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 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.

We’ll be at Quartzsite, Arizona for the next week. We are going to make a presentation on Monday. If you are at Quartzsite next week and miss the presentation, look me up and we can show you how it works. Production will resume when we return.

Pacificon was fun, and we had a stuffed room for the presentation. We had a lot of good comments from the presentation, and a lot of visitors at the Buddipole booth where Chris Drummond graciously gave me some space.

The order backlog is growing, and this weekend we’re going to work on preparing a bunch of orders for shipment.

We are working on another batch of SDR-21 barrel material, but in the meantime we picked up some Schedule 40 barrel material and put it on the website. This thicker pipe works fine, especially with well-worn used tennis balls, or Walmart Fun Balls which tend to be a bit smaller. If you want to change barrels later just friction-fit the barrel or use a little tape, or a couple of small screws to hold it on.

We are working on a strut to provide support for the trigger. It is not ready yet but looks very promising. It is best to avoid glueing the trigger to retain flexibility for service, and this strut may be the best long term solution to that issue.

We will be doing a Pneumatic Antenna Presenation at Pacificon this Saturday at 1:15. We will also be sharing a booth with Buddipole Antennas, so that’s where I will be most of the time.

Pacificon Website

Hope to see you there!