One man. One life. No idea.

Category: Radio (Page 1 of 2)

Bonkers Bunkers

In the amateur radio world, there are a group of people who like to operate portable from places of interest and see how many contacts they can make from that location.

And when I say ‘group’ I mean thousands. It’s a very popular activity within the hobby.

I’ve not tried it myself… yet.

One of the most popular places to operate from (we call it ‘activate’) is the top of a very high hill or mountain.  This is called SOTA, an acronym for Summits On The Air.   SOTA activations can be very rewarding: that extra height above sea level can really aid long-distance communications.  Of course, the challenge is in lugging all your equipment up a mountain. No mean feat in some cases.

But, not everyone can do SOTA, due to age or physical impairments, so other OTAs have sprung up over the years: POTA – Parks On The Air; WOTA – Windmills; and a recent one that has come to my attention BOTA – Bunkers.

This last one is aimed at operating from the 2,000 or so bunkers across the country, that were built for the Royal Observer Corps during WWII.

Looking on the website that has been set up to facilitate this activity, I noticed that there is a bunker in Luton and so I decided to go and take a look, as it was at a location that I’ve often walked with the dog and I’d never seen any bunker there.

With the aid of What3Words though, I found it quite easily, hidden in a small clump of trees and bushes that I must have walked past many times.. Or, at least I found the entrance to the bunker – how far underground it went, I don’t know.  The brick entrance has been fitted with an iron gate to prevent local herberts getting in there and the exposed brickwork around it is covered in graffiti.

With my interest piqued, I then did a bit of looking around the internets and I happened across this video, which shows a large bunker in town… nothing to do with the ROC.

From watching the video, I’m pretty sure I have figured out where that manhole cover is, but I’m not sure I’d be able to get down it… not with my forearms. The main entrance (or one of the main entrances) is just a few feet away, by the looks of it, but has been paved over.  Again, I have walked down that road many times, with no knowledge of what was beneath my feet.

Amazing.

Lé Weekend

We went to the pixtures on Saturday evening, to see Fast & Ludicrous 64.

It was this: ridiculous.

I think I enjoyed the first F&F film, way back when, but they have gone from outrageous stunt to even-more-outrageous-and-unbelievable stunt as the franchise has progressed.  I’m sure they came up with a whole load of crazy car-driving stunts first and then wrote a storyline around them.

I really wasn’t keen on going to see it, but was cajoled by  a nagging family and the promise of a Nando’s beforehand.

Anyway, once in the cinema and seated in front of the Supersize Screen, I stuffed my face with popcorn and sort of enjoyed it.

What I enjoyed more, was the trailer for the forthcoming Mission Impossible 7 film.  That’s a defo.

Then, on Sunday morning, I went with a friend up to our local, nerdy, radio rally and I took some stuff with me, to get rid of.  I didn’t want any money for it, so put it on the club’s trestle table to help with their funds.

Mrs. Masher was most pleased to see me taking some stuff out of the loft at long last.

She probably won’t be so happy when she finds out that most of it is now in the garage, because I had to bring it back!

I couldn’t sell it. Some of it I couldn’t even give away for free! People just didn’t want it.

I was most surprised – and saddened – to see that all my lovely gear wasn’t snapped up by like-minded nerdy buyers.

It seems that Mrs. M was right after all: it’s just junk.

Sunday afternoon, Son and I went for a bike ride – some father/son bonding time.

I had to smile when he had the audacity to overtake me on the A505, as we rode up to Royston. Crouched over the tank of his little Yamaha YBR 125 and with his jacket flapping in the wind, he slowly – oh, so slowly – passed me, with a big grin on his face.  With ten times less cubic capacity and eight times less BHP than me, I let him have his moment before I opened the throttle and used my three remaining gears to watch him quickly reduce to a speck in my mirrors.

But, it was a most enjoyable ride – we’ve never really ridden together before – and I was pleased to see that he is a competent and safe rider.

At least for now.

Happy Birthday Hedy

Today is Hedy Lamarr’s 107th birthday.

Or, at least it would be, if she were still alive.

But, it’s a birthday that is still celebrated throughout the world – albeit, in a rather low-key fashion – by radio amateurs.

So, why would a load of nerdy radio hams celebrate the life of a 1940’s Hollywood actress?

