Radio

Working with the radio at my mother and fathers place is much more successful than at home. The fact that it’s about 60KMs from the city helps. And it’s nice to spend a night in a place without light pollution is really nice.

Anyway Hannah and I set up a basic wire dipole antenna, 10 meters side to side, and strung it up around the decking out the back of my parents place.

This antenna cost us the grand cost of under $5AUD nice and cheap.

Anyway during the daylight hours, we listened in to the 20 and 40 meter bands, even picking up KE6M from california, which was kinda cool.

At night the 40 Meters seemed almost unusable as there was a lot of AM stuff emanating from China, and also a repeating noise that could of been an over the horizon radar system also from China.

But 80 Meters was fairly active, and we filled many pages of my little log book with stuff we found interesting. One of the cool things was a couple of guys talking about how to build decent chokes and baluns from stuff in their junk boxes.

A good day all in all.

I so need to get myself licensed so I can start transmitting.

~Ivy

Tags: musings, tech by Ivy
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Well to be honest I am new to the radio game. I do remember when I was ten or older a friend of my mum and dads was into ham radio. I thought this was amazing, I remember seeing the QSL cards that this person had, including one from East Germany and I really thought this was cool.

But in looking back, I think my interest began much earlier, with a radio receiver that my grandmother had. I can remember little of this set other than it was white, and had many knobs. The two things I do remember receiving on this radio, was the local constabulary talking about a stolen mini, and the Russian woodpecker. I found out what the “woodpecker” was from the show on the BBC many years ago “Tomorrows World”.

Anyway I digress, at home, in the near the City of Melbourne, with a basic wire dipole, I can pick up little other than noise, and faintly the odd voice, of which due to the noise I can’t make head of tails of.

I guess this is what one gets in world where cheap electronics spew out electrical noise. And possibly the trams running on their DC current also could be responsible.

Though to be honest, It could be all my electrical equipment in my room too.

In the end I guess I need a better antenna at home.

~Ivy

Tags: musings, tech by Ivy
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Well, I’ve been bitten by the radio bug it seems. Last week Hannah and I purchased a second hand Yaesu Ft-707 for not much.

It does have an issue with TX, which we haven’t really looked into yet (it could be a broken thermistor on the p.a. board) so we haven’t really tried that yet, which isn’t a big deal as I’m not licensed as of yet.

It does seem that the radio reception though at home is awful, though at my mum and dads place, we’ve been able to receive quite decently using a wire dipole antenna. We are restricted in what we can do at home mainly due to space requirements. Though I am interested in setting up the wire dipole out the back, to see if that could make any difference.

Our other aims are to see what other antennas we can construct and work from there, oh and get myself a vk3 call sign.

~Ivy

Tags: musings by Ivy
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