Monday June 10, 2019
21:49:45
So, this is my first blog entry since returning to amateur radio earlier this spring. In fact, it’s my first blog entry since January when I was playing around with autoposting files I uploaded from TS-DOS to Dropbox into my WordPress site.
Still haven’t fixed my own M100, although the kids’ machines and the T200 (which I’m using to type this) continue to work just fine. Really, all I need to do is order the capacitors from DigiKey, which I’d already put into a cart, but held off on because one cap was backordered. I forget whether I had written about borrowing Ben’s supply of caps, but that only got me two or three matches and didn’t do the job. I did desolder the one which everyone on the mailing list suspected and found small signs of leakage. It also was the only one to fail on Ben’s capacitor tester. So, I really ought to just bite the bullet and do that so I can re-cap all of the M100s and the T200 while I’m at it. (Might be good to order new memory batteries too, or just leave the supercap solution in place? Hmm…)
In any case, Nathan took an interest in online SDR receiver sites and started listening to CW transmissions, writing down the Morse dots and dashes on paper and later typing them into a translation website to determine what they said. It got me thinking about the sad state of my own radio equipment and how I’d left off the hobby so many years ago, not even putting my J-pole back up after re-roofing the house. One day I got Nathan to look at the J-pole with me, and after re-terminating the deteriorated coax connection at the pipes I made a new bracket to fit the new gable end and put it back up. We were back on the air!
That was around early March, and I started showing Nathan the local 2m nets and ended up being invited to the Langley Amateur Radio Association (LARA) March monthly meeting after stumbling across their weekly net the night before. There was a presentation from a local ham who had been on a trip to the LHC at CERN several years before and had lots of stories to tell and photos to show – fascinating.
In the months since then I’ve been catching up with lots of things which have developed since I fell out of the hobby – digital modes using sound card interfaces were just starting up and PSK31 was the hot thing. It’s still around but uncommon, and lots of other things like FT8 and JS8Call have jumped up to take over. Just in the last week I got a chance to receive some SSTV transmissions as well. Bought a SignaLink USB interface which does the whole soundcard interface so much better than it was in the mid-2000s when you basically had to roll your own.
Also bought some more radios – a Yaesu FT-7800 which I installed in the car, a Kenwood TH-D7A handheld because it has a built-in TNC (yes, I also got into packet which I never touched previously), and a Yaesu FT-270R handheld because it’s water resistant. Also made up easy interface adapters to quickly move the SignaLink between the FT-840 and the TR-751 2m in the house, and the FT-7800 in the car. Also modified the TR-751 to give it preamp-level audio output on mic pin 6 which was not really used (it was an input for a pushbutton which the supplied mic doesn’t have). This worked out wonderfully – no hum or RFI at all. Also got Anderson connectors and cables galore to try to standardize and make my power connections neater, and programming cables to use Chirp to sync up the memories on everything (now that I have more than one programmable radio)…
Yeah. Lots going on. It does make me happy, and writing about it brings a bit of a smile. Trying to take the mind off the date, you know.