Radio and rails...

What would a blog be without the obligatory 'about' page telling you stuff? Ok, so this blog is basically a place for my ramblings about things, be they radio, railway or electronics related. It's nothing special. I toyed for ages with a place to write things, first on my valve pages, then a blog elsewhere, then here, and finally I put all my radio 'about' information on my QRZ page which made sense at the time. This blog is created using Publii which is a static site generator. Previously I used Wordpress but for a small blog like this it was a rather large a complex beast. I had to use plugins to remove Google fonts and such because the basic Wordpress themes used them, plus there are constant attacks making it particularly vital to keep the code patched. I ran that version of the blog on a VPS rented from Heart Internet but once we got broadband by FTTP (fibre direct to the house) it made more sense to run the blog on my own server. The cost of that broadband package was less than the annual rental for the VPS. But having Wordpress running on a server actually…

Seeing there is a 70cm FT8 competition on tonight I sort of threw kit together to see if it even worked. So, one big wheel ('big' on 70cms is hardly big!) and a transverter plugged together and I managed a few decodes. Good, but... It fell apart once I tried to answer a CQ. The caller was high on the waterfall and the amount of drift the blessed transverter managed after just one transmit cycle moved the received signal right off the right hand side. So that failed. I did try to answer one more station that was in the middle of the waterfall but the same happened, this time still on the waterfall but no amount of chasing it across the screen yielded a decode. Fail again. Apologies to those two stations, this transverter is clearly useless for digital modes but I thought it worth a try. A tad disappointing. I managed all of 14 miles - I think the transverter manages 10 watts. I can do 17 miles to the local 70cm repeater on a handheld and supplied short antenna on 5 watts FM.

Two events this month, the first from the 7th to 8th and the second from the 11th to 13th (ongoing as I type). I received nothing at all on the 7th and a few poor or very poor images on the 8th. On the 12th I received one reasonable image at 13:29 UTC and an incomplete one at 15:06. I even received a partial image at 16:36 with the ISS mid-Atlantic. That probably had the benefit that this area is clear to the horizon roughly in an arc covering Wales the lower half of Ireland. No more passes here until tomorrow... let's see what happens.

So, my projects remain stalled... no idea where the time goes! I seem to be amassing bits for projects but they are just piling up. Thus far the Portsdown is still needing filters and PAs. I have a VLNA for 23cm to build. I need to move the QO100 dish from the back of the garage onto the house wall so I can mount a PA and transverter setup close enough to the shack to be able to use a transceiver, and finally get onto the wideband transverter using the Portsdown. I have dishes for higher microwave bands, a 10GHz SSPA, a 2.4GHz PA and more microwave bits coming soon including a bandpass filter for 23cm and some microwave relays. Now the weather is improving hopefully I can make some progress. I need to get a mobile tower so I can do various pointing around the house (surprisingly I am actually qualified to build these things!) which will make it easier to move the QO100 dish as well as finally getting some antennas outside. But house DIY comes first, all else is secondary... Check back this time in, umm, maybe 2025!

Two pics from today's ISS SSTV test... This is a screenshot after the fact, I was not around to witness it. The ISS had already moved out of range for me by the time I got to the PC (ok, by the time I woke up!). I was there for the next one at around 10am UTC. The signal came in strong at first but faded out very badly after a few seconds, and then faded completely out after that so it's not much of a pic. These are received on 437.800 and given my internal collinear struggles a bit to receive the SSTV images on 145.800 it is probably not surprising that this UHF digital test faired worse. But the blocks that make it through are nice and clear.ss