Radio and rails...

Those lumps you see on PC monitor cables and other PC and related cables... yes we know what they are and what they do but here's proof. I got a DisplayPort to HDMI cable for a new monitor. It works fine via VGA but why not? Anyway, aside from why on earth the PC has a DisplayPort and not an HDMI, the cable duly arrived. It's a nice cable in that it has a braided cover, feels well made and the connectors fit well and do not drop out. But no ferrites. All worked fine with both monitors - one DVI and one HDMI connected - came on fine. But when I key up the FT450D (set to 30W) the HDMI-connected screen goes blank. Completely blank. Black. It comes right back when I de-key. Ugh, no ferrites. I fitted a decent clip-on to each end with a whole turn of lead in each - no problems since. See? They do work!

So, new TV, empty space in bedroom, TV point and Ethernet points nearby, all I had to do was finish the wiring (left unconnected as it was not needed 15 years ago!) and scan for channels. Simple. OK. So I had a splitter and then found a smaller one so used that. Stuck it to the wall in the airing cupboard, wired in the CT125 coming down from the loft and two TV coax runs to the two bedrooms, and connected the other end of the CT125 to the aerial distribution amp in the wiring closet. Turned the TV on and it began scanning. And found very little. Hmmm. Well, it found the HD channels but would not receive them. Out with the meter. Connectivity fine from the splitter to the TV, so blamed the splitter and wired in the larger one. Rescanned. Same thing. Got a barrel connector and bypassed the splitter. No difference. Went to the wiring closet and checked the connection there... which I had plugged into the DAB aerial feed input, rather than a TV output! Put the smaller splitter back in and fitted the cables again and all is well. Ugh.

I can see the fascination with the 6m band these past few days. Lots of sporadic activity waxing and waning. Bearing in mind all I have is a wire dipole in the loft running roughly east-west I see plenty of FT8 activity from Europe and sometimes the Middle East, plus almost copied some SSB this morning. Now it has drifted off with only a couple of strong EU stations left. For a week or so I've tended to leave the PC on running FT8 on 50.313 just to see how things go. It should be firing data off to PSKReporter.

I have a had a real hard time trying to get GNURadio installed. The distro failed every time when running gnuradio-companion. This isn’t GNURadio’s fault, it may well be because my Ubuntu desktop has been upgraded a few times via dist-upgrade without it being a fresh install. Perhaps there is some old crud left in there even though I tried my best to remove all old versions of GNURadio and associated files and folders. After constant errors no matter what I tried it seems that my Ubuntu 18.04 installation somehow grabs GNURadio compiled against a previous boost library 1.58. So I resorted to the pybombs method which has installed a functioning GNURadio-companion despite errors with apache-thrift. Sadly, when installing gr-iio via pybombs it failed, again seemingly trying to refer to boost 1.58, rather than the 1.65 that the 18.04 distro has. So… I purged libboost and grabbed the 1.58 code from sourceforge and set it off building. There are lots and lots of warnings but it did compile and install. Trying again to install gr-iio failed - it seemed to try to install boost itself and then whinged that the version is wrong. All deleted and purged again, still using…

...arrived very quickly from Mouser... but no time to play right now!