Radio

Radio Ga Ga

/ masher / 8 Comments

I spent several hours last night, camped out in my car atop Dunstable Downs… the highest point in Bedfordshire.

An Amateur Radio contest happens at the beginning of each month and I am taking part.  As we are operating at VHF frequencies, the higher we can get the aerial, the better.

So, armed with my radio and homemade aerial (constructed from some plastic piping and an old clothes horse that I cut up) and a flask of coffee, I made my way to what I hoped would be my regular parking spot, just outside the car park barriers.

There are several car parks up there and at night they drop the barriers across the entrances. However, there is generally room to squeeze a few vehicles in.

To my dismay, every spot was taken: there were loads of cars up there.  It seemed to be some sort of gathering.  It was too late for me to search for another spot, so I parked up on the grass verge and set my aerial up behind the car.  It was a bit dodgy, because it was very close to the unlit road and it was quite scary with these idiot drivers haring round the corner towards me.  Throughout the entire event, I kept my lights on so I could be seen.

I could also be seen by the occupants of all the cars squeezed in front of the barriers.  They watched me, as I sat in the car speaking into a microphone and as I got out several times to repoint the aerial.  They looked at me curiously and chatted amongst themselves through their open car windows.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was probably along the lines of “Look at this fucking idiot. What’s he up to?”

Despite being in my car – with the doors locked – I didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t feel safe.

I’m going to have to find a backup location for next month.

Or take a bodyguard with me.

Sunday, Sunday, So Good To Me

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As Sunday’s go, yesterday’s was a pretty good one.

The weather was perfect – if maybe on the slightly chilly side, early on – as I rode up to Bletchley Park to meet up with a couple of mates for our annual Nerds Day Out. It was a lovely morning and the ride was most enjoyable – tempered only by some irritating roadworks that I should have known to avoid, as they’ve been there for ages.

Despite having visited many times, one of our little group had never been, so we had a good excuse for us to go again.  Not that I need an excuse: I must have been a dozen times already, but I still always learn something new whenever I go.

We looked around many of the huts and also made the obligatory (for us) trip to the National Radio Museum, before grabbing some lunch in Hut 4 and then going to see the Bombe.

After several hours, we’d seen enough, bade our farewells and we each went our seperate ways.

Back home, I had time for a quick cup of tea before I took the dog out and then Mrs M and I jumped in the car and headed to Milton Keynes.

We had just enough time time to shove a Nando’s down our necks before quickly heading to the theatre to see Ben Elton in his Authentic Stupidity tour.

He was this: fucking excellent.

I won’t write a review here, because many others can do it so much better, so I’ll just say: he didn’t disappoint.

That phrase could similarly sum up my Sunday as a whole.

In the words of every failed contestant on Bullseye, “I’ve had a lovely day”.

Big Weekend

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This last weekend saw the Radio 1 Big Weekend come to town.

Held in Stockwood Park – the largest bit of greenspace in town – and attended by approximately 100,000 people over the course of three days, it was – by all accounts in the local and national press – a resounding success.

Which I am pleased about: we normally only get in the news for bad shit.

I didn’t attend the festival, of course, but I could just about hear it sometimes when I was walking the dog and the wind was blowing in the right direction.

The Radio 1 Big Weekend (as an aside, I own a Shure microphone that Noel Edmonds used, back when it was called The Radio 1 Roadshow.) isn’t something I would normally take any notice of, but as it was in my home town my interest was piqued and I watched snippets of it over the course of the weekend, as it was being shown live on iPlayer.  I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t recognise any of the acts or any of the Radio 1 DJ’s (are they still called that, or is it just ‘presenters’ now?) as I stopped listening to Radio 1 many, many years ago.

The one act that I did recognise, was the headline act that closed the festival on Sunday night: a band called Coldplay. Whilst I’m aware of them, I’ve not really paid any attention to their work. But as we watched, I found myself saying things like “Oh, I like this one” or “Ahh, didn’t realise this was one of theirs”.  By the end of the night, I found I was becoming a bit of a Coldplay fan… especially when Chris Martin sang a short song he had composed, just for Luton Town FC fans, which he called Orange.

The next morning, I found myself perusing YouTube videos of Coldplay songs, when I stumbled across this one. If the sheer look of joy on The Doctor’s face doesn’t brighten your day, I’m not sure anything will!

 

Bonkers Bunkers

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In the amateur radio world, there are a group of people who like to operate portable from places of interest and see how many contacts they can make from that location.

And when I say ‘group’ I mean thousands. It’s a very popular activity within the hobby.

I’ve not tried it myself… yet.

