RANCHO JULIO? JULIO?? JULIO??!!

 

Greetings and welcome to the "Rancho Relaxo" blog for June. This month's issue is late...again. Things appear to be rather hectic around here. We're busier than a coyote in a hen house. Anyway, the Ol' Rooster and Ol' Hen just wanted to share what's happening here at our humble rancho nestled in the dry-as-a-desert and toasted-brown-as-an-onion-bagel foothills in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We're bracing for the real heat that's sure to pounce on us soon. Thanks for dropping in at the Rancho Relaxo global headquarters.

Here's a shot of the Ol' Rancher trying to get the laptop at church up and running. It sometimes needs a good talkin' too so that it functions nominally and records teachings like an obedient recorder. He really hates disobedient laptops. 

I gave my Keurig to the church since it's quick and easy to brew up a cup there. That left me trying different ways to brew coffee. After trying to deal with Moka pots, French presses, and even an Ibrik (and making a big mess with all of them), Connie the Canner suggested (well, sort of suggested) that we go "old fashioned" and just brew my coffee in...get this...a coffee pot! She politely offered her genuine Corningware percolator (from her collection - she has the electric one, too!) and said, "Here. Use this". Danged if it doesn't work just fine! Who woulda thunk?! I can make it as strong as is necessary and it's also labor saving (meaning that it makes a lot more coffee at a time than the others). Such a deal! 

Time for the "cute factor" for the day. This is "Fluffy", our first baby birdy of the season and it was named by dear friend and sister,  Lois Brillhart in Mapleton, KS. Thanks, Sis! Four more followed this one by the end of the day. We have three other brooders who will be leading around a bunch of ex-eggs soon. I wish that we could let them free range but we learned long ago that is just isn't practical around here. There are too many predators who absolutely love free chicken dinners. We'll collect the little guys and put them in a big box in the kitchen like we always do. This time, though, we'll try to sell them. We have enough birds for now and don't want to shackled to the job of "chicken sitting" a hundred birds like we did a few years ago. 

Speaking of brooders, this is a shot of a couple of "bundled brooding biddy buddies". The white hen is the one you see in the picture above. She took charge right away but the little red hen is also tending the same hatchlings but does give way to the white one. First time we've seen this. There are several eggs under both of them. 

Wanna see my thumb....again? This is the same dumb thumb that was smashed in a car door and which lost its nail. When the replacement nail was fully grown, WHAM!...it stuck itself in front of a hammer. Stupid thumb! At least the nail won't fall off this time. 

A quick shot of the original "Trash Compactor". 

Not long ago (but longer than the other day), it was time to fire up some spuds. It was decided to enhance them by adding a ton of onions and green, yellow, and red bell peppers. What a smellabration! Connie dined on hers share like a normal human but I made breakfast burritos out of mine by adding some eggs and hot Mexican chorizo. My, but that was good! Next time it's gonna be southern because I love to get cozy with a hot serving of plain grits enhanced only with a knob of real butter! Oooooh, baby!

This is one of the "improvements" around the ranch. The Ol' Rancher is also an Ol' Hamster" which means he's a Ham radio operator (since 1971). (Looking east) The antenna on the left is a dual-band "Comet" VHF/UHF vertical that allows me to hit the "Blue Ridge" repeater with a readable signal (over the hill behind us and13 miles north). That allows for much longer range (than line-of-sight) when using the 25W Yeasu mobile/base transceiver that I use. I'll do some testing to see just how compatible is for GMRS operation which is in the 462-467mhz range just above what is used for UHF ham operation (440-447mhz). I have a UHF tuner so that should help a lot. The one on the right is an 19' 11M CB 5/8 wavelength vertical that is tuned with an MFJ-949E tuner. So far, it tunes down to 40M which is remarkable for such a short antenna. A half-wave 40M dipole is 66" long! Resonance on higher bands will be tried later, to be sure. In the near future, a smaller tripod will be

mounted for the "discone" scanner antenna for the ICOM R7000 receiver.

