What we've been up to...

Day Valley is beautiful, due to its hills, valleys, canyons, and yes, more hills; when these hills turn green in the spring, we like to think that we live in paradise.  The hilly terrain is great for spectacular valley views and very-serious/devoted cyclists that roll through, but not so much for radio signal propagation - some of us have trouble hearing each other on our MURS radios... so what can we do? A bigger antenna, of course - just remember, when in doubt, go big. That's what I have on my roof, a biggish MURS-resonant copper J-Pole antenna, which allows me to hear mostly everyone in Day Valley clearly. Unfortunately, not everyone's a fan of a big metal object on the roof, so with Bruce's (Day Valley's resident radio guru) help, we devised a home-brewed, small, simple antenna that works quite well. It is an "inverted-V" antenna (so-named because it looks like an inverted-V) that is tuned to the narrow range of frequencies which FCC has assigned to MURS ...