Simon G0FCU @g0fcu@mastodon.radio

Traded in my 20 year old FT-920 for a new IC-7300 today. No regrets, loving it already.

During the storm yesterday afternoon I started the coding for my Arduino radio controlled 630m tuner. It's basically done now. I need to add some handshaking between the shack and loading coil nodes, work out how to keep the variometer within a 180° range, decide how to power it and work out how to weatherproof and mount it. Then I'll be able to tune for maximum output from the shack :)

Can anyone confirm what output I should see on an oscilloscope from the 4 outputs of an FST3252 in a Taylor detector with a sine wave input? Should each output be a sine wave but at a 90° phase offset from each other?

Really great being able to watch DATV from QO-100 geo satellite on a Raspberry Pi thanks to BATC Portadown and new LongMynd software.

Tuned up my 630m loading coil and matching circuit. 1.1:1 match at 474kHz. Coil looks a bit of a mess because I had to add additional wire to bring the antenna to resonance but the whole thing is a lot more robust than before.

Downloaded and compiled QRadioLink tonight. Works for tx & rx with my HackRF on Linux http://qradiolink.org/

Test

I've had this book for a year or so and not really opened it but there's some very useful information that has given me food for thought regarding my 474kHz antenna.

Since my 160m inverted-L antenna broke in one of the summer storms a couple of weeks ago I've been wondering what to replace it with. The idea of using a magnetic loop intrigues me but I need to finish the rebuild of my 474kHz antenna first.

Finished off my Cobweb antenna today. It's an excellent omni-directional antenna on 20/17m, I haven't spent any time on 15/12/10m yet.

I built a G3TXQ (SK) Cobweb antenna. Good 5 band omndirectional performance. Not quite finished but just a bit of tidying up to do. Initial rx on 17m seems pretty good compared with my previous antennas.

I've built my Minitiouner satellite TV rx kit and have been receiving amateur DVB-S2 transmissions from the QO-100 geostationary satellite tonight. Way cool!

Tx DVB-S via HackRF and gr-dvbs, rx using another HackRF and sdrangel, same computer.

Key components for my Es'hailsat2 LNB polarization switcher and bias T box.

I've installed Kodi on a Raspberry Pi and am running the client on Amazon Firestick's to distribute free to air satellite I receive round the house. Works very well.

As a quick lunchtime project I've connected the I/Q output of my QCX CW transceiver to my STM32F746-Discovery waterfall. More work needed but it works.

Downloaded wsjtx 2.0 rc4 tonight because rc3 caused an error. rc4 only decodes the new format message. Only got a few decodes on 40m. Come on people - upgrade.

A quick listen to MF NDB's, logged all these without trying, from Greenland to Austria. MF propagation is really good at the moment.

I'd heard that conditions on 630m were good but they are very good. I'm going to try to get the WSQ/WSQ2 software working for some two way qso's.

My radio blog is at g0fcu.com