having had a pretty poor Es season compared to last year I have switched back to HF. This hasn’t really worked either…..There must be some radio gremlins floating about as I’ve hardly even heard a European station for weeks let alone someone from further afield. All I’m getting is a load of old noise.
Good for the XYL as its made me fit the new Freesat cabling ( I don’t do Sky) for our PVR. Tidy up the garden and other uninteresting home type tasks. I even managed to get out and do a 10 mile time trial on my bike last Tuesday. Another first.
Its amazing what else you end up doing when the bands are dead…
Not being a big apple fan I don’t have an i(ffy)phone so I chose a blackberry storm which does does what its supposed to. Make calls etc that sort of thing. Its got one or rather had one small issue. The bottom right hand section of the screen didn’t click very well whilst the rest of the screen worked perfectly (Blackberry put a sort of clicking feel to the screen when you press it so its got a tactile feel and its obvious once you’ve clicked something).
Whilst having a casual google I found a solution. Using a post-it note…..I nearly fell off my chair laughing, firstly as to why these devices don’t always work as well as they are designed and secondly how a folded over post-it note was the ‘Eureka moment’ for solving the problem. still it works fine now.
One of the benefits of being a clanky is that quite a few companies still run the ‘Friday afternoon off work’ policy. My company is one of them. This friday I decided to see if my IC-7000 with it’s reciever would be capable of receiving weather satellite images. I have the reciever, a copy of Wxtoimg for decoding the signals, I was short of a suitabel antenna. A hombrew antenna was in on the cards.
Following the design that is on G4ILO’s website for a QFH antenna, I trotted off to focus and bough a few lengths of waste pipe, 22mm and 40mm NB sections.
My daughter, at 3 1/2, was my assistant and chief marker of the pipes that needed to be cut. She also helped pick the best looking pieces of pipe work, although she was a little disappointed that nothing was pink! I’ll have to address this if I’m going to count on her services in the future.
The design looks quite complicated but actually isn’t that hard to follow once you get your head round the various connections. I used some left over co-ax for mine and after an hour or so of cutting, drilling and stripping (the coax) a rather wonky looking QFH antenna was borne.
Once all connected up and the software running I had high hopes of receiving something. Wxtoimg was kind enough to tell me that the signal was in the range of ‘it stinks’ to ‘ signal? what signal?’. Even with careful calibration of the sound levels, swapping between the wonky QFH and normal 2m vertical gave no change. The error was summarised by ‘Narrow IF bandwidth – please upgrade software’ or similar. Upgrade in this sense meant shelling out nearly 50 Euro’s, a little more than I was prepared to do for a look see.
I tried other software and the result, or lack of result was the same. The conclusion for this weekends fun with radio projects is, the IC-7000 isn’t particulary good for Wx satellite reception, probably due to the bandwith and my cheapo antenna. My daughter isn’t that interested in radio (unless its pink) and that if I’m going to find out if the antenna is any good then I’m going to have to shell out, either for the software or a dedicated / better receiver.
Still I enjoyed the build and all the parts cost me £6.
Until this morning I had no real idea what this was. Now courtesy of a gentle stinging in my knee I now know that my right one isn’t as happy as it could be. I’m begining to think that my running days are numbered. So far I’ve managed to break my ankle, knacker up my toes and now a prescribed 6 to 12 months off running .
I think I’ll stick to cycling, but then again I ought to curb my super descending down cold fell as knowing my current sporting luck I’ll come off. I nearly hit a sheep at 45mph on tuesday evening…Is someone suggesting that I ought to stick to video games or something else.
