Radio and rails...

So this is my day job - well, not exactly a job and only one day a week - volunteering at a heritage railway. And here we are in the middle of nowhere... good job it isn't raining this time.

I had a number of Molex pins to wire up recently. To make things easier I decided to use some 4-core signal cable I had but found that the insulation is so poor at resisting heat that soldering the Molex pins was a non-starter as it always ended up with bare wires. Of course, Molex pins are designed to be crimped... so off to eBay. The latest addition to my toolbox arrived in a couple of days and made the job a lot easier.

When I first got my foundation licence I was lucky in that a friend sold me a used FT450D at a seriously good price. Since then it has been in regular use. But now I also have the TS2000X I am somewhat torn. Currently the TS2000X is plugged into three antennas, the loft wire + tuner, and the loft 2m and 70cm big wheels. I had been using an FT817 for 2m and 70cm but that is now sat on the floor all disconnected. Poor thing. But what to do with the FT450D... I do like the radio, it's very easy to use, nice display etc. and quite compact. Ok, not compact like the '817 but it's a 100W rig. But the TS2000X does everything I need in just one set, so do I sell the '450D? Decisions... I mean, I don't need both, I won't use both together... or will I? Well, yes actually, I can run the '450D on HF and the '2000X on VHF, especially once I finally set up my external wire (the long one not the current short one). And the '450D is connected to the Linux box with the '2000X connected to Windows. So…

I am surprised that I actually managed to do something useful today. For a while now I have been meaning to put a Cross Country Wireless HF/VHF/UHF antenna splitter to use and today was the day. It is now sat upside down on the top shelf above the radios, fed from the discone in the loft and feeding two little LoRa modules, one for TinyGS and one receiving radiosondes. The TinyGS receiver had been running for some time sat in the loft and was previously the only thing connected to the discone. The radiosonde receiver had a 70cm ground plane in the shack and never received anything. Since reorganising the feed it has burst into life, rather surprisingly finding a balloon quite close to this QTH which was apparently launched from somewhere to the west of the Lake District but the data does not show the launch site. Looking at the altitude figure in the data I suspect it is already sat on the ground. Pity I cannot go out right now to see if I can find it. Now, the cabling is RG58 and so not particularly good at UHF. The next step is to put a pre-amp next…

Some of you may remember that I used to collect valves. I started collecting when I was around 6 years old, although back then it was more to impress friends than collect. An old directly heated valve plus a Lego battery box lit my desk up at primary school. I did not start collecting in earnest until the 1990’s and launched my first online valve museum in 1999. Since then the collection grew in several directions at once, including German WW2 types, Russian Cold War types and British military and civilian types. There were specials from all over the world as well including a few Japanese WW2 ones. Valves ranged from tiny little things to a RD150YB that had to live in the garage, and a 6-anode mercury arc rectifier that was equally not allowed in the house, and for good reason too. The main collection grew to over 3,000 types, many of which had duplicates, so probably 4,000 in total. And then there were boxes of valves that did not warrant adding to the collection. And so the collection continued to expand. While on holiday in the US friend in the US was discussing collecting trends with me and…