One of the most popular places to operate from (we call it ‘activate’) is the top of a very high hill or mountain.  This is called SOTA, an acronym for Summits On The Air.   SOTA activations can be very rewarding: that extra height above sea level can really aid long-distance communications.  Of course, the challenge is in lugging all your equipment up a mountain. No mean feat in some cases.

But, not everyone can do SOTA, due to age or physical impairments, so other OTAs have sprung up over the years: POTA – Parks On The Air; WOTA – Windmills; and a recent one that has come to my attention BOTA – Bunkers.

This last one is aimed at operating from the 2,000 or so bunkers across the country, that were built for the Royal Observer Corps during WWII.

Looking on the website that has been set up to facilitate this activity, I noticed that there is a bunker in Luton and so I decided to go and take a look, as it was at a location that I’ve often walked with the dog and I’d never seen any bunker there.

With the aid of What3Words though, I found it quite easily, hidden in a small clump of trees and bushes that I must have walked past many times.. Or, at least I found the entrance to the bunker – how far underground it went, I don’t know.  The brick entrance has been fitted with an iron gate to prevent local herberts getting in there and the exposed brickwork around it is covered in graffiti.

With my interest piqued, I then did a bit of looking around the internets and I happened across this video, which shows a large bunker in town… nothing to do with the ROC.

From watching the video, I’m pretty sure I have figured out where that manhole cover is, but I’m not sure I’d be able to get down it… not with my forearms. The main entrance (or one of the main entrances) is just a few feet away, by the looks of it, but has been paved over.  Again, I have walked down that road many times, with no knowledge of what was beneath my feet.

Amazing.

Lé Weekend

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We went to the pixtures on Saturday evening, to see Fast & Ludicrous 64.

It was this: ridiculous.

I think I enjoyed the first F&F film, way back when, but they have gone from outrageous stunt to even-more-outrageous-and-unbelievable stunt as the franchise has progressed.  I’m sure they came up with a whole load of crazy car-driving stunts first and then wrote a storyline around them.

I really wasn’t keen on going to see it, but was cajoled by  a nagging family and the promise of a Nando’s beforehand.

Anyway, once in the cinema and seated in front of the Supersize Screen, I stuffed my face with popcorn and sort of enjoyed it.

What I enjoyed more, was the trailer for the forthcoming Mission Impossible 7 film.  That’s a defo.

Then, on Sunday morning, I went with a friend up to our local, nerdy, radio rally and I took some stuff with me, to get rid of.  I didn’t want any money for it, so put it on the club’s trestle table to help with their funds.

Mrs. Masher was most pleased to see me taking some stuff out of the loft at long last.

She probably won’t be so happy when she finds out that most of it is now in the garage, because I had to bring it back!

I couldn’t sell it. Some of it I couldn’t even give away for free! People just didn’t want it.

I was most surprised – and saddened – to see that all my lovely gear wasn’t snapped up by like-minded nerdy buyers.

It seems that Mrs. M was right after all: it’s just junk.

Sunday afternoon, Son and I went for a bike ride – some father/son bonding time.

I had to smile when he had the audacity to overtake me on the A505, as we rode up to Royston. Crouched over the tank of his little Yamaha YBR 125 and with his jacket flapping in the wind, he slowly – oh, so slowly – passed me, with a big grin on his face.  With ten times less cubic capacity and eight times less BHP than me, I let him have his moment before I opened the throttle and used my three remaining gears to watch him quickly reduce to a speck in my mirrors.

But, it was a most enjoyable ride – we’ve never really ridden together before – and I was pleased to see that he is a competent and safe rider.

At least for now.

Happy Birthday Hedy

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Today is Hedy Lamarr’s 107th birthday.

Or, at least it would be, if she were still alive.

But, it’s a birthday that is still celebrated throughout the world – albeit, in a rather low-key fashion – by radio amateurs.

So, why would a load of nerdy radio hams celebrate the life of a 1940’s Hollywood actress?

She became most famous for her role as Delilah, playing opposite Victor Mature’s Samson  in Cecil B DeMille’s masterpiece “Samson & Delilah” and at the time, she was touted the most beautiful woman in cinema.

But, what many people don’t realise, is that she was also an inventor.

She invented several things, but is most famously known (among the cognoscente) for inventing a radio guidance system for torpedoes during the second World War.

The system used a technique known as Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum and was developed as a way for the Allies to remotely control their torpedoes without the enemy being able to jam them.

Although they patented this system in 1942, the US Navy only started installing an updated version of it in the 1960s, after the patent had run out, so Lamarr never received a penny in royalties.

More importantly, the principle behind FHSS went on to become the basis of more modern radio techniques that we all use today, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and mobile phone transmissions.

So, perhaps it should be all of us wishing Hedy Lamarr a Happy Birthday, and not just a bunch of nerdy radio hams.

