Radio and rails...

I've been experimenting with 5W from the FT450D these past couple of days - only FT8 so can't really claim it to be QRP... and it's working well with spots and contacts all over Europe, and spots up and down the east coast of the US and into Canada. This was all on 17m, so a compromise on my loft fan dipole which is (still!) only cut for 20 and 6. Leaving the rig on 5W also has the advantage that it doesn't matter if I forget to change the tx power when I switch in one of the transverters. In fact, as an antenna the bit of wet string is pretty dire. Plans to put a wire outside remain on hold because we need to get the chimneys sorted due to leaks and naff pointing. Once that's sorted it will be too miserable to work up there!

Seems the Big Wheel 2m antenna in the loft is working ok, at least according to 2m FT8 with a bit of lift. It manages a good spread... (there's one 4m in there too)

Just managed to receive a fairly good image from the closest ISS pass. This started as it crossed the UK and continued as it passed onwards to Germany. There were a few dropouts (I run the FTM100DE with an open squelch for these) but all in all this pic is better than any that I managed from the last series. The transceiver is connected to a white stick 2m/70cm colinear in the loft and I really need to stop being lazy and set the Arrow up for these passes.

No idea what my pi-star setup was doing the other day but this might amuse some: With all that load it was still managing to do all the comms stuff! Rebooting it sorted it out and it has been back to it's usual 0.1 load ever since.

One of my ongoing projects was to build an Allstar Link node. I had acquired a working Baofeng 888 from eBay some time ago and a few days ago duly programmed it (all the channels in case I ever accidentally turn that switch) to the 70cm frequency I want to use. Also in the box of waiting bits was a Pi 3B, ex my Portsdown project (that has a Pi 4 now), a CM108 USB dongle and a dummy load. Anyway, it came to the top of the project list (= I wanted something relatively simple to fiddle with. The CM108 came from Amazon and only cost a couple of quid. They had four available, all of which are now here! Following the excellent guide (among other similarly excellent guides) at https://allstarsetup.com/modify-a-cm108-sound-fob/ this was abused into something ready for use. Next came the 888 modifications (all relevant information can be found via https://allstarsetup.com/allstar-mini-node-construction-details/) which went fine except the information I was reading did not make clear how one powers the radio. I figured that out. Note that the radio needs 3-and-a-bit volts so two diodes in series with the 5V line works ok here (I need to add another yet).