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Tough going

What’s wrong? It seems I encounter opposition in all my projects. It started with the over-sensitive protection circuit in the amplifier and then the WARC dipole blew up. But now there’s more.

When dismantling exploded antennas, the ladder sinks in the swamp that is supposed to be the lawn. I really should stop trying to do all this all alone. Too dangerous. The broken antenna could have slipped and damaged the yagi in its fall. Note to self: next time, accept the help that is voluntarily offered.

When working on a (top secret) RF project, you always bang your head against the wall when living in Belgium. There just aren’t any suppliers in this godforsaken hole for special parts and supplies (not even rare or exotic things). Up to now, parts have come from PA, SM and DL.

Order construction parts at company A, they put your stuff in backorder. Hello! It’s Contest Season and I need to fix things!

Order 30 cable shoes at company B and they send 30 BC-550 transistors in a bag labelled ‘cable shoes’. I don’t need transistors, I need calble shoes!

Put device in local repair shop, after 4 weeks you need to call to get an update. A parts backorder issue, too. Why not just send a mail and let me know?

Software! Just when you think you wrote bullet proof routines to parse emails and attachements, people express their love for me by sending mails encoded in weird coding schemes and character sets. Nothing I can’t fix, but it takes time. And sometimes a fix for problem A introduces problem B. Still I think the new software project runs quite well.

I’m beginning to get stressed out. Less than three weeks until ARRL DX CW. I can do this right now, but I surely would like to get some of my construction projects working by then! T minus 18 days…

2 replies on “Tough going”

Reading your blog, one issue predominates: stress, stress, stress. If it ain’t about lousy conditions, it’s about a broke connection somewhere.

Franki OB, you need to de-stress an take a Zen approach towards life…

73

Johan

Yes you are absolutely right but I can’t be happy about missing propagation and blown up antennas… 🙂

In my defense, I’d say that it ‘reads’ more negatively than it actually is. And to quote Johnny Rotten: “Anger is an energy”, so all this raving has a therapeuric effect.

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