Radio, railways, stuff...

Recently our ageing HP 1022 printer has been misleading paper. There is a solenoid on the righthand side which controls the feed and the associated spring gets weak. I have stretched it three times so far, each time curing the issue for a while. A new spring is needed and, of course although I have a number of these they are all safely stored in the workshop never to be found! Coupled to the desire to print in colour and on reasonably thick paper - I'm thinking short ranges of 'special' QSL cards here - after a bit of research I chose a Xerox printer. Reasonable cost and - although as is typical with these things new toner costs more than the printer - aftermarket toner is affordable. The printer duly arrived and I set up the networking and it tried a test print. This failed to eject all the way and the printer announced it had a paper jam. Ok... try again. Nope. If I eased the sheet out as it was printing all was fine, but it never managed by itself. I did the usual things. Swearing at the printer failed to cure the issue as I had…

As I have a NOV that allows the use of Q as a regional secondary locator I actually had an SSB QSO on 40m today - first time using the Q and first time on SSB voice for some time now, for over a year it's all been FT8. Excellent signal reports both ways (I had wound the wick up to 50W). I really must start talking to people again!

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!