Well, this afternoon I decided to fix a couple of problems with the bicycle mobile… firstly, the mounting of one noisy headlamp. I’ve re-done the mount using a more solid piece of plastic this time, so we shall see how it goes. No noise on HF so things are looking up there. I also fixed [...]
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Well, the antenna I tuned up in my last post, I can say, while it doesn’t work that great on 80m, it did get a contact into Victoria this evening on the AWNOI net. Terry VK2TEZ near Coffs Harbour gave me a 4-3 signal report, so still lots of room for improvement… part of that [...]
If you ever decide to put any kind of sensitive receiver on a bicycle, you’ll want to avoid this ugly duckling of the bicycle lighting world: These lights are great from the illumination point of view, and they’re not badly priced either. However, from an EMC viewpoint, they stink. I was given one as a [...]
Well, I figured I better post up pics and notes on the improved antenna design for my HF bicycle mobile station. I spent some time tuning it up today, and without resorting to the autotuner, I’ve successfully managed to tune up all bands available to me from 40m through to 6m. 80m still remains ellusive [...]
For a little bit I’ve been struggling with poor performance on my bicycle mobile station. It was an intermittent fault. Sometimes it’d work great, other days the FT-290R II would complain bitterly about a SWR issue, and receive performance would be abysmal. But then I’d set off anyway, get a block away, and the problems [...]
I picked up a few new toys recently. I’ve been looking around for a small microcontroller based device to act as a combined remote face / DTMF generator for my FT897D. The idea is that this device could interface with the FT897D via its CAT port, and allow me to adjust the frequency and mode, [...]
Well… it seems my tinkering has paid off. This weekend was the weekend of the International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend… and also a federal election. On Tuesday, I bought a trailer for the bicycle … this is primarily so that I can transport groceries, etc… to home since I’ve got the place to myself for a [...]
Well… after borrowing an antenna analyser and tweaking a few things… I made my second stationary contact using the bicycle mobile station on 20m. This time, using 20W transmit power. I now know where to place at least one of the taps on this autotransformer for 20m use. The station borrows heavily on the [...]
Well, I did some experiments this weekend regarding the bicycle mobile station using an autotransformer to match the shortened end-fed whip (6′ 27MHz helically-wound) to the 50ohm impedance my set demands. I haven’t tried this on the bike itself… these were done in my bedro^W(ahhem) “radio shack”… with the antenna and its bracket sitting on [...]
Well, I’ve been riding a lot between West End and The Gap, and I get a lot of questions from people on the band about my setup. I was doing some repairs… one of the wires to the PTT had disconnected, luckily there was a 0V return via other connections… and so while I had [...]
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