6 Metres

When I first moved to this location, just over three years ago one of the first antennas I put up was a tri band 6/2/70cms vertical. I found it to be rather noisy on 6 metres and since I could only hear one 6 metre FM repeater, very noisily and there wasn't much else going on 50 mhz I took it down.
I replaced it with a dualband X30 vertical which being smaller I managed to get up higher in the air. The X30 works very well, as well as an antenna can work in this very poor VHF/UHF location in the bottom of a valley.
A couple of weeks back, when there was a sporadic E opening on 10 I found myself wondering whether 6 metres would be open too. I renmebered that I had a 6 metre dipole lying in my shed, one had had successfully used loft mounted in a previous location.

Today I dug it out, connected it to some spare RG8X cable I had and put it up outside. Its less than 5metres up at the moment but should work OK if the band opens.

Since my main HF rig, the FT10000MP doesn't cover 6 I have put the Icom 7000 back on the operating desk for this band.

Lets hope I haven't missed all the SP E openings this year!!!

A new receiver

I have owned the Cross Country Wireless SDR 4+  SDR receiver for a couple of years now. I wasn't sure how I would get on with an SDR, as it turned out I have really taken to it. I am probably more active as an SWL than I am as a transmitting radio amateur but since having the SDR in the shack my Kenwood R1000 and R5000 traditional analogue receivers have been hardly used. there is a link on this blog to a short review of the SDR4+and I will soon be updating it with my views of the receiver two years on, but basically I have been really pleased with it. It is still in almost daily use and coupled with my elderly Windows XP laptop acting as a server works well remotely.
One of the big plus points of the SDR is than I can control it remotely over the internet using my compact Acer Netbook computer and I have had a lot of fun doing this. I suppose the next step would normally be an SDR transceiver like the flex radio but for my ham radio activities I still prefer the traditional "knobs and buttons" approach of my rigs.

However on the receiver side, early in December I ordered  a Elad FDM S2 direct sampling SDR.
This receiver covers from 9khz up to 160mhz and comes with its own bespoke software. Due to a stock shortage the receiver was not delivered until 24th December, this meant that with the Christmas festivities and visiting family  I have not had much time to use the receiver until the last week or so.

Here it is sitting on top of the SDR4+. Although  almost the same width the Elad is only half the depth. Its facilities are more complex than the SDR4+ and the software takes some getting used to although I can also use third party software such as the "SDR Radio"  package which I am more familiar with. First impressions of this receiver are excellent, although it is more demanding of the PC hardware. My main machine here in the shack is a dual core processor with 4Mb of Ram but struggles with the receiver on some of the wider bandwidth settings-possible an upgrade of the shack PC will be required.
I have no doubt I will be posting more about the Elad as I get to know it better.

Just prior to the Christmas break a fault developed with my main station antenna the Western HF10 doublet. I checked all the obvious things, the coax cable was OK, no breaks in the Ribbon cable feeder (which seems to be the antennas only weak point-it is otherwise extremely well made), The antenna element itself was checked for continuity as were the loading coils. All seemed ok but the antenna would not tune on 80 metres. As I was short of time I have taken the antenna down and replaced it with a half size G5RV for now. I will give the balun connections on the HF 10 a good clean up and replace the ribbon feeder and hope that will cure the problem. I am keen to get it back up in the air as I have found it to be an excellent antenna.

Antenna Repairs

After my antenna problems on the weekend I was keen to drop my wire doublet and see if I could sort things out.
The Western HF 10 commercial doublet I use is extremely well made and hasn't had any problems in the 18 months or so that it has been up. Although I installed a small a small centre support to anchor the balun that is at the end of the 450ohm ladder line the ladder line itself is still under some strain, particularly in high winds. I suspected therefore that the problem was either the ladder line or the balun itself. The designer does suggest the antenna is fully supported in the centre but this isn't really possible at my QTH.

Using my trusty multimeter I checked the antenna for continuity and sure enough the "earth" leg of the doublet was not connected the to "earth" side of the ladder line. I then disconnected the bottom of the ladderline  but one part broke off in my hand!

OK so this was the problem, I stripped back the offending piece of wire and reattached to the balun.

However, back in the shack and testing the antenna showed all was still not well. I dropped the antenna again and did what i should have done after the repair, used the multimeter again and could then see the "earth " of the antenna was still not connected. In fact there was another break in the same wire a few centimeters up. More stripping and re-attaching to the balun and things were back to normal. One side of the ladder line is now slightly shorter than the other but this doesnt seem to cause any noticeable problems. Still I think i will have to replace the whole section sooner or later.

