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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Playing with Yo-yos!

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 Inspired by someone on the Twitter, I ordered two cloth hanging wire spools from China and with a bit of speaker cable I managed to build a Yo-Yo dipole under 10 minutes. The Radio Sheep is impressed! So I took it up the hill. Measuring the dipoles and setting them up was... Errm... A challenge. I should have measured the length of the wire for each freq at home, not up there. I couldn't get it tune perfectly and at 20m it looked like an arrow, not a V.  I lengthened the cables with the orange clothes line wire and it was much better. I tried 40m and it was quite usable. Overall this day was a bit of a challenge but it ended up successfully. This was literally the last time everything went fine for a long while.
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I'm not enjoying this hobby

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 So, day off. I had taken two Mondays off and this was one. The plan was to go up the hill and do some antenna testing.  First, it was raining. The Met Office claimed I'd be free of any downpours so I should have paid more attention to the real skies. It was sunny at home but after 8 miles and 15 minutes I was sitting in my parked car waiting for the downpour to end. So it did, and I picked up all of the gear and walked for 10 mins to my target.  Put everything down to the picnic bench and the skies opened up. I was completely drenched but the equipment stayed dry. The Radio Sheep really enjoyed this outing Once this was gone I could see I had a window so I started to set up the antennas. Everything. Went. Wrong. A rare sight that day Hanging the long wire took approx 45 mins and I cut myself twice. Then the wire from the PC to the radio broke. Then the cable from the tuner to the radio broke. Then the rain started again. I quickly packed everything and as I was walking b...
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