AmateurRadio.com

How’s this for poor service? I ordered a 2m 5/8 vertical online from Radioworld on Wednesday May 5th. That afternoon I received an email updating the order status to “Despatched.” I paid £10.00 for next day courier. We have ensured that someone has been in all the time every day since then and no-one has tried to deliver an antenna.

I sent an email at lunchtime asking why I hadn’t received it yet. As of now, I have had no reply. Why is buying ham radio equipment always such a hassle?

A few weeks ago I set up an experimental low power EchoLink node for use as a personal EchoLink “hot spot” using my FT-817 and a dummy load. I planned to make a a dedicated transceiver / computer interface for this. I thought I found the ideal basis for the project in this UHF Micro Transceiver Module from Elcom Research, a Greek company that makes packet radio and APRS products. The transceiver runs on 5V and can be powered by a computer USB port.

Perhaps I should have been warned off by the fact that an enquiry made through the web form on the Elcom site went unanswered, but I went ahead and ordered the module on 9th April, paying online using PayPal. After a couple of weeks nothing had been received, so I sent an email enquiry and received a reply that it had been sent by air mail and should be with me by the end of the week or the beginning of the next one. This was during the flying hiatus caused by the Icelandic volcano, so I gave it a bit longer. However it is now a week after the week that the module should have been received at the beginning of, and a further email received no answer at all. It looks unlikely that I will receive the module at all, so I guess my only option is to initiate the PayPal disputes procedure.

I finally completed phase 1 of the shack renovation. G4ILO is back on the air!

The floor is now covered in wood laminate, and there is a shelf unit on the desk that displays all my radio equipment “ready to go”.

On the “ground floor” is the VHF antenna rotator, the MFJ noise canceling unit, the tuner for the MFJ magnetic loop and my two Morse keys.

On the next level is my Diamond GSV3000 power supply and my Elecraft K3. There is space for a new addition to the right of the K3. This will not be a P3 panadapter, the pictures of which haven’t excited me at all, nor will it be the recently announced Elecraft 500W linear amplifier – as if I could use one with my attic antennas!

The shelves above the K3 lift out to make it easier to access the back of the radio for changing cables. On the second storey is my QRP K2 with its matching power supply. The K2 is really there just for display, as it isn’t actually connected to any antennas, though I could easily swap an antenna from the K3 to the K2 if I wanted to. The K2 power supply runs a few other items including the FT-817ND, seen on the right with the Microset R50 144MHz amplifier. The 817 is doing duty as my 2m rig at the moment – I have given up the transverter due to a number of issues including poor memory ergonomics of the K3 and the fact that it is convenient to be able to monitor or even operate on 2m while the K3 is otherwise occupied.

The top shelf holds the Medion computer speakers that deliver decent-sounding audio out of the K3, my KK7UQ PSK IMD Meter and my collection of VHF/UHF hand-held radios and their chargers.

The opposite wall is still a hodge-podge of shelves screwed to the wall. Phase 2 is to install a custom designed system of shelves and cupboards so the boxes of “junk” can be hidden away behind closed doors. There is a firm that has a web site where you can design your own unit from standard modules and it arrives as a giant flat pack which you assemble. Olga is designing it as she is much better at that sort of thing than me.

I’m not very skilled at joinery and my home made shelf unit doesn’t look all that professional but it’s better than what I had. Having all (well, most of) my radios at my fingertips I feel for the first time in my life like I have an actual radio station. I made a few contacts today including a PSK31 QSO with Greece on 12m, two SOTA stations on VHF and a nice slow morse contact with Helge, LA1PRA on 80m.

This afternoon I disconnected all the equipment in my shack and removed it. I shall be off the air for a while.

The room I use for my shack is very small and I have run out of space to store all my electronic parts, tools and books. There is no space to permanently set up all my radios, so my K2 and FT-817 rarely get used in the shack although they could be. The only solution is to make some proper built-in cupboards and shelving. Before I do that it makes sense to rip out the worn-out carpet and replace it with something better. So I have to completely dismantle the shack and remove everything.

Hopefully it won’t be too many days before I can get the radios and computer back up and running again. No doubt, whilst I am unable to take advantage of them, there will be some major band openings!

On a clear day from here you can normally see at any one time two or three vapour trails from transatlantic jets at 35,000 feet on their way to London’s airports. For five days there have been none. The weather has been fine and the sky blue, so blue that it’s easy to doubt whether the density of dust from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland poses any real threat to aviation, or whether it is just bureaucrats being over-cautious.

Whatever the risk, the aviation ban is real and there can be no-one in Britain who has not been affected by it one way or another. The first effect we noticed was when we went to a classical music concert last Friday in Carlisle. The piano soloist was unable to get there so the Mozart piano concerto was played by a stand-in.

I received an email from one Hong Kong eBay seller to tell me that the programming interface for the Motorola radio I bought at Blackpool which I ordered from him would take longer to arrive. I expect other items I have ordered from eBay and elsewhere, including a transmitter module for my dedicated Echolink node radio, will be similarly delayed, as there is no air mail. We take for granted that we can order things from China or the USA and have them in a few days. Not any longer.

