Dominoes was called off on Tuesday due to choppy conditions. Always another day and that day is today. That meant Helen and I had a quiet evening on Tuesday.
Yesterday was a shopping day. It was a bit cloudy so progress on the battery front was small but there none-the-less. Yesterday evening we headed off to the Turtle Beach bar for the weekly cruisers get together at happy hour. We stayed quite a while with nibbles and extra drinks laid on by the house. More people turned up this week and some brought food too. As we’re around next week we must do this too. Latter half of evening was all karaoke. Very enjoyable. Early on Jim from Bees Knees gave me some spare copper foil to help improve my SSB setup. That put me on the path for what was accomplished today.
Today we scored some results. I went back to troubleshooting the interference from the SSB. I had been told that a good (but non-durable) ground plane could be made by using tin foil and tossing it overboard into the sea. To test the hypothesis the interference was caused by a lousy ground I made a tin foil ground plane. It made no difference. That left me with only one other suggestion to follow up on. That was that somewhere on the boat there was a bad negative connection. That is a daunting task to track down.
Nevertheless I thought I’d double check connections on the transceiver – the box that does all the radio work. It all looked ok but a subsequent test showed the interference to have gone. Really gone. I was suddenly sending and receiving emails at high speed on bands previously causing all sorts of flashing lights (a little exaggeration). Not a blip wrong. So what had changed? Only that the transeiver had been in contact with the metal foil covering the A/C duct. This may just fit the ‘bad negative’ connection described as being probable cause. Now with everything put back where it was except for the transceiver all is good.
Also – today was a blue sky day. That meant good progress on raising acidity of house bank.
Tonight it’s dominoes which also means snacks and beer. Life is good.
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