Radio

Well Hannah and I went to a hamfest over the weekend. And we picked up a LDG 1:1 balun and an old watt/swr meter. The hamfest was fun seeing lots of cool junk, like WW II mobile transmitters and old test equipment.

After that we headed over to my fathers place, where at least the noise levels are much down, set up our droopy dipole, set up the watt/swr meter, and did, well tried to do some tranmission tests on the FT-707, as we knew the transmit was low. Well, unfortunately we cooked the output stage and the magic smoke got out, not my idea of fun.

Anyway at least we hadn’t damaged the receive section of the FT-707, so no big issues there as I’m not licensed yet, and we’re waiting on transferring Hannah’s license from the states (which won’t be hard.) So technically Hannah can’t transmit yet, and I can’t at all.

With the addition of the balun to our dipole antenna, has removed a lot of the noise that we still received at my parents house, and seemed to improve things on most bands. We didn’t do too much on the saturday other than get everything set up and play a little on 20 metres.

On sunday morning we listened to the wia news and the callbacks associated, lots of VK5s and VK4s and a few VK3s. But we were rather disappointed that we couldn’t pick up much on 20 metres like the day before. But on 40 meters we started hearing a lot of people from New Zealand which was a first. So the balun was making a difference.

As the morning progressed though, 20 metres opened right up, and heard many a dog pile as people in the us tried to contact a guy in nz with the call sign ZL3DX.

Both of us are itching to get on the air and do more work with our antennas.

~Ivy

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