, vertically polarized, with 120 ft horizontal top at 65 ft.

Open wire fed to remote auto ATU.

Post on Blue Sky with Low Band DX Delta Loop patterns on 80m and 40m:

https://bsky.app/profile/lonney9.bsky.social/post/3lcv5bk2f5k2b

Model: https://github.com/lonney9/Antenna-Models/tree/main/HF/Basic

Held up with trees, need tensioning system that handles tree movement in wind.

Upper HF - Vertical Doublet

20m through 10m to remote auto ATU.

https://lonneys-notebook.blogspot.com/2021/03/40-ft-center-fed-vertical-40m-10m.html

VHF / 6m (50 MHz)

• Two stack of three or five element LFA Yagis for 6m.
• 20 to 30 ft mast bracketed against shed.
• Winch up/down system on hinged base.
• Mast mounted 6m low noise pre-amp.

Antenna Shed (existing building)

• Feeders go-to shed.
• Grounding system at shed.
• Remote ATU and antenna switching networks.
• Coax and control cables buried to house.
• IRLP node relocated to shed.

Feeders Go-To Shed

Balanced lines from Delta Loop and Vertical Doublet go-to shed.

Grounding System at Shed

• Lightning arrestors for balanced feeders and coax at shed entrance.
• Several 8 ft ground rods.
• Shed ground system bonded to electrical service entrance - AWG?
• House entrance grounding point.

Remote ATU and Antenna Switching Networks

Stockcorner JC-4s remote ATU located in shed.

JC-4s is a dual memory tuner with reversible un-balanced output polarity. Intended for dual antennas with dual memories which are switched in RX mode so the connected antenna is always matched on RX as well.

Delta Loop and Vertical Doublet independent switching networks and 1:1 balun in-front of ATU. This is in addition to the JC-4s internal A/B mode.

Cable Runs

• Trench with conduit.
• LMR-400 and control cables.
• Priced vs loss savings of LMR-600, not worth it for 50 MHz and below.
• Ground bonding wire.

IRLP Node 

Relocate IRLP node to shed, Diamond X-50 on shed VHF mast.

Plan to eventually convert to 70cm to free up local 2m VHF FM use, and possibly 2m EME. 

Grounding / Entrance Panel

Check / upgrade grounding at service entrance (NEC code) as needed.

Entrance panel into garage (grounded), then to shack above.

Low Noise RX Antennas

Get the K9AY loop operational.

Maybe get Active Antenna Kit from LZ1AQ - http://lz1aq.signacor.com/

EME (When I get there)

Small roof tower on house.

6m, 2m, or 23cm? 

2m is easiest with most stations.

23cm is next most popular and has strong interest.

6m is challenging, less stations.

More details to come..

Cebik Pages Update

https://www.antenna2.net/cebik/

As noted, things have been tidied and improved, updated to syntax correct HTML with a single CSS file, broken links fixed, some missing content found and added back in. A useful addition is the topics index which makes it easy to find all related pages on a subject, and see them all listed in one place.

I started working on this a few weeks ago when I learned that ON5AU who hosted the only known complete copy had become SK.

After I started looking at the Cebik pages, one thing lead to another, and the end result was significant update which I think was needed considering how useful this is to many.

Happy Holidays!

18 / December / 2024 Update

Now available on GitHub:

• https://github.com/antenna2

Clone, fork, or download ZIP archive from Green code button.

Happy Holidays!

MacLoggerDX Logs Backup Script

MLDX-Backup is a backup script I wrote for MacLoggerDX.

• It gracefully closes MLDX.
• Creates tgz archive (gzipped tar file).
• Excludes .DS_Store, debug files, QSL card images, ADIF conformations log.
• Keeps the last five backups (removes oldest when new backup is created).

Also includes information on how to manage things with iCloud drive Documents and Desktop syncing if used.

JS8Call Band Hopping Script

Recently someone asked on the JS8Call group about band hopping or cycling through several bands on a 10 minute cycle.

Jordan the author of JS8Call suggested using the API to do this.

I decided to see what was around and found this well documented js8net API library, with that I was able to interact with the API from the command line, and could read and set the frequency.

Python is not something I'm familiar with, so I used ChatGPT to help me write a python script that would cycle through a list of frequencies changing to the next one every few minutes.

The result was JS8BandHop, a fairly simple Python script.

How to build WSJT-X from source on macOS

Compile WSJT-X on Mac.

Works on my spare Late 2014 5K iMac running Big Sur 11.7.10 with Xcode 13.2.1.