She became most famous for her role as Delilah, playing opposite Victor Mature’s Samson  in Cecil B DeMille’s masterpiece “Samson & Delilah” and at the time, she was touted the most beautiful woman in cinema.

But, what many people don’t realise, is that she was also an inventor.

She invented several things, but is most famously known (among the cognoscente) for inventing a radio guidance system for torpedoes during the second World War.

The system used a technique known as Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum and was developed as a way for the Allies to remotely control their torpedoes without the enemy being able to jam them.

Although they patented this system in 1942, the US Navy only started installing an updated version of it in the 1960s, after the patent had run out, so Lamarr never received a penny in royalties.

More importantly, the principle behind FHSS went on to become the basis of more modern radio techniques that we all use today, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and mobile phone transmissions.

So, perhaps it should be all of us wishing Hedy Lamarr a Happy Birthday, and not just a bunch of nerdy radio hams.

Out and about

Today I went to St Neots, in Cambridgeshire.

And wandered around a damp field.

Full of damp men.

Looking at a load of old, damp, radio-related tat.

And had a great time… as did we all, I think.

It’s the first radio rally I have been to in nearly two years and it was good to catch up with some like-minded nerds, who I haven’t seen in a while.

And I grabbed a couple of bargains too, which pleased me greatly.

It looks like the rally calendar is starting to get back to normal.

Hopefully, the next one will be just as enjoyable.

And not as damp.

Rip Off Britain

Many years ago, I had a Psion Series 3 handheld… remember them?

I loved anything gadgety and the Series 3 fitted the bill nicely.

When it was superceded by the Series 3A, I immediately went out and bought one, even though it wasn’t that much of an upgrade.

As I remember, it cost about three hundred quid at the time.

And I was amazed, when Mrs M and I went on a shopping trip to New York just a few weeks later, to see the very same device being sold for almost half the price!

I wouldn’t have minded so much, but the damn thing was designed and built in Britain, so how can it be so much cheaper in a different country?

Fast forward to today: I was mooching through some ham radio videos on YouTube, and in one of them, someone – an American chap – showed how to build an interesting project using a Raspberry Pi, and in his video, he showed how all the parts could be sourced from Amazon. He even showed the actual Amazon pages, so one could be sure of buying the right parts.

Intrigued, I noted them all down and then went to the UK Amazon site. I then found all the parts and totalled up the price.

It worked out to be fifty quid more than what this guy paid for it in America!

The Raspberry PI itself made up over half of that difference: 64 pounds in the UK, but only 37 in the US… 27 quid cheaper!

Again, the Pi was designed in Britain.

It is a hugely successful British product.

And whilst some are made in China and Japan, the bulk of the forty million or so that have so far been sold around the world, have been made in the UK.

So why the hell are we that live in the UK having to pay so much more?

Dead handy

My Wouxon KG-UV8D stopped working the other day.

Two thoughts crossed my mind simultaneously:

“Oh bugger, I suppose I’ll have to spend out on a new handheld now”.

“Yay!  I can go shopping for a new handheld now”.

Still, being the curious radio amateur that I am, I decided to see if it was fixable.

A quick investigation showed the battery had run out of charge, despite it sitting in the charger for the previous 24 hours.  Hmmm.  I checked the charger, and sure enough, there was no voltage on the terminals.

I was somewhat dismayed when I opened up the charger and could see nothing immediately obvious.  Also, it was nearly all SMD… all too small and fiddly for my liking – I like proper components that you can actually pick up with your fingers.

Also also, I couldn’t find a schematic for it.

But, I started tracing voltages through anyway and it wasn’t long before I found a component with volts and one side and nada on the other.  Either a diode or a blown resistor, maybe.   It had no values shown on it, just the letter H.  A bit of research on the internets and some conversations with some fellow hams suggested it was most likely a 1A fuse. Bridging it with a piece of wire proved that to be the most likely case as the charger started working properly.

I didn’t want to leave the fuse bridged out – fuses are there for a reason after all – but a replacement SMD fuse on ebay was about four quid.  Yes, four quid! For a fuse!

So, I used a 20mm cartridge fuse of the right value, slipped some heatshrink over it and wired that in instead.

Put it all back together and it works a treat. No need to buy a new one.

Whilst trying to find a schematic on the internet, I read of many instances where this charger has failed, so I thought I’d write it up here for anyone who might have a similar issue.

