Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁰⁾

Following on from me always saying it's about time I got some wire outside I have, temporarily put a 9:1 unun and random wire in the loft and connected it instead of the 20/6 fan dipole. So far, I can see my FT8 signals being received across Europe with one contact on 20m and one on 40, but it's getting on towards the evening now so I need to see what it is like tomorrow. Very un-scientific of course. Noise is high, but not much higher than the fan dipole. This one will tune down to 60m and 80m but I am yet to be convinced it is actually receiving. The fan dipole pegged out at 40m and that was a struggle - little wonder with so little wire. The YT-1200 will tune the random wire to 160m but it sets the house alarm off! The wire to the bell box runs through the loft and presumably whatever protection circuit there is in the alarm panel assumes someone has cut the wire.

I've been experimenting with 5W from the FT450D these past couple of days - only FT8 so can't really claim it to be QRP... and it's working well with spots and contacts all over Europe, and spots up and down the east coast of the US and into Canada. This was all on 17m, so a compromise on my loft fan dipole which is (still!) only cut for 20 and 6. Leaving the rig on 5W also has the advantage that it doesn't matter if I forget to change the tx power when I switch in one of the transverters. In fact, as an antenna the bit of wet string is pretty dire. Plans to put a wire outside remain on hold because we need to get the chimneys sorted due to leaks and naff pointing. Once that's sorted it will be too miserable to work up there!

Seems the Big Wheel 2m antenna in the loft is working ok, at least according to 2m FT8 with a bit of lift. It manages a good spread... (there's one 4m in there too)

Just managed to receive a fairly good image from the closest ISS pass. This started as it crossed the UK and continued as it passed onwards to Germany. There were a few dropouts (I run the FTM100DE with an open squelch for these) but all in all this pic is better than any that I managed from the last series. The transceiver is connected to a white stick 2m/70cm colinear in the loft and I really need to stop being lazy and set the Arrow up for these passes.

No idea what my pi-star setup was doing the other day but this might amuse some: With all that load it was still managing to do all the comms stuff! Rebooting it sorted it out and it has been back to it's usual 0.1 load ever since.