I came across this video when looking at (W2LJ) blog and it just goes to show some people are just willing to learn something new no matter what it is and with abit of effort what can be achieve.
Salute to him!
"Be bored or interested, but never idle" - Jacob Markham (@tortelikeatiger)
At 0940hrs I switched on my WSPR beacon, lets see what today brings as the DX cluster looks promising!
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| 28Mhz QSO's |
Update 2224hrs
Well abit better but still poor. Plus the station down by Madagascar is a France SWL who location is wrong I believe?
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| 28MHz WSPR spots |
As always I forget about the RSGB contests and today was 70MHz CW contest. I was able to catch the last 1 hour and abit. I made one QSO with GM4CXM 539 report and then I tried with two other G stations but was unlucky and didnt manage to complete the contact. I know some people have been on for few hours taking part but when the contest finishes everyone just disappears!
Bands like 70Mhz I feel need the activity and the contest should start the activity and people should hang around allowing others to work each other who don't do contest?
10M WSPR
Has there been some solar activity knocking out the HF bands or are the servers down? I've been on WSPR from around 9am and looking at the WSPR maps I've not been spotted once.....
As I have been repointing the brickwork on the front garden wall, I decided to leave my WSPR transmitters on.
I now have two decided WSPR transmitter, W5OLF 10M WSPR-AXE-CW and I recently picked up a 2nd hand WSPRlite that I mainly use on 20M.
Just before I checked the online WSPR map my web browser always boots up on the RSGB DX cluster page. After looking at what had been worked by other stations on 10M today I was quite disappointed when I saw my WSPR spots! I know there are quite a few stations montoring so conditions must be poor.
The WSPR-AXE-CW is 500mW and has its own decided EFHW
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| 28Mhz WSPR spots with 500mW |
20M had quite a few reports across Europe and two spots across the pond. The WPSRlite puts out 200mW and the antenna is EFHW (PAR 40/20/10M) slightly higher up at both ends.
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| 14Mhz WSPR spots with 200mW |
Left the the FT-817ND with the V-2000 on 70cms this evening and was quite suprised what I could receive. I did try and call a few stations but with 2.5watts I wasn't expecting much.
As I'm not a major VHF/UHF op and use it for local QSO's my coax is only RG-8mini so some loss but able to catch a few station PH2M being my best ODX at 519kms.
For some reason not all spots were uploaded to PSK reporter as I did see stations in and around London calling.
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| 70cms FT8 |
Yesterday, for a change we had some good weather even though they predicted rain! So I quickly got the 70MHz halo antenna from the loft and mounted it outside on the same mast I use for my Diamond V-2000.
The 70MHz halo is a commerically made antenna I bought from a company in the UK (Moonraker). Following there measurements I was able to get a match of 1.6:1 but it's not until I done a larger sweep on the AA-600 analzyer I noticed a better dip around 67MHz at 1.1 so at some point will need to make the halo elements shorter and fine tune it again.
Even so the beacon has been running for the last 24hrs and I have received two reports via email from stations approx 25miles away. Jeremy M0XVF can hear the beacon but at the moment struggling to decode the FT8 and Terry G1LPS can receive FT8 and CW loud and he's also using a halo. Today Terry emailed saying he found the beacon very useful to do some tweaks his end and now receiving the beacon at +10.
This is one of the reasons I set up the beacon as it will hopefully help people carry out the necessary checks/tweaks to there setup.
Today I was finally able to complete the construction of the 4m personal beacon. It has all been housed into a new enclosure with its own 12v power supply.
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| The fully boxed beacon |
The beacon uses a RFzero that feeds into a M0DTS design RD06HVF1 low level amplifier. Currently set to 1watt on 70.093MHz (70.092MHz USB-D, for FT8 transmissions).
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| Insides of the beacon |
This is all mounted in the loft and for some reason even though the GPS antenna is mounted in view of a loft window it doesn't always get a GPS locked. Though when on the bench in the shack on the ground floor it does?
