Look For The Null [062]

Greetings from the shack...

HERE

I’m in the shack on a Sunday evening craving a glass of wine. I’ve no idea how much I’ll get down in this dispatch, as I spent most of the afternoon editing a podcast that should already be in your inbox and on a variety of apps.

---

THERE

Outside of some lovely chats on UHF and VHF the only other radio related adventure I’ve had was a trip up the road to the National Ham Fest at Newark. It’s about an hour North of my QTH. If you missed the podcast I’ve linked it here…

It had all the things you might find at a radio rally. Lots of older men, clubs, state of the art radio gear, fantastic antennas, interesting conversations, shiny useful bits and some overpriced junk.

I had contemplated shooting a video but soon got bored of the idea, so switched to audio. Audio for me is much easier to edit.

There was a lot of stuff outside I missed and so many wonderful off camera conversations. The few video clips I did capture, I’ll share here to give you a glimpse of the venue.

Yes. So not a lot in the video as I was too busy enjoying the conversations. If you want to immerse yourself in some longer video of the event then GT Retro world has a few on YouTube.

It’s great to catch up with radio operators and put faces to callsigns. As well as speak face to face with some stores you may only interact with online. Many of the companies put in a lot of effort bringing an immense amount of gear to the show.

Apart from Moonraker. I didn’t even know they were there. One of the biggest stores in the UK and apparently all they had was a banner and a table with a laptop on. I must have walked right pas it. Shame. I have spent a lot of money with them and they are my most local ham radio supplier.

It was obvious that people enjoy getting hands on with gear and i’m sure some people found Moonraker’s ‘stand’ a little disappointing. I was told more than a few times.

I had a little whinge about this on the Sunday net this morning…

If an amateur radio brand isn’t building a relationship with its customers it’s a Google search away from being ignored. And with many of the older radio operators slowly realising that Ali Express delivers some of the same gear, it’s the cheaper of the two faceless brands that will get the sale.

[I’ve just read that back. Sounds a bit harsh. Might be because I’ve started the wine. I love heading over to Moonraker. It’s only 40 minutes away and I tend to get great service there. Especially if certain people are on duty. I guess I’m fearful of losing that human connection.]

Anyway… they were not the only people to be there with just banners and tables. There were a few interesting clubs too. I paid £5 for a lifetime membership to WAB Worked All Britain. Their website is a blast from the past. For my fiver I got a USB stick with some cool stuff on and a new excitement for make contacts with people in weird and wonderful parts of the UK.

I’ll let you know when i’ve filled these squares.

Not many people at HamFest were pinging APRS in the carpark on arrival but I did see a few with LoRa nodes. I messaged in the app saying I was having a coffee and got to meet Dayle M0OUE.

Dayle has had some great experiments with solar powered LoRa nodes hidden in the wild.

In one corner of the event, I also got to learn more about radio orienteering, or ARDF (amateur radio direction finding).

Fascinating stuff and their stand is where I learned how to ‘look for the null’.

---

GEAR

Obviously there was no end of gear to gawk at at HamFest and I ignored the £6000 kit and looked at more of the niche stuff.

I talked about the Kenwood TK90 in the podcast but here is an image I grabbed.

A £500 mobile HF radio that comes programmed but i’m not sure how easy it is to operate as there’s not a lot going on on the front panel. Gets great reviews though.

I’d almost made it out of the event but stopped to chat with Mike from Ceecom Antennas. What a seriously lovely guy. And the passion he has for experimenting and building antennas is evident. As we chatted there was a steady flow of people rolling up and leaving with antennas.

His Moxon’s were particularly popular and he had virtually sold out of them for 6m on day one of the show. But I’ve had my eye on the 4M J-Pole he makes. My friend Richard M0OFF picked one up earlier in the day and dispite having bought a cheap 4m antenna not that long ago I could not resist. Close up they look really well made and so I picked up one of those and a mad looking 868MHz antenna that was far too big to be sensible.

There’s Mike on the left doing me a great deal. You might spot the crazy price of £40 on the taller Procom CXL 900-6LW/I 824-894MHz antenna. I think the normal price is £380. Needless to say i’ll be shopping with him again.

All in all a great weekend and i’ll certainly be heading back to the next National HamFest.

---

While having a chat on GB3OV last week Mick 2E0ILE pointed me to the OpenSpot that he uses. Not cheap compared to other solutions but it certainly looks like the easiest to use.

---

I really have not been getting the most out of my ZipTies. There’s some great cable management tips in this video.

---

ONAIR

Last weekend I tried my hand at a 4m comp. Seriously I do not know how people spend so much time doing competitions. I was only in a three hour one but I probably spent more than that trying to fill in the logs, compile the data and send it off for assessment. I've not had to do any of that before and it really put me off doing it again. When I'm doing paperwork more than I'm doing radio, it takes the fun out of the hobby. I guess it helps if you've got a PC and decent logging software, but it was a pain in the ass on a Mac. I’d be interested how any Mac users out there manage. I suspect it’s all about spending a load of cash on decent logging software.

---

ELSEWHERE

• Pirates on the Waverly paddle steamer

• If you need some more Ham Radio in your inbox check out Zero Retries. Steve knows more than I ever will.

• I once met a guy in an old people’s home that when told he could not have an antenna, he paid a window cleaner to attach a wire inside the gutter all around the roof. Great to see these kinds of stealth options are still alive and well.

• This is my other more regular, slightly more eclectic email.

• From the remastered Secret Life Of Machines series. The Secret Life of Radio.

---

FINALS

Thanks for reading and I hope subscribing.

Please share this wherever you think it might resonate. Any supporting subscriber to one of my emails get’s free access to all the content across both my publications. You are some of the more curious people in radio ;-) And I thank you.

Over

73 de Christian G5DOC

_._

[All spelling mistakes are intentional]