EFHW antenna and the dodgy 49:1 Unun

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.

Remote operation with FT-847

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.

It's been a while... Summary of the last 4 weeks

 Well...

Things did go wrong, things did go right.

I built a kit. This is a 100W linear amplifier, but I haven't plugged it in yet. I have a radiator block for it, but I haven't drilled any holes yet. I picked up a beautiful manual hand drill from a Freecycler and I'll be drilling it today, I hope. 

Then I managed to compile WSJTX, JS8Call and JTDX on my Arm laptop and made it work. This was a big step. 

There is a problem with the WiFi chip, i.e., it doesn't work because the kernel is a custom kernel by some guy w/o very good build steps so I can't compile it again easily, and the modules I can strip out of elsewhere cannot be loaded in. It's a bit crap tbh, but it does work with a USB network cable. I have a Dell dock station which functions but then it has only two USB ports. As I type this it is running almost the latest source of WSJTX on 20m, capturing things. I've managed to make more than a handful of contacts on it.

After that I started to build a Raspberry Pi station with software I'd need so that I can plug it into the FT-847 and work on it remotely from the couch. Ouch.

Totally borked...

... Some cursing and soldering later...

  

So this is how it started to look next to my couch - no place to put any snacks or coffeeeeeeeee...

When the weather got better, we started to have portable work, as a part of the exercise. 

"It's cosy here"

We met a lot of friends on the way.

I also dug out my 70cm ZL Special yagi array out of its hiding hole and finally wired it up. This is before, and there's no after picture. I made a mistake and the cross wires were a bit too short so SWR is high but still usable, I will re-do it if I find the courage because it was a very fiddly and frustrating work. I cannot believe the instructions on how to wire on the net don't exist as a nice little picture. Words don't work when you're dealing with this kind of crap. It was frustrating. I had other problems as well, when I was doing a little kit soldering and it drove me completely nuts. After that I didn't touch the radios for a couple of days because I was so frustrated. 

Meanwhile I plugged the tuner back onto the FT-847, and ordered a nice little QRP manual tuner from China - it has arrived now but I'm simply afraid of starting the kit. 

10m is dead, Jim.

Then the company gave me a gift, which was turned into Amazon vouchers, which turned into this little neat thing. It was slightly more expensive from elsewhere but it was the easiest way of getting via the vouchers and as such gifts are, free money, wasted away! It works very well with the FT-818.

I also got myself a fishing backpack based on some ideas from a fellow amateur on Facebook. Now I had used this on my previous hike with the MFJ, but this time I took the LDG tuner and everything fitted in perfectly. The below is with the Watson 9-bander antenna with a single wire working as the counterpoise, and the ground is simply lousy - but it worked! We also managed to make a 2M FT8 contact using the rubber-duck which was amazing.

This is all packed status, perfect although there's only a small amount of space left for a sandwich. One bottle of drink allowed on the side pocket. I am thinking of carrying a spare bag - I have an old gas-mask bag and there are some lovely ex-mil bread bags on Ebay which should be perfect for a sandwich + snack.

Once the restrictions started to allow recreational outings, we could also find a bench and do some FT8 work for slightly longer periods. I spent close to an hour here doing a handful of contacts. It's early days yet, I yet to optimise everything.

Unfortunately the bag has a tendency of toppling over because it had become a bit top heavy, but the Sheep comes to the rescue!

Overall it was one of the best weekend days I had this month.

Also lately I started to cycle because it's feeling warm enough, although no HF work. Only to the shops and back - and the sun still sets quite early, the below is from a cycle back from the shops and it was quite dark now. Also my bicycles don't have any lights - I've ordered some from Ebay, yet to arrive.

This is the Peugeot Pantera bike I have, converted to a straight handlebar because I can't cope with all that bending. I'm still heavy as fuck but I love cycling, even though I can't do even simple inclines right now. As can be seen I had the Baefong with me during the cycles but this was not optimal.

So attached the shopping basket which had been sitting idle in the garage for four years onto it. It doesn't look cool but much more functional. Now I can do both shopping and radio stuff on the move.

