AmateurRadio.com

It wasn’t until yesterday, browsing the Southgate ARC site that I learned of the death, on 21st June, of Gerry G3JJG. It was good to see that the Gloucestershire Echo had published a nice obituary for him, although it didn’t mention his amateur radio interests!
I’d known Gerry since my days as a new licencee in Cheltenham. Particularly in those days, I was very much in awe of his ability in CW operating and learned a very great deal from Gerry and Derek, G3NKS in the 1980s and early 1990s as we took part in RSGB’s NFD on behalf of the Cheltenham ARA. I remember Terry, G3JFH marvelling at Gerry’s ability to dig out weak signals on the 40m band in the last hour or so of the contest when many other groups were working nothing!

Gerry’s obituary mentions that he was tenacious! I can confirm that and had cause to receive more than one ‘tenacious’ e-mail when I was RadCom’s Contest Columnist and therefore perceived to be responsible for the RSGB’s Contest Calendar and Rules. Suffice to say that Gerry was not impressed with something (I completely forget now and he probably had a point in any case….) and I was TOLD about it!

Tenacious he was, but in my experience he was never rude and always a gentleman. He was a proud member of the First Class CW Operators Club and had served on their committee for several years.

I shall miss hearing G3JJG on the bands. Gerry, it was a pleasure to have known you.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d been looking at these rigs. Well, I have had the chance to play with one and I must say I’m not disappointed.

Quite obviously the rig shows its CB heritage. It’s quite big too. Certainly it wouldn’t fit in the centre console of my VW Polo in the same way that the FT8900 does.

The rig comes with a mounting kit for the car (which I made double as a stand) since the loudspeaker is on the bottom of the case, not ideal if you want to place it on a shelf in the shack.

I’ve found the rig fun and easy to use. As supplied in the AT5555N configuration from Nevada, the rig is 28MHz amateur band only. I quickly got used to the channel change moving me up or down 10khz and using the clarifier to tune in between in either 1, 0.1 or 0.01 KHz steps. This is only of significance on CW/SSB of course.

So far, I have had the rig connected up to the Butternut HF6V at home and have had a number of contacts around Europe using Sporadic E propagation. Some more distant signals have been heard from South America and the Middle East.

Output power is around 10W FM and a little more on SSB. Entirely adequate to make some fun contacts. Haven’t tried it on CW yet, but it should work with an external keyer.

I like the fact that the rig is available through Amazon making it easily accessible to someone who might be new to the hobby or getting back into it again.

If you’ve not played on 28MHz before then with rising solar flux, this is the time to do it!

I’ve just noticed that my first posting to this blog was on the 24 June 2006 – making the blog five years old.

What I have enjoyed about it is that I can write about anything that interests me in Amateur Radio be it a passing interest-du-jour or something more long standing.

It always fascinates me which posts get the most visits. The ones about setting up D-STAR have been popular – which I was pleased about. I was less pleased that a rare comment on RSGB politics was the best read post of all time on the blog! Why was I less pleased? Because this blog has always been about getting on and trying ‘stuff’ in Amateur Radio out – not paperwork and politics! So I guess if someone wants to write a blog on Amateur Radio politics, you’ll get great readership. But I won’t be writing it!

Thank you for reading the blog – if you’ve been reading since 2006 then my commiserations – but thank you!

For a while I’d been wanting to reroute the coax from the Butternut HF6V to the shack. Where was it going before, I hear you ask? Well, the lounge actually… it’s a long story.

Got around to the job yesterday and put a new coax run in up the garden, secured it to the fence and neatly tacked it up along the side of the house. When we put the V2000 vertical up on the house the other day, we drilled another hole into the shack to take this coax.

However, I had a very frustrating half hour or so trying to get the coax through the hole (which it turned out was not quite straight) – the coax kept missing the hole at the other side of the cavity and curling around.

Julie seeing my exasperation suggested I had lunch whilst I worked out a plan. Over a prawn mayo sandwich I noticed a number 8 knitting needle sitting on her desk….

Once replete, I marched outside with the knitting needle, a knife and some insulation tape. I stripped back the outer of the coax and the screen, leaving the inner of the coax to the same length as the knitting needle. I then taped the end of the coax as tightly as possible to the sharp end of the knitting needle. And poked!

The needle and coax went through the hole first time. From the inside, I undid the insulation tape from the tip and pulled the coax through as far as it would go. Then I went outside and gently retracted the knitting needle (I really didn’t want the coax to follow it!).

Back inside and I was then able to pull the coax through into the shack fully! And hastily, I rinsed the knitting needle to ensure it was once again fit for knitting!

So, I can now play HF should I wish. Currently the Butternut vertical is connected to the Anytone AT-5555. More on that in a separate post.

If you don’t have a knitting needle handy, a straightened metal coathanger may serve the same purpose.

It was a nice surprise to have an e-mail last week from Fred, PA4YBR explaining that a new version of the WinDV DSTAR software is available for download.

I grabbed a copy and have been playing with it in conjunction with my DVAP Dongle. Like the previous version, v1.1.3 works well and has some useful new features. If you’ve got GPS on your rig, you can pass that into the network and have your location shown on http://aprs.fi and there’s also an interface to ircDDB which I have to admit, I’ve not explored yet.

I like the fact that WinDV allows you to set up connects from the software, rather than fiddling around setting callsigns on the (in my case) IC-E92. There’s more debugging information than in the current DVAP Tool as well.

WinDV works with DVAPs and Hotspots too. I definitely recommend you check it out – you can download it here

I happened to logon to my eQSL account the other day – I’d recently configured my logging program, Winlog32 to automatically upload QSO records as I make them. I hadn’t logged into eQSL for quite a while, but I noticed that I’d qualified for eDX100 (100 countries confirmed on eQSL) and ePFX300 (Over 300 prefixes confirmed on eQSL).It was fun getting the certificates back – I’m not at all into the whole awards / QSL part of radio at all – but since all I had to do was press ‘Apply for award’ then that’s ok!Funny wording on the certs though…..

I’ve been quite tempted by one of the Anytone AT5555 10m transceivers. Quite clearly its heritage is a CB radio, but there’s an appeal in the simplicity of it. A few watts of SSB on 28MHz can go a long way as we know by now, and FM can be fun at times. Partly I’d thought about having one for the car – as long as I could find a 10m mobile antenna that will fit under the barrier at the station! Reading around on the web, reviews are fairly favourable. Still haven’t quite convinced myself to push ‘buy’ on the website! Anyone reading this that’s tried one?Either way – the musings have convinced me to reroute the coax from the Butternut vertical to the shack (it was previously routed to the lounge…) so that I can listen on 28MHz a bit more on one of the rigs I’ve got around. If I get a chance this weekend I’ll work on that.