[Lf] Van test,

[Frank Gentges]

LFers,

I took the van out Sunday afternoon to Algonkian park to make a dry run.

Active antenna went up on a 24' pole.  It went up fine and just strapped 
it to the ladder on the back of the van with a couple of straps.

RX320 ran on car battery through a cigerette lighter cord.  A second 12 
volt UPS deep cycle battery was added in series and then regulated down 
to 19 volts to run the Thinkpad notebook computer.  Some noise coupled 
into the audio lines from the RX320 into the notebook.  The notebook 
battery charging circuit was the source.  I built an audio isolation 
adapter to isolate the grounds between the notebook and the RX320 and it 
fixed the problem.

I copied GBR near 16 kHz from Rugby UK.  I copied 3 LOWFers, DCH from 
Berlin MD, TH from Colts Neck, NJ and A3O from PA.  Also copied by ear 
the Wa2XTF beacon from Front Royal.

The engine motor added some noise so I will probably need to leave it off 
for the night.  I want to play with grounding to see if I can fix that.

I also tried hooking my inverter to the UPS battery with short leads and 
a new RF filter.  Last year this inverter was a disaster with screaming 
harmonics all over the place.  This time it was quite and I could run the 
RX320 and the Thinkpad.  It took 4.25 amps of battery current to run in 
this mode instead of 1.5 amps on pure battery.

Frank K0BRA