ON3JT

From left to right :

1. The kit has just arrived.
2. The PCB, nice and clean job.
3. What I did in january.
4. Where I stopped in march.

More to come.

It was a long weekend and the weather was fine. Sunny and warm. Time to test the 40m antenna.
Note for myself : build or buy an antenna analyzer. Try not to dismantle the whole shack for antenna testing again.

First thing I did at my parents is to solder all amp connections. Then assembled everything together and started searching Read the rest of this entry »

With my vertical antenna I can listen to 40 and 80 meters, but we all know that is not the best setup. I could transmit with it by using an antennatuner. Using a tuner near the transceiver with a coax fed too short antenna is not the solution. Losses are building up in the tuner and coax.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once in a while I enjoy listening to webradio’s. There is sometimes a technical problem. They all use different codecs and so on. But the package of Screamer Radio tries to solve this problem. Follow this link to read more and download it : http://www.screamer-radio.com/

It also has a nice collection of radio’s preprogrammed, way too much for me. But it allows me to discover some really weird stations like old school games tunes/songs/audio. Or a bunch of online scanners.

But my favorite is the music that can be found at http://bluemars.org/
It streams 3 music channels for the Space traveller. I like the concept of their music and site.

First I tried to build a Cobwebb antenna. It is a small antenna and rather easy to build. I used cheap fishing rods, costing 4 to 5 euro each, from a known sports hardware shop. The funny thing was when I asked the sales person if the rods contain carbon fibers he mentioned that I’m not the first asking. He says = “Some people use them to make antennas…”. Big smile when I replied to do the same. Bought speakerwire and started cutting and soldering. Finally the first dipole was attached to the big cross. Added in total 4 dipoles when I wanted to test it. It was a small disapointment. Only 400 kHz usable bandwidth on 10m. The 12m and 17m were usable. But 15m also lacked the necessary bandwidth. That, the mechanical instability and difficulties Read the rest of this entry »

I made a qso in PSK31 today with SV1EAG, George in Greece. I hear you thinking : “Nothing special…”
But he mentioned this :

(YOU CAN WATCH THIS QSO IN MY LIVE CAM
IN http://www.sv1eag.blogspot.com/ IF YOU
WANT TRY IT)

And I did.  I could see the text that I was sending on his screen via the webcam. I was a bit too late to take a screencapture but if you look close enough, you should see my callsign in the logbook entry of MixW (the grid with yellow background). Very nice thing to have some visible feedback on your signal.

Keep up the good work George and we sure meet again.

I was recently designing labels for the few qsl cards that I have to sent. I’m not making 3000 plus qso’s a year, so my share in the sorting service is limited.

But I learned that the qsl cards for UBA members are sorted in The Netherlands. The guys over there type in the callsign and the software tells them in which box the card has to go. Sometimes this goes wrong, very wrong. In our local club we have a member with the callsign ON4AVP, the cards we receive are for ON4AUP. Not everyone writes clearly, including myself .

Read the rest of this entry »