Been busy - work, antennas, motorcycle

It's been a little since I last made an entry here. I've been busy on a work project. A conglomeration of VB.Net, Lotus Script, VBA, SQL server, DBF and XML stuff. It's nearing test/production and I'll be happy to move on to the next project. I was working on my motorcycle this weekend getting ready summer and came up short some parts. I made the hour and a half round trip to the Harley dealer only to get home to find out he'd given me a male part that I needed as female. That'll have to wait now. Having to special order some vinyl tubing from another dealer too. I'm really anxious to get the bike going again so I can get to the shop and have a new rear tire put on. So, what to do since I couldn't get going on the bike? I built an antenna. A colinear design from the September 2003 QST. It's about 9' tall (I built it for a higher frequency) and it works gang busters! A friend will be putting it to use out at his farm so I'm looking forward to hearing how well it performs there. I may build another one for putting out on a remote weather station. Tonight I played a little QRP portable. I was outside with a random wire (sort of) antenna with a tuner and RG-62 coax. Worked VE6CQ in western Canada. What a blast! He had a bit of a hard time copying me at first, so I switched to the home rig. Copy there was 59/59. We did a quick swap of mics on the FT-817 to the regular mic with the One Big Punch installed and he said the signal was considerably stronger. However, with the set up I had, RF was definately getting back into the mic. Ah well, it was fun!