Radio New Zealand
Posted on August 9th, 2008 by Ivy
One of the things we can pick up quite well on 40 Metres AM is radio New Zealand, on 7.145MHz it’s kinda neat.
Such a clear signals.
~ivy
One of the things we can pick up quite well on 40 Metres AM is radio New Zealand, on 7.145MHz it’s kinda neat.
Such a clear signals.
~ivy
Well this is our last week without been able to transmit, next week we will go down to strictly ham, and get ourselves an IC-706 MkIIg (yeah we did want the IC-7000 but the price was a little high.) A power supply, and an AT-7000 antenna tuner.
We can’t really wait.
~Ivy
Well I got the standard learning materials from the Radio and Electronics School and have been going through them quite quickly. They are a little rough and ready, but all the information I need to learn is presented well and explained. Which is good.
I guess I should book in an exam at some stage, the standard license has three parts to the exam. The first been theory, second been regulations, and the third is practical. The only part that worries me is the regulations part of the exam but with more study I should be fine.
~Ivy
Tried to build a 146MHz J-Pole using wire, following some of the online guides. It seems simple enough: stick a half wavelength vertical on top of a quarter wavelength matching section. The ends of the matching section have very high impedence, while the bottom is very low. So, somewhere on that path is 50 Ohms. I must admit my ability to construct isn’t the best, so the joints and connections are probably shoddy at best. Ended up using a 150 cm jumper coax bought from a local supplier. Cut one end off and connected alligator clips, one to the braid, one to the center conductor. Made few loops of coax about 4 cm in diameter as an RF choke. Alas, I’ve been told I have a hum in my transmission. Not having an antenna analyser for VHF, I can’t *really* tell where the 50 Ohm feed point should be, but even just a few millimeters off shouldn’t add a hum. I’m a bit baffled. I guess the best explanation is not enough RF choking, and the microphone or IF stage in the radio are picking up a bit of stray RF. Next will be to add a ferrous material to try and increase this.
Eventually, I hope to build a larger J-Pole for 14MHz. This isn’t a very conventional antenna, but will be the easiest for our situation. Having access to a large tree will allow me to put the ~15 meter tall antenna up rather high. It will have a feedpoint close to the shack, at the bottom of the tree. Best of all, it won’t require a huge amount of radials to get a bit of low-take off radiation happening. Hopefully this will work for a bit of DX on 14MHz.
Poor little VX-5. I’ve had the thing for years now. It was one of the first radios I got when I became licensed 3 years ago. I had upgraded the stock antenna to a simple, but higher gain, dual band Diamond whip. Unfortunately, the poor thing shattered to bits at the loading coil when the radio got dropped the other day. Back on the stock ducky antenna, I was able to finally hit a local repeater on Mt Dandenong. It seems though the stock antenna just isn’t quite powerful enough to hit them from home. Today though I was able to talk to both VK3PB and VK3TXT on the Olinda repeater. My first contacts in Australia. Yay!
de VK3GNU
Well I’ve been thinking of which license to go for to get me started, there are three classes in Australia. Foundation, Standard, and finally Advanced.
I’ve been going through the sylabuses for the three levels and I know I could get foundation without much if any study, but it is too restricted, for example a foundation license can’t use 20 Metres, which at the present moment is where the fun is.
So looking at some of the online tests for the standard exam, I managed to get 68% on it without much study, the pass mark is 70%. So I’m going to go for standard, and later on advanced.
~Ivy
So I get home, to play with the radio. And the noise is just getting to me. There is little one can do really. other than get a better antenna, and in a rental property there is little one can do.
~ivy
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
Well playing with Hannah’s HT a Yaesu VX-5 I can pick up the automated voice transmision from the control tower for Essendon Airport. It repeats itself, giving the time in UTC, with windspeed and direction, and temprature. The frequency that this transmits on is 119.8 MHz. Also been able to pick up flights coming into Melbourne Airport. Rather nifty, and kinda boring sometimes.
In other news Hannah and I popped into Strictly Ham, in Bayswater, to have a look at some radios, I think we’ve decided that we will get the IC-7000.
~Ivy