Radio and rails...

Time to replace several lengths of coax and run new... 100m ought to do it!

I finally got some wire in the air. Well, not very much and not very high, but at least it is outside. One end is attached to an eye bolt outside the shack window positioned so I can reach it with the window open wide. From there the wire runs down to the workshop. I am not exactly sure of the length, Google Maps suggests just short of 30 feet. So pretty short! But it works, and the FT450D internal tuner can cope with it from 30m to 6m, except for 12m. Anything lower than 30m has SWR approaching 3 but otherwise it seems to be ok. Pity the sun is being naughty right now but it gets a good spread across much of Europe on 20m. The wire feeds a 9:1 (I think!) unun and a 1:1 choke, then RG58 (*) to the patch panel. The cable needs to be routed yet as it is currently just running through the open window. Signals received are definitely stronger than with the loft wire and Z11 tuner but it is hard to say exactly how much because of the time taken to swap leads, disable or enable the internal tuner, and…

New (to me) arrival in the shack... something I've been toying with getting for some time now. This is a TS2000X and has the 1296MHz option installed. It will take me a little while to get acquainted with it but it brings more capability on 2m and 70cm and adds 1296. I've been using an FT817 on VHF for FT8 etc. up until now and generally running it at 2.5W - fun, but I wanted a bit more juice up there. The Signalink from the '817 is ready to go, just waiting for a CAT cable and some coax plugs as I've used all the ones I need. That will at least give me time to read about the rig before playing...

I dug my poor dusty MD380 out yesterday and charged it up. For a while now I have had Fusion and POCSAG on the pi-star but I rarely use the FT2D and when I do it's only for APRS. So I thought why not get DMR back into the pi-star. I have a dual DVMEGA HAT with pi-star set to duplex from when I was fiddling with the new HAT. Anyway, since I last used the MD380 I changed the rx and tx frequencies in pi-star to the 'designated' hotspot frequencies so the MD380 needed reprogramming. That's where it all started to go south... First off, since I rebuilt the Windows PC I did not, for some reason copy across the MD380 programming software. Ok, found it on the web and installed it. Can it see the TYT programming lead? Nah. This particular lead is basically a wire, it does not have a chip built in apparently and so needs a specific driver. Oh yes, Windows will see the lead and knows what the device is but has no clue about the driver. Ok. Found a driver. Installed it - apparently - it does not give an error but the…

(edited 27/7/24 15:34) I recently came across Meshcom (https://icssw.org/en/meshcom/) which broadly speaking is an amateur radio off grid messaging network like Meshtastic. I had a 433MHz Heltec V3 with Meshtastic installed but as there is no 433MHz activity nearby it has just been sat in the abandoned project pile aka the corner of the desk. So, I thought, here is an interesting use even if there are no nodes nearby… yeah, that’s always a bad start. Anyway, as yet the instructions are not as polished as those for Meshtastic and I struggled to get anywhere, routinely managing to lock Windows up completely when using the esptool. When I finally got the thing to look like it had connected the downloader instantly gave an error and packed up. It was then I noticed there is a web flasher (url) so I tried that. Off to a bad start, the flasher reported that the serial port (the device is directly USB connected) was not ready, and no amount of whinging and gnashing of teeth fixed it. Unplugging and re-plugging the Heltec in made no difference. Three times, same thing. I connected it to the Mac and checked that the esptool.py there could…