Summer arrived in North Wales today! Hurrah! After doing the taxi service for the teenagers, and then some (rare for me) nice fish and chips, I decided to go for a walk down the beach.
Arrrgghhh! An 8.1m spring tide at its very highest as I got there - without a radio!
Oh well. It was amusing watching my wife worry about the car disappearing under the waves!
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| One of the year's biggest tides. |
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| Water under the bridges - just! |
Winter is still making its presence felt his weekend. Winds up to 90km/h are ongoing, but it is at least relatively warm, if again very wet.
I decided to give my delta loop a rest from the endless winds, and took it down a day ago. My standby 20m antenna is an elevated vertical, which stays up permanently. It's flown through winds in excess of 130km/h.
I decided to have a rare check of the vertical at the end of yesterday afternoon, when winds were already up at 70km/h. I found several sun-cracked cable ties that needed replacing, cracked insulation on one kevlar-cored DX-Ultralite wire radial that was fitted exactly six years ago, and the solid copper wire connection to the radiator at the SO239 badly cracked and ready to fail completely.
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| The repaired vertical, during a less windy moment... |
Great! Repairs in a gale force wind! The radial was easily sorted with a generous application of self-amalgamating tape, which will see it through until calmer weather allows a replacement to be fitted.
I removed the whole feed point assembly and coax connector, cleaned everything up, applied some conductive grease to the SO239/PL259 contact points, and sealed everything up with self-amalgamating tape again.
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| Undoubtedly the most useful tool in the shack! |
A spade connector had to be soldered in the strong wind, which was effected using my endlessly-useful butane pencil torch. These are not always easy to find, so if you do come across one, buy two or more! With the flame held downwind, soldering is possible with this torch where any other system would never manage it.
There was practically no moisture ingress to the coax after several years, although I will cut the first few centimetres off and fit a new PL259 on a future sunny day, as I suspect some light tarnishing of the braid has taken place. I've now arranged the RG-213 coax feed so that it points downwards, not upwards, essentially eliminating the chances of any moisture ingress in future.
So, about an hour later, I was ready to send on 20m again!
Well, my two weeks of operating centenary station, GB4FTS got going this morning. GB1004FTS is generally too long for digital, but may make cameo appearances, as it is also approved for use.
But the propagation! Absolutely dreadful! 20m a real struggle until about 09UT, when things started to warm up a bit. So far, except for some WSPR transmissions that got out to VK and ZL, I've only got as far as Asiatic Russia on FT8/FT4.
If you're out there, looking for a SES for the log, then please do give me a call. General trend will be 20-12m during the day, down at 30-60m during the greyline and early morning/evening period. WSPR transmissions at 20m or 30m overnight.
With very unstable weather at the moment, and also rather cold, there isn't a lot of radio activity here!
After receiving my FT818 back from repairs at Yaesu, I've had time to review what I think of this tiny HF/VHF radio.
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| Good, but not perfect. |
Overall, I think it's pretty good. But there are niggly problems that make it a little bit annoying!
First off, the FT818 has no pull-out legs or bar supplied as standard to raise the controls so that they can actually be used properly! This is a major oversight for a portable radio, especially when the FT818 also has no detachable control head.
I've now bought some 'leg pegs' that prop up the front. But at nearly £20 delivered, this is not a very acceptable additional cost for a couple of small bits of shaped metal.
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| Maybe Yaesu should provide legs - simple bits of metal - as standard? |
The non-detachable head is also very annoying when you try to find a suitable box for backpack/man-portable field deployment. With a detachable head, things are far more flexible, because the main radio body can stay undisturbed in the box, whilst the head allows for easy control accessibility wherever you want to place it.
The power socket remains a major weakness in the FT818's design. The semi-permanent adapters you can buy are not very high quality, being rather weak 3-D printed units that have a tendency to delaminate along thin sections. And their use of power poles is a weakness if, as is far too easily possible, the conductors pull out of the housings right next to the bare chassis - which caused the damage to my radio.