Overall March wasn't a very good month for me. Stress levels over the top, and I felt depressed quite a lot. It's been exactly a year since we've got COVID and recovered, and over 3 months my weight loss has stalled and I gained a couple of kgs back and it does feel like it. 

I spent a fortune on my teeth, dentists are way too expensive in this country, plus the gadgets. I've been spending a lot on Ebay buying connectors, cables etc., for various projects but the projects don't move forward. Overall I'm in a bad mood because the life, universe and everything.

The April should be much better. At least my sheep were a big help. Here they are rushing me to help me with a bad time.

Arm, ex-Chromebooks and me

 So, my sister had an Arm-powered Asus C201 Chromebook. This recently got de-supported by Google, it's no longer receiving any updates. It's light, the battery lasts 10h+ and still quite reasonably fast so it's a rubbish decision by Google.

Soooo, I've installed PrawnOS on an SD card. PrawnOS is a distribution for this hardware, runs on Debian 11 but it's got a custom kernel. The graphics card is well supported and works fast enough, (unlike some other Arm Debian distro I had tried) but the Wifi is an utter failure. The maintainer refuses to support the binary blob required. 

An old USB Dell docking station was borrowed from the office IT guy so that I can at least update and work on the thing. So far I've managed to get QSSTV and FLDigi working on it. FLDigi actually works quite well - all of this is plugged into the FT-818 via ttyUSB0 and a small £4 USB Soundcard that actually works very well. 

But JS8Call and WSJT-X refuse to detect any sound card, nor they print out a meaningful output. I haven't figured out how to put them into debug mode yet. I used to compile WSJT-X from scratch so I cloned the JS8Call repo and will check if I can build the thing with Pulse/alsa support. The problem is as follows.

Both packages are compiled for Linux, but no repository is available (which is a very weird choice in 2021). There are Intel 32 and 64 bit packages for Debian, and a pair of RaspPi OS ARM binaries. So I used the ARM binaries, but no. I'm confused because even on Raspberry Pi you'd need a USB sound card, so I'd expect that to work. I cannot figure out why else they are refusing to work. I've spent approx 30 mins on it so I guess I need to retry tomorrow.

Other than that, I managed to get FT-818 and FT-847 to talk to each other. There's something wrong with FT-847's data in/out - or my old cable is rubbish.I managed to dig out my old cables, and after much testing and frustration I managed to get the FT-847 work through the mic input and the headphone output. Not ideal, but it works. Then I dug out my USB to RS232 adapter, and also found a long RS232 cable, and started to use CAT w/o a fuss.

The audio side was a bit more interesting. Double-checking with an SDR, I can clearly see something is wrong with my audio when I'm using the mic input. When I was using the data input, the power level was completely inoperative, but from the mic input the power is effective. I've double-checked the manual and this doesn't make sense. 

Even with the minimum power, from a couple of metres away I could receive all sorts of digital mods w/o a problem. FLDigi works like a dream, QSSTV - not so much. I guess I should actually read the manual but I'm pretty sure I had solid QSSTV apps a decade ago, and I cannot figure out why I cannot find them anymore anywhere. Everyone goes "Oh, SSTV? Then QSSTV is the one".  if you ask me, it's overrated.

Anyway, I'll be making some new cables when the parts arrives, and by the time they are shipped and travelled from China to here I don't forget what the project was, I'm going to build a series of audio interfaces. I've ordered

• USB to RS232 chips
• octocouplers
• audio transformer couplers - already have them
• soldering platforms - got them
• 2.5mm and 3.5mm audio sockets with multiple poles - got them but might have to order some more.
• mic input socket for C5800

So, I'm thinking of making audio interfaces with RS232 PTT support using RTS for

• A pair of FT-65s
• Baefong UV-5R
• Standard C5800
• FT-847

Alright!

Wsprry on Pi and a filter.

 So...

This was supposed to be a low-pass filter for 14MHz. It's not working well - or too well since no one can hear me!

I set up one of my Pi machines with the latest WsprryPi. I had used this successfully in the past, around 2014-2015. It does a square wave so needs filtering, done the filter above. It has a 49:1 UnUn built in so that I can plug it straight into a long wire antenna going around the study walls. Not perfect but it should radiate something.

