Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁶⁾

So far I have received two complete but very noisy pictures from the current ISS SSTV event. The first was 11:37 UCT on 9/Oct/2024 and the second was at 13:12 on the same day. Both were as the ISS passed to the south of my location and right out over Germany, for the first picture and France for the second. I could hear SSTV signals as the ISS was approaching from the west but far too weak to decode. The transmission of the second image began as the ISS passed over the west coast just south of Wales and continued across the UK and across France. I can't remember exactly. Anyway, here are the two pictures: Both images were received on a 2m QFH antenna in the loft. While waiting for the signals to become strong enough I tried other antennas: the collinear heard very little, the big wheel did better but the QFH was superior.

Another Hamfest is over... 160 mile round trip for me (ok, plus a diversion where I followed the signs to a service station which were ok until the last junction and I ended up on another motorway!!) but not a bad trip. Except for the roadworks on the A1... Anyway, a 6/4/2/70cm collinear came home with me and it is now installed in the loft replacing the existing 2/70cm one. Same cable etc. I also finished off the boarding over one bedroom - surprisingly the one where the antenna is and no, that's not the reason for completing the boarding. Honest! It has, as one may expect very little gain at 6m and 4m but replaces the 4m ground plane that I had and was rather in the way. Plus I never had any form of vertical for 6m. I also managed to today the antennas up a bit. The 70cm big wheel is now no longer under the 2m big wheel and has its own place farther away. The 2m big wheel has moved so I can actually walk across the loft without needing to crawl under it. I also recently acquired 2m and a 70cm QFH antennas from…

Slightly random... I have a Cisco SPA504G VoIP phone which I acquired ages ago and connected to Hamshack Hotline back when the UK still got 5 digit numbers. The phone isn a 4-line one and subsequently I got a Hams over IP number for line 2, then an extended freedom network number on line 3. After that the phone sat for ages with only the three lines in green, waiting for a fourth. I did consider buying a VoIP service to transfer our POTS number to once we upgraded to FTTP and lost the copper line. But then, all we used the landline phone for was ignoring junk calls, only ever making calls using my mobile phone which has free minutes and SMS, or using WhatsApp. So the landline went. And still that fourth line was dark, just sitting there. Along came CNet. I have had an interest in all things telephony and telegraphy from an early age. I always wanted a small mechanical PABX - I still don't have one but I do have an eye out for a couple of old dial phones from my childhood. And that's where the interest in CNet came from. Having investigated further…

I built a thing! This is a GPSDO using a PCB and kit of parts supplied by G8CUL and a OXCO from G1OGY. It uses a Jupiter GPS module which provides the PPS signal and a 10kHz output and the completed module provides 2x 10MHz and 1x 1MHz outputs. Although there are a number of such designs this one is nice in that it also has a display and shows the current date and time as UTC. This was, I think my third SMD construction and certainly the Mose SMD devices including multi-legged chips. No issues in construction especially given the quality of the PCB that G8CUL had made. The backup battery is a CR2 3.3V type and helps with warm starting. As the regulator gets hot I managed to fit a heatsink between it and the rear of the case and hopefully this will sort out heat transfer, otherwise I may need to bolt another heatsink on the rear. Construction in a die cast box would have been better maybe but the blue/white box fits in with others in the shack, plus I had it already! The bezel is cut down from a 3D printed one from Printables.com designed…

I had a number of Molex pins to wire up recently. To make things easier I decided to use some 4-core signal cable I had but found that the insulation is so poor at resisting heat that soldering the Molex pins was a non-starter as it always ended up with bare wires. Of course, Molex pins are designed to be crimped... so off to eBay. The latest addition to my toolbox arrived in a couple of days and made the job a lot easier.