Here’s a little video of a kit that I recently built. Works very well. Should be over interest to any morse operators.
Amateur radio
My New Year’s present to myself is a Yaesu FT-DX3000
It’s got lots of bells and whistles I need to learn about, so will no doubt be reading the manual for weeks.
So far it’s very impressive. The receiver can pick up things my old Kenwood TS570 couldn’t hear.
I attended the Friedrichshafen Ham Radio event with a number of the ICQ Podcast crew, and did lots of interviews.
Here’s one I did with Eric Swartz from Elecraft.
I managed to receive the SSTV signal from the ISS from it’s passed over the UK on the 18th and 20th of December 2014.
Here’s some of the images I downloaded :-
We held a foundation licence course over the weekend of the 15th and 16th of November, with the exam on the 22nd.
I’m happy to say that 10 out of the 11 students passed with flying colours.
The students and instructors are shown below. I’m the one on the right of the picture.
Had some fun at the weekend. A few of us from the radio club had a go at the practical wireless 144MHz QRP contest from Epsom Downs. Managed to work 61 stations, including Scotland and Ireland. This was good practice for the ssb field day in September. Had a few folks staring out of the windows from passing cars wondering what we were doing.
I bought a hands free kit for my Yaesu FT7800 in my Volvo.
Very simple to install, it just plugs into the Microphone socket and replaces the fist mic.
It has a Microphone which clips on to the sun visor, and a ptt swtich, which I’ve cable tied to the gear stick.
It’s surprising just how much easier driving is with both hands while operating the radio..
My picture in practical wireless
As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been lent a couple of radios to play with.
On the 4m Anytone rig that Martin, M0SGL lent me, I managed to contact Fred G3XXN, in Worksop about 40 miles away, who kindly came back to my CQ call. It was quite crackly, but the contact was made.
Martin, M1MRB, lent me a Motorola DP3400 DMR handheld, which I tried out – see the following video :-
