Facebook Etiquette: Five Dos and Don’ts
By C.G. Lynch (@cglynch) - November 21, 2008
Kirsten (@kirstendixson) is the source for this article! :-)
Last Saturday, I got to put on my spiffy, brand-new N1HIT shirt and answer questions about D-Star at Boxboro, the ARRL New England Division Convention, where N1HIT had a booth. Great crowd and a lot to see.
Before Boxboro officially started, I drove down on Friday and took an 8 hour class on ICS 100. ICS is the Incident Command System,
“A standardized on-scene emergency management construct specifically designed to provide for the adoption of an integrated organizational structure that reflects the complexity and demands of single or multiple incidents, without being hindered by jurisdictional boundaries.”
Basically, ICS enables all the different groups that respond to an emergency (a car accident, a forest fire, a major terrorist act, etc.) to operate as one unified force. For us hams, I feel that we must understand and be able to operate under the Incident Command System and the National Incident Management System (NIMS). I’ve taken the ARRL Emergency Communications Course 1 (EC-001) and plan on taking the remaining two courses as well as continuing with ICS training. That said, all the classes and books in the world on handling an emergency are not going to be of much help unless you practice. Tonite, I’ll be the Net Control Station/Operator for our weekly ARES Net. I’m off to prepare my notes.
It’s been an interesting summer. Got the HF dipole up (it rocks, signal reports have been very positive) and the electrical storms have kept me busy.
The past several weeks have seen a lot of rainy afternoons with strong winds and lightning here in Southern NH. We even had an EF-1 to EF-2 tornado cause some major damage and, sadly, a death and injuries. My home was far from the path of the tornado and spared any damage but I’m working diligently on a better grounding system for my radios with lightning arrestors and other improvements. The first and easiest step I took was to better protect the HF balun from the elements. Here are a few pics of the housing I put together to keep the balun relatively dry and above the snow line come winter.
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This past Saturday, with the help of K1PV, K1YU, KB1PMT and W1GEK, I put up a Cobra Senior antenna in my backyard. Using K1PV’s pneumatic tennis ball launcher (see this for an example), we were able to get both ends of the dipole up and over some tall pines. The feed point is approximately 65′ high with the ends slightly higher due to the fact that I don’t have an adequate way to support the center. Dacron cord was used for support and we secured one end to a strong tree while the other end is secured to a substantial but flexible limb in the woods to give the Cobra some flex in high winds. I’m using a 4:1 Unadilla Balun to connect the ladder line to 100′ of RG-8X coax. I’ll shorten the coax since I have more than enough to reach the shack. Soon I’ll look into getting some coax with a lot less loss. I picked up an LDG Z-11 Pro auto antenna tuner and it’s been working great with my new Cobra and the FT-990.
I’ve been too busy with work and preparing for Field Day to spend a lot of time trying out the new antenna. I did participate in a net Sunday morning on 75M and I was 20 over or more to those that gave me a signal report! Here are some pictures from the antenna install:
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Last night I took a SKYWARN training and certification class in Nashua NH sponsored by Hillsborough County ARES. Excellent instructor. Now I just need to get my weather station running and feeding data out via APRS.
It’s official. I now have the vanity call of K1PRD.
After a few attempts at getting MT 4 to behave, I realized the upgrade from MT 3 to MT 4 did not go smoothly. I had upgraded last month but the install left me juggling too many template issues. I ended up hitting the server earlier this evening (yikes, it’s Wednesday here already) and deleted mt-static and all the cgi files. After downloading a fresh copy of MT 4, I reinstalled everything, set permissions, and ran through the configuration steps. Three hours later, all is working perfectly now ( yeh, 3 hours ’cause I squeezed in some DX during the install process. 
) I’m not impressed with the default, stock templates in MT 4 and will start doing some custom work over the weekend.
Updated to MT 4 over the weekend. Haven’t had a spare minute to customize the ‘Minimalist Blue’ style other than to apply a bit of CSS and adjust the font. Bear with me, I’ll have things straightened out soon.
Spring is here and while I still have snow covering many parts of the yard and temps well below freezing at night, I was able to drive an 8′ foot copper grounding rod (actually a copper clad steel rod courtesy of K1RX) into the ground without any problems. I was able to use a 5 lbs (2.2kg) hammer to get the job done and didn’t hit any ledge. Ran 14 gauge stranded copper wire to the clamp on the rod and connected the wire to the HF radio ground. I’ll work on a more substantial grounding system over the summer.
Next, I changed one end of the antenna support line on my 40 meter dipole. Had been using some thin, weak, neon green, nylon cord. Went with for 100′ of 3/32, black, UV resistant, Dacron rope I picked up at HRO on Saturday. The other support end was already using the stronger Dacron rope. Strong winds (40 to 50 MPH gusts) last week snapped the thinner cord before I had a chance to lower the dipole. Next upgrade is to put up a 140′ long, made in NH, UltraLite Senior antenna (for 160 to 10 meters) this spring.