Hello TAPRN’ers…
First of all, we have a lot of listeners, some of whom join in the discussion while others prefer to not transmit. Remember – more are generally listening than transmitting. Enjoy the discussion and mind your personal security, but have a good and informative net.

The Voice Net for 29JAN12 went well. We had the earlier digital net with one check-in from the mid-west, then slid into the voice net after finding a clear frequency at 3834LSB. We had visiting stations from less than 50 miles from my location, extending out all the way down into the deep South and even Dean AC0– made it easily into the mix, relaying in a station from Oklahoma. We even had a bit of SNEAKY practice sending and receiving a message in phoenetic alphabet, by sending the list of all stations in the net and their turn-number in the roundtable discussion. Basically it went like this: “OK – eveyone get your paper and pencils ready, I have a message to follow…. NUMBER ONE IS ALPHA BRAVO FIVE DELTA…. NUMBER TWO IS WHISKY ZERO … …” & etc. and so it went through a list of several stations. Sneaky I know, but necesary and good practice in taking radio traffic by hand. ;^)
The topic of discussion grew naturally while we were discussing recent projects and Mary mentioned the building of Faraday cages to protect her electronic equipment from potentially destructive electro-magnetic fields caused by everything from near-by lightning strikes to nuclear EMP. It was a very good discussion. Dean suggested the use of ‘old style’ metal, galvanized garbage cans to store sensitive electronics, Mary, who actually provided the seed for the discussion talked about her making a Faraday cage instead of knitting socks and other classic home making this weekend – wow how the world has changed, especially post – 9/11… I think that we all had a chuckle at the irony of this, yet we all hope that these preps are never needed.
Our favorite non-electric farmer waaaaay up north found us by searching the dial and signed-in with an excellent and potentially critical question: ‘ So, assuming no internet, how are we supposed to find the ever changing net frequency?’. He has no internet on their non-electric farm and the ham station is ‘the only compromise’ and is run on home made electricity. This is an IMPORTANT question for all TAPRN’ers because we are dedicated to communication during loss of infrastructure and it’s patently obvious that the loss of our chatroom would make organizing the net difficult. This is a Sword of Damocles dangling over our heads. There was a good suggestion of having THREE suggested frequencies so that when/if someone is searching for us, it greatly narrows the search field. Three freqs +/- a few Khz to slide up/down for interference is much easier to search than the entire 80 meter voice portion. We are open to suggestions. Finding clear voice frequencies on any ham band during prime-time is always a difficulty. Narrow modes such as Morse or digital are EASY to arrange skeds, because a little wiggle room of even a few hundred Hz is more than enough to make a Morse contact, or a narrow band digital contact, as compared to the 3,000 Hz or so of clear spectrum required for voice, at a minimum.
>>> Please post suggestions here for how we can all find the net frequency without dependence upon commercial infrastructure.
As many of you know, my signal on voice from the home station in the past has been poor, often surpassed by my mobile radio with it’s 16 foot military whip. Clearly, there were antenna problems at home. This is no longer the case. All reports were stellar for my 100 Watt signal last night. The change???
I built an Inverted L antenna for 160 meters (and higher…) based upon Dick Cebek’s article in the link below.
http://www.users.on.net/~bcr/files/backyard%20wire%20antennaes.pdf
I had always enjoyed the inverted L. It’s been easy to erect. Simple to feed using the internal antenna coupler on old military radios and etc. but I had been put-off by the idea that was spread that you MUST have a zillion ground radials to make them into efficient radiators (i/e a great antenna). Well, Mr. Cebek is an antenna Guru par excellence, and he is known for his scientific view and measurement of antenna in a laboratory fashion, not merely using hear-say evidence like ‘it works real good’. Instead, when he analyzes an antenna, he’ll show you WHY it does or does not work, based on sound antenna theory. In short, he shows, empirically that the inverted L can be run with a few as four radials, with little degradation of performance, though more are helpful, it is not essential. Mine is presently running 10 short radials (25-80 foot) made of cheap, aluminum wire from the farm supply store & held to the ground using ‘lawn staples’ made from coat hanger wire until I get time to slit the lawn with a straight bladed shovel to put the radials below ground – out of lawn mover range…

The results have been spectacular.
OK – so that is the end of the Voice net report. We had some new stations signing in who either read about us on-line or found the discussion interesting (or horrifying :^) while tuning around the bands. Either way, it’s gratifying to have a good net going and it’s evident that many people are listening and interested, but not transmitting – yet, which is also a good thing.
That’s all for today. Please, let’s all think about how to FIND each other for the Voice Net in the event of loss of commercial infrastructure. That’s what we’re all about: independent communication. In voice, that it is especially rough to find a clear space due to the crowded/ever-changing bands.
73 de RadioRay …_ ._
W7ASA – Virginia