I love digital modes....

After quite a few silent months on the radio ive slowly started getting back into our brilliant hobby...

I managed to lose a lot of my electronic log .adif's with the old pc dying but have thankfully got these recovered (and backed up to memory stick now).

I checked in at the 30 metre Digital Modes Club and saw that i had some certificates waiting for me !

Only the starter certificates but it definitely makes me want to complete them all..

So im off and running....These are certificates for digital modes (PSK31, RTTY, JT65HF etc). If yoiu have never tried digital modes i highly recommend them. QSO's will go thru even when conditions are poor !

A quick WSPR run

Okay this morning i ran a quick 30 - 40min 10meter 5watts WSPR run and here are the results :

30m WSPR quick run 06/07/13

As we can see the M0CVo end fed vertical that is strung up along the fence line seems to be working well.

Back in the saddle....

After a little while away i've got back into digital modes after Chris M5AGG put up the new M0CVO LW-20 (80-6m) end fed Longwire the other day. Initial tests (its very early days yet) seem to be favourable over the SRC 360 HF (80-6m) end fed Verticle and its nice to be able to hear stations that are S3-S4 and not only those strong signals that are louder than S8-S9 noise on the vertical.

I came across my 30mdg certificate and loaded up the U30 software it uses for its awards program and started off on getting some of their lovely certificates.. only 26 QSO's left to get for the first award (worked 30 stations on 30m).

Whilst off for my daily sleep to straighten out my spine i decided to leave WSPR running at 5w on the longwire (11:30-14:30 GMT) and here is the trace for 30m.

Virtual Radar Working !

Well i finally got round to trying to sort out Virtual radar using the new dongle and finally ! it works.. well it probably did along along i just missed a setting to not make it work lol. I had a new version of RTL1090 that had a few more options than the last build and a quick click of those to enable them and off it went...

As you can see there are aircraft being tracked but due to not having a BaseStation.sql or OperatorFlags file at the time it only showed the bare minimum info. I later aquired an SBS Basestation.sql file and all is well.

I was blown away by the range of the new dongle from Jetvision.de... it is about 60 miles when using the Miniscan Scannign antenna from Rocket Radio ! I will have to run a comparision with the 4" antenna that came from jetvision.de to see if there is any difference.

The Good, The Bad and the RTL SDR

Well im now about 5-6 days into playing with / learning about RTL SDR's and so far its a lot of fun and fascination.

For the last few days i've been trying to get RTL1090 which is a nifty program that can grab ADS-B info and feed it into other programs like Planeplotter and Virtual Radar up and running so i can watch planes flying and find out information about them..

For about 4 days of leaving it running for a few hours each time i was getting no output and was a little confused as to whay it wasnt owrking.. I'd opened the ports etc but had no joy what so ever.

I loosely looked on the SDR# Yahoo group and saw that some people posted saying they were using a program called ADSB.exe which after reading thru seemed to do the same thing as RTL1090 so i thought id give it go as after all i had no luck with RTL1090.

After downloading it and making sure i had the right dll's in the adsb.exe folder (things like rtlsdr.dll, msvcr100.dll etc) I ran ADSB.exe and it told me that it couldn't see my dongle ! UH oh (gulps) had i blown it up??? So a quick post to SDR# and i was told to run a little tool called rtl_test.exe and post the results..

Now you must remeber that to see airplances on your pc you need to be able to decode ADS-B which is the information sent from planes as they travel the skies. things like Heading, Speed, Flight Level etc as well as aircraft identifying data... this is all recieved on 1090 Mhz down here on earth.

So a run of rtl_test -t in the adsb.exe folder in a command prompt gave the following results...

As you can see from the data output my dongle's tuner range is 

E4K range: 52 - 2171 Mhz. 

Thats fantastic i thought as i had heard that some dongles have a very restricted range.. So a big smile i read on....

