Radio and rails...

M0RVB

SAQ 100th anniversary broadcast

Good copy of SAQ here this morning during their 100th annoversary broadcast at 09:00 UTC. The reception was via a YouLoop in the loft angled towards SAQ, an Airspy HF+ connected to the Mac via USB, and SDRpp on the Mac. The first picture is a screenshot with SAQ featuring, the display shifted and zoomed such that the 'loud' stations further up the band are out of the way. SDRpp has AGC turned off, bandwidth set to 200Hz and no attenuation. The morse was perfecly readable by ear. This second screenshot has the loud stations on screen as well as a comparison. There was a secod broadcast in the afternoon, with equally good reception but slightly more difficult on the ear.

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M0RVB

Melbourne trams

Sadly I was unable to take any radio gear with me to Australia recently, so here is a picture of a tram! This particular tram runs around the CBD and is free to travel on. Melbourne is nice in that all trams within the CBD are free, with payment only necessary outsude that area. Payments are by Myki card which are used on touch pads in the trams. There is a cap on daily usage too, similar to the London Underground, where if you make two charged trips it then costs no more for that day no matter how many journeys you take. Trams otherwise are of course much more modern but keeping the older style tram for the circular route is a nice touch.

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M0RVB

Closing Windows...

Background My Windows PC has a 4th generation i7 chip and will not take Windows 11. I am not about to run an unpatched Windows of any version nor am I prepared to upgrade a perfectly usable PC just so I can use W11 so I will need to dump Windows before the end of life date in October 2025. I counted 40 programs that I use, two of which are games so do not really count. Of the 38, only a few were hardcore Windows packages where there was no existing equivalent or anything similar enough. Some of the main ones had paid-for licenses, for example VARA and SatPC32 - somehow those need to work on Linux! I decided I would keep the two PCs even after one no longer ran Windows. It may seem odd to have two identical Linux systems but I find it convenient to have one PC for each of my HF rigs - even though wsjt-x, for example has profiles and can support several rigs that may not be the case with each bit of software that I use, and there may be items specific to each rig. The PCs are almost identical, both…

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M0RVB

New additions

A couple of new arrivals, a (new) Yaesu FTM510D and an (old) Yaesu FRG9600. On the FTM510D it is unheard of for me to actually get something so new. New, yes, but usually at least a year after launch. But this is new new. I was actually about to order a FTM500D when, fortunately the advert for this poped up. And it is way ahead of my FTM100D that this is replacing. First off, I like the display. it's big but not too big, colourful and gives all the right information. Not shown here is the information you see from a memory chanel which includes the callsign (or whatever you program in), frequence, mode and tone. It seems to find the GPS a lot faster than the FTM100D or my FT5D. There are, of course a lot of variables, for example cold start times, or the fact that somehow the shack finds GPS hard despite the perfect sky view from SE to SW. (Mobile phones never seem to have an issue). But the FTM100D would sometimes not find a GPS signal in hours. The FT2D was even worse. I like the controls too, with volume top left and press for…

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