Radio and rails...

I caught the tail end of the 144MHz UKAC last night. Listening around on SSB it was useful to see how effective my basic loft dipole is. This is a cut-down old FM radio antenna I've had for decades. It's fixed horizontal roughly east-west so should max north and south. The closest heard was around 7 miles off the west end of the dipole and a clear path, and the furthest was 35 miles roughly ENE with a lot of buildings and a hill in the way. No idea the strengths of those because the S-meter packed in while I was listening, but all were easy R5 and plenty of juice. I've also no idea what power they were using and this is all very unscientific but at least proves the stuff works. Hopefully I'll be free to join in next month. Now if I could just manage a rotatable 6/4/2/70 setup on one of the chimneys... one day.

Oh so now I'm giving myself RFI. I pinched a pair of powered speakers from one of the domestic PCs yesterday and wired them to the mixer. One speaker is powered from a USB adapter and it is then wired to the mixer via a 3.5mm stereo jack and to the other speaker. No idea if the wires are screened. There is an amp in the powered unit. The YT-1200 upsets the speakers when it is operating, most so on 20m (which is the closest match for the loft antenna). But only the non-powered speaker is affected. A truckload of ferrite on the cable between the speakers has quietened it down for normal operation but it is still upset when tuning. The wire is currently wrapped multiple times through two decent ferrites, so much so that the speakers are now next to each other! Hmmm. Looks like I need to take these things apart to see what the cables are actually like.

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…