Amateur radio

A dog sled qso is a novel one to get in the log The best i can come up with was quick chat with a new yorker on 80m using 50w on the greenhouse frame fed against ground I have to admit his 4-square was doing all the work lol

 

Hex - I seem to recollect reading about someone tuning up a tram. Easy enough to match just about anything with an appropriate ATU, but how well the thing radiates is another matter

 

Hi Dave
I normally only use resonant antennas. I dont have an atu in the radio, just an old LDG AT11MP that sounds like a bucket of bolts when its tuning I checked the greenhouse frame resonance more out of curiousity than anything, as you do lol. The 259b reckoned it was near enough to be worth a go when fed against 300m worth of 2.5mm2 copper singles buried under the lawn. I didnt have anything else up for 80m so i had nowt to lose. I`ll have to keep my eye open for a tram

 

this transmitter sounds really fun. I don't quite understand though...is the primary scope of the transmitter being a safety device that can be also used for recreational purposes or what exactly?

 

I've a lot of buried wire too - chicken wire under the paths, old coax round the veg beds and brazing wire sliced into a couple of lawns.

 

The primary purpose is to use it for recreational communications. However licensed amateurs are also sometimes used to assist the emergency services with communications. An example of this was during the Lockerbie plane crash when the police communications could not cope and for a while much of the comms was handled by radio amateurs. When Argentina invaded the Falklands the first notification back to the UK was from an amateur in the Falklands to an amateur in Scotland.

 

Hams helped with comms after the 9/11 attacks in New York, also in Haiti after the major earthquake. All we need is a bit of wire

 

Many many years ago, when APRS was first released, I had an APRS HF station on the air. Although with the advent of new technology APRS has lost some of its popularity, I decided to get back into APRS. I am now retired and spend a lot of time alone hiking and taking photographs in the outdoors in remote regions where cell service may not be available. My thinking is that it would be useful for my wife to know my location in the event I had some sort of difficulty. Resurrecting my old PacCom Tiny 2 TNC I put a VHF APRS station on the air. Although it is probably not necessary with two high-performance gates in this region I decided to set the station to be digipeater. I can see DX digipeating through the station from a club in the Adirondack mountains, so I know it is being used for a digipeater.

For my base station, I am using a Baofeng UV5R HT feeding a discone antenna up 30 feet. A linear amplifier is being used to boost the signal to 30 watts. This configuration allows the station to be heard by gates and stations up to seventy miles away. (It is not due to my station, the gates are running a lot of power and are at a much higher elevation.)

In my vehicle, I installed a Byonics Micro-Trak which has a built-in GPS receiver. The antenna that came with the unit was sub-par, so I am using a 2 meter/440 mag mount with a 2.5 dB gain. The Micro-Trak is fixed on the APRS frequency putting out ten watts.

We are running APRSIS-32 on our PC so my wife can view my location at any time. Sadly, in this entire area, I can see very few other hams using this service. I would estimate that at this very moment there are about 10 vehicles on my screen, which is covering from Montreal, Canada to New York city. The green lines on the map are gate paths, the yellow lines are acknowledged packets back to my station, other objects on the map are repeaters, WX stations, emergency stations and private stations like mine.