Radio and rails...

M0RVB

More bits of wet string...

...well actually aluminium. I finally cut down an old 'fm' radio dipole to 2m and quietly ran yet another run of WF103 into the loft. So the Trio TR-9130 I got a few weeks ago finally has an aerial. SWR is not bad at 1.2 or so on the VNA. It's mounted horizontally as I got the transceiver in the hope of one day finding some 2m SSB... well it's been 3 hours, nothing yet! Impatient! Anyway it worked fine for the local RSGB News this morning, and to hear someone asking if 145.5 was in use but with no callsign... This also means I finally have a use for the KW520 SWR/power meter. However, it would not register any power on the 20W setting on the 140-525MHz range but did on the 1.8-200MHz range (both of course cover 2m). I took the lid off, discovered it would be rather difficult to get at the switches to check them so put it back together. Of course it now works fine. Perhaps the initial swearing at it actually worked. The Trio causes some QRM on the speakers of one of our PCs - actually in the room below the dipole. But…

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M0RVB

QRM

It's amazing what a single wall-wart can do. I have some X10 controllers around the place controlling the outside lights and the dimmers in our family room. For ages now, one outside light refused to co-operate. I changed my scripts to fire several on or off commands to this light which worked for a time but then nothing. All the other lights seemed ok. Then the family room lights would either come on or go off at random, but only occasionally. I went round the house with the ICR2 on MW and open squelch and there was a hash coming from one indoor camera but not the other. It also came out of many of the 13A sockets around the house. By now I was convinced I'd have multiple noise sources, potentially all of our wall-warts. Anyway, it got to the stage that the X10 controller running from the house server could no longer reliably control any lights so I got another controller and ran that from the radio PC upstairs. That, at least got most lights back to normal operation, all except the one that had seemingly given up completely. I finally made time to investigate more properly and…

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M0RVB

6m finally...

50MHz seems alive just now, and after one incomplete JT65 QSO I finally managed to complete a call with a station in the Slovak Republic at 1,600km or so and then with a station about 3km away! My first, and second ever 6m QSOs.

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M0RVB

6m activity - well, a little anyway

Up to now I have been wondering if my 6m loft dipole even works, but today I left wstjx running on 50.276 and received 3 decodes. I called CQ too and had a reply but we could not complete unfortunately. Still, it at least proves the antenna does actually work.

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M0RVB

Further JT9...

Well 20m seems to keep springing into life these days, JT-wise anyway. Lots of American stations (north and south) but I have had little luck in managing many QSOs. Then last night I had a JT9 QSO all the way to Chile at 11,800km. Not bad for my bit of wet string in the loft. Mind you, looking him up on qrz.com shows a massive antenna array so he was doing all the work! Today my first QSO was JT65 at a mere 620km. There are a lot of European stations on right now.

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