Saturday, May 28, 2022

New antenna project & visiting radio rally

 Had some days off the job. Finally started the new antenna project. Have written about that before. It is a square halo design which I saw on the PA9X site at first. I will first try with a 20m halo only, Just to see if it meets my expectations. More pictures will follow when progress is made.

If all goes well I will try to make it a multiband halo. The difference with the antenna PA9X made is that I use a fiberglass "boom" to hold the balun box.

It has been a while ago. The covid-19 pandemic....well all is slowly returning to normal. There finally was a radio rally I like to go to. I went to Beetsterzwaag village together with a new colleague which also is a newly licensed ham PD8HW. It's fun to have another radio hobbyist at the job. I have to say it was fun. We met a lot of people and of course we bought some (old) equipment.


Some fun things we saw...

I had to look for a variable coil of some sort just because of the value in money. Not that I found it. But I found some variable coils and this one looks like it is completely home made. The value was 15 euro (about 16 USD) which is cheap I think. Imagine the effort someone made to fabricate this. I did not buy it. I bought a large variable capacitor to use at some future antenna project. I might buy a nice variable coil someday.






Some capacitors I saw when wandering around. Better be careful with charged ones. 18000uF is quite a large capacity.









This is an item I have a question about. Anyone that can tell me how this works? At first I though it would receive beacon signals and display it with LEDs blinking. But there is no receiver or receiver connection. Only a power supply input. I think it is a clock of something showing when a particular beacon is on air? And how is the time sync working? It might not be so difficult of course...

It is probabely pre-computer. There are far more sophisticated systems these days...however it is intriguing.

Friday, May 27, 2022

#6m ITU HQ almost & internet temptations

 


Hans PB2T is currently active from 4U1ITU ITU Headquarters. This counts as DXCC. I received his signal through the morning. Probabely due to airplane scatter. At a certain moment he received me as well while giving him a report. Unfortunately we couldn't finish the QSO. There was no airplane reflecting our signal within the time available.


On KST chat Hans warned me not to try to make the QSO via internet. It was not my intention of course. I just wanted to let him know I still received his efforts to send his report. I didn't realize by writing him that I was trying to send him my RR he could see this as part of the QSO and that way he knew I received his report. In that case he could send a 73 and QSO could be logged. I'm happy he didn't. This seems to be a common mistake made on the chat. The temptation of such a internet service. Please be warned and don't make these mistakes yourself.

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Forget pinpoint. VarAC now recognized by PSKreporter

 


Forget about the pinpoint post I did a few weeks ago. It was a nice solution but not necessary anymore. After updating to the new V3.8.8 PSKreporter will now display VARAC mode. It works well! You can also view if interesting DX is on VarAC. Or your friends of course. I think this is a huge step forward for this digimode. I sure love it although activity is limited mostly to 20m. However this time of the year my activity is mostly on 50MHz and 70MHz. But if time allows in between I will try to be QRV with this interesting new digimode.