Posted 27 Nov 2007 — by Alex
Category Radio
During this weekends World Wide CW contest weekend where you’d be forgiven in thinking that there has been a change to the band plan I decided to finish up tuning the vertical antenna that I installed a few weeks ago so I could operate from the portions of the bands that I prefer are at the lowest SWR and hence I have the best opportunity it getting some good DX contacts over the winter.
I’d preassembled the antenna with the recommended spacings between the various traps but had discovered that the SWR varied wildly across the bands and even with a tuner (And yes I do agree with the sentiment that a tuner only hides bad set ups, but in some cases it is essential) the SWR was hard to get down to acceptable levels. On checking the spacings last night I discovered that they had almost all reduced significantly so detuning the antenna.
??Why?
Over the past few weeks we’ve had some strong winds and this may have contributed but I’m not entirely convinced yet.
Solution
Re-tighten the bolts and check again in a few weeks. Perhaps some kind of nylon spacer needs to be made up rather than relying on friction if this is going to be a problem. Hacksaw anyone!
Apart from this issue I have been very pleased with the retuned SWR, very low across all the bands and it just goes to show that quality breeds quality.
Posted 22 Nov 2007 — by Alex
Category Radio
Earlier this week I got in touch with Steve Ireland (VK6VZ) after reading his column in Radcom to see if I could get some guidance as to if there were any SDR products that he knew of to be used as a beacon monitoring station. My little project will hopefully be able to use an SDR of some sort coupled together with a small form factor PC such as a mini-itx and the Faros program to monitor beacons and provide real time data to this site across all the bands.
??Steve suggested that I contacted Alex (VE3NEA) the author of Faros to see if he’d got any information and it looks like there may be a partial success with a Softrock kit or if?? am patient there is a project which is currently as a prototype board call Mercury that looks like a real prospect. So a summary so far is:
Softrock 40 – Cheap, Can be used on 14Mhz apparently, Single band only
Mercury – Large bandwidth (192KHz – These can be allocated either as one lump or as 5 off 1 Khz segments to cover all beacon frequencis according to Alex).
??So not quite an off the self solution available but I’ll keep on updating when I get some news. Altough it does look like a softrock 40 needs to be purchased in order to have a good look at this as an option.
Posted 07 Nov 2007 — by Alex
Category Blogroll
I’ve switched hosts
Installed WordPress (which I might add is excellent and now provides the ‘no excuse for a bad site even if you are an IT muppet). Using my new hosts installation tool ‘Fantastico’ which it quite clearly is
Started the sorting out process…loads to do and not much time to do it in. A load of the pages need refilling and tarting up but thanks to my current best buddies for making this possible………
Stand up www.ukwebhosting.co.uk and take a bow
Stand up www.wordpress.org and take a bow
both of you have made this really easy
Posted 02 Nov 2007 — by Alex
Category Pocket PC
Well, as a first attempt at posting using my pocket pc I don’t think it went too bad
Posted 02 Nov 2007 — by Alex
Category Blogroll
I’ve found a new host, paid my fees to the old one for transferring my domain and am waiting for everything to be moved and ready for the wordpress installation. Hopefully this time I shall be able to do it myself but I’m not too proud to ask for help.
There’s still plenty to do now that I’ve started to transfer everything over to here ready to hopefully have it all as smooth as possible. I am quite trusting but also a little confused by all this technology. Maybe I’ll get it sorted shortly. Anyway now back to the work that pays my wages!
