Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁰⁾

Shame. The planned SAQ broadcast on the 24th is cancelled - see https://alexander.n.se/en/covid-19-stops-saq-on-christmas-eve-morning/ Oh well, no rush to sort out my VLF antenna then.

Armed with the LF converter I have been experimenting with antennas for the low side of things. There is far too much electronic hash in the house for any hope of receiving things so I now have a couple of antenna options to try outdoors. Given the radios are all upstairs and there is no easy cable route to the workshop where the antennas can go this means a remote SDR. There is already Ethernet in the garage where the QO100 transceiver was so experiments can begin. Anyway, here are the new fiddleables... an IP35 mini whip from eBay seller radio.el32 complete with bias tee: This comes as the two PCBs - antenna and bias tee - plus 3 BNC sockets. The metal box was sourced from eBay and the waterproof plastic housing from Amazon. It's a lot bigger than is needed but should be fine. And a 'loop antenna amplifier' (LAA++) and bias tee from Cross Country Wireless: All being well the first test will be of the IP35 antenna once mounted on a wooden pole. The LAA++ will take me a little longer as I need to make a loop for it.

Getting closer to being portable - not that I go anywhere! I now have an LDG Z817 automatic tuner. It seems to be working fine although it arrived with dead batteries, one of which had leaked a bit. That cleaned up ok and it now sports a set of Energizer Max batteries (ok, I had a box...) Having run up FT8 on the Mac 40m was packed but I did manage a contact with an EA station on 80m with 2.5W via the random bit of wire in the loft. Note to self: remember there are batteries in it!

My vision, if I even have such a thing is constantly going up in frequency. I am (still!) assembling various bits of microwave gear currently aiming at 10GHz. (EME would be nice, but, baby steps...). Lower frequencies are also interesting me and to that aim I now have a VLF converter which takes 50-500kHz and makes 4.0 to 4.5MHz. After throwing a bit of wire out the window I can pick up Radio 4 - which, of course I can do on just about any old thing (!) but it proves it works. Hopefully this will put SAQ on my radar, but more importantly the 136kHz and 472kHz bands - receive only for now. The bit of random wire was particularly useless of course, but sufficient to pick out speech on 198kHz.

Having two radios, two SignaLinks and multiple computers I figured why not spread a little... so here's 4m FT8 from the FT450D and transverter plus 2m FT8 from the FT817. Well, it would be rude not to use both together... Mind you, the poor old i7 MacBook Pro does seem to have a whinge if I dare do something else at the same time - it seems to temporarily forget the USB and gives a rig control error. On the other hand it is quite convenient to have the Mac set up as now because it is always on and I can very quickly get onto 2m FT8 (or indeed 70cm FT8 but my best QSO so far has been all of 7km!)