AmateurRadio.com

Today is my wonderful wife Olga’s 60th birthday. Without her amazing help and support I don’t know if I would have the strength to cope with this brain tumour. I keep up the fight so that I will still be here to help celebrate the next one. Happy 60th birthday, Olga!

With propagation on 10m being so good I have been trying to make some contacts using the Albrecht AE2990AFS multimode handheld using a whip antenna. No luck so far, however.

One annoying aspect of the Albrecht is that it tunes in 10kHz steps since it is essentially a CB radio. There is a step control that lets you choose 1kHz or 50Hz tuning steps, but this only works within one 10kHz or 1kHz range. You can’t tune the whole band in these smaller steps. Not only that but the clarifier control (better known to hams as RIT) shifts only the receive frequency and doesn’t have a centre detent so you can never be sure you are calling a station on his exact frequency.

An eBay seller of the Super Radio SS-301 – which seems to be the same radio as the Albrecht under another name – claims that the clarifier works on both TX and RX. So there is presumably a modification that would make the clarifier work like a VXO. But I’m darned if I can find any details of it. Has anyone made such a modification to this radio?

Propagation on 10m today is as good as I can remember. I made a few nice contacts using SSB including Japan, India and Bahrain. I heard several Chinese stations as well but have yet to work one.

Not really DX but a new country for me was Albania, in the shape of Dik, ZA1E. Decades ago as a teenaged short wave listener I remember hearing Radio Tirana, a huge signal on 7.065MHz, smack in the middle of the 40m phone band. I wonder whether anyone ever listened to its broadcasts? They were pure anti-capitalist tirades read by a woman announcer who sounded like she had a beard and no sense of humour. They actually used phrases like “capitalist running dogs” if I remember correctly. At least Radio Moscow tried to make life on the other side of the iron curtain sound attractive.

I don’t think there was any ham radio activity in communist Albania and there still aren’t all that many hams there now so I was pleased to work Dik for a new one.

A couple of years ago I won a 25 year old “spares or repair” Kenwood TH-205E for a few pounds in an eBay auction. I successfully repaired it, but the ni-cad pack had failed short-circuit. I then had a stroke of luck as I found someone selling an 25 year old but unused KNB-4 battery pack for a couple of quid. It held a charge, so the problem was solved. The only disadvantage was that it was the large high capacity battery pack, much taller than the original, making the radio even bulkier than it already is. I nicknamed it “the brick.”

A few days ago I was looking at the Strikalite web site and noticed that they do battery pack refurbishment. I enquired whether they could repair the 205E’s original battery pack. “Send it to us and we’ll take a look at it” they said, so I did.

A few days later I received a phone call from Strikalite saying “We need to take some money off you.” I was a bit concerned as to how much it would be as they had not provided me with an estimate before starting. But I need not have worried. The total cost including postage and VAT was £19.99 which I think is very reasonable. They did quite a neat job, with only a little marking of the case where they had to pry the two halves apart.

£20 may seem like more than a 25 year old boat anchor that doesn’t support 12.5kHz spacing nor CTCSS for repeater access is worth. But actually the TH-205E has the best, most intermod-resistant receiver of any of my HTs due to the fact that it is designed for the 2m band only, not wide band coverage. If I ever get out on the fells again, the TH-205E would be a strong candidate to take. There’s life in the old thing yet!

Ten metres has been really lively today. I made several contacts including some with the USA. The highlight was working Osama, 9K2OD in Kuwait City who came back to my first call (SSB) even though he had a bit of a pile-up! Perhaps my attic dipole and QTH are not so shabby after all!

It’s great to experience propagation conditions like this again and it cheers me up no end. Real radio therapy!

I never did get the Spectrum Communications Off-Air Frequency Standard kit working. Now it is looking as though it would be a waste of time anyway as the BBC will be closing down the Radio 4 long wave transmitter that is used as a frequency standard.

An article published yesterday in the Guardian Online explains that the Radio 4 long wave transmitter uses valves (tubes) that are no longer obtainable. The BBC has the only ones still in existence. The transmitter uses a pair and they can last as little as one year. When the last valve blows, Radio 4 on long wave will become a thing of the past.

Building a new long wave  transmitter using up to date technology would cost millions which the BBC can no longer afford due to the need to cut costs as a result of the government’s decision to freeze the licence fee.

There are many other ways to receive the Radio 4 programming if the long wave transmitter closes down. But none of them involve a powerful 500kW transmitter whose frequency is maintained accurately enough to be used as a frequency standard.