 

What a packet

Whilst rummaging about up in the loft the other day, looking for… I can’t remember what, I stumbled upon my old AEA PK-88 Packet TNC.

You remember them, right?

All the big boys were running PK-232 units, but they were too costly for me. The cheaperPK-88 served it’s purpose well, though.

Back in the late 80’s, I’d gotten very interested in the X.25 protocol used to send data packets around a telecoms network and so, when some bright spark developed a version that could be used in amateur radio in the early 90’s – AX.25 – I of course decided to get involved.

Back then, packet communications was all the rage and hundreds of us set up nodes and digipeaters at home, forming a radio mesh that allowed packets to travel up and down the country, in much the same way as companies like BT were doing.  Our packets tended to be just routine messages (like an email), rather than the commercial data that travelled over X.25. Of course, our amateur network lacked the millions of pounds that the telecoms companies were able to pour into it: it was slower and prone to failure… but it was fun and we learnt a lot about network routing.  Looking back at it now, I realise just how much I have forgotten, over the years.

But anyway…  amateur packet was pretty much killed off by the internet and so I wondered what I could use my old TNC for.

Not much, according to Google.

But, a version of amateur packet is still alive, in the form of the Automatic Packet Reporting System.   Unlike the old system, APRS tends to be more localised, with guys broadcasting beacons, detailing local weather and shit like that.  All a bit pointless, but I wondered whether I would be able to use my ancient TNC to pick up APRS packets and decode them.

And so, after much fiddling about with RS232 cables and PuTTY and a bit of soldering, I was rewarded with the picture on the right.  Success!!

I am pretty chuffed at having figured out how to get it to decode the packets, after nearly thirty years.

Next step is to see if I can actually transmit any.

Watch this space… if you can be arsed.

Time to listen

I have been working from home since just before the first lockdown and – all in all – I’m loving it.

I’m saving about two hundred quid a month in fuel, for one thing.

And about three hours a day sitting in the car.

I really do not miss that commute!

But, there is something that I do miss about that drive.

Being such a horrible, boring  journey – all 37.5 miles there and 37.5 miles back on the M1, M25 and M40 – I have to keep myself entertained, to save the steering wheel getting too chewed up through frustration.

As such, once I was in range, I would often talk to a small group of amateur radio operators, who frequent the Amersham repeater most mornings.  A friendly bunch, it was always pleasant to chat over technical matters with them. We even got together a couple of times for Christmas dinner… not gonna happen this year, obviously.

But, working from home, I am out of range and so  haven’t been able to have my regular chats with them, and I miss that.

But, the other thing I am missing is my podcasts.  Each Sunday I would store up a week’s worth of podcast listening onto a Re-Writable CD-ROM (I know: how quaint, in this day and age) and I would listen to it throughout the week, whilst driving… and until I was in range of the Amersham Repeater.

I would also record comedy shows from Radio 4 and Radio 4xtra and bung a couple of them on the CD as well.

I am still recording them, even now, but as I haven’t been driving, I haven’t been listening, so have amassed a huge backlog.

Episodes of Just A Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and The Unbelievable Truth, languish on my radio’s memory card, amongst classic episodes of Dad’s Army, Hancock’s Half-Hour and Steptoe & Son.  The Answer Me This podcast remains undownloaded, along with The Modern Mann, Rutherford & Fry, Dr Karl, The Naked Scientists  and the Eclectic Tech podcast from the ARRL.  Amongst others.

Even if things do return to ‘normal’, I’m wondering where I’ll ever find the time to catch up with them all.

Project Phoenix

I was gifted a lovely little radio a while back – a Yaesu FT-270R.

It’s an old 2m model, dating back to the late eighties, I’m guessing.  As such, it lacks CTCSS capability, which limits its use somewhat.

However, there is a space inside to fit a FTS-8 subtone encoder board. And so I thought I’d fit one of these and give it a new lease of life.

Sadly though, the FTS-8 board is no longer available and secondhand ones command a hefty price tag.

What to do? Well, make one of course!

I found an elegant design on the web and built it onto a piece of veroboard. Plugging it into the radio, changed some of the available functions, so the radio obviously detected the board.

It allowed me to choose the subtone from the front panel. Excellent.

But it didn’t work.  Checking  the output with my scope, the tone just wasn’t there… or rather, it wasn’t what it should have been.

I spent ages fiddling with it, but ultimately could find nothing wrong.

