M7!

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 Great, We've got an M7 in the house!

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Remote operation with FT-847

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Well, not bad. I put an ethernet cable around the study reaching out to the radio, plonked a cheap USB sound card and the Pi, with my old USB to Serial adapter into it and voila, it works with VNC quite well, CAT and the lot. There are future experiments to be made, like using something faster than VNC but it works, apart from 6m.  At 6m the cables are getting interference and the TX'ed signal is horrible. Needs more investigation.  Other thing to look into is the audio cables, right now they are electrically connected. That needs to go, all of that cable stuff needs to be replaced with the audio/TTL connection kit I'm working on. That'd give me both octo-couplers for the serial side and also audio transformers on the other side. Anyway, we'll get there.
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M0!

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 Finally obtained my full UK license - it's an M0. Unfortunately I had to surrender the M1 but I guess I could have insisted on doing it on paper and re-obtain that, I've been using it for a long time now, but hey, I like my new callsign. All I have to do now is remember how to say it.
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Bicycle Wheel Mag Loop

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A while back I stumbled upon  VK3YE 's excellent video about building a mag loop antenna out of a bicycle wheel. Building some type of loop like this has been in my mind for a long time so I shopped for variable capacitors that could handle this on eBay and got some junk. They weren't cheap. Overall I spent way too much money on this antenna compared to something off the shelf like a number of Am-Pro sticks could have been bought but that's not the fun (or frustration) part of it. I have had some MTB wheels in the garage for years, collected from bikes that have gone to the Rust section of the Silicon Heaven.  So finally this Saturday I got off the couch and wandered down to the garage. After checking out the two front and two back spares, I picked the one that's in worst shape, a front wheel with scored rims which came out of an old Raleigh bike i had picked up from Freecycle which was beyond any meaningful repair. The rim was in a relatively good rust-free shape and t...
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