Radio and rails...

I am slowly getting kit together for 2.4GHz and 10GHz. So far I have SSPAs for both bands, one which will hopefully enable me to get onto the wideband DATV part of QO100, and the other as part of a 10GHz setup. I got a Goobay LNB from eBay a while ago. My plan for this was to build it into a POTY for QO100 but I acquired a ready-made POTY that had an input for a 25MHz clock signal and that all works fine. So I wondered if this LNB could be persuaded to receive 10.368GHz. Fortunately I had not got as far as pulling it apart. The LNB is marked 67321, input range 10.7 to 12.75GHz, local oscillator frequencies at 9.75 and 10.6GHz. Reading up on LNBs in general was advice that one can use the 24th harmonic of a 70cm handheld held in front of the LNB to generate a 10GHz signal. This I had to try and with a bias-tee feeding 12V to the LNB and an SDRPlay RSP2 and SDRUno it does in fact work. Transmitting on 432MHz should have, in theory generated a peak at 618MHz on the SDR (10368 - 9750) but it…

I am searching for a few things and given the lack of accessible (to me) radio rallies I have listed those items I need below - please email me (wanted 'at' m0rvb.uk) if you are selling anything suitable... Microwave signal generator, to get past 10GHz 32V 15A (or higher) power supply (prefer linear) 10.5V 12A power supply - I have a 12V 15A PSU from eBay which will adjust down to 10.4V so I will try this N socket to waveguide transition for 10GHz (SMA socket would do) 10GHz waveguide attenuator 10GHz waveguide load / dummy load, at least 30W

Yeah ok, naff title. A new toy arrived today, I've been thinking about getting one of these for a while now and not doing anything about it. The lack of accessible (i.e. ones not too far away) radio rallies puts a damper on acquiring stuff so this was an eBay find. The meter had no slugs but I had ordered a couple from Vintage Electronics as well and all arrived at the same time. Of course I had to test it having never used one before, but as my radio's and patch leads are all currently PL259 I had to use an adapter. Actually three adapters! I ended up going from the rig via an SO239 to BNC male, BNC female to SMA male, and SMA female to N male! But hey, it works. And yes, I really do intend to convert to all N type connectors here… I even have them ready to make up. Lazy...

I received a few reasonable images early this morning between 5 and 6am. Hopefully later passes will yield better images. These were received on a 2m FM set with a loft mounted collinear, and decoded by qsstv on Linux.

So... having an Allstar node I wanted to configure it for Echolink. It seemed this was just a matter of editing the pre-prepared configuration file echolink.xxx and renaming it to echolink.conf. Edits in place, this I did. Oh yes, and I set our broadband router up to forward the relevant ports to the hub. On restarting asterisk it gave numerous errors of the form 'Error in parsing header on servers.echolink.org'. Hmmm. Ok, scratching around the web I found that Echolink has a firewall test service at https://secure.echolink.org/pingTest.jsp. It failed. Ugh. Then it dawned on me (meaning I read the documentation a little better!). I had set a callsign with '-L' at the end which appeared to be the way to go. But this needed separate validation! Once that was done it all sprang into life. Simple, and also obvious when I realised. Old age? http://km6uso.net/index.php/2021/02/27/adding-echolink-to-your-allstar-hub/ is an excellent guide - there are others of course but this one pointed out clearly the need to register the -L or -R callsign.