Murphy's Law

Back at the home QTH this morning with an unexpected couple of hours free to play radio, mainly due to the wet weather.
Switched on the rig and linear, tuned up for 40 metres and worked a couple of special event stations taking part in the "mills on the air" weekend. Then I noticed the linear "flashing over" and an erratic SWR reading on my doublet.  On  receive it was like a rapid QSB effect.
So I had to close down and investigate. I checked all the patch leads, they were fine, then went out to the antenna and put my dummy load at the antenna end to check my coax feed, again all ok. So the problem is the antenna itself- not surprising with the high winds and heavy rain we have had over the last few days. It was too wet and windy to drop the antenna today so I am hoping to get some fine weather and time in the evenings this week to investigate. In the meantime I can operate 15 metres and above on the vertical.

New Tri Bander

Well the new 6m/2m/70cms vertical is finally in place, it was put up with the kind assistance of local amateur GW3FSP.

The weak point in these antennas is, in my opinion, the single nut or screw that holds the antenna to its support tube. You can install the brackets and clamp the antenna up as tightly as you like but if that screw fails you have a problem.

  You can just see the all important screw directly below the radials. The antenna itself is a "Sharmans" branded V2000. I imagine it is effectively a copy of the Diamond V2000, whether the quality is any different-time will tell.

The little Watsom W30 vertical I took down served me well, it is still in good order and I may use it as a backup antenna in the loft or even take it portable.


It is currently connected up to my Elderly 2 metre FM rig, although I dug out  the Yaesu FT857 which I use for portable work to test things on 6 metres and 70 cms. Indications are that this new antenna has a bit more gain on 2 metres plus of course gives me the ability to use the 6 metre band, although I have pretty much missed out on the sporadic E season!!

I am still debating whether I can justify another rig in the shack to cover 6/2 and 70. I could use the FT857 I suppose that normally stays packed away for the odd portable outing. The funny thing is I was never that keen on the 857 in the shack, its display is rather small and it is a little fiddly to use in my opinion. The Icom 706 I have in the car is better in that respect. An Icom 706MK2g would be nice, or even an Icom 7000 (but these seem very expensive). In any event I will also need a duplexer to split between 6 metres and vhf/UHF

Antenna Work

Last weekend the weather was good here so on Saturday I started some antenna work.
Currently one end of my HF doublet and my VHF/UHF vertical is supported by this pole.

I am not sure how well the picture captures it but that bracket and pole are not quite vertical!! When I moved here in my enthusiasm to get on air I put the bracket up on a cold wet autumn evening and well...........I could have done a better job.

I have now installed a T and K bracket and will be putting a thicker , larger diameter pole up as my new mast. The old fitting will then be taken down.

As part of the antenna work I will be installing a new vertical for 6m/2m and 70 cms. I thought I would assemble the new antenna in advance and set it up on a short pole in the garden just to test it. A local amateur had a similar antenna and found the SWR was high on 6 metres and in order to get it right had to shorten the 6 metre radial.

I used my Yaesu FT857 with an external SWR meter to test the antenna. This proved interesting, the 857 has a built in SWR meter, its not calibrated, just a series of 'blobs' on the lcd but its an indicator I suppose.

On 6 metres I had an SWR reading of 1.6:1 on the external meter, not brilliant but acceptable so I wont be trimming the radial on my antenna, oddly the 857 meter was showing a perfect match (no blobs) and 2 metres both the external and 857 meters showed a good match. On 70 Cms the external meter showed again a good match, the meter on the 857 indicating quite a high SWR. It seems that the built in meters are not really that consistent, something I also noticed with the Icom 706 I have in the car.

Anyway the vertical is ready to go up on a new mast once I have some more time and some decent weather!

21 Mhz

Conditions seemed quite strange today, most of the times I listened the bands seemed pretty flat. However I tuned around 15 metres at teatime and managed to work 7Z1TT on  my first call. Running 100 watts I got a report of 58 on the Antron vertical. Not bad for a CB antenna!

!

Out with the old

Well the old, rather poor quality Sirio Boot (trunk) antenna mount on my car finally gave up a few weeks back. I used this mount for my VHF antenna. The Coax connection came adrift inside the mount. I had been meaning to change it for some time anyway so no problem. Actually there was a problem. Not only was the mount rusted on top and looking pretty nasty, the allen screws underneath which grip the bottom of the boot lip had rusted solid! Nothing would shift them! The answer? My trusty hacksaw- I had to carefully cut the mount of. Lukily I managed to avoid damaging the car.
I replaced the mount with an unbranded one obtained from Ebay, model number MB400. It looks a lot sturdier than the Sirio but time well tell. In any event it is unlikely to last as long as the Diamond mount holding my HF mobile whip, that must be around 20 years old. Those mounts are around £60 new though so for now I will try the MB400!!