Friends of ours who are due to return from Ukraine tomorrow are probably not going to be able to make it unless London Luton airport is miraculously opened. They are due to return to work on Thursday and are very anxious not to provide their employers with an excuse to terminate their contracts.

That’s the situation now, but with seismologists saying that the volcano could continue to erupt off and on for the next year or two and even suggesting that another, larger Icelandic volcano is due for an eruption, what is the future for the airline industry? If there’s a high probablility of getting stranded abroad like so many people are now, how many are going to decide to change their travel plans and stay close to home for the next few months? I will, for sure.

I dare say canny investors will be selling airline shares and investing in shipping. And I don’t suppose it will be long before the first package holiday companies start going bankrupt because of all the refunds and cancellations. Like the banking collapse, I think this is another event that is going to have permanent repercussions.

Trust Nature to cut us down to size. We humans think we are so powerful we can end global warming, yet in a few hours the earth achieved what governments alone could never have managed – a complete grounding of aviation. I suspect that a really big volcanic eruption could have a bigger impact on global climate than any of the measures agreed by the politicians.

I hadn’t been to a hamfest (or radio rally as such events are known over here) for several years. On Friday I mentioned to Olga that the Northern Amateur Radio Societies Association Amateur Radio, Computer and Electronics Exhibition was being held at Blackpool on Sunday and it was supposed to be quite a good one and she said “why not go?” I then suggested that we book a hotel for the Saturday night so we could travel down the day before and see some of the sights of Blackpool, which neither of us had been to before. So we did.

The sights of Blackpool served only to help me understand why most Brits these days go to Spain for their holidays, but the NARSA Exhibition lived up to its reputation and was well worth the trip. I spent very little but came back with a large bundle of components most of which I will probably never use, plus an apparently unused Motorola Radius GP 300 handheld, sans battery, which I was unable to resist as the price was £1. It was also nice to meet in person several people I had previously only worked on the air, exchanged emails with or who were readers of my blog.

It’s impossible to give a full picture of an event this size so I’ll just mention a few of the stands that were of particular interest.

Occupying a prime position right by the entrance was the stand of Cross Country Wireless run by Chris G4HYG and his XYL. He was displaying the new end-fed antennas I mentioned a couple of days ago, as well as his well-established APRS products and the new program APRS Messenger. Chris commented that the number of visits to his site increased noticeably after I’d mentioned the antennas in my blog – hopefully he got some sales as well!

Ian G0VGS and Kev G6FKE were manning the Sands Contest Group stand and also giving visitors a chance to look at the K2 and K3 transceivers by Elecraft.

My local club, Workington Radio Club is a NARSA member and had an impressive stand, manned in this picture by Barry G0RZI and Tony G1OAE.

Summits On The Air also had a stand where I was able to chat about WOTA with Tom M1EYP and his son Jimmy M3EYP, and meet Phil G4OBK who is the top activator in the Wainwrights On The Air (WOTA) scheme (and the only one so far to have earned a certificate.) Olga took this picture but unfortunately she caught me just as I blinked!

It was a very enjoyable day, but now you’ll have to excuse me, I have a large bag of components to sort out!

By the time I had finished repairing the TH-205E the sky had cleared and the sun had come out so after tea I thought I should go for a bit of fresh air and exercise. Olga is still suffering from a chesty cough and didn’t want to come so I decided to drive over to Tallentire village and walk to the top of Tallentire Hill. A couple of weeks ago I had spent a couple of hours parked near the top making some contacts from my HF mobile station. But it isn’t possible to get right to the top by car unless you have a 4 wheel drive vehicle, because the track is rather stony. Even if you had a 4×4, there is nowhere to park off the road right at the top. The actual summit is in a small field and accessible through an unlocked gate from the track, but it is presumably private land so whilst walkers enjoying the view may be welcome, hams setting up a portable station would probably be accused of trespassing.

But on a day like today it is worth going just for the view. The picture above shows the trigonometrical point (a reference point for measuring height used by the Ordnance Survey) looking south east towards the Skiddaw range. On the larger version (click on the small one to see it) you can see snow-covered mountains beyond Keswick in the background.

The next picture shows the view south west and on the large version you can see some of the buildings of Cockermouth nestling in its valley. The big mountain on the left is Grasmoor with its steep drop towards Crummock Water. In the distance you can see the Buttermere fells.

The last picture shows the view north across the Solway to Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. I don’t know the names of the Scottish mountains.

I would love to own the field containing this summit so I could use it as a portable site whenever I wanted, even if it meant buying a 4×4 vehicle! With the take-offs shown in the pictures the site might be quite good for VHF, so I will have to take the MFD and the FT-817 up there one day when there is a 2m contest in progress.

Today I didn’t manage to raise anyone with the TH-F7E I took with me. But despite the sun it was pretty cold up there with a stiff breeze so after a few calls on 145.500 I headed back down again.