ICOM R7000 specs:  VHF-UHF receiver covers from 25 to 999 and 1025 to 2000 MHz 

This is just the beginnings of the WA6IXI station. Lots of gear (including VHF and UHF rigs) will be added. A dedicated HF SWR receiver may be chucked in as well as a dedicated high performance VHF/UHF receiver (ICOM R-7000). For now, it consists of some parts and pieces being thrown together to see what works and what doesn't. None of this equipment has been used in ten years (I've been on VHF/UHF and not HF). As it turns out, the big black Astron power supply at the top is defective! I don't have time to crack the box and deal with it so I dragged out the 35Amp "Pyramid" power supply and fired it up. The IC-735 HF transceiver in the picture awakened quite nicely as did the HF IC-706MKIIG (off to the left on the shelf). Sitting on top of the 735 is the trusty (and a bit dusty) MFJ-949E antenna tuner. It tunes the vertical antenna that you see above. I have a couple of other tuners if this one doesn't want to work for a living. 

This is how you find the resonance of any particular antenna. It's an MFJ-269C professional antenna analyzer. In this shot, it's trying to find the "sweet spot" of one of my several mobile ham antennas. A couple of them aren't labeled other than with the makers name (e.g. "Hustler"). So, they need to be analyzed prior to being used. You can see that this one resonates far outside of the usual 12M ham band. It has an adjustable "stinger" so it may be trimmed to meet the needs. It's doubtful that the 12M band will be used much so it may end up being tuned for the 10M band which would only require shortening the stinger a bit. We'll see. 

Tip O' The Day: 

"When traversing Bigfoot mating areas, stay on the marked trail and do not make eye contact" - Twitter

And now a word from our sponsor:

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It's June? It's June?! How can it be June already?!!! June has pounced on us like a rat on a Cheese Doodle! That's enough to make a man squall 'til fall!! That's another spring that has  sprung and whizzed past before I could even recognize it! *SIGH*. Moving along.........

There shall be showers of blessings! or Load'em up!: 

The other day (when lots of things happen around here), after church, we stopped at an estate sale that was less than a mile away (nothing uncommon about that). We met a native Porter'villain (sic) named Doyle who was tending the liquidation of his parent's estate. We found much favor with our new friend and brother and he began to bless us tremendously. 

That first day, we loaded up the back of the van with our usual "stuff" but he only charged us a pittance for the entire pile! None of it was "junk"! There were even some collectibles in the mix! He advised that he would be there the next week and to return. We did that and he blessed us again! There was another load made and he all but didn't charge us! If that wasn't enough to thaw your igloo, he advised us to return the next week! We did that, too! When we pulled in and got our of the van, he greeted us, pointed to the garage, and stated, "Take whatever you want. It all has to go". 

Well...we had to ask to be excused so we could go fetch "Wooly Pully", our 5' x 8' trailer! When we returned, not only did we end up with most of the stuff in the garage, he kept going back into the house and returning with more and more goodies!! The last thing to be loaded on top of everything else, was a handsome blonde custom built book shelf that his father crafted. It had to be strapped on top because there was no room in the trailer! 

All of the racking, packing, stacking, loading, lugging, and hauling was taxing on our old airframes (where's Maynard G. Krebbs when you need him?) and that ended up giving us unimpressive thermal efficiency numbers which then required a nap to resolve. We didn't even unload when we got home. It was nap time. We'll get over it in time. 

It'll take quite awhile to "count our blessings" (and quite some time to find a place to park it all) but we really really enjoy being blessed!! 

Treat time: Until now, I had no use for strawberry ice cream. NONE. The only time I ate it on purpose was when it was part of a Neapolitan ice cream serving than I would moosh it all together so I wouldn't have to see it. But.....Connie the Canner just served me a bowl of vanilla ice cream with a ton of fresh strawberries on it and ....WOW....what a treat! Strawberry ice cream is my friend!

Ham Radio Report: I finally got my duck (the retarded one) in a row and got my ham radio station up and running. That only took ten years. There’s some really good news concerning it, too. 

Though I truly prefer a horizontal dipole wire antenna (or it's cousin, the "inverted Vee" dipole), I’m having to use a 19' 5/8 wavelength CB/11M vertical antenna. This will have to do until I can get the 105' off-center fed "Windom" dipole mounted. Most likely, it'll be tethered to the tower behind the barn. 

