Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁶⁾

I’ve always been interested in microwaves and 23cm is one band up from where I currently have kit (well, ok, apart from the QO100 setup) so I got an SG Labs 23cm transverter from eBay. I thought I may as well have a play before The Powers That Be trash the band as seems threatened. Nice little box. Of course, it gives me a problem now and having just spent an hour cobbling stuff together I am a way away from being able to actually use it. But I wanted to make sure it worked, not that I suspected otherwise but it’s a new (to me) shiny box and I want to play with it. So, how to feed it… I grabbed the TR-9130 that had been relegated to the workshop since I got a 144MHz transverter and let it acclimatise overnight. Apparently this puts out 5W on its minimum setting which is borderline for the SG Labs kit. Fumble around for my attenuators - but those are F-types. And of course I had no patch leads to hand… but I did have some useful crimp PL259s to quickly make a lead up. Running the VHF set through a SWR/power meter into a dummy load confirmed the 5W, of actually more like 6 but SSB should be fine if I don’t shout. I have a short 23cm Yagi so seemed all set for a test. But… something missing… ah yes, what do I receive it on? Ugh. Ok, run up CubicSDR on the Mac and use the SDRplay box with one of the baby antennas that came with the Pluto. The desk is now covered in bits of kit and wires. Can’t find the signal in CubicSDR. I have a handheld scanner which goes up to 1300… but impractical to slowly run through the band hoping, and anyway it does not do SSB. Setting the TR-9130 to FM caused the transverter to whinge via it’s red LED showing far too much input. Ah, the frequency meter then, that goes to 2.7GHz. Finally I can see output in the form of a fleeting count on the counter. Getting a BNC cable and the baby Pluto antenna so the antenna is close to the Yagi and I could get a more accurate reading of 1296. Good. Now I can tune to it in CubicSDR and finally see a signal, which saves me from figuring out how to do it all properly in CubicSDR! And that’s as far as I can get. I need an attenuator so I can run it via the 144MHz transverter which puts out up to 10W, or so I can use FM on the TR-9130 - ok make that two different attenuators. Not that I will get very far with an 8 element Yagi on the desk but in theory, and perhaps using a handheld I should be able to open up GB3WC from here as it’s pretty much line sight. Lots of faffing around then for an…

I gave the pibox a present today in the form of a 3.2" Nextion display. It came with a bezel which I wanted because I could guarantee not to make a neat hole in the panel. Oddly, the bezel was black in the advert but came unfinished... The screen runs off a USB port on the Pi via a CP2102 USB to TTL dongle, and the wires that came with the Nextion just reach the dongle which in on the far side of the box. It was surprisingly easy to set up, albeit I had to wrestle the Windows PC to set up the Nextion editor as I did not have a spare SD card to download the HMI file directly to the Nextion. Of course, this exercise was very much a 'got a new thing, must get it working immediately' type job and I will take time now to read up on it all and maybe find different displays, but it has at least turned a boring blue box into a blue box that appears to have a purpose!

It’s been an impressive two days on 2m FT8. Yesterday (3/march) pskreporter showed that I had been received in GI, EI, GD and GW as well as right down into Devon, and today similarly so with the exception of Ireland and the addition of GM. Not bad for my cobbled together dipole in the loft. Of course it’s likely that all the reports are from stations with humungous antennas but hey, a report is a report. And yes, tidying the loft is on my to-do list!

(updated) As I am learning morse, well, in theory anyway, I wanted a decent morse key. I think a straight key will be best but I want something decent and not naff looking or ex-military. I like the look of the Bencher (probably because it’s shiny!) but I have no idea of the feel of any of these keys and looking around for comments shows that everyone likes their own - to be expected of course. Back in December 2020 I had actually ordered one that gets good reviews but it never came. After three emails to three separate contacts and never getting a reply I turned to PayPal and got a full refund within two days. Two months was long enough to wait for the key to fail to arrive. I suspect the order was messed up by our rather stupid exit from the EU and the resultant complexities… but to not receive any reply, well, that’s just not good customer service. So... I got this instead, it's so shiny!

For a while now I've been pondering whether to get a Windows PC. For starters, SDR Console needs it as do other SDR packages. But other than watching them come and go on eBay I never took the plunge. However, as I've taken all the electronics out of the workshop due to it always being damp I had a spare Lenovo ThinkCentre PC, one of the very small things. I already use one as the home server but this other one was destined to run a DCC setup for a model railway that is still just a pile of bits. It ran Ubuntu but when I got it it came with Windows 10. All I had done was swap hard disks, keeping the Windows one just in case I ever needed it. Well... ...it is now in the shack and SDR Console has been installed and all is well. We had a screen lying around which is full HD, a much better display option than the old laptop I had been using. And with it being a fresh Windows 10 it's not (yet!) cluttered up. One strange thing though. I set up SDR Console just as I had on the laptop along with the recommended offsets etc. But on the laptop I had to adjust the offsets to set it correct, e.g. for the lower beacon to actually appear where it should. But now, with the published offsets it is in the right place with no further adjustment. Another oddity is that when I boot this PC and run SDR Console up having shut it down with the SDR receiving the lower beacon, it comes right back. On the laptop it was always somewhat off and would drift. Not sure how that happens given it's all in the digital domain. I must have set something up odd on the laptop, but no idea what. Anyway, it works. The Lenovo only has the one set of audio jacks, those on the front. And only 4 USBs, two at the back in use for the mouse and keyboard. In order to get audio into the mixer I will need to use a USB sound card, not an issue except that will need to plug in the front and I like to keep cables out of the way. Maybe it's time for another wireless keyboard and mouse, after all the current keyboard does rather dwarf the tiny PC!