It had been a busy weekend. On the Friday I'd been down to Mum's after work to pack some tiems away before the builders came. Saturday saw me off doing another of my weekend activities on Wensleydale Railway, where what I'd hoped to be a nice relaxing day saw track work at the crossing I was manning - so much for peace and quiet.

     On arriving home I found a couple of parts on my doorstep. Ah yes. Time to do a bit of repair work. My HF vertical had become poorly over the winter, it had gained rather a lopsided look. Plan A had been to sleeve where it was joined to the insulating section at the base, but when we took it into the workshop it was just two of the rivets that had loosened up. So these were drilled out and replaced. The feed point was doing most of the support work here, so we added another rivet here.

     Why not just bolt the thing together? Well unless you like to try to fit a nut and washer 12 inches inside a 2 1/2 diameter tube we didn't think there would be any point.

     Okay so what effect did it have? Well I landed 9A9RR on EU-136 with a 57 report despite me showing about a 2.5:1 SWR on 14.260MHz. Now the case was that the antenna had been tuned up at the digital portions of the bands (40, 20, 15 & 10) as that's my usual mode of working. So the conclusion is that it's now a lot happier, the bandwidth has dropped, possible as now the electrical connection between the feed and the element is somewhat better. There are tuned radials fitted, I've not adjusted them this time, and they are about 8 ft off the ground. This antenna is no longer made (EVX-4000) as it's required regular maintainance, plenty of silicone to stop water getting into the 20m trap and the plentiful use of self amalgamating tape where the tubes are jointed. I can't complain, I have 6 years use out of it so far and my squeeze a couple more out yet until I decide what to replace it with. My postage stamp garden suits this one, although when I lower it on the mast I haven't much room at the end of the garden to play with.

     Sunday was busy too - this time near Dent in Cumbria. To provide communications to the ambulance at the bottom of the hill at Lea Yeat, I was stationed not far from the summit of the Coal Road to Garsdale with my 6m/20ft portable mast and a talkthrough radio. In the end we only had messages relating to them arriving, setting up and finishing without incident, but they are in a hole radio wise.

     I haven't decided what to do with the temperamental 6m beam as yet. I will however give it another try before I think about getting rid and sorting a HB9CV for the band. I have one for 2m, it's been used portable, and got me into Southern England from home on the 20ft mast with 30W on SSB.

For those who peruse the Amateur Radio Group, you will notice that the picture show the monitor running HRD - Ham Radio Deluxe, which is a piece of transceiver interface software. It shows all those controls etc on the rig, including some of those a few button presses away down menus that I rarely touch, having set the machine up to work the way I like it. Whoa betide firmware upgrades for the rig that lose all my settings!

Not that I use HRD on that particular unit, I have resorted to using Mix-W which has all those nice digital modes covered, I have paid for the licence and I am used to it for doing the bits of contesting I dabble with. Notably the RSGB 80m Club Championship, where the Brimham Contest Group seems to hover around 8th in the ratings. We're not a big group! The host runs XP and a fully populated set of memory slots. Being out of the ark metaphorically, it still has an old fashioned genuine RS232 connection.

I have splashed out recently on a new laptop. Now it's not often I get out and about with the rig but it'd be nice to have a go at digimodes and contest logging. My cheapy dongle to do USB to RS232 however was not accepted by Windows 7 and after consulting some of the IT gurus at the club it's all down to the drivers. I did think about banging my head on the table at one point, then I considered that I might be better and getting one with a known, non copied, chipset. FTDI came to mind, well they do drivers for every conceivable OS for theirs.

Plugging it straight into the W7 laptop, it searched for a driver, loaded it than told me it doesn't work. Guess what, reading the label that came with gave the URL for the FTDI site, driver download not long, 10 seconds later they were installed and tweaking HRD all the screen came up with the settings on the rig.

I haven't tried it with N1MM logger yet, but that's coming. Although the next contest out I may be logging is in fact the RSGB 2m Backpacker's. That coinicides with out weekend trip to the pub, so it may prove interesting! Alas, the FT290 can't talk to the laptop, unless anyone out there has designed an interface that is.

This is a tale of mystery and a collection of strange noises in ther night (and the day for the matter).

What causes those strange additions to the audio of one of our local repeaters? It seems to be somewhat erratic, and the keepers seem to be a little baffled. Once in a while we get all the background noises of a bowl of cereal. One theory is that it's thermal, things expanding and contracting? Something electrical nearby? Possibly not, it's in a hangar at the Gliding Club.

Those with keen eyes on the picture can spot the antenna, but what I'd really like is some ideas to come forward to at least give the keepers something to work with.

Recently acquired is a somewhat vintage Icom IC-720. This one had been sitting unused for about 8 years it seems, it would receive intermittantly but then go somewhat deaf. Well I did Google the rig and the pointers were to the step relay contacts.

Yes you had to take rather a lot of it apart to get the assembly out, but in comparison with working on the Kenwood TS-440SAT previously owned (with rather annoying coupled boards) this one with a number of Molex KK connectors was so much easier to work on. It was dealt with by the cotton bud and the switch cleaner, the contacts ending up being a healthier colour, and the cotton bud black.

It does lack some of the "bells and whistles" of the more modern rigs, such as computer interfacing, DSP and an internal ATU. At least it is rather more intuitive in terms of operations, the controls do what they say. The only niggle is the way the meter function switch is hidden under a top panel control.

The rig is set to be something more appropriate for "Vintage Machinery Rally" the group attends in September, you get a few of the "I used to have one of those" meetings. It'll join the Yaesu FT290R 2m multimode on display (and in use).

Merry Christmas to you all!

