Back in June 2011 I put up a horizontal delta loop for 40m and I wrote about it at some length here. Since then, I’ve made a few changes to my aerial for the lower bands, experimented with an off-centre fed dipole, a resonant dipole for 40m and a doublet fed through my SGC smartuner before […]
Category: Construction
Building a set of 5B4AGN bandpass filters
For the Martello Tower DXpedition to Herm, I borrowed two complete switchable 5B4AGN bandpass filters, we had one connected to each radio to prevent the two stations interfering with each other and they worked very well. I’d decided before we went to Herm that I wanted to build a set of these filters myself and […]
Data (RTTY/PSK) contesting – The anatomy of an ideal QSO
I like contesting. I like data contesting and I operate a lot in data contests. I don’t generally have the time to dedicate to making a winning entry although for the big events, I’ll try and make a good score and aim to finish high up in the table. I’ve done well enough though and […]
Testing my dummy load
Back in August last year I built a dummy load out of a bunch of resistors, a paint tin and some oil. I said at the time that it seems to work fine on HF but not so well on VHF. After I used the load last weekend to test my aerial, I thought perhaps […]
Winding coils for various radio projects
Over the last few days I’ve found myself winding coils for construction projects. I dug out my MKARS80 kit from where it’s been sitting for the best part of a year and the next stage was fitting some trifilar wound transformers. These are made by lightly twisting together three lengths of 38swg enamelled wire and […]
The CQ WPX RTTY Contest 2012
Anyone who follows me on Twitter or reads this site will have noticed that I was planning on taking part in the CQ WPX RTTY contest last weekend and that I was keen to sort my aerial out in advance. I lowered the mast, fitted my new balun along with two new coax tails and […]
You can never have too many 0.1uF decoupling capacitors
A couple of weeks ago I needed to repair my iPod transmitter for the car and the fix was a simple one – Resolder the power supply cable and replace the decoupling capacitor because it had broken. The problem was that I had no ceramic disc 0.1uF capacitors. I ended up using a miniature multi-layer […]
Planning permission – I had a visit and a letter from the council
Planning permission is a subject I’ve steered clear of on this blog for one main reason. I don’t have any. I used to have a twenty foot pole on the side of my house with a seventeen foot long 2m beam for over fifteen years along with an 18ft vertical colinear for 2m/70cms, all with […]
Mast is up, beam is up – It’s all done in time for CQ WW SSB
The crowds descended on my QTH again today in order to finish what we started back on the 10th September, just six weeks ago. Today we had Chris, M6GSD, Tony, G0MBA, Colin, M1EAK, Yan, M0YNK, Bill, G0OAX and Chris’ son, Dean here. To start with, Chris drilled the holes to mount the chemical anchors for […]
Now this is what you call a pulley!
As has been well publicised in this blog, Yan, M0YNK has been constructing most of the hardware to go with my mast. I popped into his workshop on the way home tonight to find him working on a pulley for me. Originally we’d bought one which wasn’t man enough for the job and Yan had […]