There's little doubt that the power socket needs a major rethink, although we're unlikely ever to see it as I doubt Yaesu will keep the FT-817/818 form in future, despite its long-term success.
The internal battery is problematic, too. Whilst it was never going to power the radio for long, it is useful for something like working the 30-minutes or so of greyline from a beach, where you then go home with a flat battery, satisfied with a handful of QRP VK/ZL QSOs. But the widely-reported tendency of the battery to drain quickly when left installed even on a FT818 that's switched off, makes it less than ideal.
Of course, we have to remember the positives. It's only about £600 new. Half the price of the IC-705, for example - and I know I want none of the fancy features that has. The Yeasu's pretty tough, but the IC-705 isn't. Both have TCXOs, which is really what we should expect of all radios today, regardless of price.
So, the FT818ND I have no regrets about. But it isn't really well thought-out for field use, and its higher-power cousin, the FT-891, gets a little closer to the mark there. A hybrid of the two is really what I would like to see - detachable head, slighly larger controls, and maybe a maximum power of 15W from external batteries.
One day, people who actually use radios outdoors might design a rig suitable for that environment!
With all repaired and back to normal now, I took the tiny FT818 to the coast at Llanbadrig church this afternoon for a short period of operating.
Mostly, this outing was to see how convenient (or not!) my latest rearrangement of the equipment might prove to be.
I hadn't realised something quite funny about this operating position - a churchyard with lots of buried people around (including one grave stone with a Greek inscription): its grid square is IO73sk - 'silent key'! That made me smile.
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| 'Graveyard portable' at St. Patrick's 4th century church (IO73sk!) Wylfa (decommissioned) nuclear power station centre background. |
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| The FT818, back in action after its repair. Man, it was cold! |
Anyhow, all worked well with the coax magnetic loop tuned to 14MHz. The bands were far too busy to make much impact with about 3 Watts out, but I did manage a few QSOs with FT4. A couple of WSPR TXs at 1w were above or similar to any other G stations, so that's fine.
Generally, the FT818 is pulling me away from what can be rather dull digital work, also with the added equipment complexity, and towards SSB. With a bit of luck, it will soon be much warmer!
Well, a few weeks after it was launched, how's the fundraiser going for the RF detection and prediction of earthquakes going?
Things should be looking up, because we've had several large earthquakes across the globe, including very major shakes where my niece lives in New Zealand, and tens of thousands in Iceland over the past weeks.
Drum roll, please...
Work continues between other duties on the shortened 30m vertical, just 5m tall.
I'm still working in the garden on this one, where there is too much clutter to get reliable results. Nevertheless, I do now have a shortened 30m vertical that has excellent matching and performance.
To achieve this, I needed to swap the original coil for another I used a couple of years ago for other experiments. This has a variable tap, and I found only ~7 turns were needed on 50mm pipe to reach the best match.
The 'best match' was still 1.3:1, which is what you get with a standard 1/4 wave vertical fed with 50 Ohm cable. You can either live with the 1.3:1, or try a second coil across the vertical and radial connections, which I found lowered the match to 1.13:1.
Here's the latest prototype, which of course needs a bit of tidying up for the final version:
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| Coil party! It looks horrendously lossy, but seems not to be. |
I know what you're thinking: 'wow, that looks like a lossy mess!' I couldn't agree more. But it works. Here's the comparison with G0PKT, a full 1/4 wave vertical at 10MHz, which is at the coast in the east of England, benefiting from considerable coastal gain that we know from plenty of experiments here is typically 8-10dB:
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| Compared to a full vertical and its 'free' environmental gain at the coast, my 'coil wonder' seems to be working just fine. |
Comparing to a typical doublet with 300 Ohm feeder, my antenna is doing very well indeed:
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| Nearly 5dB better than a doublet across all distances. |
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| But out at DX distances, my antenna is 11dB better than the doublet. |
I'm glad to report that my FT-818ND, which I managed to accidentally fry recently, has been repaired by Yaesu and is now in transit via FedEx!
