Seaside trip to Bognor Regis with no FM

So, we went to Bognor Regis.

 

Not a good day for a radio adventure

It's been on our list for a long time, we passed through it once but after watching the utterly brilliant dark sit-com Don't Forget the Driver where Toby Jones plays a tourist bus driver dealing with unexpected immigration and human trafficking issues we had to go there. It was nice, we had a nice coffee & cakes, walked around and came back as the sun was getting out of the clouds.

I had my radios with me but in the end didn't do an expedition because it was pointless.

I'm not enjoying this hobby

 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 back to the car the skies opened up once more.

Worse - I arrived at the car to a racket. I had left the FT-65 on top of the roof and it was soaked in all of that downpour. Positive side? Yaesu didn't lie when they said their radio was waterproof. 

Overall I hated this day.

Yet another failure

OK, today we went out to the usual stuff with Ms B and put up the random wire. The antenna worked beautifully. The noise levels of the LiPo was low too.

The Radio Sheep is really enjoying itself.

What failed was the audio interface. I quickly ordered some and tried some SSB work. No luck, so we went back home. I came back the next day but that's a different story.

ISS SSTV passes

Today ISS was transmitting 12 different pictures continuously so the aim was to capture at all 12. I managed to capture 3/4 in total as below. Because it was a work day I missed most of the passes due to meetings.

2nd pass was worse.

I couldn't coordinate myself to try the next day.

 

Playing with Yo-yos!

 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.