Radio, railways, stuff...

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 to the discone, and then to run some Ultraflex 10 instead of RG58. It’s only a few metres but every little helps. TinyGS info can be found at https://tinygs.com The software on the radiosonde receiver is rdzTTGOsonde and information can be found at https://sondehub.org/

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 another collecting friend and said he collected US antique types, others collected microwave types and, pointing at me he said I collected everything and there is nothing wrong in that. But it made me think what exactly is my interest. And so I decided to concentrate on what I found most interesting - British military types, mainly in the CV, and A, N and V military series. The collection included a number of CRTs as well and eventually took over the whole garage. I decided then to concentrate solely on CV types and trimmed the collection to 1,500 types, again with duplicates taking the collection to over 2,000 valves. Of the remainder many were sold and many hundreds went to the National Valve Museum which was nearly as old as my own. Eventually though three things happened. First, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new additions. Second, the website was now seeing fewer and fewer actual hits (as opposed to search engine spiders), and, most importantly I realised it had become an obsession. Time to quit. I also came to the realisation that I had an awful lot of valves in lots of boxes and I never even looked at any once they went into a box. So I decided to close the website and sell off anything I could, donating the remainder to the National Valve Museum. The website was essentially converted to flat HTML files with none of the database behind them and taken over by a member of the BVWS. Of course, all praise to them for doing that, but none to me for all my years of work. Par for the course. In the past 20 years I received just a handful comments thanking me for providing the photographs and information about the collection. I…

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