Main page

In Memory of My Father Who Passed Away on 04/01/2007

Visit LMARS Website

Welcome to our Ham Radio & Avian Pages. I have been a licensed ham since 1979 and hold an Extra Class license and Jim was licensed in Nov. 2000 and holds a General Class license. I became interested in radio after enlisting and serving 4 years in the U.S Army Signal Corps as a equipment repair tech.

I spent most of my tour at Patch Barracks in Vaihingen Germany and worked in a
Top Secret Communications Center and was discharged with the rank of E-5.

I had a lot of experience because my father had his Radio & TV repair business until he retired in the 90's and learned a lot from him.

When I was 10 years old I built my first pre-amp using 2 transistors for my dad's Lafayette CB tube radio
and constructed it in a metal file card index box which you could buy for 39 cents.

In Hign School I had straight "A's" across the board in electronics class for 3 years.
History and English were another story.... I hated it !

VHF RADIOS
On the base station we use a Yaesu FT-1802M/F ( 2m ) feeding into a Mirage Amplifier which was modified by changing the output finals and now delivers 230 Watts into a 10 elelment Crushcraft Beam at 55 feet. No problem working repeaters and simplex well over 150 miles.

HF RADIO For HF there is the Kenwood TS-480SAT which in my opinion is a great radio for the price.
The Heathkit SB-200 was totally refurbished with all the mods. On the input tuning circuits I removed
all of the fixed capacitors and added variables. You can really tweek the input circuits for an
almost perfect 1:1 match on all the bands.

Heathkit used ballpark input capacitors which gave limited input tuning. By adding the variable 500v caps,
you now have a true pi-network for each band. The amp runs on 240VAC which gives a little extra
plate voltage on keydown as you are not dropping precious voltage across the 120v house wiring pulling 16+ amps.

After adding the input caps and getting the match down to almost 1:1, the amp only requires 65 - 70 watts
of drive for full output which is easier on the tubes. Hitting it with 100 watts only gives about 30 more watts output.

All the radios use Turner Plus 3 preamplified mics which had to be padded down by adding a resitive
voltage divider inside the mic base and receive excellent audio reports.

10m PROPAGATION BEACON
The propagation beacon transmits on 28.273 with a CW speed of 13 w.p.m.
Radio is a Kenwood 430S doing 50 watts into a Cushcraft 10m Ringo vertical at 50 ft.

I have the main cooling fan running full time and added 2 extra fans to the heatsink. This radio suffered
the famous low power fault which I repaired. There are pics on the beacon page.

ANTENNAS
On 2 meters there is the 10 element Cushcraft Beam at 55 ft.

For The 10m Band, a AR-10 Ringo & 3 element beam both at 40 feet are used.
On the remaining HF bands ( 12 - 160m ) individual Double Bazooka Dipoles are used. These antennas are very broadbanded and having one cut for each band eliminates the need of a Antenna Tuner.

The Bazookas do suffer a very slight loss by gaining the extra bandwidth but eliminates the need for a tuner.
All of these feed into a 9 position ( home-made ) coaxial switch making it a snap when changing bands.
All of the dipoles have a 1.2:1 or better SWR at band center.

POWER SUPPLY

A MFJ-4035MV Non Switching 35 Amp Power supply is used.
This powers the HF Radio & 2m Amp. A 14 amp supply powers the 2m radio. For emergency power
I have 2 150 Amp Hour Deep Cycle Marine Batteries which are on a constant float charge.