Radio and rails...

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…

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…