Well I’ve had this little radio thanks to Dino at Bettercom.
It’s a small dual band HT that’s fairly light and feels well built.
So far so good, the manual is interesting, but the radio sounds good. I’ve not really used it on air much as of yet.
DE VK3IVY
Well the last thing I expected to find there were Quansheng hand held radios. Ranging from their UHF CB radios, to their 2 metre and 70 cm hand held radios.
So I asked about them, and was promptly told that to buy the 2 & 70 Handheld one would need a license.
I promptly bought one for $150 which I thought was a good price.
Now when I got home even though the handheld had been fully charged. The charger didn’t work. I emailed Dino at Bettercom the seller of the radio, and then tonight he popped round and dropped off a new charger for me. Which is now properly working.
I just have to say it’s been wonderful dealing with Dino at Bettercom. Now his site isn’t finished as of yet. But here it is: www.bettercom.com.au
DE VK3IVY
whee, a good sunday spend doing some DX much thanks to:
IZ4DLR
FO5Jv
ON8VP
IW4EIQ
I4LEC
IZ2GAF
G4RIQ
S51ZZ
Much fun was had on 14.180MHz SSB.
Take care
DE VK3IVY
Oh I’m licensed again. I’d been silly and forgot to renew my license, but all sorted now.
~Ivy
Well I’ve managed to get a couple of Android devices now. Firstly the Huawei S7, a cheap android tablet marketed here by Telstra as the T-Touch Tab. It’s not too bad, it has it’s limitations. But for the price a nice little device.
Secondly I’ve also got (as a mobile phone shock horror!) a HTC Wildfire, of which I’m pretty impressed with.
Anyway I’ve been getting into hacking and building android stuff. So far I’m running a very customised version of android on my S7.
Lots of fun really, still trying to learn how to build android from source (I can build reference implementations.) But repackaging an android rom is not hard with the right tools.
I’m probably going to add more notes of my exploits with Android here along with the radio stuff.
well I’ve set up the new site for vk3kid just working on it now, and adding content.
Well it seems that propagation is improving finally. On 15 Metres 21.26MHz I can hear SX2IMA contesting. This is a station operating out of Greece for a field day. It’s faint but I can hear them from here.
Things seem to be on the up finally, this is the first time I’ve heard much in the way of DX on 15 Metres.
Well, I had a full wave loop for 20 Metres, which I tried to convert into a folded dipole (now this is proof that one must think before one acts) which was a failure as there wasn’t enough wire strangely enough, and to top it off after the strong winds in Melbourne the other night caused some damage to that failed antenna.
Now generally for a dipole we work on the theory that the full length of the dipole is ½λ so for example for the 20 meter band we could go for the following formula:
(300 ÷ 14.175) ÷ 2
where 14.175 is the centre frequency I’m trying to work with.
So from this we get the value of:
10.582 metres
As I’m working with dipoles we can simplify the formula above to just 150 ÷ λ where lamda is the frequency we’re working with. I’m wanting to get good coverage over the 20 meter band so I’m using the frequency of 14.175.
So for a normal run of the mill dipole our two “legs” of the dipole would be:
5.291 metres
Now a folded dipole has the characteristic of offering a better match over a wider band. Meaning if all goes well the folded dipole will work over the entire 20 metre band without having to use a tuner.
Though using a tuner and balanced feed line it is said that one can use the folded dipole on other bands where the half wavelength is at the lowest frequency you’re operating on.
Now for my folded dipole, the full length of it for ease of construction was 10.6 Metres, and the distance between the top of the folded dipole and the bottom (I’m sure there is a word for this but for the life of me I can’t think of it.) was .6 Metres.
Now the feed impedance of the folded dipole is somewhat higher than that of your standard dipole (which is around 72Ω) , and is close to 300Ω so instead of the 1:1 Balun that a standard dipole would use a 4:1 Balun to try and bring the impedance as close to 72Ω as we can.
Anyway, after building this, and putting it up in the air, I’ve checked the swr of the antenna, and it appears to be 1.5:1 across most of the 20 metre band. So I need to tune the antenna up a little, as it is just a touch too long. But it works very well compared to the full wave loop I had used previously, and much better than my first attempt of a folded dipole.
Well I wasn’t happy with the full wave loop for 20 metres. While it was quiet, I couldn’t hear much either, and also I was proving difficult to match. I may not of thought things through properly when measuring it and may of left it a bit too short.
Anyway I’ve had some luck with folded dipoles previously (on 40 Metres and 80 Metres.) So I decided to build one for 20 Metres.
So far so good, not a perfect match it’s about 1.5:1 across the band. But that’s not too bad. I might see what I can do to improve the match.
So far so good. Just listening to someone up on the Birdsville Track.
~Ivy
Well set up an inverted V dipole for 80 Meters. And so far so good. It has a 1:1 swr at 3.5 MHz, and about 1.5:1 at 3.6 MHz.
So as I don’t do much in the way of CW, I could shorten the antenna a little, so to get it closer to 1:1 around the area in which I tend to talk on. Which is around 3.59 MHz for a little group that I like to touch base with.
Also with the help of VK3GNU, who is much better at getting ropes up into trees than I. We set up a full wave loop for 20 Metres.
Still thinking of what else to build. One of the things we’re considering is a beam for 20 Meters. How many elements, and do we buld traps to make it shorter. Who knows but it will be a lot of fun.