So I'm on the look out for an external GPS antenna. When the RFzero doesn't get a GPS lock the beacon will only send CW ID (callsign & locator) & carrier. So if you do monitor it and don't receive the FT8 transmission that is the reason why.
https://www.qrz.com/db/M0NYW/B
When I bought the RFzero my plan was to use it for a beacon on 8M (40MHz) band but after doing some reading online I decided agaisnt it, plus sourcing a decent amplifier to boost the 13dBm that gave me a few watts was hard to find for this band and making one having to experiment with low pass filtering without the test gear wasn't a option either.
Then I thought, "what I'm I going to do with it?"
Reading the FULL licence document I realised that we can run a 70MHz personal beacon "subject to your interpretion of the jargon". Well that was going to be the new purpose of the RFzero.
Still the output is very low and I still needed a way of increasing it alittle. I searched the internet for some time looking at "70Mhz", "QRP amplifiers" as key words into my search list. I finally came across a circuit that M0DTS made for his 71MHz DATV transmitter that gives him 10watts output, which is too much for a personal beacon but looking closely at the design it consists of two stages.
The first stage is a RD06HVF1 where he is using it to give 1watt on DATV. This power level is what I'm after so I decided to order the device and set out building the board.
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| M0DTS 70MHz RD06 Amplifier |
As like most of my homebrew designs, the amplifier is built on copper clad board as I can place/move components as needed and with the Saturday post landing on my doormat, a package containing the RD06HVF1 and the amplifier was finally finished!
With it all connected up and running off my 12v bench power supply that is limited to 1amp just to do a quick test the amplifier is working fine and I'm able to vary the output from nothing to 3watts via the 2k2 pot. This is the power levels I was after and suprised no one has developed a PCB or kit as I sure something like this would sell!
I only placed a small heatsink while I was testing the amplifier and I found anything over 250mW that small heatsink it got warm quickly, so this will definitely need bolted to a larger heatsink even though the plan for me is anything from 500mW to 1watt output.
Please check out Rob (M0DTS) website for details on the amp plus loads of other interesting ham related projects.
Now all that is left is to rebox the Rfzero with the new amplifier!
The internal battery on the Yaesu FT-817/8 radios were always abit lacking. The original FNB-72 isn't available but there are third party versions inproduction for around £20 .
Even though these are good value I was wondering is it worth it when I came across a 2 x Talentcell YB1203000 battery packs with charger and 2.1mm DC leads for £20 which also included shipping from a UK seller.
These batteries are Lithium ion and gives between 9 -12.6V at 3amps and some version have a USB port for charging mobiles phones but this model just has a 2.1mm jack. When you quickly look at the specs of each.
I decided to try the Talenent cells as I got two batteries plus these can be used with other QRP radios or electronics. My FT-817ND has powerpole connectors so a quick lead made up and I hopefully have a two batteries that might perform abit better for portable use.
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| TalentCell |
The TalentCell has LED status light, On/OFF switch and 2.1mm connector
I was aware of RFzero for quite some time and missed out on the first batch, then due to the IC shortage production was put on hold for awhile until now. Bo (OZ2M) recently posted on the 8M IO group that he had units ready to go, so I jumped at the chance of purchasing one. He made transaction a breeze and it arrived quicker than I thought.
The RFzero™ is an Arduino multi-purpose GPS controlled Si5351A RF unit. It can be used as a beacon (IBP, SPB, CW, FST4, FST4W, FT4, FT8, JS8, JT9, ModeX (JT65, Q65, …), PI4, WSPR, …), stand alone WSPR/FST4W transmitter, signal generator, VFO, QO-100 dual LO, low cost GPSDO. If you've never heard of it before click here to find out more.
The board is pretty much ready to go except soldering 4 LED's and the RFzero manager software makes its easy to change the parameters if needed.
As I had experimented with 40MHz band (under ISM) before using my FT-817ND and attenuating my output to a massive 10mW ERP I was impressed when carrying out remote site tests under normal conditions I could detect WSPR transmissions quite a distance from my QTH. The best remote site test was over 12 miles away just using a homemade halo in the loft for transmit and a loop for a receive antenna.
