Now that we're officially in contract, I feel more comfortable about sharing! Barb and I are buying a house. It's a crazy 1951 modern design. I'm afraid we won't be able to fix it up all fancy like the current owners, but we'll try. The garden certainly is nice. I took most of these pictures while walking around with the inspector. For anyone wanting to visit from the city, it's only about $15 round trip to the Cortlandt station, and I promise I won't make you do any yard work while you visit. Here are the pictures.

I've been on a cake binge lately. Partly driven by the fact that I am trying to cut back on junk food and told myself that I had to make my own. Here's this weekend's recipe:

Tres Leches Cake

Cake:

• 6.75 oz cake flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 4 oz (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 8 oz white sugar
• 5 eggs
• 1.5 tsp vanilla

Grease and flour a 9x13 cake pan. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. In a mixer, cream the butter and sugar. With the mixer on low, add the eggs allowing each one to incorporate before adding the next. Add the vanilla. Pour into the pan and bake at 350 until the internal temperature is 200F - about 20 minutes.

3 milks:

• 1 12 oz can evaporated milk
• 1 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk
• 1 c half and half

When the cake comes out of the oven, set aside and allow to cool completely. While waiting, whisk the three milks together. Prodigiously poke the cake full of holes with a chopstick or something to that effect. Pour the milks over the cake and allow to sit overnight in the fridge to ensure everything is soaked up.

Topping:

• 2 c heavy cream
• 6 oz white sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp unflavored gelatin

Place the whisk and mixing bowl in the freezer and allow to cool. Pour about half a cup of the cream into a metal measuring cup or small metal bowl. Sprinkle in the gelatin and allow to sit for a few minutes. Gently heat over a low flame until dissolved, being careful not to bring to a full boil. Pour the cream and gelatin into the mixer and begin to whisk while adding the sugar and vanilla. Whisk on medium-high until thick. You can 'ice' the cake with the whipped topping, but I prefer to allow the topping to set in the fridge for a few hours (or overnight with the rest of the cake) and serve the cake slices with a hefty dollop of cream on top.

I wasn't extremely happy with the PC satellite control software out there, so I decided to do something about it. The process was quite a learning experience - it's my first true multi-threaded GUI app (as opposed to the web apps I'm usually building) and I learned a lot about basic satellite prediction.

It's based on bits and pieces of other open-source software out there, but architected using a more modular approach with decoupling done through a series of event handlers set up as a bi-directional message bus. I release the code on Google Code and wrote an article for the AMSAT Journal (122.55 KB).

My coffee grinder died today. In fact, it had begun to slowly deteriorate the past couple of weeks. It served me well... I had used it every single day for the past two years. It's a beautiful KitchenAid A-9 - one of the new models. I have to say that I expected a good 5 years out of it.

When these grinders act up, they are very irritating. The motor is a direct drive 200W model that spins a tad too fast. There's no auger, so there is nothing really to help break up the whole beans before they reach the burrs. When the beans have trouble getting down into the burrs (maybe they're afraid?) the motor just spins faster and faster and spews the last of the ground coffee all over the counter.

I opened it up to try to figure out what might be causing this, and to be honest I can't really tell. I guessed that something might have loosened up (bearings perhaps?) causing the burrs to vibrate and not allowing the beans to flow in. Turns out there's not even any bearings! The rotating burrs rest on a plate with a fair amount of play, so while the burrs can be replaced, that's not any guarantee they will remain lined up.

Reluctantly, I started to seal the think back up... The motor is held to the cast alloy body with two tapered screws. Disaster! I stripped the soft alloy and now the motor won't mount up at all.

It's unfortunate, really, that something as over-engineered as this has such weak points. Little things like this are what make the difference between professional gear and pseudo-industrial-looking home gear. My favorite grinder to date is the Zassenhaus Grain Mill, but it's a little labor intensive for morning brew.

I found a larger KitchenAid Pro Line on clearance for $150. It's got gear reduction and an auger, so opefully won't grind itself into oblivion. If it does, my next choice would be a Rancilio Rancho (at a whopping $300)
Well, wish me luck. I guess I could just go back to the $20 blade grinders!

I know that lots of people have made successful QSOs using an array of HT's, mobile units, and any number of home made antennas. I started similarly small, but had a couple of different design goals for satellite communications.

First, I am somewhat limited by my pool of equipment - I don't have old radios around or an HT that can be brought into service. I want to get as much use of what I have, but I also will need to make investments as they make sense.

Second, I want to be able to work satellites from my current base which includes a 75' feedline to the antennas on my roof. While mobile/portable operation is a goal, I'd like to start with more and pare down for portable work rather than the other direction.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I want to engineer a solution that will produce reliable, repeatable results. As exciting as the first few contacts are, if I am to use satellites as a reliable means of DX work, I'd like to remove as much of the luck from the equation as possible.