Information was passed onto me from AA5SH - Notes on Building WSJT-X on my Mac. The main difference is this guide uses current stable release of Hamlib (4.5.5) from their Github repo.

The steps create a directory called /Users/<username>/wsjtx-build, with a sub-directory each for Hamlib and WSJT-X source code and building.

A detailed guide of how I have my rig control, logging, and digi mode apps configured is at:

https://lonneys-notebook.blogspot.com/2023/06/macloggerdx-flrig-with-wsjt-x-fldigi.html

Xcode

Xcode can be downloaded from the App Store, for older versions of macOS it can be downloaded from https://developer.apple.com/xcode/resources/ > Additional downloads > Search for the version number.

Supported version of Xcode for a given version of macOS see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode.

There are two parts to install Xcode one is just to install from the App Store or download from the Apple developer site, and then also from the command line run the following command:

xcode-select --install

Agree to the Xcode license agreement:

sudo xcodebuild -license

CMake

Download the latest CMake universal from http://www.cmake.org/download/

Open the DMG then drag and drop the application bundle onto the supplied /Applications link.

To complete the install process run:

sudo "/Applications/CMake.app/Contents/MacOS/cmake" --install

Homebrew

Install Homebrew from https://brew.sh/ 

Run the two commands shown at competition to add it to the path.

Install gcc@9:

brew install gcc@9

Mac Ports

Install Mac Ports from https://www.macports.org/

Quit and re-open terminal after installing. 

Install the required ports, answer yes to dependancies or use port -N (non interactive):

sudo port install autoconf

sudo port install automake

sudo port install libtool

sudo port install pkgconfig

sudo port install texinfo

sudo port install fftw-3-single +gcc9

sudo port install asciidoc

sudo port install asciidoctor

sudo port install libusb-devel

sudo port install boost

sudo port install qt5

sudo port install qt5-qtmultimedia

sudo port install qt5-qtwebsockets

Build Hamlib

https://hamlib.github.io 

https://github.com/Hamlib/Hamlib

This only needs to be done once.

Using the current stable release, 4.5.5 at this time.

mkdir -p ~/wsjtx-build/hamlib-prefix/build

cd ~/wsjtx-build/hamlib-prefix

git clone --depth 1 --branch 4.5.5 https://github.com/Hamlib/Hamlib.git src

cd src

./bootstrap

cd ../build

../src/configure \

   --enable-static \

   --disable-shared \

   --disable-winradio \

   --prefix=$HOME/wsjtx-build/hamlib-prefix \

   CFLAGS="-g -O2 -mmacosx-version-min=10.7 -I/opt/local/include" \

   LIBUSB_LIBS="-L/opt/local/lib -lusb-1.0"

make

make install-strip

If make install-strip fails, run make install

Build WSJT-X

Download source code tarball (.tgz) from:

WSJT-X https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/wsjtx.html

WSJT-X Improved https://wsjt-x-improved.sourceforge.io

Note: WSJT-X Improved includes additional features (some later make it into regular WSJT-X), and alternate layouts.

Extract the tarball file, you should see a folder named wsjtx-<version number>.

Open the src folder with-in this and extract wsjtx.tgz, this is the source code.

mkdir -p ~/wsjtx-build/wsjtx-prefix/src

mkdir -p ~/wsjtx-build/wsjtx-prefix/build

Copy the source code with in the expanded wsjtx folder into ~/wsjtx-build/wsjtx-prefix/src

cd ~/wsjtx-build/wsjtx-prefix/build

FC=/usr/local/Cellar/gcc@9/9.5.0/bin/gfortran-9 \

   cmake \

   -D CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="/opt/local/libexec/qt5;~/wsjtx-build/hamlib-prefix;/opt/local" \

   -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/wsjtx-build/wsjtx-prefix \

   -D CMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX12.1.sdk/ \

   ~/wsjtx-build/wsjtx-prefix/src

Substitute the Mac OS X SDK version you have installed in the above command if you have a different version.

cmake --build .

cmake --build . --target install # Builds wsjt-x application bundle 

cmake --build . --target package # Builds .dmg file in build directory

Other Info

Notes on Building JTDX on Mac - AA5SH.

How to Build WSJT-X on the Apple M1.

Misc Notes

Find QT version (installed via Mac Ports): /opt/local/libexec/qt5/bin/qmake -v

Build JS8Call on macOS

https://github.com/bazineta/js8call/blob/js8call/README.md#compiling-on-osx

Not tried it my self yet.