Radio

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

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Well on Wednesday Hannah posted of to the ACMA the paperwork for her license, and now she’s the proud owner of the call sign VK3GNU. I have to say I am amazed at their turn around time.

Now if only the FT-707 transmitted.

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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

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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

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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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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

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Well fired up the FT again tonight lots of background noise, more than usual. But for a first from home WWV was coming clear on 10MHz AM well still fading in and out but still a lot better than normal.

~Ivy

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The one thing I love, is just listening to people chat about whatever is on their mind, such as politics and the price of oil.

I’m really looking forward to the point I can chat too, I sometimes wonder how I will fit in with this crew of amateur radio operators. Mainly because I’m so much younger than them.

But in the end it’s going to be fun, and that’s what this hobby is all about.

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Just looking at new radios Hannah and I may get, and we keep on looking at the IC-7000. This radio appears it will cover everything we want to do and more.

The good thing is we can easily set it’s output power so that on the foundation license I can transmit (there is a 10 watt maximum on the foundation license) and then ramp it up when Hannah goes to transmit (once we’ve transfered her license from the states to here.)

I really like the look and the feature set of this radio, and it appears it will work a lot better where we are, as it’s dsp filters should be able to cut out a lot of the noise.

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Well, got home tonight, and decided to do a quick scan of 80 and 40 meters as I do, got VK3LO nice and clear, discovered why, he seems to be only around the corner which would be why I’m able to pick him up quite well when he is transmitting.

So Hannah and I quickly threw up the wire dipole outside, and discovered that much to our dismay, we got the same results with the wire dipole inside (well it’s a different one, still about 10 meters per pole but up in the picture rail of our room.)

So the (electrical) sounds of the suburbs is still causing an issue.

What we really need to do is try and set up the wire dipole up a bit higher other than just throwing it up randomly in the back yard, and see if that makes any difference.

Or wait till next time we’re at mum and dads again and see what we can do there.

Or look at other antenna designs we can throw together in a cheap and easy manner, and see how they go.

All good fun.

Also saw the antenna tuner for the FT-707 on vk classifieds and by the time I’d got home the thing had sold, got to be a bit quicker.

~Ivy

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