Anyway, I can hear my signal on the FT-818, not very strong but audible and stable. It does definitely filter out at VHF, but I can still hear a meaningful signal on 29MHz, I guess it is attenuated enough so that it's not causing issues. I hate winding cores. It is stressful and not being able to measure them straight away is frustrating.

On the other hand, no one else hears me! I've been transmitting for a couple of days now, but not a single spot on the WSPR net DB. I have checked my frequency - it is OK, but PSK Reporter site only shows a handful of people listening on 20m. That is a problem. I guess most have moved away from WSPR to FT8 or others. I wonder what I can do to create such a beacon that can run on a headless system. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Nice backpack for QRP work!

 

Only the Friday evening I was talking to my wife, telling her about the backpack my Grandpa gave me in early 80s.

I was around 8-10y old, and my uncle in Belfast had gifted me his ZX Spectrum 48 because he had upgraded, with a bunch of game cassettes. This had to be carried around so Grandpa probably took me to a shop in Dundrum (Newcastle NI), they used to live in a nature reserve near the village. 

It was one of those shops in small villages where they sell everything. So he gave me a small fishing tackle bag, including the waterproof removable bait bits. It was perfect for the ZX, power supply, games and a tape for loading the games + jacks. It just fitted everything nice and tight. For the next number of years I used to pack the ZX and go to friends to play games. It was simply brilliant.

Many moons later, I found it also perfect for carrying books around - and I used to be a massive reader of SF until COVID-19 made me too nervous to concentrate more than 15 seconds.

The bag still kicks around, about 35 years later, but it has worn off badly, and both of my NI grandparents are gone for more than 20 years now.

So, I was telling my wife about this bag, and maybe I should check fishing shop sites for something similar.

Then on an amateur radio group in Facebook I noticed another amateur showing off his wonderful QRP hiking setup. A fishing bag, with a perfect place to hang an antenna, and enough space for a radio, tuner and power supply plus other bits and bobs + and a sandwich and drinks.

And it was relatively cheap, around £27. So I ordered one.

It's perfect. I love it!

Side effect of all this is I've been thinking about my grandparents a lot. My last remaining grandparent, my Granny on my father's side had died last month and I still haven't fully appreciated the loss - with the lockdowns and everything I haven't been able to go to the funeral, it was in another country in any case and with my parents' ages and past illnesses it'd be stupid to risk it. 

Motorbike Mobile

 

So,  finally I had a day off.

I had a fake Nagoya RB-46 off China in late December. So I finally mounted it on the bike and took my Watson MultiRanger 9 and another fake Nagoya antenna out on my LT.

Then I had my MFJ tuner and the FT-818 on a padded bicycle bag, and the microphone plugged on a 2m-long cable. I dropped the mic at some point (and straight into the mud!) but at least I didn't break a thing this time. I grounded the antenna and the radio to the bike - but couldn't put a stake for additional grounding. I hope that will happen the next time.

  

Not bad? I put the UV-5R and the FT-65R into one of the glove boxes and took it out for a ride, aprox 30 miles in total. The antenna held just fine. Let's see how it works in the long run. Also it worked and tuned great in 40 and 20m. Next time I'll also try 6m.

M0!

 Finally obtained my full UK license - it's an M0. Unfortunately I had to surrender the M1 but I guess I could have insisted on doing it on paper and re-obtain that, I've been using it for a long time now, but hey, I like my new callsign.

All I have to do now is remember how to say it.

Full UK license test? Passed!

One of the Sheep is helping
with the calculations.

Well, that was easy. I had some mistakes but went way better than I was expecting. Last two weeks I only managed to have a couple of hours doing mock exams and almost no time to read the books to refresh on theory. 9 mistakes out of 58 - worse than I would normally expect but...

Last two weeks in average I had less than 6h sleep every day, and worked through the rest. I'm physically knackered and when I booked the exam I was thinking 'this is almost a week after the go-live, things would have had calmed down by then'... Ooh no.

Now it's time to take the FT-818 out for fun. 

2E0!

