Spent the afternoon (really nice afternoon) shooting that damned tennis ball gun trying to get a line up over a tree where I wanted a line to go up over the tree. Must have shot that thing 20 times before finally getting one over that would work. Broke several lines and lost 2 of the six tennis balls I went to Ace Hardware and got. But found a tennis ball from last year in the underbrush. And, wouldn’t you know, that was the one that went pretty close to where I wanted it to go.

So, I got the steel wire going from the top of one tree, over the house, to the top of another tree. Attached the new 6-160 antenna (and balun) before pulling it up into place. Now to play …

MCARC 10-meter chat net went well except I kept shutting down my auto-tuner no matter which antenna I used for transmitting. The 6-btv worked best for everything, but, I could hear some of the people on the new antenna way better than the 6-btv or my multi-band fan dipole. But all my antenna’s shut the auto-tuner down. Great signal reports for about 5 seconds when the tuner would shut down and my signal went to crap. Hmmm…

I’m thinking that, after Field Day, I’m going to find a way to attach the 6-btv to the roof  of the house, and start saving up for a 50 foot tower. And that Military antenna thing for Field Day and trips around. Going with just 2-meter/440 in the truck and have the Caravan set up for the 857d. Sounds like a plan!

Other than all that it’s pretty much SSDD around here.