This weekend coincides with the Pt. Hueneme festival so we are expecting a good crowd to come through. We are manned at those times but could use some extra people and are working on that. In addition, setup of the antenna will be on Friday the 20th of August. This also gives us a chance to promote the USCG Auxiliary.

We will run on emergency power Friday night and will get commercial power from the lighthouse after it opens Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon.

I am planning on operating some the evening of the 20th after setup. Am still looking for operators that evening. In addition, I want to operate the evening of the 21st from 1500 until ???. That all depends on bands and weather conditions. I expect the other lighthouses suffer the same from climate conditions but it can be pretty brutal up here and we will be working in a canopy with tarp sides.

We will have three stations operating anticipating one on 40 meters, one on 17 meters and one on 20-15-10 meters. A 40 meter dipole, 17 meter Buddipole and a HyGain TH3JRS for 20, 15 and 10 meters at approximately 20 feet. Initial published frequencies plus or minus QRM are 7180, 14294, 18145, 21290 and 28495 kHz. A VHF station will be setup and hopefully be able to access not only Yankee Romeo, but other Auxiliary and amateur repeaters in the area.

K6AUX will offer an award to any station that works all three lighthouse being manned by District 11SR Coast Guard Auxiliary which includes K6AUX, K6A, and W6A during the special event period. Certificates require a 9 x 12 or larger SASE or for stations within the US a QSL with $1. The certificate is available for printing so K6A and W6A can offer the same or use whatever requirements they desire. This, of course requires sharing logs which I hope is no problem with all stations.

The station was a TS-450S and the antenna a cage antenna on the bow of the ship 90 feet up in the air.

Channel Islands Dolphin Audio

Live Channel Islands WebCam

There is currently a webcam positioned to look out the master bedroom window shooting the channel with my zodiac and Silverton boat.  You can see streaming video from the link on the homepage.

Watch for boats to go by…

Can never throw anything away. After cleanup, thinking maybe I can find my old 813 sockets and turn this into a 160 meter amp. Notice the holes! When I built this amp all I had was a large drill big and a ‘nibbler’ tool. So, the large holes took days to chop out.

Time to update the old pair of 4-400’s that was refered to as “Bertha”.   Build in 1978, Bertha was originally four 813’s, but when I picked up a pair of 4-400’s, was converted to that in grounded grid.  The chassis has seen several changes so it was full of holes.  Not to mention bad construction.   I was young.  I was in a hurry.  I wanted power!  However, Bertha is responsible for a lot of the 300 countries that I have worked.