Radio, railways, stuff...

My bit of wet string in the loft, or rather, my fan dipole has been doing quite well of late, albeit only on FT8 and FT4. By fan dipole you are no doubt thinking of a dipole made up of several, i.e. more than two, dipoles cut to various bands and all terminated on one coax. Well, yes, but I only ever got round to making it for 20m and 6m. But even there it has been doing well these past few weeks with all of Europe in easy reach and forays into USA as far as the west coast, Canada, South America, the top of Africa and the Middle East, plus occasional contacts in Turkey, Russia, Oman and Kazakhstan. Not too bad at all given the 20m wires are far from straight, being bent at the ends to fit and not straight horizontally either. I mean it's sort of an inverted vee with a level bit in the middle and does seem fairly omnidirectional, probably by accident but hey. It will tune on all bands from 40m to 6m thanks to the YT-1200. Since I passed the Intermediate I've set the FT450D to 30W, the maximum for the tuner, but even before that as an M6 I had PSK QSOs as far as Chile and the Falkland Islands at the maximum permitted 10W, and goodness knows how little of that actually got out of the loft. And tonight a -16 FT8 report to central Brazil at over 5,500 miles. I keep meaning to put up a random wire and a suitable un-un to see how much better an external antenna will be. No chance of a beam or anything excessive here as we stick out a bit and there would be complaints. But wires should be ok. Of course, the shack is in the spare bedroom, so upstairs and the other side of the house from where the wire would attach, so quite a run of coax...

So… the buck converter module arrived and I soldered it in and set the voltage to 3.8V. One of the voltages was wrong. It transpired that I had a resistor of the wrong value, not far out mind, just a few ohms… ok, 560K instead of 56K! Ahem. Right, fixed that and the voltages are all correct so the serit module got soldered in and the USB module fitted. It was now that I realised that one needs to first register on the VivaDATV forum for access before you can download the software. Yup, read everything first… Anyway, the pause allowed me time to go back to the workshop and add the resistor needed for the V0.8 and newer versions of the software. Did I mention reading everything first? I got the software today and ran the test program. This came up with two errors to do with the USRC and LAV filters and fixed by running packages that come as part of the MiniTioune ZIP. And success, all tests passed. I have a box on order but otherwise it's a matter of testing on-air now, or testing using the feed from a satellite dish. But now it's raining and the project QO100 dish is still in the workshop.

Typical! I finally made time today to build up the Minitiouner hardware (https://wiki.batc.org.uk/MiniTiouner_hardware_Version_2) which had been sitting in various bags in a tray for a year now. Everything went well (the PCB is very finely made) right up to installing the step down buck regulator of which I had two from eBay. So... step down buck regulators... they were right here in the rubber component mat. Where is the rubber component mat. Yup, the workshop has been tidied up and rearranged twice since all the components arrived and for some unknown reason I put the darn buck regulators on the bench and not in the same tray as the rest of the bits. And they are now nowhere to be seen. More on order from eBay... serves me right. Edit: typical. So the new ones arrived and the unit is working. Today I found the ones I ordered previously inside the envelope that the PCB came in, clearly placed there by me so I would not lose them! I now have 5...