April 5th, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
Jim, Craig and myself went to have breakfast and play radios at Shoreham (Victoria on the Mornington Peninsular).
Jim cooked a magnificent breakfast (crikey it was good). I played radios. Craig did the filming and a lot of the antenna erecting (I was pretty lazy really).
All in all it was a “top day”. Craig has put a video up at…
You Tube of Radio Boys At Shoreham
Oh. The radio I was using (an FT-897D) was connected to an OCF dipole antenna cut for 80m and using my own 4:1 balun. I made contacts on 80m and 40m quite easily and could hear some 20m activity. It seemed to be a reasonable performer.
Details of the balun on a subsequent post. However – it was very successful. I was quite surprised.
Cheers – Richard
February 28th, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
I got some fairly low end (by some standards) hardware last week and installed Debian-Lenny on it.
Wow! What a thing it is. I’ve learned heaps in the process. The goal is to learn as much as possible about Linux, install a knowledge base that I’ve purchased the code for (phpkb 6) and later deploy the [...]
February 1st, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
Well, its been another few hours on the phone and trying without success to upgrade our accounting software and I quite reasonably and with considered aforethought need to vent my spleen or my head will explode.
To their credit the Indian call centre gentlemen have handled my begging, pleading and small lapses into tears quite well. [...]
February 1st, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
A new category! Surely there must be a million blogs with categories just like this.
This posting is prompted by my exasperation in dealing with computers.
On a daily basis I wonder if it is a conspiracy to make my life difficult or just to bleed me and my business dry by a never ending round eternal [...]
January 17th, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
A friend sent me a link that, in the link, claimed how the name “HAM” came into being for amateur radio operators.
Shortly later he sent me another link to a WIKI that refuted the claims in the previous link
Here is the wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio
For myself, I believe tha name comes from one of the amateur [...]
January 17th, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
Last week I purchased a “Netgear ReadyNAS DUO” NAS box and a pair of enterprise grade 1TB hard disk drives. It is pretty cute and I named it “Nellie”. Nellie is a “network attached storage” box. She has an RJ45 interface into which I connected my ethernet network cable. The hard drives are mirrored meaning [...]
January 17th, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
At the EMDRC I was given a tripod (thanks Dave, very much). I instantly had an application for it – a really simple and quick to deploy support for 2/70 small vertical I have.
In the picture you can see the (blue) tripod extended. I have put my Diamond X30 onto it by simply slipping a [...]
January 17th, 2010 •
Posted by admin •
I am a proud member of the EMDRC (Eastern and Mountain District Radio Club) as well as a few others in fact!
This year, same as last year, we had a “social field day” at the club rooms where members met, talked, played radios and best of all ate free sausages in bread. I also took [...]
December 16th, 2009 •
Posted by admin •
I was on ‘REC repeater this afternoon. I was asked to go QRO which I did and the reason was that someone was dropping a carrier on me.
I said on air, truthfully, that the last person that was dropping carriers had all their gear seized and is being prosecuted. We knew his name, his home [...]
December 16th, 2009 •
Posted by admin •
Straw poll time!
Is an OCF dipole really a dipole? Do dipole legs need to be even lengths to be called a dipole?
Does the word “dipole” imply even lengths on the arms?
Should it be called an “off centre fed long wire” – even though it is tuned for a band and its harmonics?
Is it better characterized [...]