Radio and rails...

I think my shack was sulking tonight as I'd not played for two days. First the tuner played up and then the PC would not see the SignaLink. Running lsusb showed it to be missing. I could not reach round to replug the USB cable so rebooted the PC instead. Now it showed it but wsjtx-x could not. Checking the config wsjt-x had reverted to the internal sound card. I'm guessing that running it with the USB missing did that. Or they really were sulking! Oh yes and then 20m is completely dead. Trying 40...

Ok, so I acquired a YT-1200 automatic tuner some time ago but left it gathering dust as I had always planned to add more bits of wet string to my loft fan dipole for other bands. The tuner was going to go on the long wire that I never got round to making via a 9:1 un-un which is wound but not soldered up and looking sorry for itself in a corner of the workshop. Plus there has been a lot of FT8 activity on 20m anyway and the internal tuner in the FT450D is happy there. Well, I set this thing up last night and it happily tunes from 80m to 6m (not tried 160m yet). The fan dipole has two elements, one cut for 20m and one for 6m, but I've now made FT8 contacts on 40m, 30m, 17m and 15m, not bad for a bit of wire stapled to the rafters and 10W or however much actually makes it out of the tuner. Yes it's not a mega-station with a beam or even any kind of external antenna (yet!) but it works for me, aided of course by FT8 being a weak signal mode - my signal…

Just got a DV-MEGA single band 70cm Raspberry Pi hat because I wanted to have a fiddle with a hotspot for the MD380. I can get into three (sometimes four) DV repeaters from here but I do like to play with tech. This little board plugs into the Pi’s GPIO connector. I already had a spare Pi 3 from an abandoned PVR project and a PoE power unit so why not. The board will take an SMA arial directly but mine has a dummy load screwed in instead. I’m using Andy Taylor’s Pi-Star package from http://www.pistar.uk/ - from there one can download a complete image for various boards including the Pi which, when imaged onto an SD card results in a Pi which boots up headless and presents a really nice web interface from which all configuration and monitoring can be carried out. And it works really well. It is a doddle to set up and configure, especially given an instructional video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5G4gYDdJeQ Anyway, it also made me reconfigure the MD380 as the codeplug I had made previously was a little disorganised. I now have all four local repeaters set for all the useful talk groups in two zones each…

Having finished a major bit of academic work I treated myself to a relatively short trip down south to the National Hamfest yesterday (Friday). This is my first trip to such a thing since the radio rallies of the 1980's and I had no idea what to expect but I can say it was worth the trip, if only to see what I can't afford to buy! I didn't come away with much - I grabbed a pair of Nagoya NA-771 aerials, one for the UV5R and one for the MD380 (different antenna connectors of course!) and one of QRP Labs excellent 5W single band transceiver kits for 40m. The manual (PDF) is a work of art giving detailed instructions of every step of the way including photographs to show what things should look like. This is waiting until I pass the Intermediate exam. Oh yes and an SDRplay RSP2 followed me home too. Unfortunately the SDRuno software is Windows only but CubicSDR works fine on the MacBook and with very little fiddling I'm listening to SSB on 20m. I've used CubicSDR on the Linux box before so not too steep a learning curve. The RSP2 has two antenna inputs…

I had WSJT-X running just in case I had time to make a few QSOs while writing. There was plenty of activity and numerous decodes but I'd not had time to play. Then there was a cryptic decode at 16:09 UTC which just said 'SOLAR FLARE'. The timing and frequency suggest it was someone a few squares away. And sure enough, no more decodes. At all. I switched to WSPR and recorded a couple of stations that way, and was recorded by a couple too, but it's very dead. I wish I was watching the waterfall when it actually died off... anyway, not long after it seems to have recovered as I can see traces again and it's decoding.