K9JY Moves to Vermont

Well, my wife, greyhound, and I moved to Vermont from Wisconsin in June. It’s a big change, though a well-thought out one. Essentially, we made a decision that we would retire in 4-years and it was time to figure out how we would go about doing that. We started talking about it seriously in January of this year, I flew out in April to look at houses, we put in an offer and took up residence in early June.And getting the house in shape has taken a LOT of work; almost all our our free days and vacation days doing literally about 50-things on a list. We’re 7-miles from the Canadian border - and sometimes our Cellular company welcomes us to Canada when we’re in our house - and sitting on top of a 600-foot ridge / hill. The house was built in 2001 and we live on an almost 2.5 acre lot.

Why did we pick Vermont?

We get this question all the time and usually from people who have not been to the state before - although people who live here ask as well. There are some straightforward reasons:

• Downsizing costs a lot of money. There are buying / selling expenses for the houses, moving expenses, updated insurance plans, money to put into the house to make it the way you want it to look and feel (and in this house, that’s a lot of money….). And we wanted to pay for all of that while we were still working rather than taking it out of our retirement money.
• The cost of living is lower here, especially property taxes. And people here complain about property taxes, but for us, they are half of what we paid in Wisconsin (for a lot more services).
• The climate is more moderate here. Something like only 5% of Vermonters have air conditioning, but we’ve had our share of 90-degree F days here and we have air conditioning. But we have fewer high humidity, dew point, heat index days. And, I assume because we’re only 3-small states in, being close to the Atlantic Ocean seems to temper the below zero days in winter.
• We wanted to be on the East Coast, but we didn’t want to be subject to Nor’easters. The mountains between us and the ocean seem to protect Vermont from the worst of those storms.
• And there are a lot of places we didn’t want to live, so we eliminated them right off the top.

So far, we’re incredibly happy with that decision to move here.

What about ham radio?

There is a plan, though it won’t be completed until next year. This year, the plan is to install verticals for 80 and 40-meters. In fact, I ordered everything for those antennas yesterday and they will all be here this week - just in time for my vacation and putting them all up (after digging the holes…). Here are the antennas:40-meter full size verticalThis is the full size 40-meter vertical antenna from Comtek. It’s 34-feet high and has full bandwidth and weighs only 15-pounds. It covers the entire band with an SWR of 1.5 to 1 or less.I also bought 60 35-foot radials for this antenna using DX Engineering’s radial plate.80-meter full-size verticalThis is the DX Engineering 80-Meter self supporting heavy duty vertical antenna, 70.5 feet tall (for tuning) with an HD pivoting base kit.It’s a big antenna. I wanted self supporting because the tower that I get next spring will have guys and I don’t want my large front yard just be a bunch of guy wires. This will give the antenna a very small footprint from a visual perspective (not the radial perspective…).I bought the antenna with a manual winch so that the antenna can be raised and lowered by one person (i.e., me).It also has a radial plate and I bought enough wires and connectors for 60 65-foot radials as the ground plane to the antenna. It should play pretty well.

And the rest of the stuff

Coax runs, mounting pipes, ground rod and lightning arresters, etc. The radial wires were unsurprisingly expensive, given the cost of copper. The difference between the rolls of radial wire, connectors, etc. was expensive enough. But I decided to get the pre-measured radials with the connectors to the radial plate already soldered on so that I can much more quickly get the radial field down. The pre-measured, of course, are somewhat more expensive, but the time and effort to do 120-radials manually is not worth the savings.I also decided to do the full 60-radials right away. Outside of just getting it done, the number of radials impacts your SWR and takeoff angle for your signal, so I wanted to minimize both right away.More pictures will come. In the meantime, a lot of work is now beginning!