E4K L-band gap: 1087 to 1231 Mhz

Oh no... the gap in the tuner is right where i need to be listening for 1090 Mhz ! drat... no ADS-B decoding from me..

So thats why for 4-5 days ive been going mad thinking id either blown the dongle or that my aerial wasnt working correctly... i did think about ordering another "cheapy" off of ebay but as lot of them dont list the tuner they have  i didn't want to risk so i've ordered direct from jetvision.de (the people that do 1090 Mhz software and kits). 

The new dongle is an ezCAP RTL2832  with a RT802 tuner that 100% works on 1090 Mhz.. Hurry up Mr Postman ;)

RTL SDR Success Day 1

Well after getting everything connected I had a little bit of success.

I came across some blips on the spectrum, looked the frequency up on google and found that it was a pager signal (POSCAG). Another quick search on google for some decoding software and I hit on PDW. The picture shows PDW (top) and HDSDR on the bottom).

I'm debating wether or not to put a Diamond X30 2m/70cms co linear up in the loft and use this as my sdr antenna as it basically covers upto about 500mhz. The NewSky TV28T covers from 20mhz to 1800 Ghz) any comments welcome.

NewSky TV28T dongle and antenna

Here is a picture of the Pc USB Tv Dvb dongle that has the RTL2832U chipset and also has the E4000 tuner chip needed to run as a SDR dongle. Also the Miniscan scanner antenna aerial

RTL SDR

Well after reading up that certain PC usb TV DVB dongles were found to be able to be used as SDR's I took the plunge (as we are radio experimenter's aren't we :) and bought the Netsky TV28T Pc Tv Dvb USB dongle from eBay for £10 !!! Much cheaper than the Funcube dongle at £140.

Now, remembering I'm a total newby to amateur radio thanks to google I was able to get the dongle up and running under HSDR and SDR# within about an hour. I connected it to my SRC HF 360 antenna (80m-6m) but didn't see too many blips on the spectrum analyser so have ordered a scanning antenna that works on the freqs the dongle works at ( about 60mhz - 1.8ghz )

Special Callsign : Queens Jubilee Year

Special Callsign : from 00.00 BST 5 May 2012 to 23.59 BST 10 June 2012 i will be using the callsign MQ6ODC in recognition of the Queens Jubilee.

The log will be held here and updated daily.

To recieve one of my cards there are 2 options (SWL's also welcome to request a card)...

Option 1. Send your card to me (include your address) and i will send one in the post.

Option 2. if your not sending your card but would like one of mine please send a S.A.S.E and i will get it off to you.

73 Glenn MQ6ODC (M6ODC)

ARISSat-1/KEDR SSTV Signal

After checking the latest prop conditions (not been good here) and seeing the A index high and the K index low i saw a link to the Amsat website. After a quick browse thru i saw that it was possible to hear and recieve SSTV image from the satellite...

I connected up my 2m aerial into my Yaesu FT 897D and tuned to 145.950 and fired up MMSSTV and here is the the first pass pic i recieved.

It was recieved at 3:50pm on Sunday 4th Sept 2011 and i cant wait for a closer pass to hopefully get a readbale picture.

Back at it...

After a few boring months recovering i am slowly getting back to the radio :) with the last few days running WSPR (http://wsprnet.org/drupal/) to check the radio is sending and recieving ok.

Here is a picture of my trace on 20m @ 1watt for 2-3 hours! to see where i can be heard and who i can hear back.

WSPR 20m @ 1watt

No Activity

Hi,

Nothing much happening radio wise at the moment as I have Shingles :(

I'm currently on a course of anti viral's and hoping I will start to feel better soon...

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9

Up and a running....

Well the radio has been back about a week now and i haven't posted much as i have been playing with the PSK31 data mode using MixW software..

Its very simple to set up and once you have your macros sorted your off and running ;). All you do is tune to a frequency, watch the waterfall appearing and click on a line to read the qso and find out the information (Callsign) to start a QSO... Below is a screenshot of the QSO's happening around 14.070 (the lines indicate the conversation which MixW converts from binary to readable text..

