AKBiocca Engineering

Eric and I are preparing to do an invited presentation on Antenna Launching at the March 25th meeting of the North Hills Radio Club near Sacramento. If you are in the area we hope you can come by. This will be a bit different than the last presentation in Sacramento when the projector was not available. At least we hope it will be different, and we can show the slides and video that we have. We will also bring some launchers to look at. No selling is planned for this event.

We had a busy weekend at Monterey Radiofest visiting with lots of folks and answering Launcher questions. In between I worked on a new Web Catalog which is now online (not bad for four days part-time effort). I also see that the website was very busy with lots of hits and orders over the weekend, probably relating to the March QST photo and mention.

If you have any questions or suggestions on the new Catalog website, see the Contact Us web page on the right and drop us a line.

New Online Catalog

Some folks are questioning the long lead times. I am working hard on that, but I don’t want folks to be surprised if it is not instantly better. Lots of parts are on order and already in stock, but a lot of machining remains to be done, stuffing boxes, packing and so forth. The assembled launchers take a lot more time, so we will keep on it till we get caught up. I see Elecraft is four months out on the new K3, so it may already be too late to order K3’s for Field Day…

Thanks & 73!

I see the new March QST features a photo of one of our Launchers in the hands of Ed, WD4DTC. Great job, Ed!

We are preparing to depart tomorrow for Radiofest in Monterey. This weekend we will operate a booth at the ‘Fest. Come by and say hi if you are in the area!

We are turning out launchers, but are a bit behind. There was a big surge in January after the ordering was turned back on, and we are still chewing through that. Order turnaround is almost up to 6 to 7 weeks, so we have out of stock’ed the built launchers until we can reduce the lead time. I have more parts coming in, but the time to machine them and pack them is harder to find. We will be hitting it hard again after this weekend.

We have also started a new catalog replacement program that will solve the issues some are having with the present catalog. Internet Explorer seems to work, but other browsers are not happy.

Thanks for your patience,

– Alan, WB6ZQZ

I have been testing a different trigger, and early results are excellent. The flow rate exceeds the standard trigger in dynamic bench testing. Launcher testing is still ahead, but these triggers have been used successfully on launchers before, so no difficulty is expected there. This posting is to help those who have been seeking triggers independently and provide some details.

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We had a great trip to Quartzfest. I made 3 presentations - one on launchers, one on baluns and one on the amazing new LED flashlights. Hope to see you there next year!

Various issues in January conspired to delay our progress on orders by several weeks. Things are moving again, but we have missed estimates of shipping in some cases. My apologies for that.

We are about out of the old cache of triggers, so we will be shifting to a different unit. Eric has used these in all his launchers and they work well. To my eye they are not quite as aesthetic, but functionality is fine. I will continue to evaluate other triggers and may find a better choice later on. The trigger is easy to upgrade when not glued, and we no longer recommend glue there.