A Great Day For Trike Technology...
...and, thus, a great day for us all.
Ladies and gentlemen: I present to you the Model WT-166, from the aptly-named Cases Galore. At 11.5” by 7.5” by 4.4”, it is exactly the right size to snugly hold two Hawker Cyclon six-volt batteries placed end to end, their accompanying charge controller, plus the DC-DC converter, the 3-watt cellular amplifier, and the antenna/power junction box for the CB radio. The PVC sides of the case are easy to work with, so I can drill holes and place all my switches. Finally, the whole thing is just narrow enough to ride securely on the rear rack of the trike, held in place with two bungies.
Only took me three tries to get it right.
In other trike tech news, the Cobra CB had its first test today. This involved kludging together something resembling the final installation so that I could try out the antenna setup. (Those of you not technically-inclined should maybe just skip this part, and head on down to the paragraph with maple syrup in it.) The basic problem with running a CB or any other transmitting radio on a trike is the lack of a ground plane. When you put a CB antenna on a car or a truck, there's usually lots of ferrous metal that the vertical antenna can use as its near-field reflection point. But my trike doesn't have enough conductive surfaces, which means that the standing wave ratio (the ratio of the maximum radio-frequency (RF) voltage to the minimum RF voltage along the transmission line) would be unacceptably high. An SWR that's too much above 1:1.5 or so means that you won't transmit much power, and you can even damage the radio.
But the clever folks at Firestik have a solution: the Firestik II "no ground plane" antenna. Instead of using a vehicle's body panel as a ground plane, the antenna uses eighteen feet of coaxial cable, which the manufacturer insists must not be cut. Not even half an inch.
And I believe them: my maximum SWR on channel 20 was about 1:1.5, which is perfectly respectable, and on channel one it was an almost perfect 1:1. I got the CB primarily for the NOAA weather channels, which I will use to avoid tornadoes and meteorite showers. But it'll be nice to be able to chat with people for the few minutes that they'll be in range, and maybe call for help if I fall into a canyon.
After verifying all this with the SWR meter and doing a happy geeky dance, it was off to get some food for our bare pantry. The number of "This is the last time I'll do x" moments has been steadily increasing, but with less than three weeks before we close on the house, it's become a regular nostalgia-fest, even affecting mundane errands. No point in buying the usual Canadian-style plastic jug of gen-yu-wine maple syrup, is there? The smaller glass bottle will do. Are there too many onions in the double-pack bag of reds and yellows? Probably, but it's only $3.50. I accidentally bought three more cans of tuna than I meant to, but still fewer than the normal month's supply.
Yessir, change is a-commin', and other platitudes.
