Category: Construction

How to build a shack clock using a Raspberry Pi and a 7″ Touch Display.

Raspberry Pi shack clock

A few weeks ago I bought the official Raspberry Pi 7″ touchscreen display for a project which sadly didn’t work as intended, this left me with the unused display and a case. I started thinking about things I could use it for and settled on a shack clock. Long term readers of my site will […]

New aerial – I’ve decided!

After much research, I’ve decided what I’m going to replace the Hexbeam with. I’m aiming to put up a SteppIR UrbanBeam which will give me the same coverage as the Hexbeam with the addition of a folded dipole on 30m. At the same time, I’m going to replace all the coaxial cable with Messi & […]

Website updates complete and a few general news items

A couple of months ago, I started working on some upgrades to qso365 and I’m pleased to report that everything is now complete. The most obvious thing was the change of theme which controls how the website looks. The old theme was the original one I set up in 2010 and was starting to feel […]

How to enable cross band repeater on an Icom ID-5100E

Icom ID-5100 showing which diodes to remove to extend transmit and enable the cross band repeater

How to enable cross band repeater mode and extended transmit on the Icom ID-5100E

Rebuilding and raising my ADS-B receiver

Hexbeam with ADS-B aerial

Earlier this year I replaced my Hexbeam (with another Hexbeam) and I wrote about it on this site. There was a gap of a couple of weeks when I was between aerials and to take advantage of that, I temporarily moved my ADS-B receiver to a temporary stub mast, effectively raising it 7ft from the […]

Building an MMDVM hotspot on a budget

MMDVM Hotspot attached to the Raspberry Pi Zero

I bought myself a new handheld at the Newark rally earlier this year, an Anytone AT-D878UV to use on DMR. When I went on holiday in October, I took a couple of copies of RadCom with me and in one of them there was a review of my handheld. The author mentioned that he’d used […]

Installing a dipole for 30m

Dipole at sunset

I’ve never had a decent aerial for the 30m (10 MHz) band and have struggled to work much on the band either with my old doublet or the inverted L that I’ve had up for the last couple of years. About a month ago, I realised that I could hang a single band 30m dipole […]

Anderson Powerpoles

Powerpole tail all ready for my PSU

Some time ago back in 2012 I first heard about the Anderson Powerpole in episode 53.5 of the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast and I immediately bought a load of them to use in the shack. I have a number of tails hanging off my PSU, all terminated in Powerpoles. I’ve always soldered the metal contact […]

Replacing my hexbeam with… another hexbeam!

My new hexbeam with 40m

At the end of July, I happened to glance up at my aerial and noticed the 15m element hanging down. It was broken. It didn’t look serious though and I was sure that it was just that the connector on the end of the element had snapped off. Around the same time, I was offered […]

1090 MHz ADS-B PCB antenna from eBay

That's better - The repaired ADS-B PCB antenna

About a month ago I bought a 1090MHz PCB aerial on eBay and immediately forgot about it. It arrived a few days ago and I had a good look at it before I connected it to anything to try and work out what it actually was. I decided from the construction that it was a […]