Radio and rails...

I am planning to have a fiddle with digital modes. My current leads will not reach from the FT450D to the PC so I get the chance to do some soldering and make the leads longer... see if can remember which end of the iron gets hot. There are a few quite strong RTTY signals about (I don't yet recognise the sounds of other modes) which takes me back a way. Years (decades) ago (I was 15!) I used to buy up old Creed 7B and 7E teleprinters, renovate them and sell them on to make a bit of pocket money. These were all set to 50 baud, not 45.5 baud as I only had a tuner for 50. I got quite good at it and I wish I had kept one. At one stage I had a couple running, one via a terminal unit wired to a B40 receiver, plus a separate tape punch and reader. It used to be fun running off reams of print from the Russian news agency TASS, or columns of numbers that I had thought were spy stations but turned out to be weather stations. Fingers crossed I'll manage to get it all wired…

Well I am up to three HF contacts now, two with Slovenia and the third with one of the 14th Antarctic Activity Week special even station. My tatty fan dipole seems to work ok. At this rate (4 QSOs ever since just before Christmas 2016) I'll soon need a logging programme to cope with this high load... hmmm.

Well I made my first 20m contact today - with a special even station in Slovenia no less. Very quick contact, 5/9 each way. But this is on my loft crude wet-string (fan dipole) antenna with 10 watts. Not too bad for a first contact I think... 871 miles.

I added a 20m dipole to the loft fan dipole today, and fixed the leg of the 6m wire that pulled out of its crimp eyelet. I have yet to cut the coax and insert a coupler so I can use the VNA, so I installed it and hoped. The VNA gave it a SWR of just over 3 and the FT450D tuner is happy at that. But the band is absolutely dead!

Do radio amateurs develop a desire to go ferrite hunting? I've often wondered this. Many years ago when I used to go to radio rallies - this is when there were some close to here - there were always people wandering round examining various torrid and such. I never questioned this but always witnessed it. And I seem to have joined them! I now have four T130-2's, one of which will be a 9:1 un-un and a box of assorted toroids on order to see if I can shut the hash up from a couple of wall warts. This is since I got my license, so it must be catching.