Radio Furries (original) (raw)
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded inRadio Furs' LiveJournal:
Tuesday, April 28th, 2015
7:25 pm
[hastka]
FCC movement on new bands, and who is left alive here? :) "Amateur Radio is poised to gain access to two new bands! The FCC has allocated a new LF band, 135.7 to 137.8 kHz, to the Amateur Service on a secondary basis. Allocation of the 2.1 kHz segment, known as 2200 meters, was in accordance with the Final Acts of the 2007 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07). The Commission also has proposed a new secondary 630 meter MF allocation at 472 to 479 kHz (...)"
About time. :)
Is anyone left on this group to even read this? ;)
Saturday, November 8th, 2014
5:56 pm
[megadog]
Steady Eddy A while back, I acquired an Eddystone 840A receiver at a rather good price. It had been "got at" internally by a previous owner, the power-supply choke being replaced by a monstrous stack of resistors and the valve rectifier had been replaced by a BY127 semiconductor diode.
I reversed these 'modifications' - using the correct UY41 valve rectifier and fitting a choke-I-happened-to-have, then acquired a replacement UL41 output-valve (the original having gone leaky) and - lo and behold - it worked!
On all except frequency-band 1 [10-30MHz]. Which, it has to be said, is where a lot of the daytime radio-activity takes place.
Initially I suspected that the UCH42 frequency-changer valve had gone weak and lacked enough emission to oscillate properly at the higher frequencies - I was about to blow £6 on a new-old-stock valve from Langrex but decided first to do some more investigations.
So - time to do an "AVOscopy"[1] - which revealed some odd readings round the oscillator-coil for band 1. Further research revealed that the coil showed signs of having been soldered by Stevie Wonder and quality-checked by Ray Charles.
Cleaning up the joints, resoldering them, refitting the coil - I was rewarded with full-on oscillator-action and the ability to listen to Russians talking to Central-Americans on 28MHz.
Now, time for me to fully realign the coil-pack
and finally re-spray the outer cabinet.
[1] an "AVOscopy" is the technical term for an investigation using an "AVOmeter", such as the traditional AVO Model 8.
Thursday, May 22nd, 2014
4:21 pm
[actonrf]
Ham Radio Fun: Tracking Howl's Moving Castle
While setting up the PC to track APRS data especially from an aircraft (validate sensitivity and range), I notice this. I did not know Howl's Moving Castle had APRS. Actually it is a car and the guy forgot to configure his TNC.
Current Mood: 
accomplished
Sunday, April 27th, 2014
6:52 pm
[megadog]
Size matters.... Here's a pic of my latest little toy - a 100-watt HF transceiver - sitting on top of the Kilowatt-rated 'match-anything-to-anything' antenna-tuner I use to couple it to my long-wire:
Friday, April 18th, 2014
11:12 pm
[hastka]
Shortwave nostalgia Delayed crosspost from my personal journal.
I picked up an Icom R-20 handheld wide coverage receiver a couple months ago, and have been re-living some of my childhood playing around with that (and with software-defined radio, another post).
While trying to figure out digital modes I'm hearing on the receiver, I came across this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbhCeWtX9sg
Much to my amazement, I heard several of these when I was a kid on ham radio -- especially things like the piano scales and gongs which are pretty unforgettable. There were a couple others that had children's voices speaking numbers which didn't appear on that recording. At the time I just wrote it off as someone playing with the radio, but... interesting.
It's kind of strange to think that I accidentally witnessed a portion of history in an era that will never really return, now that we have all the Internet stuff and satellites and all... kind of like finding wild feeds on analog satellites... these days it's just too easy to scramble.
Anyway, figured it'd be neat to see if anyone here remembers anything like those... plus I so rarely hear any activity here any more!
Sunday, March 2nd, 2014
12:32 am
[hastka]
Episode 5 + ham radio?? Hey guys,
Don't know if there's anyone still alive in this community, but I've had an issue nagging me all evening and was hoping someone out there could help.
In the section of the Hoth battle in the control room (0:27-0:30 and 0:40-0:45 of the video below) there's a digital signal that I *KNOW* I've heard before, at least back when I was more into radio stuff in the early 90s. I'm thinking it's the digital blurb that was sent for several seconds in the WWV rotation, but I can't find any reference to that in the current WWV specs, nor any videos of it (I no longer have a compatible receiver).
Can any of you pick it out? I would love to know what it's saying. :)
Sunday, February 16th, 2014
5:57 pm
[megadog]
HF Happenings 28MHz seems to be opening-up at last - the 'quiet sun' of the last decade has lifted and given way to some rather good propagation.
This weekend I've had a few nice natters with Thailand, India, Brazil,
Sri Lanka
Ceylon, Sicily, Nebraska - all using 30 watts either to a dipole or - when portable - to the standard 2.4-metre whip antenna on the PRC320.
My other band-of-choice - 5MHz - has yielded Iceland, Norway, an obscure and seemingly highly-desired-by-the-IOTA-crowd island off Denmark, and the Isle of Man.
Sunday, February 9th, 2014
7:33 pm
[megadog]
HF contact-of-the-day UK to Guadeloupe on 28MHz using only 7.5 watts PEP to an 8-foot whip antenna on a PRC320 manpack.
Sunday, February 2nd, 2014
5:24 pm
[megadog]
5Mhz is fun! Another nice 'grey-line propagation' natter with Iceland on 5MHz. This is rapidly becoming my favourite band: no crazy contesters!
Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
8:07 pm
[megadog]
Canadians get access to 60-metre band. https://www.rac.ca/en/news/stories/2014/20140122a
On Wednesday 22nd January, the Canadian regulator, Industry Canada (IC) released a decision to allow amateur radio operators to use the 5332 kHz, 5348 kHz, 5358.5 kHz, 5373 kHz and 5405 kHz frequencies on a no-interference, no-protection basis, 2.8 kHz bandwidth, same modes as U.S., 100W PEP maximum power.
These are the same channels, modes and criteria as those available to US operators on 5 MHz and are as the result of an official IC consultation held earlier in Summer 2012.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Right now, at the right time of day there are plenty of 'Northern' stations to be worked on the band - earlier today I had a nice half-hour chat with a couple of Norwegian stations and also TF1EIN located around 45Km from Reykjavik - my first Icelander on 5MHz.
Sunday, October 20th, 2013
12:43 pm
[megadog]
Weekends are not a very good time to try operating on the HF bands. Weekends are when most of the contests happen - so you get hordes of people who only want to exchange callsign, signal report [which is invariably 5x9, even if they have had to ask you to repeat your call several times] and serial-number before moving on to work the next victim.
Today there seems to be a "Worked All Germany" contest on 28MHz - despite which I managed a rather more relaxed natter with a guy in CT8 [San Miguel, the Azores]. Not bad going since I was only running my PRC320 at 7.5 watts into a dipole.
Wednesday, July 24th, 2013
8:37 pm
[megadog]
UK to India with 30 watts Today's HF DX: UK to Gandhinagar, India on 14MHz from my little PRC320 with 30 watts PEP. OK, I had an unfair advantage in that I was using a proper dipole rather than the 2.4-metre-long manpack whip antenna...
Tuesday, June 18th, 2013
9:29 pm
[megadog]
Toy-of-the-week #1 At the weekend I visited the Newbury Radio Rally which is basically a gathering where radio-geeks offload their caches of strange radio-gizmos to other similarly-inclined geeks in exchange for cash.
My #1 acquisition was a 1960s-vintage antenna tuner:
originally specified for a quasi-military UK Government agency. Back when these were produced they cost something over £100-each, at a time when the average UK resident earned something like £500/year. The insides are, let's say, "built to professional standards" - lots of silver-plating on the coils and gold-plating on the switches.
For this I paid £20. It will no doubt serve well to tune-up the random length end-fed antenna I use with my PRC320 on the 5MHz UK amateur-band allocations.
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
9:45 pm
[megadog]
Baby-Beast My "Big Beast" HF antenna-tuner is rated at 1Kw continuous-carrier-power and so is rather too bulky for home use: therefore I've been building a "mini-beast" that compromises power-handling - a mere 250 Watts - but has a rather more home-office-friendly footprint. Here's a pic of the prototype:
There's a big continuously-variable silver-plated 'roller-coaster' coil, and a 2.5Kv-rated 250pF variable-capacitor - both mounted on a Polystyrene insulating 'slab' that is rated to handle up to 25Kv. The control-spindles are both insulated and fed through Polystyrene bushings on the front-panel, with at least a half-inch gap between the spindles and any grounded meetalwork. Ideally, I need to source some "Eddystone" 1/4-inch insulated spindle-couplers to do the job properly though.
The backplate [not shown] will have separate isolated terminals for both the inductor and capacitor so I can wire them in whatever combination of series or parallel is needed to get a resonant impedance-match.
Thursday, November 1st, 2012
7:47 pm
[megadog]
sunspots ! Over the last few days, HF conditions have been really rather good: I've worked plenty of Central/South-American stations on 28MHz, and (by prior arrangement) a couple of operators on the Falklands.
It's amazing how far 30 watts PEP to a dipole can go when the upper-atmosphere is in the mood.
Monday, April 9th, 2012
8:10 pm
[megadog]
Tuner-tastic. I've been doing various radio-stuffs over the last day or so. Experimentation [like putting it in the microwave to see if it heated] showed that a Polythene Tesco 'value' kitchen chopping-board provided a good low-RF-loss insulating baseboard; couple this with a 'Roller-Coaster' variable inductor and a 300pF 2.5Kv-rated variable capacitor acquired a couple of weeks back and the result is somewhat obvious.
I've got a rather nice metal case into which the whole thing will be fitted - once I've cut out a sane front-panel for it and drilled the rear panel to take both a 'N'-connector for the transmitter-side and some solid terminal-posts for the antenna.
The design is this:
Though I am not bothering with the antenna-current meter.
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
9:18 pm
[megadog]
Saturday, November 12th, 2011
5:25 pm
[megadog]
HF radio conditions are ++good. While romping in the forest, 30 watts of SSB to a 1/4-wave whip antenna on my battery-powered PRC320 gets me lots of US/Caribbean/Central American contacts.
Which is really not bad going from Europe.
Friday, October 21st, 2011
7:18 pm
[megadog]
The only way is Up! HF conditions seem to be looking up: today I worked lots of Central-Americans on 28MHZ, which is not bad going for a mere 30 watts PEP from the UK.
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
8:31 am
[keeganfox]
Antenna Tuner! I made an antenna tuner! I used this basic design from HCDX, but I decided to use the coil from this design as I liked the exponential winding idea. It just seemed better to have more different coils, than a tap every ten turns. Do I know what I'm doing? Not really, but I doubt either can really be wrong.
Most people who know me know I can be a workshop packrat at times. But it's not bad, it's for projects like this!
It's made almost entirely out of leftovers and free things. The magnet wire is leftover from the loop antenna project, the wood was free, the cardboard tube was an unusual small diameter and quite stout, wire is from dead computer power supplies, knobs and components from an old Akai receiver from the dump, acrylic was free, and screws were spares/leftovers. I had to buy the 12 pin rotary switch, which was all of $4.
I haven't tested it yet...
Thoughts and suggestions?