Luckily, the inadvertent contact of the +ve DC supply with the rear, bare metal chassis, led only to the burning of a small part of the ciruit track behind the input jack; no components were damaged.
Again, I can't stress enough that, even if you are careful, Anderson Power Poles, which the DC jack adapter for 817 and 818s require, are not very secure and will, in my view inevitably, pull out one day, make contact with the chassis, and burn things in your radio. Only use connectors well away from the body of the rig, if at all.
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| This tiny radio is well on the way to becoming my favourite. |
Not that it was cheap to repair - just over £100, including courier delivery. But that's OK. This included the engineers at Yaesu giving the rig a full check-out, including actual output power at all three high, medium and low settings on all bands.
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| Useful Yaesu engineer report as part of the repair. |
So I've now made very sure there can be no repeat of the accidental contact. All my Anderson Power Poles, which I had never used before this incident, always disliked, and will never again use, are long gone in the recycling bin. I've now got fixed wires going into the jack adapter, with an in-line connector and fuse in place.
For those thinking about an FT-818ND, I think it's a really good radio. Very small, very lightweight, great audio, TCXO as standard. Controls a bit small, but the menu system is very intuitive. The only suitable alternative, with TCXO as standard, is also a Yaesu, the FT-891, but that weighs twice as much as the FT-818, though it gives up to 100W, of course.
[UPDATED, COMPLETED VERSION OF THIS ANTENNA PROJECT DETAILED HERE.]
Well the sun is shining in Wales, but the wind is still a bit strong at 35mph gusts today.
I like the 30m band, but don't do enough operating there. So I wanted to see if I could use a standard, nominally 7m fishing pole, to suspend a 5m long wire so that it would work as a 30m vertical with a loosely-calculated, detachable coil at the base, and as a 20m vertical without the coil.
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| 10MHz bottom-loaded vertical, flapping in the wind... |
Well, even though the coil was a bit of a guess, and I only have one radial for getting a rough idea if it would work at all, I already get a 1.25:1 match. A standard 1/4 wave vertical has a native SWR of 1.3:1, so this is working well.
The coil itself is loosely wound on a 38mm diameter, ~170mm long PVC drain pipe section, 1.3mm enamelled copper of 13 turns. Matching done using a SARK analyser and spreading/compressing the coil until best match achieved.
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| First test of the coil. It worked! Wire can later be taped or glued in place with silicone sealant, etc. |
I'm currently sending 200mW WSPR, with very good early results, considerably better than anyone else I can find on the database in the UK on the 10m band running 200mW. So this antenna can be made to a higher standard, have another 1/4 wave radial added, and deploy at the beach from the end of next week onwards, where travel to anywhere in Wales will be permitted.
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| My 200mW, vs. 5W from G0IDE. |
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| Spots of 200mW, 16:26-17:26UT 16/03/2021. |
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| Despite using 14dB more power than I am, my all-distances result is only 7dB weaker than G0IDE. |
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| At DX distances, my 200mW is only 2dB down on 5W from G0IDE, though more data is needed. |
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| Against what is probably a dipole (operators are extremely poor at corresponding or providing info about their antennas), my short 30m vertical is doing very well. |
Reading up about the achievements of the now-destroyed Arecibo radio observatory, I found this reference to an interesting paper that tells of the impact of a tropical storm upon the ionosphere. Not something that we would perhaps expect, but of interest to us radio enthusiasts.
After several days of very little, if any activity at 12m, the band suddenly opened up in spectacular fashion for an hour or so this morning, out as far as YB and VK-lands. I managed successful FT8 QSOs with both entities. As quickly as it became active, the band then went very weak indeed.
