Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁶⁾

I managed one 70cm FT8 QSO today. I had the TS2000X on 70cm randomly and answered a CQ. That was around 50 miles out to the southwest across the Pennines, so not so bad for my loft 70cm Big Wheel and with the rig set to 10W. A little later I put out a CQ, no replies but it did indicate I was heard in Wales at 78 miles and Northern Ireland at 179 miles.

You know the saying, a man with a watch knows the time but a man with two watches has no clue. Well, my GPS clock plus 10MHz source has decided it no longer wants to be a clock. It was a nice idea, came as a kit of parts from three sources and worked well up to a point. But the GPS module always seemed a little deaf. I had it connected to one of those little magnetic pucks but it struggled, often loosing all sight of any satellites. I tried it on an external antenna (sat on the windowsill) and on the puck placed outside with no difference. With a splitter inline a Leo Bodnar unit was happy so I had to assume the antenna was fine. Anyway, it has spent all day with no satellites in view whereas the QRP Labs clock is fine as is the NPT server. So it has been switched off and assigned to the 'box of abandoned projects' where it resides, alone. (edit: that one is now outside in the workshop with a small GPS antenna on the workshop roof and is working just fine - except the LCD is very sluggish with…

I've been looking over the QSL cards I received with the view to somehow printing on the back, given my handwriting is worse than any doctor, or spider... Like many my QSL cards have a printed back to add QSO information in predefined boxes. I thought I could probably sort out a template for Apple's Pages word processor to print the rear of a card. Some cards I received simply have a label stuck on the rear positioned top right with all the information on. That seems typical of special event stations or, I guess people that send a lot of cards. Another example, similar to mine has a longer label with details overlaying the pre-printed boxes and having almost the same design as those boxes. I guess that makes it easy to either print a label or fill the card in by hand. Many of the cards I receive are hand written, all with far, far neater handwriting than mine! So I wrangled Pages and got text in approximately the right places as an experiment. I figured out how to define a page size of QSL card dimensions and hit print. As expected the printer was sat waiting for…

A couple of days ago I was looking for a stand for the FT5D and found a rather nice leaning one to 3d print. Today I found similar stands for the ID51 and the MD380. All three duly printed and lined up...

I finally have a UTC clock (it does other stuff too). This is a QRP Labs Clock built from a kit of parts plus a GPS receiver, also QRP Labs. Very simple to build. It runs from 5V (pity it's not 12V but there you are) but I recently acquired a 5V linear PSU to run the three little LoRa boards rather than the 12V/USB charger I currently use. The kit is not yet finished - I need to attach the power switch and connect those two push buttons - but it's a neat little thing in a nice case. I was looking for a GPS locked UTC clock and recently built a kit which is also a 10MHz source and has a 10MHz OCXO to make a really useful device. That also has a clock display as well as other dispel modes such as satellites, locator and such but the clock is always about 1 second slow. Reading through the documentation from QRP Labs it transpires that this is because the 1PPS signal and the NMEA data can overlap, so the data stream from the GPS that shows date and time is not aligned to the PPS pulse which…