Sunday, May 3, 2009

Moonscape - Off the air!

So, my dog is destroying my backyard, along with my antennas and cables. Last summer I did a lot of work of re-landscaping the backyard - spreading rock (thats the Arizona equiv. to grass) and installing new plants in the rock hard ground they call "soil" here. But now, all but one plant has been chewed up. He even chewed down a small orange tree, leaving nothing but a 3 inch stump in the ground. His digging is making the backyard a safety hazard - its like walking on the moon but without the low gravity. But the worst of it is that he somehow got through the small fence that was protecting an exposed piece of LMR-400 cable running to my stealth vertical. It rained the next day and now the shielding of the cable is corroded and needs to be replaced. I'm picky about efficiency and I just "know" that I can hear the signal loss on the recieve side - sunspots be damned!
Pictured below is the proud beast and some of his handiwork. Notice the almost-dead rose bush to the left. You can't see it, but the bush is actually hanging above a large hole where the root system used to be. It's like he cut the plant's legs off just below the knee...