Monday 20th June

A busy night last Monday, as well as the usual coffee drinking and banter, Chris showed us his new £30 2W Chinese handheld radio from ebay, which comes with an interesting array of accessories.

we also set up a WSPR station and managed to be picked up in Canada on 0.5W.

and some of the guys did some aerial testing too.

Monday 13/06/2011

Monday: Another play night in Banstead.  This evening I did some more PSK31 with the little Small Wonders Lab kit. It worked better on Epsom downs the Saturday before. I think this was due to the switch mode power supply I was using. The home made antenna seems to work well.

A view of the PSK31 Rig:

 

PSK Signal:

 

Various discussions took place on a number of topics as well as some tea and coffee drinking :-)

Monday 06/06/11

Last Monday I took some Items of radio test gear to play with. Most new amateurs have not seen a Dip Oscillator, Absorption Wavemeter or an Antenna Noise bridge.  

We played with the Dip oscillator and Absorption Wavemeter and found both seem to need re-calibration. This is another job to fit into my already busy schedule.

The type of Dip Oscillator we played with.

My VHF/UHF Absorption Wavemeter

We then moved on to the Antenna Noise Bridge and while it did give us a lot of noise when switched on, we could not get it to work with the ATU and antenna onsite. I must look at this again and try and get it to work correctly.

Although we did not have a total success it was still a good evening.

Monday 30/05/2011

We were closed Bank Holiday Monday :-(

I am looking forwards to this coming Monday. I have found some items of test gear which some of the guys may not have seen.  This should give us something to play with at the start of the evening.

After that, who knows what others will bring.