Well well, finally we managed to beat Ofcom's IT issues and I got issued with my 2E0 license.

This Sunday I hope to pass the full test - then I'll add another license to my list! So far I had a TA2, M1, M3 and now this 2E0! Next will be an M0. Unfortunately my current callsigns are all used, so I can't apply for that now. I can't see them in the list of the issued/reserved calls but the system wouldn't give it to me. I wonder why. Oh well...

M7!

 Great, We've got an M7 in the house!

FT-847 troubles.

I've been recommissioning my FT-847 and only on SSB I'm getting bad audio results. Usually I'm told it's hard to understand. I'm running QRP level powers, and I've tried with and without the PS. Ferrite beads at every single cable to prevent RF leak back into the rig, 2.5W transmit power so I'm sure PA stage isn't being hard-worked. I've also tried different mics, just in case - nope.

I've tried to check the transmission at home - the radio frontend is easily overloaded with two of the radios so close so I tried from a short distance instead using the FT-818 but the results were inconclusive due to my wife being a brand new amateur so she wasn't really up to the reports / handling of the radio to ensure a steady voice was coming.

As far as I can tell it's happening on all bands, I've tried multiple 20m contacts, and yesterday did the same on 6m - same kind of results. Trying it out with the 2M all-mode mobile radio (Standard C5800) showed a different kind of horrible audio, but then that radio too has been sitting unused for 5y and it's from the 80s so that might be even in a worse state!

FM and CW works just fine - clear audio, no funnies, no chirping. I haven't tried AM yet.

I've checked every single option on the radio and the calibration menus with no success.

Good news all around

 It's getting interesting. As you might remember

I hold a full UK M1 license (reciprocal)

I also hold a UK M3 license.

Now I'll get an 2E license (exam sorted out yesterday, nice pass mark)

I've booked my full UK exam for end of January.

My wife also passed her Foundation License exam yesterday, and now she's sitting next to me programming her brand new FT-65E. 

Success!!!

 

What a neat set up!

Alright, first contact on the FT-818 and it's an 59! OM3TWM from Slovenia was coming S9+ and responding to loads of M7 and M3s so I thought I'd have a chance with 6W QRP so gave him a call and he returned. Very nice.

Also got the C5800 out which was nice, I could hear a couple of FM contacts but no one came back to my calls. I'm still suspicious of this radio's sideband operation. I need to try some more contacts and get reports...

Also somehow the UV-5R looks very handsome with my 20+y old FT-23R antenna!

Bad modulation reports

 So I was out once more with the FT-847 and made a contact with EW1MM but his report was bad. 54, if I remember correctly and he mentioned that there's something wrong with my modulation. I spent the next three days testing with the help of my wife in freezing cold and got nothing. At least on 2M and 6M all AM, FM and SSB works fine. I need to test the HF side but that will have to wait until she gets her own license so that we can successfully transmit both sides and compare. 

I have no idea how to debug this at home since the radios interfere way too much in SSB/AM.

SWLing again...

Well that was fun. We were out on Christmas eve & the boxing day, and then I was out on the bank holiday Monday.

I mentioned the activities on the Christmas Eve earlier.

On the boxing day we were out for a walk, and then did some radio stuff. We could hear a pile up from Europe to Bolivia, and the chap was coming out 59 very loud! On our little single-band 20m vertical! Incredible signal. Unfortunately no one heard us transmitting 2W, including our sheep's attempts.

On the Monday bank holiday I grabbed the equipment and headed out once more. I tried some 50MHz SSB and FM calling, no luck. I also did this half the time with the microphone gain down all the way. You moron... Finally I finished at 14MHz once more, hearing loads of VK and very strong EU signals. No responses to my CQs. The radio was allegedly putting out 100W but I could see a lot less on the SWR meter so I wonder if the radio's power is down somehow. I hope I didn't break this radio. 

Also it was freezing cold. 1.8C outside (started with below zero) and inside the car was less than 5C. 

I was wrapped up warmly in two polar jumpers and a hat, but I felt quite cold in the end and headed back home for tea.

Still no contact but yet another long path day

Well, that was fun.

