Bulk update from this day

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 Between early Sept and now I entered everything in one go, with appropriate dates...

Popular posts from this blog

EFHW antenna and the dodgy 49:1 Unun

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You might remember the 49:1 UnUn I had built on a small cardboard box. (Actually I might not have blogged about that, I'll do a post later). Successfully tested on Saturday. Two contacts under 10 mins, then we got cold and walked back home. 9m pole, 10m of thin wire, couple of metres of counter-poise, SWR was 1:1.5 or better at 14MHz. 2.5W to it and we bagged two contacts right away.
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FT8 UHF contest

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It was fun. I did 6 contacts and M7 did one. We used the FT-818 and the cheap Nagoya 2/70cm clone next to the potted plants in front of the window, vertically and we still made some contacts. I also tried the 70cm ZL Special inside but that didn't work well.
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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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