Testing...

Since I am hoping to take a trip to Cornwall for a few days shortly I thought I would assemble and test out my portable station. The fine weather this evening provided the ideal opportunity.

First I dug out the Yaesu FT857, removing it from the shack an replacing it with this old Yaesu FT211 which is fine for 2 metre FM use.

Next I took out my 12 volt portable pack and set up the FT857, Buddistick antenna, MFJ tuner and my "new" mini CW key and set it all up in the back garden.

The Buddistick was set up on the lawn and tuned for 40 metres

After tuning around a very lively 40 metre band I tried listening on CW. I was rewarded by a QSO with G0NXA. I was running 25watts and got a 559 report, not bad for the tiny Buddistick with two radial wires laid on the lawn!
At least I know the setup is working, hopefully I will have time to use it when I am Away.

Key decisions

Following on from my last post I had also decided that I might try some CW operating when I next use the portable gear. In the past I have worked SSB only but with my very limited antenna system I should get better results with CW. I have two keys here in the shack, both my paddle key and the straight key are too large and possibly too fragile to take along in my portable kit. I mentioned this fact in a conversation on 2 metres a few days ago and a local GW3 friend told me he had three keys that he would be interested in selling.
A few days later he called around with the keys, leaving them with me to try them out and choose the one I liked.

You can see my own "Straight Key" at the rear to give some idea of the size of the smaller keys. Although initially I liked the look and feel of the key on the left,and it had quite a weighty base it wasn't the one I chose. I found it very difficult to adjust and wasn't too happy with the way that the lead that connects it is on the right hand side of the key rather than at the rear. The little key at the centre was my final choice although I really need to find a base for it now. Note the lever to the right of the key. Moving this closes the contacts so that the key is continuously  "down". I wonder was this designed to help "tuning up" so that you don't have to press the key down?

Portable power

The Yaesu FT857D that sits in my shack is slightly wasted in its current role as a two metre rig. I originally bought it some years ago to use for portable work and got to thinking that perhaps I should actually use it for that purpose.I also have a portable "Buddistick" vertical and  two suitable portable twelve volt power packs here. 
The first pack  large heavy unit which contains a 20ah battery which although its a few years old now still seems to hold a charge.

This is a useful piece of kit buts its heavy, not suitable for a long walk and too weighty to pop into a rucksack/backpack

The smaller pack is a lot lighter, it is a 12 volt 4.5ah rated pack. This unit  is older and I have recently found that even after a full charge it was only showing just over ten volts.
With nothing to loose I opened it up and found it contained two 6 volt batteries.

Luckily the electronics supplier Maplin stocks identically rated and sized batteries and I was able to replace these worn out items leaving me with a useful small pack again.

Amazingly for less than the cost of the new batteries I could have bought a whole new unit. I didnt do this because none of the new units I saw were as compact and light as this one and they had features I didn't need such as compressors for inflating tyres and jump leads for starting cars. All this unit has are the twelve volt sockets seen in the picture and a useful light at the rear.

Now all I need is some fine weather and free time to go portable again!

Museum piece?

Last weekend I was lucky enough to take a trip up to London. Whilst there I visited the Science Museum.
Amongst the many exhibits there was a section on telecommunications. Since this is a museum I wasn't surprised to see exhibits such as the one below which shows a ships radio room from the early 1900's.

A little more of a surprise was the fact that there was a small section on Amateur and Citizens' band radio with exhibits that looked familiar, in fact the equipment on display is the same as that used by many radio amateurs today!

I am sure most of you will recognise the two amateur "rigs". The small transceiver on the bottom right is an "SMC Oscar One" mobile CB for the UK FM citizens band.
I guess these rigs are museum pieces being in excess of 30 years old now but I wonder how many museum goers will realise there are still plenty of similar radios in daily use!

Sad News

If you are  in any way interested in Shortwave listening you may already have seen or heard the news that the English service of Radio Netherlands is closing down at the end of this month.
This in itself is not that surprising, many international broadcasters have left shortwave, generally replacing their broadcasts with an internet based service.
The shock news here is that Radio Netherlands is also closing its English webstream. so no more Radio Netherlands via my internet radio. This is a real shame RN's programmes were high quality and very informative in fact they were easily the most listened to station on my Internet Radio. So maybe we are not just witnessing the demise of shortwave broadcasting but also international broadcasting via the web. It is puzzling as in the past such broadcasters have always maintained an internet presence, In any event I will miss Radio Netherlands!

Adventures in Audio

Whilst I haven't been able to operate HF from home for the last few weeks I have been considering some small improvements I could make to the station. My Yaesu Ft1000MP which I have owned from new is capable of producing excellent transmit audio. I had always felt though that I hadn't really taken advantage of this.,
I was recently inspired by watching an episode of Ham Nation (well worth a look if you don't already know about it) a U.S based internet videocast full of amateur radio features and hosted by Bob Heil. In episode 36 there is a feature on improving audio.
Anyway I now have a "studio" type microphone hooked into a small mixer

Initial tests running the rig into a dummy load and monitoring on my R5000 receiver seem quite positive with punchy audio which is adjustable using the 3 band EQ on the mixer. The Microphone by the way is a fairly cheap "pro sound" unit obtained from Maplins.

Hopefully I can soon get this set up "on air" and get some audio reports.

No Shed, No antenna!

When I first moved to to this QTH I surveyed the garden looking for a suitable place to anchor the far end of my HF wire antenna.
At the end of my garden was this monstrosity

It was ugly, it leaked, the door didnt close properly and the window was missing! However it was a convenient place to bolt a pole to so that it could hold one end of my doublet antenna.

But it had to go and it now looks like this

So for now I have no HF antenna. I now need to to set up a pole and pulley system so that I can erect my new wire antenna. I have bought a commercial antenna called the Western HF10. There is a review of it on G0KYA's blog here. This antenna should just about fit in a straight line down my garden.
In addition I still have to put up my 10-15-20 hygain vertical. Sadly the poor weather and the amount of other household work I have been doing has got in the way!