AmateurRadio.com

The objective of today’s walk was Fellbarrow, a minor Wainwright fell WOTA number LDW-199 in the North Western Fells. It had never been activated before and I thought it would be an easy walk, so off I went.

I set off along the lane that goes behind Whin Fell. By a field gate I was checking the map to see if this was where I turned off the lane to go up on to the fells, and someone walked by and asked if I was lost. I said I was just checking to see if this was the way to Fellbarrow and he said yes, you can go that way, so I did. After about 15 or 20 minutes of walking I found that I was at the far end of a large field surrounded by a dry stone wall with barbed wire on either side and no way I could see to go any further.

Eventually I did find a place where the wall had fallen down and it was possible to negotiate the barbed wire, only tearing my walking trousers a little bit. I carried on but found the directions I thought I needed to go blocked by walls and gates.

The trouble with these grassy minor fells is that they don’t look very distinctive so they aren’t obvious targets to aim for, and they are infrequently walked so there is no obvious path to follow. Basically, I was lost. APRSISCE on my mobile phone was no help as the mapping it uses contains no topographical detail at all. I tried Google Maps but it informed me that there was no network coverage so it couldn’t download any maps. I plodded on until I saw a path that descended into the valley and I decided to stop, have my lunch and go back.

After lunch I decided I would follow some tyre tracks up hill just to see where they went. After about 5 minutes I saw a stile in the fence and a path. I followed this and after a couple more stiles found myself on the top of Fellbarrow with its Ordnance Survey trig point.

I got out the Motorola GP300, made a couple of calls on 145.500 FM and was answered by Colin 2E0XSD. However despite a take-off that covered Whitehaven, the Isle of Man, Workington, Cockermouth and the Dumfries and Galloway area of Scotland I got no other responses. I checked the repeaters and heard Richard MI6BJG/P putting a call into the GB3GI repeater. He was walking into Belfast with a hand held radio and we had a chat for a few minutes until he started dropping out of the repeater. I also heard a repeater GB3BT on the channel marked for GB3EV, which I later found is at Berwick on the north-east coast.

I still couldn’t raise anyone on FM simplex, so I decided to come back. The return route was a bit easier and used the path I should have taken if I had walked for another 5 minutes beyond the point that I was misdirected. I think I need GPS software with OS maps on my HTC Touch.

A recent discussion on the WSPRnet website concerns whether one should log WSPR contacts. It was pointed out that normal WSPR “spots” are not contacts. However it appears that some operators consider that if two stations spot each others’ signals within a short interval of time then they treat it as a contact and QSL it.

In my opinion WSPR spots, even if they occur both ways within a short time, are not contacts because you have no way of knowing if someone else received your transmission (or what signal report you got) without using the internet. It would be nice if the WSPR protocol provided a way to discover who is hearing your signals without using the internet but it doesn’t. I have no issue with QSLing WSPR “spots” as SWL reports. But they are not contacts, and if anyone uses eQSL to send a QSL to me for a WSPR spot it will be rejected as “not in log.”

Today I replaced the home made 2m Moxon Rectangle with a Vine Antennas SuperMoxon. As you can see from the picture of it installed in my attic it is a Moxon Rectangle with two directors that are also folded into a rectangle.

My attic, like my house, is very small. As is usual with modern British houses, the roof trusses are made of thin wood with cross-bracing for strength, so the attic area isn’t open to allow the free rotation of antennas. I have crammed rather a lot of antennas into this space to try to cover the maximum number of bands, so the VHF antennas have been forced into odd corners. Using a conventional small beam is not possible as there is insufficient space to allow rotation.

Vine Antennas claim that no other antenna gives so much gain in such a small turning circle, so it seemed like an ideal design for this situation. They claim that the directors add an extra 3dB of gain to the Moxon Rectangle design – about 9dBi which is more than a three element Yagi.

The antenna was quite expensive to buy. It is quite rugged and heavy but looks a bit home made. While the driven element and reflector made use of Jubilee clamps to tighten the main elements on to the smaller tubing used to form the corners, the directors used self tapping screws which had worked loose in transit (and probably would work loose in use due to wind vibration) and which stripped the inner hole when I tried to tighten them. You are left to your own devices to find a way to weather proof the feeder connection. Since my antenna is going to live a cosseted life away from the wind and rain I was not bothered by these issues.

The antenna presents a 50 ohm load but needs a balun to prevent feeder radiation. Vine Antennas offers a choke balun (apparently several turns of coaxial cable held in a loop using cable ties) for an extra £15. I decided to do without this, but I placed a clamp-on RFI ferrite over the cable close to the feed point which will hopefully achieve the same result.