It's a freezing cold morning so I had to go out before the sunrise. First I did some shopping and then drove to the nature reserve on top of the Chiltern hills. As the sun was rising off the horizon, I was ready with the radio setup, this time the MJ-945E, a single-band 20m antenna and the FT-818.

CQ baaa ! CQ baaaa! CQ baaaa!

Yet once more the Australia was wide open! Plenty of VK stations were on air, Tasmania stations were also coming loud and clear! It was almost impossible to find a clear frequency, the whole band was glowing. The Russians and Italians were out en-force, Spain was coming out loud and clear too. I could even hear local(ish) G and M stations via ground wave. 

In the end I spent over an hour basically listening and that was fun. I didn't have the power cable for the FT-818 so I couldn't transmit over a couple of watts, so no one responded back. QRP SSB is really a struggle. I must bring out the laptop for FT-8 work.

Around 10 I packed up and went back home, I needed some hot drinks by then. 

Listening to pile-ups but still no contacts

 Took the radio out today, about lunchtime.

The Sheep says 

"I'm way better operator than half of these Italians"

It was... Interesting. Both of the antennas tuned up nicely on 14MHz first, then I listened to some and tried to respond - no takers. Tried some CQs but got no answers either. I could hear into the US very clearly a couple of mid-west and South Florida stations, and lots of Italians, Slovaks and some Serbs. Also some Arabic stations were very clear but didn't catch their call signs. Some operators are really lousy. Rubbish NATO code usage (Kilowatt is not a part of your call sign morons!), operated on top of others, and didn't play nice during pile-ups. 

Then I wondered around to see if I can get some contacts elsewhere, and found that there was a massive pile-up on a Tasmanian station!

VK7RG was coming out load and clear at 14.213MHz, and a lot of European stations were piling up on him. Especially a TA7 station was being extremely obnoxious, transmitting on top of other stations QSOs, not waiting for the VK7RG to call back. Oh well. 

I did responds a couple of times when he was picking up the next contact, but it'd be definitely impossible for me.

In the end I did put out about 75W SSB, anything higher the radio would get upset. The antennas somehow lost their tuning (I think there's something wrong with the cables) but  they were still around 1.5SWR max. I did try some 144.300MHz SSB calling too but as usual didn't hear anyone.

I had a laptop with me to try some digital modes, but then in the end I gave up and rushed back home around 2PM. It's now past 4PM, so I'll go and check my telescope out instead. The weather really sucks but it's a good time to calibrate the scope and oil the joints and the gears.

Still, not a bad day so far. I'd be happy if I can catch a couple of stations when I'm down in the garage, but the local 2M/70cm situation is dire.

In other news, VX7-R is still AWOL.

Today wasn't that bad

 

I didn't have my usual assistant so the little sheep helped instead.

Not a bad evening. After moping most of the day finally (yesterday depressed me to no ends) I got out just before 4PM and drove to the usual location and put up the antennas on top of the car. Then I got the FT-847 out - this time microphone included - and hollered a couple of CQs. Once more the US was very strong, heard lots of people from MN and Ohio, even all they way to Nebraska. I was putting out about 25-50W and once more, no one heard me or responded. I start to wonder if FT-818 was a bad idea with its QRP levels! I still love it to be honest, and FT-847 is also a fantastic radio. Later I gave up on 20, tried 40 and 80 but I couldn't get the multi-band tuned up. Then I went onto 145.500 and with the dipole on top of the bonnet (visible behind the sheep) tried a couple of CQs and a G4 from Cirencester responded so we had a nice QSO. 

Then I packed up the radios, drove a short distance and tried some night time photographies of the skies. It wasn't extremely successful, I had a hard time focusing the camera, but I managed to get a couple of almost in focus shots. Finally came back home around 6:30. Not a bad evening considering all things.

The micro VNA

Very nice piece of kit. I was wondering why it wasn't charging, but then I found out that it had no battery! No problem, I have a couple of Poundland power banks which has more than enough juice to run it. I love it. Yesterday I analyzed every single antenna in the house which included a couple of unknown pieces of metal. It's already paid for itself.