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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Wittering Beach: Sand and Radios don't mix

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So, Ms B, a friend of us and I jumped into the car and went to Wittering Beach. We arrived at 11 just after the rains stopped. Setting up the antennas and the beach tent took a while but in the end we spent a very relaxing and joyful time. I wasn't very successful with the end-fed and FT-818 and sand got everywhere but I truly managed to let go under the shade of the tent and relax. I wasn't stressed when something didn't work and I wasn't annoyed with anyone. Just me, Ms B and the sea. Perfect.  The Radio Sheep is scouting for some 6m contacts.
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