8M - Equipment

When people have asked me what equipment I have and they hear "FT-817" it always follows with "why do you want one of those QRP radios for"

Well......... heres a few of the reasons, I used the FT-817 stand alone rig, IF for transverters, to source QRM and as receiver for testing homebrew equipment. To me the 817 has a lot of uses plus being my first every radio I bought when I got licensed. Yes I sold it and bought another then sold it again countless times but the most recent one is here to stay!   

It's new venture as the heart of the 40Mhz WSPR beacon. Set to the lowest power setting 500mW and a chain of attenuators with a lenght of RG-58 coax I'm able to get the power down to 10mW's. It will also cut the receive side down but until I can make some sort of relay system up to switch over between TX/RX its the way going to be.

The other pieces of hardware is a Tigertronics Signalink and Raspberry Pi with a GPS dongle to keep the time synchronized with WSJT-X.

 

I did have a dipole up previously for this band when I was monitoring at the beginning of this year and was only able to spot one station during an opening April, ZS6OB but nothing since. I think most of this is down to the orientation of the dipole in the loft being NNE to SSW. So in the end I decided to construct a halo type design based on Roger's (G3XBM) "homebase-10" basically a cobwebb with just one band. Rescaled the measurements for 40.6MHz