60 Metres

Today I applied online for a notice of Variation to my licence to enable me to operate on 60 metres. The NOV was granted seconds after applying so it seems the intention is now to grant an NOV to any full licence holders that wish it.
The NOV gives us in the UK 11 frequencies that can be used on 5mhz.
Interestingly enough initial experiments show that this is one band that my Western HF10 doublet doesnt like - tuning is extremely tricky even with an external ATU. Although keeping the power down seems to improve matters.  It seems if I want to use this band I am going to need to rig up an alternative antenna.

Antenna update

The "Western HF 10" antenna I recently install came with an information sheet recommending that it is installed with a centre support. At my QTH I have a small mast mounted on the back of the house and another at the end of my garden. In other words-no central support. The antenna although in itself lightweight has quite a large balun at the end of the 450 ohm ladderline.

 I quickly found that if the balun was left hanging freely it put too much strain on the coax cable going into the balun. The result was the cable was pulled out of the PL259 connector requiring re-soldering.

I have now installed a short support pole underneath the feedpoint of the balun and anchored the balun and the coax to it-that appears to have solved the problem.

I am very impressed with the antenna. It can be operated without an ATU on a portion of 80 metres and 20 and a large portion of 10 metres also. On the other bands down to 80 metres the internal ATU in my rig tunes it easily.The antenna seems very lively, especially on the higher bands. It will tune on 160 metres using an external ATU but signals on that band seem very low (The antenna is far too short for the band) and I think that anything other than local contacts on 160 would be unlikely.
It has coped well with the 300+ watts I have occasionally used when trying out the borrowed vintage KW1000 linear amplifier I have in the shack at the moment.

 As an added bonus this antenna seems very useful as a general shortwave listening antenna. I have hooked it up to my R5000 receiver and had some good results from around 3Mhz up to 30. On medium wave it does seem a little "deaf" obviously this is the same problem as 160 metres and I wouldn't have expected this antenna to work well on MW.
All in all as a compact antenna this one is really quite impressive and the quality of construction is excellent also.

Antenna Work

Since I moved to this QTH I have not been that happy with my HF antenna. At first I put up a half size G5RV antenna and added an inductor to each leg to allow it to tune up on 80 metres. That lasted a few months but after a while the antenna wouldn't tune, try as I might i could not find out why, eventually I replaced it with a home made doublet.
After having my shed demolished I lost one of my antenna supports and for a while the far end of my antenna was simply tied to the fence.Earlier this year my next door neighbours were having some work done on their garden. They removed an old metal pole, 4 metres or so long which they had used to support a washing line. They offered me the pole, asking if it would be any use for my antennas. (I am lucky-I have good neighbours). Of course I accepted the pole and set about making use of it.

First I dug a hole at the end of the garden

And placed the old washing line post in it, filling the hole with concrete.

I now had a "Stub mast" which would form the support for my new antenna pole. 

I then ordered a hinged bracket from a seller on Ebay 

Yesterday I had a 20 foot (approx 6 metre) thick walled aluminium pole delivered and today along with a local Radio Amateur friend we put the whole lot together to make a decent antenna support.

There is a pulley at the top of the pole so the antenna wire can be easily lowered or the whole pole can be easily dropped using the hinged bracket which is attached to the stub pole. We also installed a new HF antenna the "Western HF10 " which I bought some months ago.

Here you can see the shack end of the antenna (the wire is below the VHF/UHF colinear and above the TV antenna)

First impressions of the new antenna are good. It seems very lively particularly on the higher bands and I also had some good reports on 40 metres this afternoon. I will write more on this interesting antenna when I have had a chance to fully test it but it does seem a significant improvement on the previous wire.

Antenna thoughts

Before winter sets in I am pondering whether to try replacing my Inverted L that I use on 80 and 40 (and 30 metres) with  either a doublet or a dipole. The disadvantage of this is that half of such an antenna would be running through the empty field behind me would not be, as the inverted L is fully contained in my small 10 metres by 10 metres garden. The antenna would have to be supported at its centre in an inverted V style. At an old QTH for a while I used a half size G5RV. It worked fairly well and I even inserted traps and an additional length of wire to allow it to tune up on 80 metres. I didn't have that antenna up for long enough to properly evaluate it, so it may be worth another try.
Long gone are the days when as a young SWL I had a 100 metre long wire, even a 40 metre dipole is too big for my garden!