It was doubtful that the vertical would tune down to the 40 meter ham band but the Ol' Hamster was smiling mighty biggly when it tuned even further down the ham band spectrum than anticipated. She'll even tune down to 3.5mhz (80 meters) with a decent SWR!

Of course, none of this would have happened had there not been an old man clambering about on his roof in the middle of the day trying to assemble a mess of metal and make it look usable again. What a sight to see. And, of course, you just know that he would drop some of his tools and mounting hardware down the steep roof, eh? Some of the flight of the recalcitrant hardware was arrested by the gutter. That did help maintain a good mood but it was still "monkey time" for the old guy who had to scamper down to retrieve his goods. 

Connie the Canner, ever vigilant to watch over her septuagenarian hubby, manned the "watcher's post" in the back yard which had a clear view of the erection. She made sure that her elevated adventurer didn't cause her to suffer a "code brown" exigency. In her mind, she was dealing with a roof climber who only had the confidence of dentist, Dr. Jesse W. Heywood (Don Knotts, "Shakiest Gun in the West"). Silly granny. In my mind, my Superman cape was fresh back from the cleaners and it was time to rock!  

The big tripod had to be mounted first. That required screwing the feet down to the roof with two long special screws with rubber washers. Then, a liberal dose of "Wet Patch" roofing tar was slathered on to seal things up and protect it from the weather.  

The good news is that the antenna can be tuned on most bands above 3.5mhz. I say "most bands" because I've not yet been able to tune it on 10 meters (a different tuner will be used) and I can't tune it on 30 meters until I rewire my code keyer. 

For some reason my "straight key"  (don't go there) isn't being correctly recognize by the transceiver (don't go there, either). When the two-wire key is plugged in, it auto-keys and sends un-commanded "DAH's" instead of waiting until the key is depressed. The control panel knobs, buttons, sliders, and switches are all in the correct places so I'm not sure what that's all about. The previous owner was primarily a "CW" operator so the rig should be "plug and play" for the keyer. So, the auto-keyer, which has a three-wire connector, needs to be wired up. The hardware is available (I think I have 4 auto-keyers so I'll need to build 4 sets of wires) but the priority is not so it'll have to wait a couple of more days so I can try again. The soldering iron is at hand. 

The next antenna project (unless I can first get a small tripod for the "discone" scanner antenna) will be to mount the 105’ off-center fed Windom horizontal dipole. One end will be anchored to the 60’ crank-up tower (soon to be raised) and the other to either the tripod that the vertical is mounted on or to the ex-basketball pole out by the driveway.  If the pole is used, it will need to have at least a 30’ pushup so that it’ll clear the roof of the house. That would actually make it an "inverted Vee" dipole but that's fine since I'm dealing and "NVIS" environment (near vertical incidence skywave). The "inverted Vee" is a good antenna for such use. So far, “eyeball” measuring has been used so nothing is exact. It’ll be dialed in as soon as  is practicable. 

Diggity Dog Report or How to Make a Hot Dogs Cool Again: There just hasn't been enough time to get Fuzz Dogg a haircut so he's been a lot warmer because of having to wear his winter coat during the first part of summer. The best that can be done for now is to hose him down really well and make a swamp cooler out of him. He doesn't seem to mind at all. Other than that, he's doing well.

Abby is her normal princess self and loves her pal, Fuzzball. They cavort and frolic a lot except when they are snoozing during the day. That leaves them with plenty of energy to stay up all night and guard Rancho Relaxo. Uh-huh. 

Well....there you have it: another short episode of the long happenings at Rancho Relaxo (aka “Dos Acres”): home of Rancho Ran, the world's least-most greatest authority: home of the Yo-Yo  twins and  three ducks that we try to keep in a row (one of which is retarded): home of Connie the Canner, the world's greatest side-kook and CEE (Chief of Everything Else): where the air smells and where alliteration reigns supreme: where being modern is optional and where there are no slaves to fashion: where the eggs are always mostly fresh: where things can get...interesting: where it's all news to me and where...you just never know.