Ham Radio
General description of the Tinkermill Station.
The following description is written for folks that are not familiar with Ham radio and was compiled with the wonderful Tinkermill tour guides in mind. If you are Ham, you might find this boring and want to skip this.
There are many aspects to Ham radio - so many that if you pursue one aspect for 2 years and then change to the next, you can spend a lifetime doing it. One of the most coveted Ham radio activities is to "chase DX". This means you try to make direct contact with stations all over the world. To be able to do this effectively, you need tall towers, big antennas, good radios and lots of power which is why only a limited subset of the Ham community can do this. If you look at the cards on the wall, you can see many of the exotic places the Tinkermill station contacted. Tinkermill has the best station inside the Longmont City limits for working DX and is definitely within the top 10 stations in Boulder county in that regard.
The main antenna is a Mosley Pro-67 mounted at 65 feet on a Rohn-25G tower. This antenna covers 40m (3el), 30m (1el), 20m (3el), 17m (2el), 15m(3el), 12m (2el) and 10m (4el). The antenna is turned with a Yaesu G2800 rotor. We also have 2 dipole antennas for 80 amd 160m.
The shack is continually under construction and the next steps would be to add remote control for antenna switching and rotor control. We also need to get 208V installed to run an amplifier.
Existing equipment:
2. Kenwood TS-440S Radio.
3. Dell Computer with dual 1920 x 1080 displays.
4. Astron 35A 13.8V Power supply.
5. MFJ-1128 Power strip with Anderson Power pole connectors.
6. LP-100 Power Meter.
Planned equipment:
1. Alpha 9500 Amplifier.
2. IRLP Node on 2m or 220 Mhz.
3. 2M and 70cm antennas.
We also have a Yaesu FT-890, Ameritro ALS-600 and Dentron Antenna Tuner as backup equipment.
The shack is open to licensed Ham operators who has been certified to use the equipment. Certification is $20 for basic shack access to operate the analog radios and $130 to operate the Flex-6400 which can be accessed remotely. Contact Sebastian in the Ham Radio channel on Slack for certification. If you are interested in obtaining a Ham license, please contact the Larc Education Team: http://w0eno.org/Education
