My last post was full of projects I have been working on all year, an annual wrap-up as it were. If you payed only slight attention to the post you would probably notice that nearly all of the projects were woodworking projects. If you went back to posts and social media of late 2013 and early 2014 you would find that most references were to amateur radio, go back a little further and there was a nearly three-year stretch of mostly aviation mechanic stuff.

What does it all mean? Does this guy flit around from interest to interest and never finish anything or stick with anything? No, and yet sort of.

When you have a wide range of interests it is difficult to work within the scope of all of them at once. Often times projects will spur interest or rekindle interests never pursued when they encompass something “new.” Take radio for example. I have been doing radio stuff since the early 80s. I was into CB back then and later with Search and Rescue that continued. When working in towing I did a lot of auto-electric and radio work. One of the things that got me into CB was a desire to work short wave. What brought radio back into phase for me was aviation.

My personal interests in aviation mechanicing are widely separated, and at the same time not so divergent. My greatest personal interest is in restoration of early aircraft, around 1910-1930. In the latter part of this radio was just making it into aircraft. To work on radios in aviation you need an FCC General Radio Operator License (GROL) as well as FAA approval. As an A&P student I found that while the FAA mandated curriculum lags behind current technology (some stuff from the 40s is still required knowledge) it is still much further ahead of the period I am interested in.

Beyond my personal interests, I need to be marketable as a mechanic to get a job. An A&P mechanic with an FCC GROL with a RADAR endorsement seems to have an advantage to me. To get the commercial licenses it made sence to get an education on the subject matter. I had just finished two years of A&P school and the thought of starting a new major and taking on more student loans seemed like a bad idea. Re-enter amateur radio. Now, 30 years after my initial desire to get  a ham license, I have my Amateur Extra Class license. 

Woodworking also ties into this mix. Hams don’t just talk on the radio, they build them. They build structures to contain them, they build a lot of stuff. Well, some do anyway. It wasn’t just radio that pushed me further into my woodworking zone though.

Back in the early 90s I rebuild my great-uncles house after he passed away. I have been doing odd construction related stuff for years but this was my first big project. I had to learn a lot before starting various trade work, and I did learn a lot and I have put it to good use over the last few decades. I like wood working and construction, it is very satisfying.

So with this back ground of making stuff building my own airplane seemed like a good idea. Many of the early aircraft were wood structures. Even the largest airplane ever built, the Spruce Goose was a wood structure airplane. This is how woodworking got me into aviation maintenance.

By now I bet a few things are clear and some are clear as mud. All of my interests tie together, somehow. Even homesteading ties to my interests. Some more obvious than others.

So, back to interests in phase. The desire to work on projects in various areas of interest all the time is always there. The needs of the time dictate what specific areas need the most attention at that moment. I can keep a few things floating at a time but not everything.

One of my current goals is to do stuff from various interests more often, mix them up a little more.  I have a tendency to go all-in when phase shifts and one skill becomes more timely than the others. Subsequently, it looks like I’m often distracted by another shiny. If I am truly honest with myself there is a degree of truth to being distracted. Fortunately it is distraction by a subject/project/research that I most likely would have ended up doing anyway.

~FlyBoyJon/KK6GXG/A&P/…

While I was in A&P school almost everything I posted was, of course, aviation related. Since I graduated a lot of my time has been spent working with wood. One of the biggest projects, literally, was a new woodworking bench using traditional joinery and oak draw-bore pegs to tightly secure it all together. (later I added a crochet at the left front that was attached with 2 lag bolts which constitute all of the metal on the bench)

But wood isn’t everything. Back in October I took my first Amature Radio license test and earned my Technician class license, last month I took the General class exam and earned my General class license. I’m used to doing computer hardware work and in the past I did a little electronics work so I was familiar with some of the stuff involved in radio, but not a lot.

Back in the 80s I was into CB radio. Later in life when I was working in the towing industry I did a lot of electrical work on our tow trucks which included the radios, and of course, installing my own car stereos since I could drive. These other activities made me a little familiar with Ham radio, but only in a very cursory way. What pushed me to finally do what I had wanted to do for decades was learning more about aircraft radios in A&P school.

Now my “electronics bench” is shifting from computers to radio. I have some basic electrical diagnostic tools and a full compliment of basic hand tools, but I am lacking in some of the basic radio diagnostics and bench-tools. As with woodworking and other trades, what better place to cut your teeth than making some of your own tools.

This week on my radio projects list I had one bench tool, a dummy load. For those who may not know, a dummy load is what you would connect a radio transmitter to, instead of an antenna, to conduct a variety of bench tests, usually power output related. Not having a load while transmitting, an antenna or dummy attached, a radio can burn out; basically you are generating a lot of “power” but not giving it anywhere to go. While testing you don’t want to connect an antenna because you would be transmitting all of your tests on-air wasting air-time and occupying a frequency someone else could be using for communication.

So thats why a dummy load, now for the what. A dummy load is used to dissipate RF energy, that would otherwise be radiating from an antenna as radio waves. The load can be dissipated through a resistive material as heat instead of radio signals.

An easy way to accomplish this is to use a resistor with relatively low resistance and that can also handle high power loads. Another criteria is that it shouldn’t radiate, or leak, spurious signals.

That last part becomes tricky because you can’t use resistors that are made from coiled wire, normally the kind used in high power applications because the coils inside the resistors will generate inductive fields. Another more practical way is to use a bunch of lower wattage resistors in parallel so the wattage is accumulated and the resistance kept low.

A trick that can be used to help in the dissipation of heat from the resistors is to submerge the resistor package in a fluid medium that will help dissipate the heat generated by the resistors making them more efficient. The trick with this is to use a medium that has a high flash point so you don’t accidentally start a fire. This is called a “wet dummy load.” It is recommended that transformer oil is used; this is what utility companies use for the same purpose in their large power transformers. Unfortunately this stuff is very expensive. The last time I checked it was $2,300 for a 55 gal drum, about $42 a gallon if you could find it in anything less than 5 gallons. Fortunately there is an alternate, mineral oil, which is pretty close.

So what’s in store next you may ask… A field strength meter is on the list for next week. With any luck I will be able to get out and do some shopping for that project in the next day or two.

That’s all for now, and 73
~FlyBoyJon / KK6GXG