Andy M0DCD

Prompted by the latest story to appear on the BBC website here

One of the issues about the widespread use of 433.920MHz with paging for car alarms and locking is that there are other devices using this frequency. They rely on the short duty cycle (you press the button for half a second or so) so that you can have multiple users, it's a crude TDM (Time Division Multiplex) if you at it that way. All you need is a unit to lock up in transmit and you could cause a problem.

The second issue is that in order to keep the cost down, the receiver technology is deliberately kept simple. There are regenerative and direct conversion receivers in a lot of devices. They are simple (and cheap) but lack selectivity from signals on nearby signals, consequently a strong signal a few MHz away would desense the receiver, which is probably what the case is in Southampton. There was a similar case in Windemere, in England's Lake District, caused by wireless terminals in a restaurant.

In the UK, Amateur repeaters in the 70cm (430 - 440MHz) band are located between 433.000MHz and 433.375MHz and that's near enough to cause problems in such as location as Otley, West Yorkshire, where the repeater antenna is on the roof a a pub (with car park) and it is rumoured that there have been callouts to motoring organisations when they've failed to unlock or disarm their cars. The input frequencies in this band are 1.6MHz up from the outputs in the UK, but you'd only get a short outage from a passing amateur.

TETRA could also be an issue, there are lower than the Amateur allocation in the UK, but a strong signal strength would produce the same desensing effect.

Just to remember that these low power devices get the third bite at the frequencies, the MoD being the primary user, Amateurs are the secondary allocation in the UK.

The third issue, in that in the race to keep the costs down, the frequency control is often just a ceramic resonator or SAW device and they use wide modulation on FM or just AM, and a similar pass band on the receiver doesn't help selectivity. No they're not going to employ superhet receivers with crystal filtering for this application - it'll up the costs and the complexity somewhat.

One word of advice, if it's a critical system, or you require it to work all the time then 433MHz is not the solution.

After all, hopefiully you can put the key into the door to open it! Not so with some new cars though it seems.

We're having a bit of a tussle between older reports from the NOAA (2008 it seems) and actually what's happenning with our nearest star. Yes it does affect us here, there's a few who've noticed that the coldest Northern Hemisphere winters seem to coincide with minimi, notably in the "Little Ice Age" in the 18th Century. Now some are predicting we're in for a fairly long lull inproceedings.

The trouble is, the Sun continues to throw stuff at us, and we've had a recent blast in our direction. I tend to agree with NW7US, we'll see how this pans out.

We've had propagation up on 10m but it seems mostly where I am related to Sporadic-E, certainly in its character, but I'm too far north to really notice anyway and a bit too close to the auroral zone. 20m had been staying open til quite late (~2100 UTC) but it's a band I tend to stay away from at moment, 17 and 15m being a little better for DX interest. I've not worked anything exotic on 10m, but at least I have finally nabbed SV9 on 6m.

Hang the expense!

It seems that this hobby has the definite ability to become a very expensive pastime, however after a joke remark was put forward in the club we have launched the "Poundshop Antenna Challenge" . The idea being to build an antenna using parts that aren't intended for that purpose, for a fiver (to our overseas reader that's about $8) at most, the idea being to put something that works together, using it and clocking up the points. It doesn't seem to have an actual prize for the best but we do think we could produce a suitably impressive certificate, even for the best heroic failure. You know, looks good, matches well but just doesn't seem to radiate at all.

My budget has hit £2.39 so far, and a 4 element quad for 2m should be the result, I just hope that putting 30W pep into it won't fry it that's all.

Well it's suppose to be a nice view from here!

This was the trip to the top of the hill, Scafell in the Lake District of England, that went a bit wrong. Wrong in that we didn't actually do any radio in the end.

It wasn't all that bad going up, it's just that the high wind and cloud meant that it was more of an issue avoiding getting lost and getting hypothermia. Fortunately, there was a nice bit of wall to sit behind and in true SOTA fashion out came the camping stove and a tin of tomato soup was heated up. Visibility was less than 30m as we made our way along the ridge to come round and down. The drizzle was the type that wets everything, but my recently cleaned Gore-Tex jacket kept it all out.

Now this end of the Lakes are less well tramped than the usual peaks, and it was a case of heading off on a bearing until we found a very vague path and did end up back at the campsite although for a long time we we'ren't sure we were even in the right valley.

We'll have to have another go later I suppose. Still, we did get to (almost) the highest point in England, we had planned to get onto Scafell Pike, but with high winds and no visibility that wasn't to be.

Plans were to operate 2m SSB and FM up there, the ancient FT290R transceiver and HB9CV antenna were carted up there to remain unused and we only heard one station calling another summit in North Wales (which we couldn't hear).

Oh well, back to the pub for a pint then!

At the time I'm writing this, we've got a spot count of 122 and a flux of 152. It wasn't that long ago we had a nice zero spot count and flux down in the low seventies. Oh how things have changed.

Well HF propagation has certainly not been consistant, and it's made a mockery of the lower bands. This time last month we even had a distinct lack of short skip on 80m which for the RSGB 80m Club Championship is a bit of a disaster, when you can hear the Russians but can't hear anyone else in the UK. At least this week it's been better.

17m has been staying open well after the sun sets and 15m has been nicely in action. Until of course we get another blast of the solar wind and everything vanishes.

We have plenty of spots, coronal holes and turning the dial is a bit of a white knuckle ride. We're getting flares we didn't have a year ago, and we're hearing stations we couldn't hear last year. All a bit different from the "doom and gloom" scenario a while back. Crumbs, I may even have to make up an antenna for 12m at this rate (a full wave loop by the way - I'm a bit pushed for space at home).

There's a CME heading our way for the 9th or 10th March, so may produce some nice aurora for some, or a load of noise for others. On the other hand, some interesting VHF contacts with some very wobbly CW (morse).