AmateurRadio.com

Two things have happened over the last week. The first was that after what must be 10 years I had a decent crash on my mountain bike. Nothing too bad, just a reminder that I’m not 16 any more and that duckboards have 2 parts. One part grippy, one part slippy. The grippy bit is for the tyres not hands, kness, elbows and shoulders. The slippy bits are not for tyres. Enough of that though.

This forced lay off has had me googling rather than building stuff (that occasionally works) and I found what looks like a nice idea. From the video it looks like a simple, portable qrp hf transceiver. There isn’t much detail on the functionality but a quick dig revealed gerbers etc so a build-it-yourself could be on the cards. Without further ado, take it away Mr Colton

There’s a bit more detail here a the hackaday.io project page and a block diagram below

pinched from Hackaday

Sunday saw the annual pilgrimage to Blackpool for the NARSA rally at the Norbreck hotel in Blackpool. The club has a stand there and its a good place to promote the club, meet up with on air and social media friends as well as selling your old crap valuable things.

There are always a good number of stands with the main suppliers going toe to toe with the the back room business. This year I met up with Dennis from Kanga who helped to remove some of the hard earned cash I made for the new Arduino based Sudden TX, RX and DDS. I’m a sucker for Arduino so it wasn’t too hard for my resolve to crumble.

I also plumped for a desk stand for my IC-7000 from M6TNW at a fraction of the cost of a commercial version (There was a tenner off at the rally as well no contest really) as well as the worlds most expensive separation cable for the IC-7000. I daren’t say how much it was as it brings me out in a cold sweat. Needless to say it keeps the XYL happy as things are ‘tidy’.

It was sad to see that as a forty something year old I was one of the youngest there. But I’m aware that the RSGB are on the case so hopefully we’ll see a reduction in the average age before too long. It’ll be another year before I go to another rally so I’m glad that I went and thanks to Dave and his team for putting on the event.

Well the node is up and seems to be running reasonably well. The software is reporting distortion on the input but I think that is more to do with the close rf during testing. There are now some isolating transformers and a resistor in series to knock back a bit of signal and it seems to be ok when I connect through the web interface. Perhaps some other measures might help. Its still running on vox but until I can work out how to do the ptt easily I’ll stick with that.

I’ll leave it on for a while and see what I get back from the locals. Here’s a reminder of the details

Callsign – MB7IAH-L

Node number – 243350

Freq – 144.9625 Mhz

CTCSS – 103.5Hz

Power – 1.6w (hold onto your rf hats!)

Antenna – 1/2 wave dipole

All powered by a Raspberry Pi, Svxlink and a Baofeng UV-5R.

Enjoy

I’ve used AutoCAD for a while (because I had a work licence) but since being promoted I didn’t need CAD software…boooo (I also had an inventor licence but that wasn’t used as much). Anyway, back to the point.

I made a couple of front and rear panels for the QRPLabs ultimate 3 WSPR transmitter and thought that someone else might like to make one. Well if you do the dxf files are below. You can modify them easily in Draftsight (A free 2D bit of CAD software) that accepts AutoCAD files. The file shows the parts embedded on a sheet that can be used for laser cutting and your local FabLab or similar.

Anyway enjoy

AutoCAD Files

I’ve had a little play about whilst avoiding the household viewing of ‘Strictly come dancing’ aka ‘celebrity showing off’ with the APRS maps you can embed through APRS.fi

I’ve added a little map to the site here

Just a bit of fun but I do like APRS. Great for the fells.

Trouble is it seems to default to Helsinki regardless of the lat / long you put in the script

There’s been a bit of positive progress on the node at g7kse headquarters.

Mucking about with Echolink software proved a time consuming affair. This and that connected but not playing with each other and some absolutely horrendous noises coming out of all sort places and some shocking audio means that there is a good chance that isolation is needed. So a couple of transformers have been ordered.

Once the software is sorted on windows and I have all the hardware playing nicely I’ll move onto the RPi. I have a lot less experience with linux and image that hours will be consumed (lost) compiling and fulfilling dependencies and other joyous things that you get just installing stuff on linux. The benefits way outweigh the drawbacks. A headless and simple set up is key to a lightweight setup.

Once the odds and sods have arrived I hope to get something up and running reasonably quickly. Daniel, M6ENL and I had a quick go with it last night and it worked well enough for us it was nowhere near robust enough to be let out in the wild.

Onwards and upwards…….

p.s. The GPS on the U3 died as well so there’s that to fix too. Bugger.

Today I received a very nice email from Ofcom. It was my NoV for my echolink node.

MB7IAH

Whilst I won’t be able to get it up and running this weekend because we have guests I hope to have everything up, running and ready for use early next week.

There is a restriction of 1.6w TX output using the 1/2w dipole (vertically polarised) but I’m keen to get the thing up and running. Eventually It’ll all be on the RPi but for now it might be quicker to install onto one of the old netbooks and to use that as a way of optimising audio and tx settings before going headless. There are a few restrictions on its use but they are perfectly sensible and being able to be unattended is a real bonus.

Exciting times. Here’s hoping it’ll get used by more than just me.