And so I passed it onto Dave, who – being a clever bugger – worked out pretty quickly that the board I had built actually worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the radio didn’t. It was giving out the wrong signals to the board.

This wasn’t something that could be easily fixed – possibly a microprocessor issue. And so, I figured a workaround, that would allow the tone to be selected manually, using a combination of switches to produce the binary equivalent of the hexadecimal value that the board was looking for in the tone lookup table.

This worked perfectly and when I tested it, I was successfully able to open several different repeaters, all using different subtones.

And then I found a bug, where the tone would only change after five minutes and not whenever the PTT was keyed.  This looked to be a fault with the MCLR on the PIC… possibly damaged by putting in 7.6 volts from the radio (datasheet states that Vpp shouldn’t exceed Vcc). Not having another chip available, I made a slight mod and fitted a miniature relay, which only allowed the board to be powered when the PTT was depressed.  This seemed to work nicely and I was able to switch tones easily and on-the-fly.

So, I put a call out on a repeater. “Your audio is awful!”, I was told.   I replaced the mic ( a new one from ebay cost fifty quid! Yes, fifty quid for a 30 yr old mic!) with an old YM-47 from an FT-290 and it worked perfectly… once I had figured out the differing wiring scheme.

And so, after many weeks of working on it, on and off, it is ready to be put to use.

Not that I need another radio at the moment, so a friend is going to borrow it.

Many times I nearly gave up on it and was going to throw it away. But, I had invested a lot of time and a reasonable amount of money on it and so I wanted to see it through.

I’m pleased that it is finally finished and working… because that means I can now move onto my next project 🙂

Can we fix it?

Yes we can!

This weekend has been a time for fixing things:

The external speaker that I connect to the radio in my car, has been intermittently playing up for the past couple of months and I just keep forgetting to look at it. But today, I have fixed it! I replaced the cable and it no longer sounds like Norman Collier (now, there’s one for the kids!) and the sound quality has actually improved as well. That old cable must have really been rubbish!

 

Now, when I put down the concrete base for the new shed a couple of months back, I accidentally tripped and – to stop myself falling face-first into the wet cement – I grabbed at the nearest thing to steady me. That nearest thing was my active loop aerial, which didn’t take my weight particularly well. It has been broken ever since. But yesterday, I dragged it indoors: if the soldering iron can’t get to the mountain, then the mountain must come to the soldering iron! I repaired the circuit board, put it all back together and then added some clear silicon sealant around the entrance holes. It’s now all working good as new, again.

 

For Christmas, Santa brought Son  a new bike. Unfortunately, on it’s way from Lapland (Halfords), the handlebars got twisted in the back of my sleigh. Also, we discovered that the rear brakes squealed like a pig being chased by a former Prime Minister.  Although it is obviously under guarantee, getting it back to Lapland would prove difficult, and so yesterday I set about it with my toolkit.  Rides like a dream, now.

 

 

Finally, there is my bench power supply.  I built this in 1980 from Practical Electronics magazine. It has given faultless service, until just a couple of weeks ago, when it just decided it didn’t want to play any more. I did consider just buying a new one, as they are relatively inexpensive nowadays, but then I thought I’d have a go at fixing it – I get a lot of enjoyment from fault-finding and fixing things… although maybe not so much when I can’t figure it out and can’t fix it! But this was pretty easy in the end.

 

Turns out the primary windings on the mains transformer had never been soldered on to the tags. Upon inspection, it seems the enamel coating hadn’t been properly scraped off either. It had obviously come like that from the manufacturer. In all, I’m surprised it worked for as long as it did. But it did. For 39 years! And now that I have properly made those connections, I might just get another 39 out of it!

I officially give up! Yet again.

Morse code is an anachronism.

Invented and used in the 1840’s, it seems somewhat out of place in today’s high-speed world, where data rates are so high that whole sentences of text can be sent in the blink of an eye.

It’s an outmoded form of communication, that just doesn’t sit well with modern  methods.

And yet… it does.

It is still used by the military – not necessarily as the main basis of contact nowadays, but certainly as a fallback, I’m sure.

And in the world of Amateur Radio, it is still a much sought-after skill amongst many.

There are plenty of amateurs out there who can do Morse.  Many of them excel at it.  And there are even some that won’t use any other method to communicate over the air.

Sadly, I’m not one of them.

