First summit of the year

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Posted 17 Feb 2012 — by Alex
Category Radio

Well I can call it a summit because it features in Wainwright’s book but it really something to write home about as far as height for me. But, there’s always a but, I decided to go with the XYL, kids, mother in law (not sure what the shorthand is for one of those) and two dogs. Abigail is my eldest at 5 years old and Sam is only 3 so to them this was a veritable Himalaya.

Progress as you can image was at their pace and eventually I had an extra 20Kg on my shoulders as we went back into the cloud near the summit of Dodd (LDW-174). The summit is low at only 502m but the propagation into both Southern Scotland and Northern Ireland was in effect and I managed a summit to summit before the kids / XYL got bored. Needless to say the dogs didn’t bat an eyelid.

So I’m off the mark for this year and hopefully I’ll be able to get a few SOTA and WOTA summits in this year although I think I’ll avoid carrying the kids. The lake district is an excellent place to live and visit and I’m glad to have made some new contacts for the log and I hope it will help WOTA to grow and grow

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A little help

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Posted 13 Feb 2012 — by Alex
Category Web

Ok so this one isn’t strictly amateur radio but its a handy tip, or at least I think so.

I’m just about old enough to remember to tie up my shoelaces in the morning (Although its taken me 2 days to remember that I broke my shoelace and as yet haven’t remembered to open the drawer and replace it with the one I knew I bought a while ago). So I can remember that its quite easy to ‘Just upload your photo’s’ to this site or ‘just back up every 10 minutes’ or other mundane tasks that your computer should do for you without even questioning it. In fact it should almost be law that stuff is backed up as soon as you put it on your PC without having to ‘Just set this or that up’.

Where am I going with this?

The answer is recently I found If this then that (ifttt) and have used it to do simple tasks like cross posting and other little tasks on web based systems that it current supports.

Another one I found is Dropbox automator which like the name suggests does stuff to folders and files in you Dropbox folder as soon as you put them in. A pretty handy tool for when, like me you need to re-size photos for putting in this blog, uploading documents to Google Docs and other little boring jobs.

Hope you get some use out of these services like me, now where’s that shoelace before I forget

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Weekend 50Mhz vertical antenna

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Posted 08 Feb 2012 — by Alex
Category Antennas

One of the enduring aspects of amateur radio is the emphasis on ‘experimentation’ and ‘homebrew’. To many people this means designing innovative circuits for their own transceivers, amps or whatever floats their boat.

My area of interest is in collecting either bent wire, off cuts of cable and odd shaped plastic parts scavenged from just about any skip or rubbish bin I can find. Some people like to call this antenna experimentation. My XYL likes to call it ‘That junk in the garage’. I like to call it my continued education. Below is a teaser!

The latest in my armoury of ‘stuff I’ve done’ will never help anyone chase DX or bust a pile up for a little activated square or something else. But it will give me another band to work with when I’m away from home, either on top of a summit, at the mother in laws or operating portable in the summer Es season (I say summer because the top of St Bees head isn’t very welcoming in the winter as I found out whilst operating GB4LBC).

My take on the 5/8 wave 6m vertical originally published by the UKSMG by Mike, G3JVL took a little over a weekend and was made relatively cheaply from scrounged resources. I enjoyed the job so much I’ve added a little project page here which I hope you enjoy.

Feel free to try it out yourself and improve on the design path I took, let me know how you got on with the manufacturing of what should be a nice project (that can also be cheap if you’re scrounging skills are up to scratch)

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K1MAN

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Posted 03 Feb 2012 — by Alex
Category Radio

On 14.275MHz I have been listening to a ‘news’ broadcast by K1MAN. This may not be news to many of you but it’s the first time I’ve heard what seems like a pre-recorder loop of ‘news’ going on and on and on. Surely this isn’t legal?

I quick Google later I found out that this is an on going issue with the FCC, ARRL and just about every governing body in the US. So not really legal but loop holes are loop holes. Time to close them.

Oh dear

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Hermes a step closer

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Posted 03 Feb 2012 — by Alex
Category Radio

Southgate ARC News ran a short piece on TAPR and appointing PCB manufacturers the other day. Reading onto this could be catastrophic but I can see that Hermes is getting closer. I’ve been following this for a little while know and bump into Kevin Wheatly, M0KHZ, the project leader every once in a while. I am really looking forward to this innovative piece of kit coming to the open market. Having seen a very early prototype a few years ago I would love to get one of my greasy paws on one of these. A high performance (HF) shack in a very small box! Hold onto your hats for Dayton then!

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