Don't take my example as any sort of assertion that I think this is the best way, or even how anyone else should follow my lead! I just wanted to share what I got to work and the results.

The antenna is a Cushcraft 2m/440cm 3 element yagi mounted about 50' above ground and 15' above the roof of my apartment. It is mounted to a simple light-duty TV rotator. The bands have different feed points and elements but share a boom.

Each antenna is connected to an SSB preamp through 3 feet of 9913. The 2m is using 75' of RG-8X and the 70cm feedline is 75' of RG-213. The 2m antenna is driven by an IC-V8000 and the 70cm with the IC-7000.

I am currently limited by the antenna in a couple of ways. First is that I have no elevation control and the antenna to mast mount is fixed at 90 degrees. This means that I can work satellites as low as 7 degrees, but seem to lose them around 20 degrees elevation. Unfortunately, this also means that I am unable to take advantage of higher elevation passes which would have a lower path loss. I had also intended to run full-duplex mode and used the two different transceivers. Unfortunately, since the two bands share a boom, they interact heavily and the 2m transmission completely overloads the front-end of the IC-7000.

In keeping with my goals of making reliable communications, I'm going to make a few more attempts making only a couple of tweaks to the setup above. Ultimately, though, I will move to some antennas like the Gulf Alpha 70CM-8ELSat and 2M-5ELSat at about a 20 degree elevation on an 8' cross boom. I will replace the 6m beam for now since it will most likely be a while before that band sees any propagation more than the hour or so a month that I catch.

Many thanks to the AMSAT-BB list, Gary WA2AQH, and the SatComm Net hosted by the MBARC . If you're in the area and want to join in, it's every other Thursday at 20h00 on the KC2DAA repeater (144.225 pl 100.0)

I've been having a lot of fun working HF and a few local repeaters, so I wanted to share my experiences as a newcomer to the hobby who is one of the dreaded new No-code Extras.

Starting off, I had a lot of luck just tuning around the New York City area 2m repeaters. There were a lot of friendly folks on the air, and it got me in the habit of good QSO procedure. When I moved from the mobile antenna mounted to the balcony railing to a rotated yagi on the roof, my goal was to reach repeaters as far away as possible. I was particularly interested in reaching repeaters closer to the catskills...

The most consistent repeater I was able to reach is the KC2DAA repeater on Mount Beacon. This repeater hosts the Hudson Valley net as well as some activities of the MBARC such as a semi-weekly Satcom net for discussion of area satellite work.

It took about a month to get word of my General/Extra upgrade. At that point I was diliberating a solution for multiband HF access. Quite a few people extolled the virtues of the G5RV and the price was right. It turned out that I didn't have as much room for a wire antenna as I thought. I did manage to use the G5RV for a few 6m and 20m contacts at a friend's house in the Catskills.

After ruling out any sort of wire antenna, I turned to the vertical. At the time, the only real benefit that I realized is that a vertical is self supporting. I planned to mount the antenna on the roof of the apartment which is about 40 feet above ground and contains very little metal mass.

I ruled out the radial-less half-wave designs primarily because of their comprimised design, and mixed results in the review pages of eham.net. Of the multiband 1/4 wave designs I settled on the Butternut HF9V with the tuned radial kit. Installation and tuning whent great, and I am constantly surprised about how well it performs.

In the end, another huge benefit of the 1/4 wave vertical design is the low radiation angle which makes it great for DX work. In fact, it's so good, my country list is longer than my state list!

States Worked

• Alabama
• Massachusetts
• Mississippi
• Ohio
• South Carolina

Countries Worked

• Europe
• Spain
• France
• Hungary
• Italy
• Norway
• Czech Republic
• Slovak Republic
• Belgium
• Russia
• North America
  
• Cuba
• Honduras
• Canada
• USA
• Mexico
• Trinidad & Tobago
• South America
• Columbia
• Argentina
• Venezuela

Since I'm only running 100 watts, I'm limited to conditions which haven't been great. That being the case, I've been able to make at least one 5x9 contact with any given attempt.

Passed my general and amateur extra in one go - the guys at the Columbia University ARC are a nice group. Soon I'll be getting rid of that LAMO call sign for something shorter and hopefully a little more pronouncable. I need to get on some better frequencies too... The local repeaters are all just yapping about traffic.

I'm now officially an amateur radio operator! I passed the exam a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn't in the FCC database until today. I'm going to take the general/extra test a couple of weeks from now, so hopefully I'll be able to get a shorter call sign soon!