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I’m finally eligible to claim one of my own WOTA certificates! This morning I made a contact with Phil G4OBK/P on Souther Fell and thereby completed working all of Wainwright’s Northern Fells.

Phil had preannounced his intention to visit Souther Fell on the WOTA website, which was the last one I needed. This fell is blocked by higher mountains so I can’t work it from home – I would have to get to a good vantage point. I could have driven to a suitable spot, parked and waited for Phil to appear but I decided to make the contact from a summit. The weather forecast was for rain, however, not the kind of conditions I normally choose for an activation. Out of the rucksack came the antenna mount (so I could use the waterproof rucksack cover) and the APRS radios (too expensive to risk getting wet.) The rig for the day was the Motorola GP300 with the base loaded Nagoya half wave telescopic.

The weather lived up to the forecast. By the time I reached the summit my boots had taken on water from the numerous puddles and long wet grass I had to traverse to reach it. My Goretex waterproof was letting in the rain, too. Only the inside of my rucksack remained dry. The views from this summit can be spectacular, but today was no day for a camera. So no photos. Instead, I’ll link to a page that has some pictures of what I could have seen on a better day.

I had to make several calls before I could raise anyone. Finally Malcolm M0XAT heard me. Next the Penrith duo, G0TDM and G4WHA, and then Colin G4UXH and Sue G1OHH from “down south” who were both at good signal strength. I then had a bit of a wait before Phil arrived on summit and began to call. I passed the time trying to wring the water out of my socks.

Mission accomplished I headed back down to the car, home and a hot bath. The radio and antenna are now in the hot water tank cupboard drying out. My boots will probably take a bit longer.

It’s annual general meeting time again for the Ridgeway Repeater Group (http://www.rrg.org.uk). The group looks after the GB3WH and GB3TD as well MB7UR and GB3NW in the Swindon area.

If you are close by, do come along – it would be great to see you there.

The meeting will be held at 19:30 at Thring Townsend, 6 Drakes Meadow, Penny Lane, Swindon. SN3 3LL

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It’s annual general meeting time again for the Ridgeway Repeater Group (http://www.rrg.org.uk). The group looks after the GB3WH and GB3TD as well MB7UR and GB3NW in the Swindon area.If you are close by, do come along – it would be great to see you there.The meeting will be held at 19:30 at Thring Townsend, 6 Drakes Meadow, Penny Lane, Swindon. SN3 3LL
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We are very pleased to announce the winner of
1,000 Photo QSL Cards
from KB3IFH

Thanks to Randy for sponsoring this month’s drawing.
We had almost 500 entries!

We’re giving away more great prizes soon.
Stay tuned and get ready to enter.

OK, onto what you’ve all been waiting for!

The winner of our May 2011 prize giveaway is…

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Series Four Episode Ten of the ICQ Podcast has been released. News Stories include :-

• Amateur Radio suffers robot interference setback 
• Disappointment when poorly designed equipment malfunctions 
• 1000 FUNcube group members 
• Radio Hams' Royal Wedding Tribute 
• Practical Introduction to Amateur Radio
• World Amateur Radio Day on prime-time TV 
• Your Callsign to Mars 
• Easy Soldering Comic Book
• New 2m ham radio station on ISS 
• Danny’s Digital Packet 
• Bell System Technical Journals online
• One Millionth QSO mark for Summits on the Air

Your feedback and Martin (M1MRB) discusses NVIS.

Series Four Episode Ten of the ICQ Podcast has been released. News Stories include :-

• Amateur Radio suffers robot interference setback 
• Disappointment when poorly designed equipment malfunctions 
• 1000 FUNcube group members 
• Radio Hams' Royal Wedding Tribute 
• Practical Introduction to Amateur Radio
• World Amateur Radio Day on prime-time TV 
• Your Callsign to Mars 
• Easy Soldering Comic Book
• New 2m ham radio station on ISS 
• Danny’s Digital Packet 
• Bell System Technical Journals online
• One Millionth QSO mark for Summits on the Air

Your feedback and Martin (M1MRB) discusses NVIS.

See original post here.  Convinced that I had it working, I put the IC-290A aside and worked on some other projects.  But, when I came back to it a few weeks later, the display was still disappearing.  So, armed with the schematic and the block diagram, I began narrowing it down.

The display digits and tuning A/D converter are both driven off the same bus.  But, since the disappearance of the display did not bring loss of receive, that gave me some confidence that it was not affecting the synthesizer.  In order to simplify the analysis, I elected to assume that it was a single component (almost certainly a cold solder joint or an electrolytic capacitor) at fault.

Another clue was that the VFO dial ceased to operate once the display started acting up.  Taking the single-point-of-failure assumption into account, this strongly implicated the microprocessor on the LOGIC board as a starting point.  The only suspicious device that I could find on the schematic was C9, a 1000-uF, 6.3-volt electrolytic capacitor on the Vcc line of the microprocessor.  So, I replaced it with a similar value unit from my junk box.

And, the radio seems to be working…for now.   I did park it on WA1ZMS/B overnight and it is still running.