Two or three years ago I had a browser tab sitting open on the Hendricks 41dB Step RF Attenuator from Pacific Antenna/QRP Kits in California. For some reason I never ordered one and when I finally remembered that I was going to get one, they were out of stock. I dropped them an email back […]
One of the new local Foundation licence holders recently did the Intermediate course and exam and as part of her practical assessment, she built a capacitance meter which I’m sure helped her pass the course. Well done, Caroline! I fancied doing the same as it’s a handy piece of test gear that I’ve never owned. […]
Earlier this year I decided it was time to replace my doublet with a new wire aerial. There was nothing actually wrong with the doublet, I’ve worked plenty on it but it always galled me that I had a smarttuner connected to it which limited my transmit power. I could only run 100W SSB or […]
There seems to have been an upsurge in people operating WSPR recently. Barely a day goes by (sometimes barely an hour) without someone posting a map of where their signals have been received on Twitter. When I first started experimenting with WSPR and QRSS some years ago, I did exactly the same. I’m quite sure […]
Not long after my last post on this subject, back in January, the preamp I had mounted in the box at the top of 30ft of pole strapped to the side of my house failed and I was forced to removed that particular ADS-B aircraft tracker. I still had my loft unit running and working […]
My shack computer is an Apple iMac. For a few years, I’ve operated a lot of data modes and been very successful in data contests. I’ve always enjoyed data modes and in 2012 I operated GO6NHU to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics exclusively using data. Back in 2015, Apple released a new operating system called El Capitan and […]
I wasn’t sure whether to post this or not as it’s not specifically amateur radio – But there’s a small amount of electronics involved so I figured it might be of interest. A few days ago while Susan and I were out, I received a text from my son saying “I thought you’d like to […]
I’m a happy owner of two Icom ID-5100 radios, one is mounted in the car and I use the other one in the shack on low power for working the local repeaters. It doesn’t get much use but I’m monitoring GB3CL and GB7TE most of the time. About the only thing which I don’t like about this […]
I’ve been moving some boxes around recently and I unpacked the bandpass filters I built for one of the Martello Tower Group DXpeditions and successfully used again during our activation of the MV Ross Revenge in August 2016. It struck me that I’d never produced a full set of figures showing rejection on each band, insertion […]
Following on from my last update, I’ve spent a fair bit of time experimenting with two very different ADS-B aerial configurations. I have two Raspberry Pi3s, both running identical software and exactly the same receivers, the FlightAware Pro Stick Plus which is a version of the RTL-SDR dongle with a built in preamplifier and bandpass filter. […]