Out and about

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Today I went to St Neots, in Cambridgeshire.

And wandered around a damp field.

Full of damp men.

Looking at a load of old, damp, radio-related tat.

And had a great time… as did we all, I think.

It’s the first radio rally I have been to in nearly two years and it was good to catch up with some like-minded nerds, who I haven’t seen in a while.

And I grabbed a couple of bargains too, which pleased me greatly.

It looks like the rally calendar is starting to get back to normal.

Hopefully, the next one will be just as enjoyable.

And not as damp.

Rip Off Britain

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Many years ago, I had a Psion Series 3 handheld… remember them?

I loved anything gadgety and the Series 3 fitted the bill nicely.

When it was superceded by the Series 3A, I immediately went out and bought one, even though it wasn’t that much of an upgrade.

As I remember, it cost about three hundred quid at the time.

And I was amazed, when Mrs M and I went on a shopping trip to New York just a few weeks later, to see the very same device being sold for almost half the price!

I wouldn’t have minded so much, but the damn thing was designed and built in Britain, so how can it be so much cheaper in a different country?

Fast forward to today: I was mooching through some ham radio videos on YouTube, and in one of them, someone – an American chap – showed how to build an interesting project using a Raspberry Pi, and in his video, he showed how all the parts could be sourced from Amazon. He even showed the actual Amazon pages, so one could be sure of buying the right parts.

Intrigued, I noted them all down and then went to the UK Amazon site. I then found all the parts and totalled up the price.

It worked out to be fifty quid more than what this guy paid for it in America!

The Raspberry PI itself made up over half of that difference: 64 pounds in the UK, but only 37 in the US… 27 quid cheaper!

Again, the Pi was designed in Britain.

It is a hugely successful British product.

And whilst some are made in China and Japan, the bulk of the forty million or so that have so far been sold around the world, have been made in the UK.

So why the hell are we that live in the UK having to pay so much more?

Dead handy

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My Wouxon KG-UV8D stopped working the other day.

Two thoughts crossed my mind simultaneously:

“Oh bugger, I suppose I’ll have to spend out on a new handheld now”.

“Yay!  I can go shopping for a new handheld now”.

Still, being the curious radio amateur that I am, I decided to see if it was fixable.

A quick investigation showed the battery had run out of charge, despite it sitting in the charger for the previous 24 hours.  Hmmm.  I checked the charger, and sure enough, there was no voltage on the terminals.

I was somewhat dismayed when I opened up the charger and could see nothing immediately obvious.  Also, it was nearly all SMD… all too small and fiddly for my liking – I like proper components that you can actually pick up with your fingers.

Also also, I couldn’t find a schematic for it.

But, I started tracing voltages through anyway and it wasn’t long before I found a component with volts and one side and nada on the other.  Either a diode or a blown resistor, maybe.   It had no values shown on it, just the letter H.  A bit of research on the internets and some conversations with some fellow hams suggested it was most likely a 1A fuse. Bridging it with a piece of wire proved that to be the most likely case as the charger started working properly.

I didn’t want to leave the fuse bridged out – fuses are there for a reason after all – but a replacement SMD fuse on ebay was about four quid.  Yes, four quid! For a fuse!

So, I used a 20mm cartridge fuse of the right value, slipped some heatshrink over it and wired that in instead.

Put it all back together and it works a treat. No need to buy a new one.

Whilst trying to find a schematic on the internet, I read of many instances where this charger has failed, so I thought I’d write it up here for anyone who might have a similar issue.

 

What a packet

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Whilst rummaging about up in the loft the other day, looking for… I can’t remember what, I stumbled upon my old AEA PK-88 Packet TNC.

You remember them, right?

All the big boys were running PK-232 units, but they were too costly for me. The cheaperPK-88 served it’s purpose well, though.

Back in the late 80’s, I’d gotten very interested in the X.25 protocol used to send data packets around a telecoms network and so, when some bright spark developed a version that could be used in amateur radio in the early 90’s – AX.25 – I of course decided to get involved.

Back then, packet communications was all the rage and hundreds of us set up nodes and digipeaters at home, forming a radio mesh that allowed packets to travel up and down the country, in much the same way as companies like BT were doing.  Our packets tended to be just routine messages (like an email), rather than the commercial data that travelled over X.25. Of course, our amateur network lacked the millions of pounds that the telecoms companies were able to pour into it: it was slower and prone to failure… but it was fun and we learnt a lot about network routing.  Looking back at it now, I realise just how much I have forgotten, over the years.

But anyway…  amateur packet was pretty much killed off by the internet and so I wondered what I could use my old TNC for.

Not much, according to Google.

