Greetings,

Well, last weekend I made a trip to Lake Havasu and spent some time with Elley Ringo and he fiancé, Dan. Between eating out and talking by the pool until midnight, spending a day on the lake on their massive pontoon boat, and getting three shoots with her in, I’d have to say it all added up to a great time. The 5 hour drive in each direction could have been shorter by 4 hours but it is what it is.

And their couch was super comfy. I slept very well.

We can say we shot in California because we landed the boat on the west shore in some bushes and grabbed some bikini shots. Later we found a nice quiet cove and got some shots of her in the boat. That evening we did some night shots using their pool and the lighting turned out interesting. Then, Monday morning, before I headed home, we shot in her bathtub. The sun and blinds gave us some fairly outstanding options. I’ve included in the gallery some of what we did that I’ve had time to edit.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, (Bonita) I’m organizing my projects, and by next month I hope to be deep into building some kits and talking to people on the radio more. Of course there is always time to edit since the radio is fairly dead during the middle of the day anyhow. It comes to life in the evenings. Understanding radio propagation is part of being an operator.

One of the projects we finally got to was to put screen doors on three of the doors here. I still need to get some wood bracing done for the base of them, but now we have some nice and much needed flow through of cool fresh air, especially in the radio/editing room.

My large antenna array is going to take longer to put up than I originally expected. My 55 foot tower can easily handle the job, even with all the wind we can get. But it is a crank up tower, meaning there are three sections and it is all held up by a single aircraft quality steel cable. It is suggested that it be replaced every 5 years. And, or course, my tower is 20 years old and has the original cable. It has only been holding up simple wire antennas so nothing much breaks if the tower lowers quickly. With a beam antenna like this one, a fall like that would turn the antenna into land fill. Sooo, now I’m waiting for a $500 cable to show up and I have to order some new coax cables for it also. Have you ever seen the movie, “The Money Pit”? Yeah, it is one of those projects. But it will be worth it!

Stay cool and happy!

Dave

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