HERE
Did you miss me? I missed you?
If you read my other more frequent writings on Documentally.net you’ll know this summer has been a fine balance between adventure, keeping the kids occupied and managing the land.
As the kids have just gone back to school I should now I have some time for radio. In fact tomorrow I have two friends stopping over for a field day. M9TOG and M1NER may well be adopting the Scottish ‘M’ to their callsigns, as in-between popping to the pub, we’ll have a little field day at my QTH.
I’ve painted the caravan, finished the offgrid power system and just this week accidentally ran over the only installed HF antenna with the lawnmower.
It’s amazing how quickly an electric lawnmower can wrap up a 40m long wire after the wind put the end of it into the long grass.
I’m sure we can come up with some other solutions between us. After all, playing with antennas is what we do.
Speaking of playing. If you are new here I feel compelled to tell you that I’m just playing in this space. There is so much to learn but I feel my mission is to play, make mistakes, learn from them and then have some more fun.
Sometimes the learning sticks and I feel I might have levelled up. But it doesn’t matter how much I learn, there are still some folk out there I feel are surfing a completely different wave. And pulling tricks at the same time. Tom Salzer is one of them.
Check out EtherHam.com and level up. Or at the very least learn some new stuff.
THERE
The image at the top of the screen is of my Meshcore Node hanging off the inside of a catamaran somewhere in a bay off Kalamata, Greece. (Not my boat. It belongs to family.)
I’ve had far more fun with LoRa messaging after switching from Meshtastic to Meshcore, as there seem to be far more people using it up in the north. Not only that, while in Europe, on holiday with family, hanging the node from the boat put me in the middle of some fascinating conversations with locals and tourists alike. Everyone conveniently speaking English.
When GSM was scarce and the sat-net was off to ‘enhance the kid’s holiday experience’, being a floating node was great fun. Plus I learned a lot about the local area from the people who lived there.
Note: There may be some amazon affiliate links in this post because… erm… Billionaires gotta eat and I might get to feed off their crumbs? …In reality you should probably buy everything from Canny Components who are lovely humans who care about their customers.
GEAR
I’ve quickly installed a MAP 2-BTO tilt over antenna mast that can take scaffold poles. If I use one of these swan-neck poles with the scaffold pole I could get a small antenna or node also on the mast.
It’s installed next to the caravan/shack/shackavan in anticipation of my friends coming over.
I paid about £220 for it over a year ago and it’s finally in the ground. I’m hoping two bags of cement will keep it upright.
Then while tidying a shed I found a 2/70 collinear, beam and a loop antenna. As well as my 80m HF loop, a ZS6BKW (my favourite HF antenna) and a set of HF Hustler resonators in all the bands. That’s not including my QRP box with a folding mag loop, a Windcamp Gipsy Dipole and another linked dipole. Some of which can do 100W. So we should be good for wire in the sky.
I forgot to mention that I also found two 868MHz antennas, one was as tall as me and then another shorter one got used in this Meshcore Project.
This was an easy build. I just attached the antenna, a USB solar panel and a waterproof box, with battery and ESP32 inside. Then flashed with it Meshcore. I have stuck it on a pole that used to carry telephone wires and so far it’s been running for two weeks as the Scottish ‘BorderNode’.
And here are some new products mentioned including iCom’s new 2/70 mobile radio that costs £750. 😲 …And as far as I can see it doesn’t even have SSB.
Finally… here’s a short video I made a little while ago on the RigExpert, StickPro…
ONAIR
Outside of the LoRa experiments and things listed above I have mostly been mobile on 2m in the van. chatting to holiday makers with handhelds on the beach and hikers in the mountains.
HF has been scarce. Austria, France, Ireland Germany, Norway etc, but I hope to make up for that this weekend.
More on that in the next issue no doubt.
ELSEWHERE
Columbian amateurs have been helping in Earthquake response.
Some interesting Am-Sat records have been set.
If you don’t read Random Wire, you should. Tom does an incredible amount of work researching, experimenting and curating Ham Radio content. You can find him here in a post where he was kind enough to mention my other newsletter. It’s content rich so take your time.
Has the US been using GPS satellites to update cryptographic keys?
Looks like it’s been a fantastic summer for Sporadic-E.
MeshCore v1.17.0 landed on 9 August with a rewrite of its collision-avoidance system and support for eight more boards plus Elecrow has launched the ThinkNode M9, a self-contained MeshCore terminal with a physical keyboard. More on MeshAmerica.
This is my other more regular, slightly more eclectic email. If you take out a supporting subscription either there or here you get access to all the content on both publications.
Should you be interested in obtaining a 300ft tower… It’s quite a handful.
Incidentally if you ever managed to chat with Darth Vader on the CB in the US, there is a slim chance it was actually him.
FINALS
Thanks for reading and I hope subscribing.
I’d best head out and prepare for the mini field day. If you are on HF over the weekend and don’t hear us, we’ll either be in the Bear Claw or The Curfew.
Please share this wherever you think it might resonate. Great to have you here. You are some of the more curious people in radio ;-) And I thank you.
Over
73 de Christian G5DOC
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Holiday makers and hikers on 2m - were they licensed?