AmateurRadio.com

One of the enduring aspects of amateur radio is the emphasis on ‘experimentation’ and ‘homebrew’. To many people this means designing innovative circuits for their own transceivers, amps or whatever floats their boat. My area of interest is in collecting either bent wire, off cuts of cable and odd shaped plastic parts scavenged from just about any skip or rubbish bin I can find. Some people like to call this antenna experimentation. My XYL likes to call it ‘That junk in the garage’. I like to call it my continued education. Below is a teaser!

The latest in my armoury of ‘stuff I’ve done’ will never help anyone chase DX or bust a pile up for a little activated square or something else. But it will give me another band to work with when I’m away from home, either on top of a summit, at the mother in laws or operating portable in the summer Es season (I say summer because the top of St Bees head isn’t very welcoming in the winter as I found out whilst operating GB4LBC).

My take on the 5/8 wave 6m vertical originally published by the UKSMG by Mike, G3JVL took a little over a weekend and was made relatively cheaply from scrounged resources. I enjoyed the job so much I’ve added a little project page here which I hope you enjoy. Feel free to try it out yourself and improve on the design path I took, let me know how you got on with the manufacturing of what should be a nice project (that can also be cheap if you’re scrounging skills are up to scratch)

One of the enduring aspects of amateur radio is the emphasis on ‘experimentation’ and ‘homebrew’. To many people this means designing innovative circuits for their own transceivers, amps or whatever floats their boat.

My area of interest is in collecting either bent wire, off cuts of cable and odd shaped plastic parts scavenged from just about any skip or rubbish bin I can find. Some people like to call this antenna experimentation. My XYL likes to call it ‘That junk in the garage’. I like to call it my continued education. Below is a teaser!

The latest in my armoury of ‘stuff I’ve done’ will never help anyone chase DX or bust a pile up for a little activated square or something else. But it will give me another band to work with when I’m away from home, either on top of a summit, at the mother in laws or operating portable in the summer Es season (I say summer because the top of St Bees head isn’t very welcoming in the winter as I found out whilst operating GB4LBC).

My take on the 5/8 wave 6m vertical originally published by the UKSMG by Mike, G3JVL took a little over a weekend and was made relatively cheaply from scrounged resources. I enjoyed the job so much I’ve added a little project page here which I hope you enjoy.

Feel free to try it out yourself and improve on the design path I took, let me know how you got on with the manufacturing of what should be a nice project (that can also be cheap if you’re scrounging skills are up to scratch)

On 14.275MHz I have been listening to a ‘news’ broadcast by K1MAN. This may not be news to many of you but it’s the first time I’ve heard what seems like a pre-recorder loop of ‘news’ going on and on and on. Surely this isn’t legal?

I quick Google later I found out that this is an on going issue with the FCC, ARRL and just about every governing body in the US. So not really legal but loop holes are loop holes. Time to close them.

Oh dear

Southgate ARC News ran a short piece on TAPR and appointing PCB manufacturers the other day. Reading onto this could be catastrophic but I can see that Hermes is getting closer. I’ve been following this for a little while know and bump into Kevin Wheatly, M0KHZ, the project leader every once in a while. I am really looking forward to this innovative piece of kit coming to the open market. Having seen a very early prototype a few years ago I would love to get one of my greasy paws on one of these. A high performance (HF) shack in a very small box! Hold onto your hats for Dayton then!

Just a quickie to say that I’ve started a new project page to show you how I got on making an accurate clock with the MSF 60Khz time signal, an Arduino and someone elses code. The detail is all here

GB4LBC has now shut down, we’ve amassed quite a few contacts over this weekend to add to our haul from last weekend as well. The loan of the old shop from St Bees lifeboat was very much appreciated by all of us that got involved. I managed to get a couple of 2m FM contacts from the top of the headland before the battery died on me and fired up the Monday night intercontinental special (loosely based on just about every other vertical but with one exception – It wasn’t resonant on the band it should have been). I’ll check it with the analyser shortly to see what I’ve managed to do with it but even when it was tuned by the autotuner and at an awful efficiency no doubt I managed a couple of DX contacts to add into the book.

Over the next few days I’ll be collating all the log sheets we have and totting up all the contacts. I’ve got quite a few to do. We seemed to be more popular than we bargained, so it’ll take a bit of effort to sort out the QSL cards and awards.

Norman, G7MRL, Noel, G4PEW, Liz M6EPW and myself will undoubtedly be back next year and hopefully colin, M0XSD can do better with his lurgy timing with our muddy antenna installation and modest transceivers to do battle with high winds and rain as well as frozen soil so thanks to everyone who answered our calls, forgave our ability to forget your callsign, call you by someone else’s name or listened without switching off to us repeating ourselves with the same facts and figures that we’d handed out in the previous over. You’ve all made our 2 weekends of SOS Radio week enjoyable and most of all memorable.

GB4LBC going QRT

Well, that has to be the longest day I’ve ever spent at the mic. Both Norman, G7MRL and myself have been at the coalface from about 8am. The morning sun was just starting to peep through the fells and made for a lovely sight. The bonus was that the ground that had been boggy and muddy last week was stiff with the hard morning frost and it made setting up the mast much easier.

Lovely morning for radio

The St Bees lifeboat station manager has been so helpful and not at all concerned by our muddy footprints that have given away our movements on his clean floor. We’ll need to clean it up properly tomorrow afternoon.

Conditions weren’t as good as last weekend. The band seemed to have a lot of static in the morning and QRM at lunchtime followed by bedlam in the afternoon with stations on top of each other on 40m. 20m was contest town and we only managed 1 contact before be gave it up as a bad idea. 17m, 12m and 10m gave a few contacts including Greece on 10m FM, which was nice.

Both Norman and myself had a tiring day and at 3pm headed back to 40m for a few more QSO’s. We’re back on the air tomorrow although I’m on home duties in the morning but Noel and Norman will be on in the morning. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to use my 6m 5/8 vertical.

Anyway, although it was a tiring day we couldn’t have filled 5 pages in the log without everyone coming back to our CQ call. Without those patient people who  helped us when the conditions were against us. The number of stations that wanted our little extra award certainly helped get the numbers up. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that GB1LBC will be in big demand tomorrow after Bill had to call it a day with feeder troubles today.