Some time ago I bought a second hand but never assembled Cushcraft MA5B and yesterday I collected it with the plan to get the aerial all built and ready to go. It’s a couple of years old so it comes from the time before MFJ acquired Cushcraft so I hope that it will be a good one. Once I’d got […]
Month: September 2011
Band conditions – wallop, what happened there?
Today is Saturday. I woke up and got up around 08:00, at 08:15 I was on the wireless giving away a few points in the CQWW RTTY contest. I only operated S&P and in 45 minutes I’d worked 25 stations starting off on 40m and switching to 20m after a while. I worked all over […]
Days 246 to 255
To get me back up to date, I’m going to do a couple of big updates and because each one will cover around ten days it’s going to be a log extract in the form of a list as I reckon that’s the easiest way to do it. There’s a nice range of contacts there […]
Assembling a section of Alimast
In my last update, the final image shows a single section of Alimast standing on the concrete. I bought four sections of Alimast from Aerial-Parts of Colchester, each being 2.5m long for a total of 10m (33ft). These four sections were delivered with one being fully assembled and the rest being parts for me to […]
The next stage of the new mast – Mounting the pivot pins in concrete
My new Alimast from Aerial-Parts of Colchester tilts over using a pivot system and so the ground anchor consists of two pivot pins mounted in the ground. These two pins have been linked together for ease of securing in concrete and to add a little extra resistance against pulling out of the ground. Here you […]
Building a Nixie Clock
A week or so I was inspired by a post on a forum I frequent to build a nixie clock. If you don’t know what a nixie tube is, the best way for me to explain it is to reproduce the first few sentences from Wikipedia. A nixie tube is an electronic device for displaying […]
Days 243, 244 and 245 – Late night data
These days were while I was still on holiday and as tends to happen when I’m not at work, I become slightly nocturnal. On one day in particular I went to bed, really couldn’t sleep and ended up getting up, coming back into the shack and playing radio. On day #243 I first worked OK1DX, […]
To tune, or not to tune? Would you use an ATU?
Today I’ve been measuring the SWR of my 40m delta loop on different bands and frequencies using a borrowed MFJ-269 analyser. 40m 7.000 – 1.5:1 7.100 – 1.4:1 7.200 – 1.5:1 20m 14.000 – 1.6:1 14.100 – 1.7:1 14.200 – 1.8:1 14.300 – 1.9:1 14.350 – 1.9:1 15m 21.000 – 1.6:1 21.100 – 1.6:1 21.200 […]
Aerial work and digging a hole for my new Alimast
It’s taken a few weeks of planning but today a small working party consisting of myself, Colin (M1EAK), Yan (M0YNK), Chris (M6GSD) and Kevin (M0GWE) descended on my house to take down the mast with my VHF beam and move the 10m 5/8 wave to the standoffs the VHF aerial was on. That was completed […]
Days 240, 241 and 242
I’ve become a bit lapse in updating the blog with QSO details and so I’m a few days behind here – I’ll try and catch up over the weekend. But just because I’m not writing the blog doesn’t mean I’m not using the radio. On day #240 I first worked a few more stations on […]
