Blogospheric Refraction

The life and times of Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)

Browsing Posts in Homebrew

This post may also be read here. Well, today I did some more work on the 2m linear.  Earlier this week I ordered some SMA connectors and some 1N5711 diodes for the project. Two 1N5711 diodes will be used to make a voltage peak detector, to detect when the amplifier is subjected to power above [...]

This build log is also viewable here. Background A few months back, I grabbed the trusty FT-290R II ready to do my weekly run from The Gap to Tarragindi.  Quick test to check everything’s okay… the power meter swings to full scale, but strange, I’m not hitting any repeaters. Okay, grabbed the FT-897D instead, and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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… 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 [...]