News from the construction club
Ian continues with his love of military equipment repair. He has been
working on the B2 spy set. He had it working at Rishworth earlier in
the year but it had a replica TX he had scratch built. Now he has an
original TX section. He has also been using a 123 set and installed a
neat mod for netting. I will try and send you some photos in the next
few days.
Ian and I moderate the B2SPY set yahoogroup. Perhaps you can give
this a mention. A search for B2SPY will lead listeners to our group.
Over christamas I completed my MKARS80 RXTX what a fantastic bit of
kit for £50. The audio is FB, covers the whole 80m band and easy to
build. My friend Norman has not had time to finish his so I have as
of yesterday I now have his aligned on the band and the tx working. I
still have with the help of Ian to set up the drive and mixer
correctly. We have as you know all the kit at the club. I had
Colette aged 7 help with the winding of the final toroid of both
Normans and my kits, this is good and the QRP gods will look down
favourably, no transistors gave up any smoke as a result.
Last night (Thursday) it was one of the few occasions when we were
unable to meet. The threat of more snow coupled with our local
authorities inability to clear our roads means we had to all work at
our home benches and chat over 2m.
Perhaps Bill we can have some photos of the operating position in the country.
My next project will be the cw add on for the MKARS80. Ian tells me
off because I have too many projects on the go. I still have a DDS
sitting waiting to be grated with an icom if and af boards.
Most recent purchase was a froggy 7 for £30. Have installed a slowmo
drive which improved the tuning no end.
I have moved my shack to the conservatory, my loft space shack was
just too cold for comfort. I had a broken antenna switch in the junk
box, the switch had failed, Ian gave me a relay from his massive stock
of spares and now when I power up the downstairs sheck HF is
automatically switched to there, when powered down the feed switches
to the froggy 7 in the bedroom for headphone monitoring whilst Michele
watches Eastenders or some other such TV mush.
Michele has given me a iphone for Christmas. I rarely have to open up
my laptop and can catch up on emails and the like in down time waiting
for Eurotunnel to deal with the snow on the line ha ha. What a
fantastic bit of kit for a ham. It has some cw practice apps. There
is an app which allows a paddle to be used to type in text for text
messaging the problem is it requires the phone to be hacked which
would void the warrantee. A bit risky with a phone that costs about
£400.
I have spend some three years now working in France, and have made
good friends with the Dunkerque radio club as you know. Perhaps this
year it is time to consider new horizons, jobs are hard to find in the
Uk right now but watch this space.
Can I finally ask you to mention the Dover Radio Club Rally on 17th January 2010
information from www.darc.org.uk. The club used to hold an annual
rally and we are planning to start these again. We have almost every
table booked and will be drawing in hams from all over the SE of
England.
What a pity you left London, you could have come down and met the
construction club had you still been in London. I am sure will will
meet up at some time. I am considring the purchase of a motorhome to
replace the one we sold a couple of years ago. I have a trip to Rome
already mentally planned, and Michele as you know is radio friendly.
Bill keep up the good work with soldersmoke.
Because of the snow I am working Uk side today I guess I should get
back to some work again.
73 from Nigel, White Cliffs of Dover England
Month: January 2010
Stradivari, Violins, Sunspots, and the Maunder Minimum
I mentioned Antonio Stradivari in SolderSmoke 120, but I felt a bit guilty about it, because there wasn’t much of a connection to radio. But Nick, KB1SNG, has come to the rescue. Nick sent me this interesting article that discusses POSSIBLE connections between the quality of Stradivari’s violins and the sunspot count. Check it out:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_violin.html
A recent article in The Economist alerted me to the fact that OM Stradivari was busy in the shack, churning out mechanical audio oscillators well into his 90’s. I thought that Stradivari’s late start, and his success in his senior years makes him an inspiration for many of us. A quick look at the Strad-Wiki page confirms this: Stradivari didn’t really hit his stride until age 54, and did his best work between age 54 and 81.
New antenna for the HW 8 station
Now that my HW 8 station has been moved indoors (good thing — there was snow on the hilltops this week!) I had to put up a new antenna. I decided to go with the same design that I had earlier: a dipole fed with TV twin-lead. I knew I needed a bit more wire than I had used in the original — I had trouble getting that antenna to tune up on 80. So I went to the local hardware store and asked for 20 meters of AC line cord. That cost me 8 Euros. Not bad.
We had a nice sunny afternoon on Sunday — Billy and I took the line cord out into the olive grove and pulled apart the two wires. (Hint: Start from the center, and pull slowly, or else the cord will get all twisted and a two minute job will turn into a twenty minute exercise in untangling.) I got to use some of those Radio Shack “solder strips” — I just wrapped a few around the connection points and applied heat from a cigarette lighter.
I put some parachute cord (550 cord) over a conveniently placed tree branch using the venerable rock and rope method. One throw was all that it took. The radio gods were smiling on this project.
Success! With the Trastevere flea market Pi network, the thing tunes up nicely on 80, 40, 20, and 15. I notice that the cheap CB SWR meter that also I picked up at the flea market doesn’t seem to sample much RF at 80 meters. I’m guessing that the designers were very focused on 27 MHz.
I quickly worked stations all over Europe, and even worked one station in Israel. I worked G4OEC in Somerset — I immediately thought of Tim Walford, and asked OM OEC if he knew the wizard of the Somerset farm. Mac said his village was far from Tim’s QTH.
It is nice to once again get familiar with the daily routine of the bands. 80 is hopping when I turn the rig on at 6 am local time. 40 seems to be active too. 20 opens a bit later, and I can hear stateside stations starting around noon local time. I really like hearing KZ1H up there in the high end of the 20 meter band — I can hear him almost every day.
Check out the ad for the HW 8 in a 1978 catalog. This must be a non-U.S. catalog because the ad brags of the HW-8’s ability to “work the States.”
Not much astronomy this weekend — Sabina and most of the rest of Italy fell under clouds on Sunday night. But I did catch a glimpse of Capella and the Kids.
New (old) antenna
We were back out in the woods this week, and on
SolderSmoke Podcast #120
January 2, 2010
Olive harvest in Sabina, Christmas and New Years in Rome.
"What, no Klingon?"
How's my whistling SSSS problem?
DX on 20, HW8 QSO with KZ1H
Auroral flutter on US stations
W4OP: Homebrew Hero
Softrock progress
Linux woes
72 Part Challenge: "Stuck between best wishes and hugs and kisses!"
Chinese Hamsat in orbit, with CW telemetry
AA1TJ in CQ, and using diodes as audio amplifiers.
Stradavari and Julia Child: inspirational late starters!
Billy's RC plane
QRSS: telemetry next?
WSPR: 150K reports per day
New issue of Hot Iron
MAILBAG