Radio, railways, stuff...

...well actually aluminium. I finally cut down an old 'fm' radio dipole to 2m and quietly ran yet another run of WF103 into the loft. So the Trio TR-9130 I got a few weeks ago finally has an aerial. SWR is not bad at 1.2 or so on the VNA. It's mounted horizontally as I got the transceiver in the hope of one day finding some 2m SSB... well it's been 3 hours, nothing yet! Impatient! Anyway it worked fine for the local RSGB News this morning, and to hear someone asking if 145.5 was in use but with no callsign... This also means I finally have a use for the KW520 SWR/power meter. However, it would not register any power on the 20W setting on the 140-525MHz range but did on the 1.8-200MHz range (both of course cover 2m). I took the lid off, discovered it would be rather difficult to get at the switches to check them so put it back together. Of course it now works fine. Perhaps the initial swearing at it actually worked. The Trio causes some QRM on the speakers of one of our PCs - actually in the room below the dipole. But as I cured our mains-bourne QRM in general I feel I'm still winning.

It's amazing what a single wall-wart can do. I have some X10 controllers around the place controlling the outside lights and the dimmers in our family room. For ages now, one outside light refused to co-operate. I changed my scripts to fire several on or off commands to this light which worked for a time but then nothing. All the other lights seemed ok. Then the family room lights would either come on or go off at random, but only occasionally. I went round the house with the ICR2 on MW and open squelch and there was a hash coming from one indoor camera but not the other. It also came out of many of the 13A sockets around the house. By now I was convinced I'd have multiple noise sources, potentially all of our wall-warts. Anyway, it got to the stage that the X10 controller running from the house server could no longer reliably control any lights so I got another controller and ran that from the radio PC upstairs. That, at least got most lights back to normal operation, all except the one that had seemingly given up completely. I finally made time to investigate more properly and began by unplugging the noisy cameral. Silence! All hash gone. Ok. Took the wall-wart out to the workshop and plugged it in. Instant hash, on or off load. I replaced it with another and although that camera still makes a hash on the ICR2 when close by there is nothing anywhere else in the house. And the X10 lights all work, controlled once more by the server, including that apparently uncooperative outside light. I dismantled the offending wall-wart. It has the relevant filtering components so I assume one or more of them have gone duff over time. Now, if I can just get rid of the ticking noises from the CAT5 cabling...

50MHz seems alive just now, and after one incomplete JT65 QSO I finally managed to complete a call with a station in the Slovak Republic at 1,600km or so and then with a station about 3km away! My first, and second ever 6m QSOs.