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| 12m comings and goings this morning with ~20W and a 3-ele LFA. |
Yaesu have just got back to me on their assessment of my FT-818ND, which I managed to kill recently through a brief contact of the +ve wire with the bare metal rear chassis of the rig.
The engineer reports: "burnt out PCB track between DC Jack & T1035".
That seems fairly hopeful, even if the labour costs, repair and postage brings the bill to just over £100. I'm just hoping that the damage didn't propagate further, and that once the track is repaired, more work might be needed. In that case, a new unit is likely to be a better use of money.
Well, these things happen. Luckily, my only signficant damage to any equipment in the past 10 years, and only occurred because I used those stupid Power Poles!
It's been quite windy recently, and so my tower with 12m LFA has been down a couple of times, to reduce the chance of damage. So attention naturally turns to maybe greasing those rusty bolts over there, changing that plastic cable tie here, etc.
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| This identical photo of step ladders appears under several sellers' listings, all based in China. |
Because a luffed tower with a large antenna on top can't be lowered to the horizontal as there's no room to clear the floor, I need a big step ladder or small scaffold to access all the antenna's parts. In the past, I borrowed my now ageing neighbour's ladder, but in the Time of Covid, that's not such a good idea.
So, I looked around E-bay and found some good looking ones for £66. Now, I do almost always check that those people who claim to be UK stockists but in fact are based in China, are not trying to trick me.
In this case, the seller did not claim to be in the UK. But other listings, using the exact-same photo of step ladders, include a UK flag. Those sellers are not very honest, even if they ar not trying to simply take your money, but merely get you to buy from them, not somebody else.
Now, to be fair to the Chinese, I have never bought anything from them via E-bay where the product has not been both delivered in good (often remarkably good) time, and of the expected (or better) quality.
But a couple of weeks later: no step ladder!
OK. I got a response that claimed the ladder had been delivered, please check with the delivery company what happened.
I checked, and could see that the ladder had indeed been delivered, but to somebody else's address!
The seller refunded me in full as soon as I told them this had happened. They say the ladder was processed to the wrong delivery company depot in the UK. But it's hard to see how a parcel with the completely wrong post code could be delivered to (and accepted at) the wrong address.
I suspect the seller may have simply mis-addressed their parcel; we'll never really know for sure. With so many people relying on deliveries now, it's not inconceivable that a very busy van driver, finding no matching address, simply threw it over a hedge to get rid of it and get his 'delivery' payment.
But the bottom line is: the Chinese seem to be honest when it comes to honouring transactions, but do have a tendency to advertise themselves as selling from within your country, when in fact they are selling from China.
This doesn't necessarily mean you've been conned altogether, but you may be conned into buying from a country where you can only rely on the seller to refund you, and have no legal rights that can be enforced.
And note that 'lifetime warranty' strap on the image: that part is really of no value at all, as I would not expect the seller to still be around in a few years, let alone actually be contactable and willing to send a new ladder.
Do scroll to the bottom of each E-bay listing, and check the business address provided!
For more than a year now, I've been monitoring the 5W, 14MHz WSPR signal from VK3QN, an array of 2, 6 element Yagis fixed on long path to Europe, operated by Ian Williams, VK3MO.
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| VK3QN 14MHz array. Image (C) Ian Williams, VK3MO, with permission. |
Just under a year ago, I established that there was a ~21dB difference in the signal from VK3QN received at the beach, compared to the signal received inland (making a correction of ~2dB for the vertical delta used inland, as this has approximately that much 'design' gain over the 1/4 wave vertical used at the beach).
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| Last year's beach/inland RX test. |
This morning, using my vertical delta loop, VK3QN came in at the strongest level I've yet detected from home, peaking at +8dB. It's a remarkable thing to note that, had I been at the beach, the signal from Ian today would have been around +30dB! RX was on overnight, so the sheer rise in signal strength is also very notable:
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| VK3QN, 5W WSPR received by MW1CFN, 09/03/2021 |
After a consultation last year, OFCOM, the UK regulator has introduced, as it was always obvious it intended to do, limitations on all UK amateur licences that require EMF safety limits to be observed at all times, but only in relation to anyone who is not the operator. You can fry youself as much as you like, but neighbours and the like are all to be protected. This guidance assists understanding.
