Radio and rails...

The first new (to me) toy of 2026 is a Yaesu G5400B Az/El rotator and controller. This is another thing I have been looking for and this came at a reasonable price. Not yet tested as it needs cables which are made to measure... I've no idea even where to mount it! I can see it ending up on a short mast somewhere up the garden with a couple of Yagi antennas on for 2m and 70cm for satellite work. EME has always been a dream and this has potential and for me EME is more something I want to do but not do all the time. Plus it's hard! So, above is is the two parts of the rotator itself, azimuth on the left and elevation on the right. And the controller is shown below. The unit is 240V powered and once I get some cable I will test it.

Today saw the Christmas 2025 broadcast from SAQ. I set up three receivers to see if any could pick the signal up. These were as follows: YouLoop 1 (loft), Airspy HF+ Discovery, Mac SDR++ YouLoop 2 (loft), Heros VLF converter, SDRPLay RSP2, Linux SDRconnect PA0RDT miniwhip (loft) plus associated preamp, Behringer UMC204HD, Linux VLF-RX tools During the event the VLF-RX code refused to start because, I think anyway ALSA mixer had claimed all the interfaces - the error was that the interface was busy. I was running YouTube on that PC for the live stream. There was no copy, not even a trace of the signal via the RSP2, but the Airspy setup worked fine. Signal strength was well down on last time but still readable visually and audibly although the report I submitted was QSA 2 and QRK 3. The screenshot above shows the reception plus the difference between the LNA being off (lower half) and on. The YouTube video of the event can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSGQ0zR188Q

Bought myself a small treat for the coming year... makes a change from the tiny freebie calendars I get sent. https://tubemapper.com/

I have been pondering leaving a screen attached to the Winterhill box and ahve now acquired a screen from a retired PC. It is destined to be hung on the wall but I also wanted a keyboard and mouse for the box. I have a spare RF keyboard and mouse but they tend to always be in the way. So I found this on Amazon, cheap enough to try and discard if no good: It is tiny and works fine. It would never replace a 'proper' keyboard most of the time but for this purpose it is ideal. I am not sure how long it will last as it does seem a bit fragile, in particular the power switch on the top does not seem to be of any quality. But time will tell. I can see this being useful elsewhere around the place. It looks to have most of the keys I would ever need including the Windows key (if one must!) plus backslash and that reverse aprostrophe that is sometimes missing. It misses that Pound and Euro but never mind.

Tonight none of the outdoor automated lights came on. On further testing the internal lights also refused to work. Odd, everything was just fine yesterday. I use Zigbee devices around the house with four devices controlling various outdoor lighting, two controlling dimmable internal lights and several devices reporting on room and heating temperatures. Two outdoor lights are all-in-one Zigbee bulbs, the others are diminutive units in various electrical boxes. All use 2.4Ghz Zigbee and all the lighting controllers are also Zigbee repeaters and so form a mesh. The whole lot is controlled by a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee dongle, zigbee2mqtt, mosquitto and homebridge. This also integrates it into the apple stuff so everything can be controlled from the Apple Home app and/or Siri. Of coure the downside is there are few physical switches now so this was a problem I had to fix. I had no clue what was wrong. Rebooting made no difference. But a bit of searching suggested that USB3 devices can cause issues at 2.4Ghz. Remember from my previous post that I had attached a SSD to the server? Well, that alone made no difference but was a precursor to the issue. Today I had inadvertently…