Radio and rails...

I received my first QSL cards via the bureau today, a pleasant surprise. 6 cards with dates spread across most of 2017 - a lot of the time I use eQSL so I didn't expect many. Some request cards in return - which I will of course but I'm afraid the basic design of mine is no match for those received!

I've whinged before that my ears are naff. I often use headphones to help but now with so many radios it's a pain, especially when the relevant socket is on the rear of the rig. Ages back I set up a mini-recording studio to help the kids with their music lessons and practice. Guess what, I have a mixer as part of this and yet left it sat on a shelf forgotten! No prizes for guessing where it is now. So, I can now mix in all the radios and the PC / SDR and output to headphones or speakers or both. It has two channels so I can play one radio through one speaker and another through the other which is useful. The same goes with output to the headphones but this is less useful because my hearing is so far down on one side that I play everything through my 'better' ear. But it gives a lot of flexibility. One thing I am toying with getting is a decent audio processor. I had a Datong unit which I sold on but that was before the current DSP offerings. Again, the mixer will be useful because it has an…

Well I got up relatively early and cut 35 foot of WF103 and soldered a PL259 on one end. The hole in the ceiling above the radios won't take the width of a plug but will - just as it turned out - take the cable. It now has one run of RG213 and three of WF103 and an RG58 and I reckon nothing else is going up that way now. My little Antex iron had no chance against the copper in the WF103 so I had to drag the reflow machine in from the workshop, overkill but it made a good joint. Got the co-linear set up and mounted and the VNA said 1.2 SWR on 2m (it only goes to 180MHz). The radio was easy to install and is smaller than I'd imagined (but then I'd not taken any notice of the stated dimensions). I put the SWR meter inline and it agreed with the 1.2 SWR on 2m and said the same for 70cm. The first thing the rig did was tell me that the micro SD card I fitted is bust so its in the bin. Another one worked fine. Mind you, I should have realised…

I got myself a combined birthday and Christmas present - actually the first radio I've ever purchased new apart from the handhelds - a Yaesu FTM100DE. Not set it up yet, and I've still got to run some WF103 down to connect up the 2m/70cm co-linear which is sitting in the loft waiting. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, this means I finally have a C4FM radio (one of the the local repeaters speaks it) and this time I have a Yaesu box with a radio inside, unlike the empty box that scammer Steve 2E0STI sent me a while ago. Now, where can I install it where it won't be noticed... hmmm.

(this is a re-write of my original post to tidy it up) I signed up to EchoLink today and installed EchoMac, a Mac version of the software. I have yet to play with this other than making calls to the *ECHOTEST* conference - a self-test facility like you get in Skype. Getting the software to communicate was a bit of a fiddle, through no fault of the software or EchoLink. First off, the home router needs to be able to pass UDP ports 5198 and 5199 in both directions to the Mac, and port 5200 TCP outgoing. The information is here http://www.echolink.org/firewall_solutions.htm. By default everything incoming is off other than a few rules that I have for the web servers. So I had to enable this. The Sky router I have can be a pain here because more often than not, pressing Apply to save firewall rules gives a 'not found' error and it seems to want several goes before it works. No idea why that should be, surely the script is either there or not, not there sometimes! Anyway, I got the rules in. Note on the Sky router you need to first define a Service for those UDP ports, then…