The last time I took my Icom ID-52E with me to North America I wasn’t able to access any repeaters due to the US having different amateur frequency allocations on 2m and 70 cm, which my European spec radio couldn’t transmit on. Schoolboy error.
Continue readingWith my 7300 now over 2 years old the internal battery was well and truly knackered, failing to keep the clock powered for more than a few minutes off the power supply. Time to put on my Big Girl Pants and dig out that soldering iron.
Continue readingWe should have known that Rojar would be busy since it’s quite close to the coast (and therefore tourist population) but I didn’t anticipate that the crowds would be up so early.
Continue readingThis 10 point summit was chosen for today’s activation on the basis that parking should be easy for early arrivals, and that the whole way up is on marked paths. Add in a dead-end dogleg in order to reach the AZ and we should be in for a quiet morning.
Continue readingOur first ‘big’ one on Tenerife, Roque del Conde carries 8 points for a successful activation with another 3 points available for doing it in winter. And yes, I can’t believe I’m writing that as I sit here with the air conditioning cranked up, nursing a mild touch of sun.
Continue readingToday we activated a peak close to our hotel on Costa Adeje, TF-016 Guaza. It was another early start and we had intentions of getting up to the top well before sunrise, but our chosen parking location near a local garage turned out to be quite busy despite the time of day, so we looked around for somewhere more discreet and found a nice spot just down the road. Unfortunately this meant walking back up the unlit, busy road without a verge, so we were very glad when we found what looked like an alternative path to the summit.
Continue readingA couple of days ago I sat down and programmed all Hubnet repeaters and gateways into my Quansheng UV-K5 via Chirp, taking the details from ukrepeaters.net to make sure everything’s fresh.
In the spirit of sharing I’m making this file available for download as a Chirp IMG file as well as CSV. If you’re grabbing the former then I’d advise you to download data from your radio first before pasting in the repeater list, then re-uploading the file from your radio. Like most people I’m using custom firmware and taking this approach minimises the chances of you importing something other than the list of repeaters and gateways. The usual caveats apply…
I’ve had some difficulty in getting my Windows 10 virtual machine to run the CPS software from Motorola which I need in order to program a GM340 for an upcoming project, and thought I’d document the steps taken in case it helps somebody else. The general feeling appears to be that you need an older version of Windows like XP, and/or a physical machine, but with a few tweaks you can convince the CPS to run in a Windows 10 VM, in my case Parallel Desktop on MacOS. Here’s what I did:
Continue readingEver since picking up my IC-705 in October 2021 I’ve been dining out on location rather than configuration, at least where the home antenna is concerned; a random-length end-fed with a 49:1, slung up into a tree next to the shack. I’ve had some pretty good contacts using this setup, working QRP far into Europe and occasionally pinging the ding-dong repeater in New York on 10m, but it was always a suck-it-and-see first attempt, a cheap way of finding out which bands I want to focus on before spending more money. I was still chasing my first transatlantic contact when I heard Russ VE9FI one evening in December but, unable to work him on my EFLW I quickly uprooted the IC-705 to the back patio, where my home made EFHW was doing WSPR duty. Blow me if I didn’t get an S5/5 @ 5W, nearly three thousand miles across the pond, on battery power.
An obvious solution would be to throw some more power down the wire, but at the back of my mind it was clear that the wire was the problem. And the power. But mostly the wire. So here I am two months later, with some very nice fibreglass poles and a hastily flung resonant 80m HW, buzzing with excitement at the changes brought about by some fairly simple guying.
Yesterday’s initial attempt at stringing the 40m long stealth wire across the garden in a rotated L configuration produced more of an inverted V, thanks to the luxurious flexibility of my new poles, but adding some guy lines today actually enabled the vertical part to be truly vertical, and I think that’s what’s made the difference between the RF fizzling out at the horizon and providing a truly great take-off angle. All I know for sure is that I’ve not had any WSPR spots from Central America, West Coast US, or China until today.
Going forward I’ll probably add a second 2-section pole to hold the blunt end of the wire, replacing the far too flexible single section that I used as a stop-gap in fading light yesterday.