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After a hour or so of the JT-65 used frequencies (note – not allocated but generally used frequencies) being covered in RTTY I decided not to bother trying to have a QSO using that mode. It also helped that the JT-65 programme kept crashing on my struggling net top.

I thought I’d try and listen out for the ISS if it was passing me by and using HamSatDroid on my trusty phone I was presented with a big fat ‘not today you won’t’.  I remembered that I hadn’t updated the Keplerian data before checking the passes so I did and the programme defaults to the first on the list. AO-07. It showed that it was due to make a pass in about an hour. With this opportunity I assembled my Sotabeams SB270 and checked to see if the pass was easily visible from my house, i.e. from about SW to roughly NNE and luckily it was so I thought this would be an opportunity to taken.

Bearing in mind it was dark at this time and my decking needs a good coat of ‘taking down and rebuilding thanks to Story homes’ I pointed the antenna skyward and was met with a crackly warbly of ‘CQ satellite’ from a German station. he called CQ for the complete pass and I didn’t hear a single response to his calling. At this point I wish I had a duplexer connected to the antenna and a steady tripod as well as a handy lightweight rotator to help with the pass as this was too good an opportunity to miss. Alas I had none of the above and the station went unanswered. A 2m / 70cm duplexer is now on the shopping list as the chance of me being able to spend some time making a rotator is fairly small. Perhaps a larger one will come available at a Hamfest or eBay.

VHF is by no means easy at my QTH but there seem to be opportunities and its probably about time I explored a few of them

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.