I’ve mentioned QRSS a few times and have put together a good page all about it on the Martello Tower Group website which you can read by clicking here. I’ve tried running it on 30m from this QTH either through my long wire or a cobbled together dipole in the loft but neither method has […]
Category: Construction
Replacing the Schottky diodes in my FT-847
Some time ago I blogged about Radio improvements and tweaking things to make them better, specifically a number of modifications that I’d had made to my Yaesu FT-847. I talked in that entry about swapping the cheap switching diodes out for low noise Schottky diodes to reduce the HF noise floor and I said I […]
What’s this?
I collected my old component rack from my mum’s loft a couple of weeks ago and in one of the drawers I found two pieces of breadboard with the same thing built on each of them. I built these when I was in my early teens and that’s quite obvious from the quality of the […]
MKARS80 – Everything from bag two is fitted
The MKARS80 kit comes with all the parts in a number of bags, the previous blog post about it was when I’d completed bag number one and now spent some time fitting all the components from bag number two. I think it’s starting to look quite good.
MKARS80 – All the resistors are in
Inspired by listening to a couple of episodes of the Soldersmoke podcast, specifically Soldersmoke #130 I decided to ‘melt some solder’ this evening and pulled my MKARS80 kit back off of the shelf. I was given this as a Christmas present and all I’d done with it was to fit a handful of resistors. Tonight […]
Radio improvements – Tweaking things to make them better
I like things to work well. I like to tweak the best possible performance out of equipment and as such I’ll look into what I can do to make things better and do it. I’m not counting my current HF aerial in this as that was just thrown up at the spur of the moment […]
Days 35, 36 and 37 – A great ‘radio’ weekend
Day #35 was Friday and after work I had a quick word with Andy, IZ1MHQ on 40m. Later that evening I had a tune around on 80m and heard a really strong signal coming from HE3OM in Switzerland. It was a club station and I worked them and discovered that they were operating from Sottens […]
QRSS for the third time
As mentioned over the last two days, the G0PKT QRSS transmitter has now been spotted by a number of ‘grabbers’ around the world, the furthest away being just over 1400 miles away in Russia. Not bad for a transmitter and aerial that cost less than £20 to put together and runs around 150mW output. As […]
QRSS, woo!
I arrived at work this morning to an email from Mauro, IK1WVQ to tell me that he’d spotted the G0PKT QRSS beacon on 30m. This is the first time we’ve had a reported signal and looking at the trace he sent me, the signal really was quite strong. It stayed with him for a large […]
Day 9 – Namibia!
I won’t normally blog twice a day and I generally won’t blog on the same day as I had the QSOs but as I’m not going to be on the wireless again today I thought I may as well post. I’ve had three QSOs today, the first was on 7MHz where I worked IK4HLQ, Joe […]
