Antenna moves

M0RVB September 30, 2024

Another Hamfest is over... 160 mile round trip for me (ok, plus a diversion where I followed the signs to a service station which were ok until the last junction and I ended up on another motorway!!) but not a bad trip. Except for the roadworks on the A1... Anyway, a 6/4/2/70cm collinear came home with me and it is now installed in the loft replacing the existing 2/70cm one. Same cable etc. I also finished off the boarding over one bedroom - surprisingly the one where the antenna is and no, that's not the reason for completing the boarding. Honest!

It has, as one may expect very little gain at 6m and 4m but replaces the 4m ground plane that I had and was rather in the way. Plus I never had any form of vertical for 6m.

I also managed to today the antennas up a bit. The 70cm big wheel is now no longer under the 2m big wheel and has its own place farther away. The 2m big wheel has moved so I can actually walk across the loft without needing to crawl under it.

I also recently acquired 2m and a 70cm QFH antennas from ft8.co.uk. These are really well made, being constructed from copper pipe and waterproofed. I will be experimenting with QFH antennas but wanted proper ones due to (a) being too lazy to build right now and (b) even when I do build one I need something to compare it to. Currently only the 70cm one in set up, in the loft again, and replacing a discone which was also in the way. This feeds a Cross Country Wireless HF-UHF antenna splitter and provides the antenna for three LoRa modules, one for TinyGS, one for radiosondes and one is a LoRa APRS iGate (RX only). The satellite reception report via the TinyGS console shows the antenna is working really well. My plan though is to replace this with a parasitic Lindenblad (seeing I am building one) and then actually use the two QFH antennas for satellite work. The only downside there is the need for more coax feeds into the shack from the hole in the ceiling, said hole already being full. But at some stage I need to enlarge it to run the LDF4-50A up for the QO100 dish once I move that from the garage wall. That will be a major tidying-up exercise!

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M0RVB April 27, 2024

Screen moves

I now have a Raspberry Pi set up on one of the four monitors in the shack. The original layout was two screens at the top on Linux, then bottom left on Windows and bottom right - central to where I sit on the Mac as the main screen. But that layout had two major issues... I use a program called Barrier to basically act as a KVM switch for the three systems with the Mac as server. That way the Mac mouse and keyboard controls any of the systems, although it can be awkward sometimes where Windows expects keys which Apple doesn't have. But Barrier does not understand dual monitors and so moving the mouse up from the Mac got to the Linux box fine, but moving it down from the left hand screen would not get to Windows as the program does not see it being physically there. I could live with that, except for issue two... The main issue was with the Linux screens being at the top and thus making me sit back or crank my neck upwards, not a good position. So... I got to realising that although I use both screens on the Linux…

M0RVB March 10, 2023

Radio moves

I've had the FT817 attached to the MacBook of late, just for VHU/UHF use, but the poor old Mac struggles if I dare to use anything other than wsjt-x. I want a Mac Mini... but anyway, that aside I decided to move the radio over to the Windows PC now. wsjt-x installed easily as usual and all works. The only issue I can see is how Windows messes up its USB ports if I switch the FT450D in. Currently I have that configured to switch between the Linux PC and the Windows PC so I can use VARA / VarAC and other such things on HF via the FT450D. I just use a USB switch obtained via Amazon which seems to work ok. The FT450D side of things comes in as COM6 and the FT817 now comes as COM4, no idea how Windows decides to allocate those. Time will tell...

M0RVB May 12, 2021

Antenna fiddling

I’ve been investigating putting some antennas outside and not getting very far. So I got a 2m ‘big wheel’ antenna off a trader on eBay. Plan A was to build my own but, being lazy I purchased a Wimo one. I’ve just installed this in the loft, directly above the shack so no issues of distancing (!) and it is a lot bigger than I had pictured. I now need to crawl under the thing to get to the fan dipole and other less important things such as the plumbing feeding the shower… hmmm. Anyway, it all went together without much struggle and the NanoVNA shows a decent low SWR across the 2m band. I’ve had to rearrange stuff so the 4m dipole is now where the 2m one was and had to be rotated 90 degrees so is now roughly north-south. Initial PSK Reporter results from the big wheel - note both the 2 and 4m antennas are fed from transverters from the transverter store in the Ukraine - showed 2m FT8 results of -14db into Cornwall and -10db into Cork plus a decent spread, and 4m picked up in south Wales so no worse than before. Of course,…