But, a version of amateur packet is still alive, in the form of the Automatic Packet Reporting System.   Unlike the old system, APRS tends to be more localised, with guys broadcasting beacons, detailing local weather and shit like that.  All a bit pointless, but I wondered whether I would be able to use my ancient TNC to pick up APRS packets and decode them.

And so, after much fiddling about with RS232 cables and PuTTY and a bit of soldering, I was rewarded with the picture on the right.  Success!!

I am pretty chuffed at having figured out how to get it to decode the packets, after nearly thirty years.

Next step is to see if I can actually transmit any.

Watch this space… if you can be arsed.

Time to listen

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I have been working from home since just before the first lockdown and – all in all – I’m loving it.

I’m saving about two hundred quid a month in fuel, for one thing.

And about three hours a day sitting in the car.

I really do not miss that commute!

But, there is something that I do miss about that drive.

Being such a horrible, boring  journey – all 37.5 miles there and 37.5 miles back on the M1, M25 and M40 – I have to keep myself entertained, to save the steering wheel getting too chewed up through frustration.

As such, once I was in range, I would often talk to a small group of amateur radio operators, who frequent the Amersham repeater most mornings.  A friendly bunch, it was always pleasant to chat over technical matters with them. We even got together a couple of times for Christmas dinner… not gonna happen this year, obviously.

But, working from home, I am out of range and so  haven’t been able to have my regular chats with them, and I miss that.

But, the other thing I am missing is my podcasts.  Each Sunday I would store up a week’s worth of podcast listening onto a Re-Writable CD-ROM (I know: how quaint, in this day and age) and I would listen to it throughout the week, whilst driving… and until I was in range of the Amersham Repeater.

I would also record comedy shows from Radio 4 and Radio 4xtra and bung a couple of them on the CD as well.

I am still recording them, even now, but as I haven’t been driving, I haven’t been listening, so have amassed a huge backlog.

Episodes of Just A Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and The Unbelievable Truth, languish on my radio’s memory card, amongst classic episodes of Dad’s Army, Hancock’s Half-Hour and Steptoe & Son.  The Answer Me This podcast remains undownloaded, along with The Modern Mann, Rutherford & Fry, Dr Karl, The Naked Scientists  and the Eclectic Tech podcast from the ARRL.  Amongst others.

Even if things do return to ‘normal’, I’m wondering where I’ll ever find the time to catch up with them all.

Project Phoenix

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I was gifted a lovely little radio a while back – a Yaesu FT-270R.

It’s an old 2m model, dating back to the late eighties, I’m guessing.  As such, it lacks CTCSS capability, which limits its use somewhat.

However, there is a space inside to fit a FTS-8 subtone encoder board. And so I thought I’d fit one of these and give it a new lease of life.

Sadly though, the FTS-8 board is no longer available and secondhand ones command a hefty price tag.

What to do? Well, make one of course!

I found an elegant design on the web and built it onto a piece of veroboard. Plugging it into the radio, changed some of the available functions, so the radio obviously detected the board.

It allowed me to choose the subtone from the front panel. Excellent.

But it didn’t work.  Checking  the output with my scope, the tone just wasn’t there… or rather, it wasn’t what it should have been.

I spent ages fiddling with it, but ultimately could find nothing wrong.

And so I passed it onto Dave, who – being a clever bugger – worked out pretty quickly that the board I had built actually worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the radio didn’t. It was giving out the wrong signals to the board.

This wasn’t something that could be easily fixed – possibly a microprocessor issue. And so, I figured a workaround, that would allow the tone to be selected manually, using a combination of switches to produce the binary equivalent of the hexadecimal value that the board was looking for in the tone lookup table.

This worked perfectly and when I tested it, I was successfully able to open several different repeaters, all using different subtones.

And then I found a bug, where the tone would only change after five minutes and not whenever the PTT was keyed.  This looked to be a fault with the MCLR on the PIC… possibly damaged by putting in 7.6 volts from the radio (datasheet states that Vpp shouldn’t exceed Vcc). Not having another chip available, I made a slight mod and fitted a miniature relay, which only allowed the board to be powered when the PTT was depressed.  This seemed to work nicely and I was able to switch tones easily and on-the-fly.

So, I put a call out on a repeater. “Your audio is awful!”, I was told.   I replaced the mic ( a new one from ebay cost fifty quid! Yes, fifty quid for a 30 yr old mic!) with an old YM-47 from an FT-290 and it worked perfectly… once I had figured out the differing wiring scheme.

And so, after many weeks of working on it, on and off, it is ready to be put to use.

Not that I need another radio at the moment, so a friend is going to borrow it.

Many times I nearly gave up on it and was going to throw it away. But, I had invested a lot of time and a reasonable amount of money on it and so I wanted to see it through.

I’m pleased that it is finally finished and working… because that means I can now move onto my next project 🙂