The SWR is almost 1.0:1 at 144.0 MHz, as the plot from my AA-200 antenna analyzer shows, but it rises steeply to 1.4:1 at 144.4MHz and 2:1 at 144.8MHz. Clearly I had better not use this antenna to work satellites.

It’s a bit early to say how performance compares with my old Moxon Rectangle. The beam width does seem sharper and the front to back ratio seems quite noticeable. I heard the GB3VHF beacon for the first time since it moved to its new location, but it is in and out of the noise on slow fading as it always used to be. I can clearly hear the Northern Ireland beacon GB3NGI, which curiously is the same strength on the SuperMoxon as it is on the ribbon cable Slim Jim (which is also due for replacement with a commercial antenna.)

This antenna is probably as good as I am going to get given the restricted space available. The SuperMoxon design is copyright Vine Antennas and commercial reproduction is prohibited, which should be borne in mind if you try to make your own version.

I just got round to checking the Sport Radio page of the May RadCom so as to transfer to my wall calendar the dates and details of any contests I might be interested in making some contacts in this month. I happened to notice that the exchange for the 144MHz Contest on 15/16 May is RS(T), serial number, grid locator and post code.

Post Code??? What’s the point of that? And what if you are operating portable from a hill somewhere and don’t have a post code? Daft idea if ever I saw one.

I’m not paranoid, but I think everyone is out to get me!

I ordered some connectors from eBay seller m0jpm and, because I have been thinking about getting a radio that has N type connectors on it, I decided to order a couple of BNC to N-type adapters so I could use the much easier to obtain BNC plugs on my antenna cables. The listing I ordered from is shown below.

The package arrived this morning and when I opened it, to my dismay I found that the adapters were the reverse of what I wanted. As you can see, they are for attaching N-type plugs to BNC sockets.

It has sometimes happened that I ordered the wrong thing by mistake, so I was relieved when I checked the eBay listing and saw that this time it was the seller’s mistake not mine. But my relief turned to anger when I emailed the seller to inform him of the error and received the reply: Dear g4ilo, Hi we have send you what you have ordered, as this is the only n-type to bnc we have listed. but if you not happy send it back for a refund.

Is it really necessary to insult my intelligence by telling me “we have send (sic) you what you have ordered”? I will send the adapters back for a refund (and no doubt be out of pocket for the postage) because they are no use to me. But I shan’t be buying anything from m0jpm again.

In a comment to my previous post Ricardo CT2GQV said that I should give up buying on the Internet. I wish I could, but if I did I would have to give up the hobby because it is not possible to buy radio stuff round here.

A few weeks ago I set up an experimental low power EchoLink node for use as a personal EchoLink “hot spot” using my FT-817 and a dummy load. I planned to make a a dedicated transceiver / computer interface for this. I thought I found the ideal basis for the project in this UHF Micro Transceiver Module from Elcom Research, a Greek company that makes packet radio and APRS products. The transceiver runs on 5V and can be powered by a computer USB port.

Perhaps I should have been warned off by the fact that an enquiry made through the web form on the Elcom site went unanswered, but I went ahead and ordered the module on 9th April, paying online using PayPal. After a couple of weeks nothing had been received, so I sent an email enquiry and received a reply that it had been sent by air mail and should be with me by the end of the week or the beginning of the next one. This was during the flying hiatus caused by the Icelandic volcano, so I gave it a bit longer. However it is now a week after the week that the module should have been received at the beginning of, and a further email received no answer at all. It looks unlikely that I will receive the module at all, so I guess my only option is to initiate the PayPal disputes procedure.

Not much happening today. I have been WSPRing on 10m with 5W but heard nothing and have been spotted just once – by OY1OF on the Faroe Islands.

Yesterday evening I was receiving EA4SG in Spain but he was running 20W. I upped my power to a similar level, and was spotted by G0HNW and M1AVV in the early evening. I left the system running all evening but after it was dark I noticed my neighbour’s security lights were coming on at the start of my WSPR transmissions. Not good when you are trying to maintain a “stealth” station!

Before I started with WSPR today I got out the old DOS laptop and the Motorola programming software to make a few changes to my GP300 configuration. I reduced the squelch threshold slightly, reduced the power from 6W to 5W which should help the battery endurance more than it will affect reception of my signals, and I programmed the radio for 16 channels.

Now there are 16 channels it’s difficult to remember what they all are so I made a paper scale to go under the tuning knob which shows the 2m channel numbers or repeater calls. I had to use the magnifying headset to do the very small lettering and I can only read the scale with my reading glasses on – which I don’t when I’m out and about. But I couldn’t read the channel numbers on the original dial scale either so I’m not actually any worse off. I used to have great eyesight – this is what happens after spending most of your life in front of a computer!