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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Rodents!

There's a double edge sword to this Daylight Savings Time thing. Up until a few weeks ago, it was pretty light around the time I drop my son off at his school in the morning. With the resumption of DST, it has been dark again in the early mornings and now, it just starts getting light around 7:00 AM.

This morning, I arrived home from dropping Joey off at around 7:10 AM. I went into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water, when I happened to look out the kitchen window. "Why am I seeing ladder line?", I thought to myself.  I went into the rec room to look out into the back yard to see the end of my W3EDP laying on the lawn.  It appears that a ravenous squirrel chewed through the support rope. Looking at the remains of the rope, you can tell it didn't snap, and there was nothing that could have frayed it, at that spot. No, it was chewed.

FYI - this is not my back yard - this is a generic "Squirrel chewing rope" picture

How long it has been this way - I'm not sure. It was fine last weekend, that I know. So, this unwanted gnawing has to have occurred sometime between Sunday evening and Thursday morning.

The good news is, that it will still be light tonight when I get home from work, and (double bonus) I have a brand new 100' roll of Dacron antenna rope in the shack.  I hope that I will have enough time this evening to get the W3EDP re-strung in either a temporary or perhaps even permanent fashion before the beginning of the 80 Meter QRP Fox hunt tonight.

Since I was going to take down the 88' EDZ anyway, if I have enough daylight, I will try to lower the end that goes to my support mast in the far corner of the yard and replace it with the new rope that will be holding the end of the W3EDP.  That will get it up roughly about 10 feet higher than it had been.  I hope to get the apex even higher, but that might have to wait for a week or two as what I am going to try to accomplish tonight will be tricky enough. As the weather has been warmer the last few days, the snow in the backyard has melted and re-frozen into a solid sheet of ice. My chore tonight will be like trying to raise an antenna while walking on a skating rink. Fun.



72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

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