I wanted to apply for the T&I licence but didn't want to tie up my FT-817 for a WSPR or FT8 beacon so my plan is to now use the RFzero as the heart of a FT8/CW beacon on the 8M band. I have order a GPS antenna and now starting to look for a suitable amplifier to take the 20mW to a reasonable level like 5-10watts. I have approached EX8MLE who designs very good amplifiers but from what I can see on his Youtube videos the amplifiers for 40MHz - 70MHz are 25watt - 50watt output.
So if anyone knows of a suitable 5-10watt version please let me know.
Today I put my 10M W5OLF WSPR beacon on and started to notice some distances with just the endfed wire when I checked the map earlier in the day.
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| 500mW |
So I decided to shut the WSPR transmitter down and switch on my IC-703 to see what I could work. Most of my activity was on CW and one SSB QSO. It was nice to have had 5 CW QSO's with stations from the States all with my 10watts.
One of the stations from the States was K3Y/3 (Straight Key Century Club) 17th annual Straight Key Month event operators during January.
As most of my operating is with CW or SSB on HF I'm finding one rig that hasn't seen much use at all recently. I don't know why but I feel the magic/appeal of the radio has disappeared.
When the pre release information came out about the ICOM IC-705 I knew it was a radio that fitted my requirements and was happy to sell other radio's I had to fund it. Once I got it this was my favorite rig not so long ago but as I got a excellent condition IC-703 Plus and 4 band Elecraft K1 second hand I just find myself not really using the IC-705.
The lack of a built in ATU and low activity on VHF/UHF is probably two reasons why it doesn't get used and once I plug the interface cable into the PC the noise floor increases slighty even though I purchased a decent USB cable and wrapped it around a ferrite core.
Is this a faze at the moment as I'm leaning towards selling it but wonder if I'll regret it!
For me the IC-703 does everything I need as I fitted the 500Hz CW filter, I even bought a another IC-703 for mobile use due to it having the ATU as the Comet HF mobile antenna is narrow on some bands. My K1 mainly gets used on the 40M/20M QRP frequencies and the Yaesu FT-817ND get used on 40MHz, VHF/UHF or HF WSPR.
In the UK, I have heard automated messages from two radio stations stating that "the radio station your tuned to is no longer available on AM frequency".
Absolute radio 1215KHz and Greatest Hits Radio 1170Khz (Teesside) are closing down there AM transmitter service. Both stations are owned by Bauer Media Audio UK and they do seem to own quite a few radio stations!
Absolute Radio 1215KHz is quite a well known frequency and had good coverage across the UK and also some parts of Europe aswell. I have listened to this station a fair bit and was a good signal source to test any receiver I bought and wanted a referance point.
I have read on some forums of the "delight" to hear of the closure of the 1215KHz transmitter network as it hindered DXers from DXing on the AM broadcast band. In a way I agree with the Dxers but also think it's a shame that these services are disappearing from the airwaves as the alternative service of DAB doesn't serve the purpose for motorist who listen to the radio. I tend to travel to remote places in the North East of England and after quite a few miles DAB just drops out and then displays "no signal" and that when I switch to AM. With both automated messages it also advised the listeners to use a app that can be downloaded onto your phone but I personally don't want to use my "included data" to stream music plus I don't use my phone while driving.
Bauer Media Audio UK state that only 2% listen to there AM where 35% of their cost goes to fund it. I know I use it as a back up when DAB is no good but what about the people who are in the remote areas of the UK and the long distance drivers who use services like this?
I wonder if the BBC will follow suit with Radio 4 as I know they have shut down their local BBC AM stations.
One thing I do hope of this closures, is that Ofcom opening the AM broadcast band for low power community stations like the Dutch system or a licence free system as the AM broadcast band during the day is starting to become very scarce with UK output and low power stations could provide a vital service for remote areas.
