So the Camb-Hams headed back to Mull for their 2012 DX’Pedition which I took the main lead on the VHF organising, we booked a cottage in the slightly rarer square of IO66. We initially planned activations on 6m, 4m, 2m and 3cm using SSB, CW and JT6m. In the end we managed much more than we ever intended, including EME on 2m, 2m/70cm satellite operations and later in the week a few QSOs on 23cm after swapping the 2m and 3cm kit over. 3cm from [...]
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Yaesu’s Quadra VL-1000 Will do 70MHz
So I had noticed a while back, when developing my Icom (CI-V or band Data) to Yaesu BCD Band Data Converter that occasionally I could get 70MHz to show up as the band. I always had it in mind to investigate this further. Today I set about finding the BCD which selected 4m (70MHz) and found it with all BCD lines high (Band A=1, Band B=1, Band C=1, Band D=1, ) great! On page 5 of the manual it shows the pin-outs, on BAND-DATA 1 [...]
To Do – 24/10/2011
Just thought I would share some projects I have bits for, and can recall at the moment, but are in the waiting pile: – APRS beacon built around a PICAXE-08M which periodically wakes up, beacons and shuts down. – 3 x Azimuth rotator controllers. 2 for the CUWS (G6UW) and one for John G4BAO. – Write up an AZ and EL rotator interface, basically my own version of an LVB tracker or ST-2. – 30m QRSS CW beacon. – RTTY modulator for my IC-756pro3 using [...]
SCAM12 Installation
So I was convinced for my new mast I would use a SCAM12 after seeing G4ERO’s installation (picture on his QRZ page). I had done some antenna work round at Colins QTH and seeing how simple it was to erect (BINGO!) and take down. The mast is approx 3m when down (with antennas on) and the top of the SCAM12 is 12m when up. The SCAM12 is pneumatic and requires about 22PSI of pressure when fully up and mine stays up for days. The SCAM12 [...]
40m 1/4 Vertical [Epic] Antenna
So the antenna farm at M1BXF QTH just got larger with the addition of a 40m 1/4 vertical. I’d been thinking about this antenna for while as verticals are good for DX, more in this in a moment, and require little space to erect, but does need space for radials. The antenna is based on a 10m fiberglass pole for the vertical element support, 17 radials and a clothes line ground screw to hold it up. I ended up with 17 radials as I cut [...]
Using Power Point for Project Decaling
So I build loads of project which in the end require labelling, but how to do it so it seems professional? In the past I used to just make lines of text which was more or less the project name and my callsign, printed it and stuck it to the box, not very professional! Well while looking at some projects on the net over the weekend I found a Cumbria Designs Minicounter frequency counter built by Matti Niskanen, OH2CF which looked like a real professional [...]
Shack Panorama
So after sending a quick picture to Twitter showing my clean shack I got quite a few replies. I thought therefore it would be good to show the shack in its entirety. I first Googled to see if Picasa could do it and got a result back for Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (could this be a #fail for Google?). Anyhow after a straigh forward email, had to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, which the installer gave [...]
6m DX Window
So I can’t get it out of my head all the grief I got after operating within the top 3 KHz of the DX window on the 6m band… The conditions were such that there was a chance of some North African stations being on the band so I thought I’d position myself at the top end, not the middle of the DX band incase, also I should point out in region 1 the band plans are only guidance. People trying to tell me I [...]
DX’Peditions and shack improvements!
It has been a busy month. First I was on holiday for 2 weeks, one week at my parents in Scotland and the 2nd I was on the Isle of Arran for the Camb-Hams 2011 DX’Pedition. The DX’Pedition was sponsorship by Kenwood UK, Icom UK and Linear Amp UK. The latter provided us with an HF amp (Challenger) and a 6m/4m (Discovery 64) amp. On the DX’Pedition we planned to make about 4000 QSOs in the week, this is about what we have managed to [...]
PC Trouble
So about a week ago I tweeted that my PC had crashed and on boot-up I got error messages saying there were missing DLL and SYS files for the programs which were running when the crash happened. All week the PC had sputtered which was uncharacteristic of it being quite a decent machine. I decided to run the Maxtor disk check utility which it failed the disk and recommended I replace it, so after a reboot to do more detailed test it failed to boot, [...]