Going mobile

My mobile setup for HF appears to be working well, on receive at least. I have ordered a small auto ATU to broaden the bandwidth of my mobile whips as at the moment the TX bandwidth is very narrow. Nevertheless on 20 metres I have heard stations In Austrailia, Indonesia and the USA as well as the Carribean, all on 20 Metres, note I say heard the only transmitting I have done so far has been a local QSO in order to get an audio report!
I am happy to report that my car does not seem to generate much QRM at all on HF and what little there was (on 40metres) the noise blanker on the 706 deals with.
I am not so pleased with the boot mount I bought for the HF antennas. It looks like the one below

Mine is unbranded but I have seen these branded as Sirio mounts. The connectors to the centre pin and earth under the mount are not in any way weatherproofed. Worse than that tightening the nut (as I needed to do) around the SO239 connector can cause the coax to disconnect and break away from the mount. This happened to me and I had to remove the mount from the car and solder the coax back on. Yes the mount does work and it holds the HF whip on fine. It is however poorly designed and its a pig to fit!  Not clear in the picture  is the plastic dome on which the SO239 sits which is mounted on a smaller metal dome. The plastic dome is free to slide over the metal one below altering the angle of the antenna. All very well but there doesn't seem to be a way of stopping it moving. So the antenna will not stay at the exact angle you want.

I guess its a case of you get what you pay for as these mounts are fairly cheap. I am looking for something better now as I don't think mine will last to long!

Antenna work

The beautiful weather today meant it was time for some outdoor chores. Once these were done I decided to have a go at improving the SWR on my Hygain AV12 ground mounted vertical.

Whilst the antenna seemed to work well on 10 metres the SWR was a little high on 20 on the lower part of the band, meaning of course that the antenna was too short. I took the antenna down and after several trips to and from the shack to check the SWR (it must be great to have an antenna analyser) I managed to improve things across the 20m band. The problem was caused by the uppermost clamp not being tight enough, allowing the 20 metre section of the antenna to slide into the main tube thus shortening the antenna! The SWR on 10 is also nicely low, no need for an ATU on these bands. 15 metres has always been a difficult one on this antenna. Indications are that the 15metre section is too long but I have run out of adjustment on that band, if I want to shorten it any more I will have to use a Hacksaw. As it is the match isn't too bad (Around 1.5:1 SWR) but not as good as the other bands. Whilst I was working on the antenna I took the opportunity to connect the ground radials more effectively as pictured below. A good ground system is essential with the AV12 yet the manufacturers don't provide any easy way of connecting the radials. Here I have used the crimp on connectors that slide over the nuts at the bottom of the antenna.

Random Ramblings

Radio time this weekend has been a bit limited so yesterday I set up the TS450S and inverted L on WSPR and let it run on 30 metres whilst I was doing other things. In fact I let it run overnight on Saturday and was interested to see that the 30 metre band didn't die at all during the night- previously I was lucky to hear anything after 2200. In the wee small hours my 1watt signal was heard in VK land as well as Stateside and throughout Europe. On Sunday morning I switched over to 10 metres, with no results but moving down to 12 metres heard an EA station.

Interestingly I worked a bit of 40metres SSB this afternoon on my Random wire ("The antenna that shouldn't work") and spoke to a G3 station with an interesting antenna. He was also using a random long wire which started within the integral garage at his home and was actually wound around the garage several times. He told me he didn't use an ATU, he simply adjusted the length until the antenna resonated on 40 metres. The only problem he had with thus setup was that if he removed his car, or any other metal items that were stored in the garage the antenna went off resonance and refused to match! Its amazing at what can be made to work as an antenna on the HF bands!
A random picture accompanying this entry- an EQSL recently received from DL9SUB.

PSK on 30 Metres

Despite being licenced for quite a number of years, in the past, I had never used the 30 metre (10mhz) band.I'm not sure why, in my early years on the HF bands I used to use CW, later on I was keen on data modes, I just never used that particular band. This summer, after a break of many years I set up again on data, mainly, for now at least PSK 31 using the Digipan software.I also decided to concentrate on the 10Mhz band. Since August this year I have had a few hundred qso's using my inverted L and power of between 20 and 50 Watts. My contacts have admittedly been mainly into Europe but I've been having a lot of fun and found it to be a fascinating band. Tonight however my PSK signal made it "across the pond" to the station of K1NOX. It just makes me wonder how much better I could do with an antenna resonant on 30metres. I'm just not sure whether or not I can get away with another antenna in the garden!

Hello

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I hope to be posting here regularly about my radio activities. I live in a modern house with a garden roughly 30' by 30'. Although this is probably more space than some people have it isn't ideal for amateur radio antennas.

However I do manage to operate a simple station that is capable of transmitting from 80metres up to 10.The picture shows my inverted L antenna (lying on the lawn just prior to me putting it up!) which is based around a fibreglass roach pole, its a quarter wave on 40 metres with a trap in it to allow operation on 80. In this Picture you can see the base of the antenna with the 1:1 balun at its feedpoint. This antenna was based on an article in 'Practical Wireless'magazine, there is a link to the design here it really works quite well and fits easily into my garden.