Finally got my first REAL HD camcorder. I tried one of those flip cameras from a Black Friday deal at best buy back about 3 years ago. I think I used that particular camera 4x before it just died. The battery worked fine the camera when you turned it on just didnt power up.
anyhow.. back to the JVC Everio Camcorder. GZ-E200BUS.
And now I present my first time lapse video with it.
Not too bad for out a side window of my house. Through a dark screen and about 10 minutes after removing it from the box.
A couple observations.
1. Wow the sun goes down fast when it gets to a certain point.
2. Didnt know the neighbor was going to cut the grass, sorry Mark.
Not too bad for 150 dollars shipped off a random Woot.com deal.
I have been using a random wire antenna for quite a while now. The first one I created was for Dayton Hamvention where my son and I camped at Buck Creek which is an Ohio State Park. At Buck Creek we threw up the antenna about 30 foot into a tree close to our camping site and with about a s2 noise level we had probably the best radio experience to date. Taking a look back at the geography of the area it is easy to understand why. The camping area is surrounded by lake on 3/4 sides and the whole camping area is about 30 foot above the land surrounding the camping sites. This almost entirely made up for the prevalence of Poison Ivy.
That was the first experience with the "not so random wire" The second was field day. Same results here. The noise was higher being that we were down at the USS COD downtown Cleveland but we still got out fine and made plenty of contacts. The Ohio QSO party was done with the same random wire in my back yard operating "picnic table" portable. This "not so random wire" operated better than my 80m center fed dipole at the home. The location was the same but performance was now. This year we joined the Ohio State Parks on the air competition and activated Punderson. Another location just like Dayton Hamvention. The spot we picked was a good 500-600 foot above most of the surrounding area. So anyhow. because websites come and go I locked this stuff for my records. Here it is. The document I used to create the cheapest.. AND the best antenna I have ever used.
The "Best" Random Wire Antenna
Lengths Random wire lengths you
should and should not use!
Updated 06-29-2012
The random
wire antenna is probably one of the least expensive, easiest and
cheapest HF antennas to use if you have a tuner and you want to
get the "most" out of a length of "random" wire without having to
pull out that calculator, doing the math, getting the center
insulator built or bought, running the feedline, and all the
rest that goes with putting up a more elaborate antenna. All you
need for a random wire antenna is some wire, your tuner, one or more
supports up as high as you can get them to string the wire from the
supports to the tuner, at least one or two insulators and a
little time.
One single wire, no solder
connections, very simple.... all the way from the tuner to
the end support. That's it in a nutshell.....or
is it?
Many hams have tried till they are blue
in the face to install the random wire antenna that works on most;
if not all of the HF bands with terrible results.
Swr usually is all over the place and the
tuner will just not do it's job. You can get good loading and low
swr on sometimes 2 or 3 bands, but one or more of the bands
that you want, just will not cooperate with an swr that can be
adjusted with the "tuner".
So after much frustration..down it comes
and you go on to a totally different type of antenna....all that
time just wasted in your opinion.....until now!
We recently found some good information
about random wire lengths that you should and should
not use.
Jack,
VE3EED, hopefully has solved a major headache we all have when we
attempt to go thru the trial and error and frustration with getting
the random wire to work where WE want it to work.
He knew that in order for the tuner to
"see" a fairly low swr to work within it's range, that the
antenna had to be NOT A HALF WAVE ON ANY FREQUENCY that we
wanted to us, because a half wave will give us a very high impedance
and the resulting swr into a 50 ohm transmitter!
So Jack took most of one day, did the
math with the aid of his trusty calculator, several cups of coffee
and came up with...............................
In Jack's own words....
"Here's the word on random-wire
antennae."
Presented for your
consideration by Jack, VE3EED. The table below
represents half wave lengths and multiples that you DO NOT WANT TO USE!
You have to stay away from a
half wavelength on any frequency. Therefore, we came up with the
following numbers to avoid (IN FEET):
These lengths in the table below are
the culpritsthat cause all of
the trouble when using random lengths.
Frequency MHz
1/2 Wave
2nd Multiple
3rd Multiple
4th Multiple
1.9
246
492
738
984
3.8
123
246
369
492
7.2
65
130
195
260
10.1
46
92
138
184
14.2
33
66
99
132
18.1
26
52
78
104
21.3
22
44
66
88
24.9
19
38
57
76
28.5
16
32
48
64
So those are the
numbers above that we have to stay as far away from as possible
when building a long-wire antenna.
REVISION NOTE: We had a note from James,
KB5YN, pointing out that one of my so-called GOOD numbers was 220
feet. That is the 10th multiple of a half wave on 15 meters. Well, I
didn't think it would make any difference at that many multiples.
However, the radio didn't tune up very well on 15 meters.
So,
having nothing better to do one day, I re-did the calculations going
out to 500 feet. That meant calculating all the way to 32 multiples
of a half wave on 10 meters. I won't bore you with all that so the
first portion of this still only shows up to the 4th multiple. There
are so many new frequencies to stay away from, that it gets pretty
tricky for the longer wires. However, the list has been revised and
is good for wires as long as 500 feet. 73.... JACK, VE3EED