owenduffy.net performance improvement

I have been concerned at slowly degrading performance on my web sites, coming to a head with migration to WordPress (this blog) about six months ago.

To improve performance, I have migrated all content to a new hosting service on Godaddy’s latest cPanel hosts.

It is a substantial amount of work, and I think everything is working properly. It is certainly much quicker and consistently quicker (at the moment) on the WordPress application.

Though I have taken care in specification of character sets, it appears that special symbols have been trashed in the migration. I have done some global search and replaces and think I have found and fixed all (or most) problems. Credit to the Search Regex add-in.

 

Last update: 20th June, 2014, 6:45 AM

Fan frustrations

For some years I have used Ceramica muffin fans for low noise and long life. They use ceramic bearing which are quieter than ball bearings, but longer life than sintered bronze bearings which dry out.

That said, I was annoyed to find the fan I have replaced in a one year old computer power supply fail after another three years. The original was a bronze bushed fan which dried up. Continue reading Fan frustrations

Last update: 13th June, 2014, 6:11 PM

Analysers – help or hindrance

A ham posted online:

I spent several happy hours this weekend building the DE of the 6M Quad described in the June 2014 QST, p 30. When I got it completed, I put the antenna analyzer on it, expecting to find a nice resonance in the 50-51Mhz region and an impedance of 120 ohms or thereabouts. To my surprise, the radiation resistance in the couple of dozen ohm range, and resonance, if that is what I can call it, depends on how am I holding the loop.

After a bit of QST bashing in the thread, he later reveals:

The trial with the analyzer was about 2′ of RG-8X with PL-259s on each end, to BNC jacks on both antenna and analyzer with adaptors.

Analysis

Much as the chap expressed his lack of confidence in modelling tools, NEC reveals what is happening. Continue reading Analysers – help or hindrance

Last update: 13th June, 2014, 8:29 AM

Equivalent circuit of small transmitting loop with auxiliary loop feed

A common method of feeding a small transmitting loop is to use a small auxiliary input loop. This is sometimes referred to as the “Faraday feed”, implying a shielded feed loop though many so-called shielded loops are not effective (Duffy 2007), but the loop does not need to be shielded nor does there need to be a metallic connection to the main loop.

This article looks at an equivalent circuit. Continue reading Equivalent circuit of small transmitting loop with auxiliary loop feed

Last update: 26th October, 2015, 11:03 AM