M0RVB ⁽³⁰⁴⁾

I am surprised that I actually managed to do something useful today. For a while now I have been meaning to put a Cross Country Wireless HF/VHF/UHF antenna splitter to use and today was the day. It is now sat upside down on the top shelf above the radios, fed from the discone in the loft and feeding two little LoRa modules, one for TinyGS and one receiving radiosondes. The TinyGS receiver had been running for some time sat in the loft and was previously the only thing connected to the discone. The radiosonde receiver had a 70cm ground plane in the shack and never received anything. Since reorganising the feed it has burst into life, rather surprisingly finding a balloon quite close to this QTH which was apparently launched from somewhere to the west of the Lake District but the data does not show the launch site. Looking at the altitude figure in the data I suspect it is already sat on the ground. Pity I cannot go out right now to see if I can find it. Now, the cabling is RG58 and so not particularly good at UHF. The next step is to put a pre-amp next…

Some of you may remember that I used to collect valves. I started collecting when I was around 6 years old, although back then it was more to impress friends than collect. An old directly heated valve plus a Lego battery box lit my desk up at primary school. I did not start collecting in earnest until the 1990’s and launched my first online valve museum in 1999. Since then the collection grew in several directions at once, including German WW2 types, Russian Cold War types and British military and civilian types. There were specials from all over the world as well including a few Japanese WW2 ones. Valves ranged from tiny little things to a RD150YB that had to live in the garage, and a 6-anode mercury arc rectifier that was equally not allowed in the house, and for good reason too. The main collection grew to over 3,000 types, many of which had duplicates, so probably 4,000 in total. And then there were boxes of valves that did not warrant adding to the collection. And so the collection continued to expand. While on holiday in the US friend in the US was discussing collecting trends with me and…

Time to replace several lengths of coax and run new... 100m ought to do it!

I finally got some wire in the air. Well, not very much and not very high, but at least it is outside. One end is attached to an eye bolt outside the shack window positioned so I can reach it with the window open wide. From there the wire runs down to the workshop. I am not exactly sure of the length, Google Maps suggests just short of 30 feet. So pretty short! But it works, and the FT450D internal tuner can cope with it from 30m to 6m, except for 12m. Anything lower than 30m has SWR approaching 3 but otherwise it seems to be ok. Pity the sun is being naughty right now but it gets a good spread across much of Europe on 20m. The wire feeds a 9:1 (I think!) unun and a 1:1 choke, then RG58 (*) to the patch panel. The cable needs to be routed yet as it is currently just running through the open window. Signals received are definitely stronger than with the loft wire and Z11 tuner but it is hard to say exactly how much because of the time taken to swap leads, disable or enable the internal tuner, and…

New (to me) arrival in the shack... something I've been toying with getting for some time now. This is a TS2000X and has the 1296MHz option installed. It will take me a little while to get acquainted with it but it brings more capability on 2m and 70cm and adds 1296. I've been using an FT817 on VHF for FT8 etc. up until now and generally running it at 2.5W - fun, but I wanted a bit more juice up there. The Signalink from the '817 is ready to go, just waiting for a CAT cable and some coax plugs as I've used all the ones I need. That will at least give me time to read about the rig before playing...