It's just 1 of the amazing Digital Modes our hobby encompasses and i will post about HellSchrieber Digital Mode once ive had some results.

Not much happening...

Well the LDG 897-Plus ATU stopped working last Friday. After making my first HF qso with M0PAW the following morning I switched everything on and the tuner's LED constantly flashed and would not tune at all.











So I'm stuck with only a few usuable bands (20m-10m) with a low swr so I haven't used the radio very much as I'm cautious about using it. Hopefully the tuner should arrive back mid next week.

I also sent off my documents to the ARRL this week so that I can continue to install Logbook of The World and start saving this DX Qso's for the DXCC award :)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Digi interface

I purchased one of these units from Alan - M0AQC and have to say it's brilliant. Here is what his interface page says:

'Get on DIGI modes at Low cost
units built by Me - M0AQC

PSK31/DIGI mode PC to RADIO interface unit, This unit is a professionally made interface, using isolating transformers for input and output connections to the PC/RADIO. It also uses an Opto IC or Reed Relay for TX.

Therefore this unit totally isolates the radio from the PC for all DIGI modes such as:

PSK31/63/125.....RTTY.....SSTV.....OLIVIA.....CW.....HELLSCHREIBER.....THROB.....
PACTOR.....AMTOR.....MFSK..... etc........

This unit also works with Echolink and Easypal Digital SSTV.

I am also told some guys also use it for E.M.E transmissions! '






Have a peek at Alan's website and if you have any questions he is very helpful (even to newly licenced operators like me! :)

Alan's Digi interface website

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Up and running...

Well the station is finally setup...,

Unfortunately sorting the coax out up in the loft has done me in so it's rest & ice for the next few days so no proper chance to use the radio.

Also I have ordered a CAT cable (will hopefully arrive in the next few days) so that I can use HRD. A big thanks to Phil M6AHZ for the help as he us going to show me how it all works and get it set up. This with my digi box (more about this in another post) should allow me to try most modes.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A lot of 1st's

With Monday looming fast I'm hoping for nice weather to get everything setup.

Once everything is setup there will be a huge lists of 1st's...

First SSTV Qso
First PSK31 Qso
First Voice Qso etc etc

I will also looking into awards like 'Work every country' 'Worked every UK county' .... So many things to get set up for.

Any hints / tips about awards etc would be greatly appreciated as it's a mine field !

- BlogPress from my iPhone

Almost there...

Well after waiting for what seemed like ages all the radio equipment arrived safely !!!!!!

My setup now is:
Yaesu FT 897D
LDG AT-897 Auto tuner
MP 8230 PSU


The aerials are:
Snowdonia SRC HF 360 Vertical 
Diamond X-30 2m/70cms Colinear


I now have to wait until Monday until an aerial installer can come and fit a 18" T & K bracket so that i can mount the Snowdonia SRC HF 360 Vertical as i was hoping to mount it onto the UPVC fascia but unfortunately its too narrow so have to get a bracket fitted.

2m coverage

Currently im using a Kenwood TM 251e 2m mobile rig (10W) with a 'Knocked up' J-pole... My local repeater is GB3SC and as you can see from the map im roughly in the center of the coverage (red star icon).

Now, the repeater is only about 9 miles away (Bournemouth GB3SC) and im told i can get into the repeater ok but i only ever manage to contact someone either between me and the repeater or the other side of me towards the Southampton repeater (GB3SH) but never manage to hear anyone the other side of either repeater.. I was told by someone that lives between the Bournemouth repeater and the Weymouth repeater (GB3DR) that he always hear's alot his side so what am i doing wrong? Any ideas as all i can usually hear is the local Echolink repeater which is very close to me (MB7IBH)...

My QSL Card

Here is my first attempt at a qsl card.... this is what i will be using until i get some professional ones made up