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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Antenna analyzer - ordered

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 I've got too many antennas lying around, I can no longer remember what they were for. 50MHz? 144MHz, 430MHz? Dual band? Single band? Not a clue. I've ordered a £30 NanoVNA (vector network analyzer) off Amazon, arriving tomorrow with Prime. It looks like one of the many cheap VNAs on Ebay/Amazon but reviews are very good. This will do up to 900MHz but even that's way too high for my current hobby (which is more concentrated on the HF side), and that is spectacular price / performance point. I cannot believe these things exist, about 15-20y ago a Vector Network Analyzer cost big bucks and was a lab bench equipment only companies and insane amateurs could afford - this thing is slightly larger than a credit card and only 30 quids! Simply my mind is blown. I've watched a couple of videos and I'm quite sure this will be enough for my own purposes. I don't have any GHz equipment and don't care about that right now. It will be perfect for managing & testing an...
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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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