This weekend just gone I was at Imbil helping out with the International Rally of Queensland, reporting scores for the car rally there. This was my first look at packet radio in action. Prior to this I had enabled the amateur radio options in the kernels I built, but never tried actually hooking radio to [...]
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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 [...]
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 [...]
Well, today I got news that the Wireless Institute Australia has decided to change the cost of membership, not in the favourable direction either. This, on top of a $1 increase in our annual license fees (to $66/year), and substantially blown out costs for obtaining a license. For someone like myself, who is no longer [...]
Quake highlights threat to internet links: Damage to fibre-optic cables from the Japan earthquake highlights the vulnerability of Australia’s international communication links, one expert says. Meanwhile HF propagation has been steadily improving with the extra solar activity. I think this is a good year to be improving that HF station on the bicycle.
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 [...]
This is a question raised on an earlier post of mine. It’s an interesting comparison between radios and mobile phones. And some are of the belief that all you do with a radio, is talk on it, or that mobile phones can completely replace radios. Rather than respond there, I’ve decided there’s enough content there [...]
That was one of the comments made following my piece in this week’s WIA national news. We better start thinking up a better protocol then if that’s the truth. And we’ve only got 5-10 years to do it apparently, and migrate everyone. The IPng working group started their work in the early 90′s. It took [...]
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