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Canadian provinces NOW count for the 2002-2003 program that is now in progress. Further, CYØ and CY9, Sable and St. Paul Islands, can be used to count for Nova Scotia. Concerning "location", while ARRL WAS allows 50 miles to still count as one location, we will borrow a VUCC rule of 300m/1000ft to count as one location. You may combine your states from multiple locations and submit your states as a "Rover" entry.
The 2002 Program is in progress. Please continue to take the program as a challenge to your day-to-day operating and encourage your friends to participate. Even if you are a single-band specialist--log your states each year and send them in. It's a great way to look at year-to-year variation in propagation, activity level, and station condition. Remember, all your contacts from July 1, 2002 through June 30, 2003 count for this award. It's not too tough to go back into your logs and see what you've worked.
Rules and forms are available on web-page www.csvhfs.org or by email from w9fz@csvhfs.org or by snail mail from Bruce Richardson W9FZ, 2330 Lexington Ave. S. #312, Mendota Hts, MN 55120 . This year's results and the all-time records should be on the web-page shortly. Certificates will be mailed shortly.
Thanks for participating and go to it again!
JØ/Series-Resonant Blocking Caps
I was recently reading the ARRL UHF/Microwave Experimenter's Manual. In Chapter 6 "Design Techniques" - authored by Bill Troetschel, K6UQH - he discusses JØ capacitors that are chosen to series-resonate the parasitic inductance of the capacitor leads and housing (at the frequency of interest). He states that in general, the inductance of 50-mil chip caps are .25nH and .50nH for 100-mil. He then presents equations to determine the inductive reactance and capacitance for the frequency of interest. The implication is that when selecting chip caps to act as DC blocks (but trying to achieve no other high-pass or low-pass filtering), the series-resonant chip cap will achieve DC blocking but attenuate your frequency of interest the least. Through the miracle of Excel, I had some fun playing with the equations by plugging in ham band frequencies from 160m to 24GHz. Then, courtesy of the prize table at a CSVHFS Conference, I referred to ATC chip cap graphs to plug in their stated frequency of series-resonance for several chip values. I chased the equations backwards and was able to confirm the general inherent inductance values offered in the ARRL book. In the graph below, I've left the cap values determined by Excel--you'd pick a common chip value that is "close enough". Ceramic, Silver Mica, or larger dimensioned chip caps have more inherent inductance and their series-resonant value would be generally smaller than the ATC caps for which the table below is intended.
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