Mounting the mini paddle got me to thinking – it had to be light weight but not too light weight that the paddle would slip about while in use. The mount also had to be at a comfortable height to work just right with my large hands. I also wanted it to be uniquely Canadian.
Usually with projects like this I need a few weeks to let the solution come to fruition. I came up with a unique idea – use a hockey puck; it’s cheap, has some weight to it and it’s Canadian, eh? It fits into my ‘go’ kit quite nicely and it’s durable. A visit to Lee Valley Tools here in Ottawa provided the pucks and some high friction adhesive discs for a very reasonable price – a dollar for the pucks and just a few dollars for a bag full of discs. The pucks aren’t quite kosher Canadian, being manufactured in Slovakia now, but they are ‘regulation’ size. As you can see the adhesive discs fit perfectly on the puck and prevents slippage on just about any surface.
And finally a last picture of the FT-817 propped up with the $2 iPad adjustable stand from my previous article of a few days ago. Also note the front antenna connector is terminated with a 50ohm resistor left over from my network installation days. This is to protect the finals in the event that I forget to switch the antenna from front to the rear antenna port.
All photos for this article were taken with the Canon G10 in RAW format and post-processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for colour adjustments and cropping. Irfanview was then used for reducing the photo size and sharpening for efficient use on this blog. This will be the topic for a future article.
