Month: April 2008

My favourite tool for listening to webradio’s

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.

My homebrew vertical multiband hf antenna

cobwebb-antennaFirst 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 more

QSO with SV1EAG and webcam feedback

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)

sv1eag_on3jt_psk31_qso.jpg

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.

Barcodes on QSL cards, an idea

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 :-).

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Current projects that needs attention

Like many amateurs I have more than one project that needs attention. Here’s a list what is keeping me busy :

  • Cantenna for 23cm
  • Short 40m inverted V dipole
  • BITX20 tranceiver kit
  • 23cm ATV biquad antenna
  • Antenna switch box 1×6
  • Pic programming for the BITX20
  • Make cables for a small LCD panel
  • …

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