Radio and rails...

My vision, if I even have such a thing is constantly going up in frequency. I am (still!) assembling various bits of microwave gear currently aiming at 10GHz. (EME would be nice, but, baby steps...). Lower frequencies are also interesting me and to that aim I now have a VLF converter which takes 50-500kHz and makes 4.0 to 4.5MHz. After throwing a bit of wire out the window I can pick up Radio 4 - which, of course I can do on just about any old thing (!) but it proves it works. Hopefully this will put SAQ on my radar, but more importantly the 136kHz and 472kHz bands - receive only for now. The bit of random wire was particularly useless of course, but sufficient to pick out speech on 198kHz.

Having two radios, two SignaLinks and multiple computers I figured why not spread a little... so here's 4m FT8 from the FT450D and transverter plus 2m FT8 from the FT817. Well, it would be rude not to use both together... Mind you, the poor old i7 MacBook Pro does seem to have a whinge if I dare do something else at the same time - it seems to temporarily forget the USB and gives a rig control error. On the other hand it is quite convenient to have the Mac set up as now because it is always on and I can very quickly get onto 2m FT8 (or indeed 70cm FT8 but my best QSO so far has been all of 7km!)

My first FT8 on 70cm. Only 25km, but still a first for me. No reply sadly, so no QSO this time. At the time I sent a few CQs while watching pskreporter and seeing nothing. I checked this morning just out of interest and there was this one reception report. This was via the FT817 and 2.5W into a 70cm big wheel, which isn't at all big at that frequency! I had only just installed it which itself was a bit of a comedy of errors. I had some M&P cable ready for it but just never got round to making it up, so soldering iron out, BNC at the shack end, cable pushed through the hole in the ceiling, N male at the antenna end. The centre pin fell out! So, picture me managing to pull the loft end of the cable back down the ladder and across there landing floor to the shack (hard enough feeding the cable through the hole so I really didn't want to have to pull it put again!), supporting it with my knee, soldering iron at maximum reach and more heat... the NanoVNA showed the SWR to be just right where it needed…

I had heard of VARA HF but not done anything about it because the Windows machine is not connected to the HF rig. That was cured yesterday by something I should have got ages ago - a USB switch. This switch has two USB connections aimed at connection to two PCs, and then four USB sockets for devices. So the SignalLink and the USB adapter for CAT control are now plugged into this switch which shares these between the Linux and Windows PCs. It all seems to work fine with USB devices connecting and disconnecting and, fortunately for Windows anyway appearing in the same place. It took me a whole to figure out that the CAT control, ends up as COM6 on the Windows box but so far it has not decided to change when reconnected. Now the Windows box can see the FT450D I tried WSJT-X - no issues there, and it provided a good end to end test. I downloaded VarAC and the VARA HF modem. Installation went fine and almost straight away it decoded a beacon on 14.105. Since then it has been decoding numerous other beacons and a few CQ calls but I have yet to…

I have always dabbled in home automation, pretty much since before it even became a thing. Most of the control was, and mostly still is via X10 devices and controllers which use mains signalling. This is rather old fashioned now and, being mains signalling is susceptible to interference. At one stage the outdoor light, which are controlled via an X10 appliance module in the workshop were very intermittent, until I discovered the wall-wart on one of the internal cameras was injecting awful noise that caused a scanner AM to buzz wildly when held near any mains outlet in the house! Anyway, that isn’t radio related, but this is… enter Zigbee. I have not read very far into this yet but it uses 2.4GHz among other frequencies for its signalling and there are lots of modules available. I plan to change our two dimmers to Zigbee and it will be pretty much plug and play. Apart from removing the mains signalling path the modules communicate both ways, so the controller can see their status as well as control them. Some of the newer X10 modules do this but very few of them and none of the ones I have. The current…