SKYWARN Recognition Day this weekend!

Once again I'll be participating in SKYWARN Recognition Day, Starting officially at midnight UTC 12/1 until midnight UTC 12/2.

I'll be at station WX4MRX in Morristown TN during the "graveyard shift". I'm not sure how long I'll be there, as I have to be back home by sunrise.

I've participated in several of these from "MRX" and have enjoyed them thoroughly. Usually I end up all by my lonesome but last year a couple of guys were with me most of the time I was on station.

I'll try to post some pics of the current incarnation of the MRX station.

I'll try to update my frequency via my Twitter accounts @k4hsm and @etskywarn. 

I hope to catch you on the air!

433 MHz Tape Measure Antenna

Stan. Swan (ZL2APS) has an instructional project for building a UHF tape measure antenna (and yours truly makes a special appearance with my VHF-designed antenna) based on the design by Joe Leggio (WB2HOL).

Here are the opening paragraphs of his Instructables project:

This Instructable relates to the design & evaluation of a simple tape measure based 433 MHz 3 element Yagi antenna.  An effective receiver was made by  "persuading" a ~US$4 Dorji 433 MHz ASK (Amplitude Shift Keying) data module into analogue signal reception,perhaps from a companion PICAXE driven tone transmitter.

When used with the tape measure Yagi antenna, DF (Direction Finding) performance over line of sight ranges to 1km was quite remarkable,with a DMM (Digital Multi Meter) RSSI signal strength display allowing extremely fine bearing resolution.

The project, photos, and downloadable PDF can be found here.