I was never a fan of this idea, which was set in motion as a direct result of irrational public panic about 5G systems, as I set out last year. Of course, 5G has nothing to do with the amateur service at all, but OFCOM would have no such rationality brought to the table.
Despite extensive formal requests from all the various parties involved in bringing this forward, including OFCOM, Public Health England, ICNIRP itself (who never responded at all), and the RSGB, absolutely no scientific evidence has been provided by any of them to support the notion that typical amateur frequencies and powers present a health hazard.
The RSGB claimed there was such evidence (but never provided references to it), and supported OFCOM's moves.
It's quite something when a regulatory body says there may be a danger, yet cannot point to a single piece of proper, peer-reviewed scientific evidence to back up the introduction of their new rules.
In addition, ICNIRP has been heavily criticised as being an unaccountable advisory body that, it is further alleged, has serious conflicts of interest. Little wonder that those who have scrutinised ICNIRP have asserted the European Commission should stop supporting it.
Be that as it may, I'm glad that OFCOM have, at least, taken on board my observations that amateurs are never trained to undertake such complex assessments as are now being demanded of them and do not possess, nor are ever likely to possess, the required, calibrated analysis equipment to do so.
In that regard, OFCOM have created a calculator so that one only needs to enter EIRP, duty cycle and frequency to obtain a 'safe' separation distance. I'm not persusaded yet that the calculator is actually as easy to use as it is portrayed - many 'guesstimates' have to be made - nor that the output presents meaningful results. Not that I accept there is a demonstrated risk, anyway. But quite who OFCOM imagine a 'professional installer' in the field of amateur radio is, well, anybody's guess. Clearly, there is no such person in practice, and it remains a mystery why this term has been included in the rules.
So there you are. More regulation of, and infinitely less representation for, amateur operators in the UK. I suppose the only good side is that, when neighbours claim that certain installations represent a danger to health, we will now be able to demonstrate that they do not. Either that, or the output will show there is supposed to be a danger (though there is no scientific evidence to demonstrate what this danger is), and the installation cannot proceed!
In practice, will anybody take any of this seriously? I rather doubt it. If someone ever brings a case to court, it must surely be that the lack of scientific evidence for harm would work very much against OFCOM, particularly as they have admitted to me in correspondence that it was all motivated by the 5G rollout.
For what it's worth (OFCOM will 'log and ignore'), and as an idea for when (if) you want to make a representation about all this when invited, this is what I submitted to OFCOM on their announcement:
"I consider the online calculator to be inadequate. It appears to assume that the exposure is to a fixed, static absorber (e.g. a neighbour), but makes no adjustment for the common situation where the general public referred to in these rules are incidental to the transmitter location (e.g. a specific person passing transiently along a path/road).
There is also no provision for absorption by structures (e.g. a house), which would otherwise dramatically reduce the safe minimum distance.
I also highlight again the failure of OFCOM, PHE, ICNIRP and the RSGB to advance (under statutory requests in the case of the first two bodies) any citations of peer-reviewed research that demonstrates a risk, or likely risk, at HF/lower VHF frequencies, and that this imposition by OFCOM is arbitrary and irrational."
A high pressure system, coupled to strong thermal stratification, has come to rest over the UK and out to the east.
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| Surface pressure. Image courtesy UK Met. Office. |
Whilst my HD TV signal is no longer available under these conditions (and some widespread engineering works), conditions on 144MHz have been stable out to the near continent, especially the Netherlands. Also a few from Germany and France.
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| Tropospheric ducting forecast, courtesy F5LEN. |
