RaDAR – Preparing for the contest

I spent an hour or so this afternoon doing a kit check for the RaDAR contest in two weeks time.

I put up my paint roller handle mast, pretty quickly. It will come in handy where there may be no trees or dangerous trees to use like thorn trees. Antennas tend to get quite tangled up in these kinds of trees!

I incorporated a pully and carbiner again for the end fed to easily be hooked on at the top of the mast. If a rope needs to be used to hoist the antenna into the air the pully can serve the same purpose.

A while ago I wiped Windows 7 from my digital modes netbook which I use for RaDAR digital comms and installed Linux Mint 15 Xfce on it. I use FLDigi an excellent cross platform digital modes program. I had to test whether my Signalink USB sound card adapter could work with Linux – it did! Linux uses way less resources than windows reducing boot up time and vast improvements in battery life! Important things for RaDAR.