I would LOVE to be able to read morse code, properly.  I can send at slow speeds and I can read it at very slow speeds. Very slow. Very, very slow. Reading is the hard part.

Rather like learning a new language (and ostensibly, that’s what it is), there are many different methods for learning it. Over the years I have tried reading books (Duh!); listening to tapes and listening to other operators sending. I have tried several PC programs and mobile phone apps. I have built machines for practicing with (see picture above), eventually taking them apart and using the bits for another project, because I was getting nowhere.

Frustratingly, in my teens, I did learn how to read and send, and could do so at about five or six words a minute.  If only I’d kept it up.

Similarly, I used to be able to parlez francais to a reasonable degree.

But I allowed them both to lapse and nowadays I struggle to learn either.

And it really annoys me.

I’ll admit that this is partially down to commitment. I don’t seem to have the time nowadays to study for such things.

And the inclination. That’s kind of gone too: I want to learn it, but I don’t want to put in the effort.  Like the rest of the MTV generation (yes, I think I just about fall into that category) and, as Freddie Mercury sang: “I want it all and I want it now”.

And so, after several months of “giving it another go”, I have hung up my headphones.

Again.

For the last time.

That’s it! I have resigned myself to the fact that morse code will forever evade me.

No more, will I try learning and decyphering that strange sound of dits and dahs pouring from my radio speaker.

No more, will I spend hours in the car listening to an 800Hz tone beeping out letters of the alphabet to me.

No more will I drive the family mad, as I sit in my room badly tapping away at a morse key.

No more, will I… who am I kidding? Give it three months and I’ll be back at it for another half-hearted attempt.

Good and bad

I’ve had a torrid time of it this week, on the motorways.  I know I often joke about it, but I’m starting to wonder whether being able to bring traffic to a standstill, merely by being on the same road, really is my super power… as rubbish as that would be.

My journey home from work on Monday had an extra hour added to it, when an accident on the M40 reduced the motorway from three lanes down to one. During rush hour.

Likewise on Tuesday, an accident on the M1 at Hemel closed three of the four lanes during rush hour, adding ninety minutes onto my journey home. Ninety minutes! And when we finally got moving and got past the accident, there was hardly anything to see. If I’ve been made to wait that long in the traffic, I want to see a reason for it, carnage even, not just a BMW with it’s front bumper hanging off!

Wednesday. Don’t get me started on Wednesday! I had to go to Swindon for a couple of meetings and so left half an hour earlier than normal. We suddenly ground to a halt about 2 miles from J18 on the M25. And we just sat there. And sat there. Eventually we inched along and I could see that all the lanes had been closed, due to an accident and the police were turning vehicles round and sending them back up the motorway. We all got diverted through Rickmansworth. Can you imagine four lanes of motorway traffic driving through Rickmansworth? It wasn’t particularly quick, I can tell you! I eventually arrived in Swindon – having completely missed my morning meeting – after five and a quarter hours. A journey that normally takes about two and a half.   I left as soon as I could, following my afternoon meeting, but was thwarted once again when an accident on the M4 slowed us all down. “Long Delays Between J12 and J10” threatened the overhead signage. My heart sank and I looked to my satnav for advice. “Avoid this bit of the motorway and go through Reading”, it said. Sort of. No way! I’ve been caught like that before. Reading at rush hour? It’d be a nightmare.  And yet…   If I could just get to the A329… Inexplicably – and possibly because I still had the morning’s motorway horror still in my head, I found myself taking the slip road at J12 and heading to Reading on the A4.  I was right: it WAS a nightmare.  Four hours after leaving Swindon, I arrived home.

Thursday wasn’t so bad, save for a bit of a hold up on the 413 Denham Road in the morning.

And then yesterday, Friday – when I can normally work from home – I had to go into work for a meeting. I had a lovely journey in. Friday mornings are definitely the best time for driving on the motorways.  Friday afternoons, not so.  My journey home was again lengthened by some numpty who doesn’t know how to drive properly on the motorway, ramming into the back of another vehicle and causing a huge tailback on the M1.

If only everyone was as good a driver as what I am, there would be no accidents. They all drive too fast and too close. Unlike Miss Daisy here.

But today has been good: a leisurely drive to our local annual ham radio rally with a couple of mates.

Good weather.

Plenty to see.

A couple of bargains.

Meeting up with more friends.

And an ice-cream.

A perfect Sunday.

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