Ham Tour

The past three weeks went very quickly, I spent my time holidaying away from work. I managed many things which included some serious mileage up and down the Country whilst on our tour.

I started off the holiday by getting stuck in to the project that has kept me busy for over 12 months, which was of course to decide which of the many homebrew /adapted antenna (IOIo or Yagi) would work best for me on the satellites.

I now have gained enough info during the various designs of the IOIo and now with a lot of testing and building I finally knew which one I was going to use based on my shack set up and Yorkshire wallet (often impossible to get a Yorkshire Man to spend his cash). The previous antenna I tried which was what I called the IOIIIIIII Yagi, gave some excellent results with big signals being put into the “birds” I received some nice signal reports. However without elevation control the now narrow beamwidth as G4ILO, kindly advised me and commented “the sharper beamwidth of the long yagi means it's much more critical to point it exactly at the satellite? The broader IOio design lets you aim in the general direction and still get some RF where you want”
It did make accuracy into the birds much more critical and unfortunately until I part with some cash for a decent Elevation rotator I have found that the single loops radiated signal is much more usable for my set up at 1000ft asl. Thanks Julian ;-)

This was to be the antenna that is more usable on both the FM Satellites and the SSB Satellites, when set at a fixed elevation. In my case I have chosen a 30 degree inclination which has shown to provide good signals from 10 degrees up to a 50 degrees Pass on VO-52 (SSB Sat).
Passes at 20 – 40 degrees can be worked quite well for the FM Sats such as AO-51, SO-50 and AO-27. I have noticed a distinct benefit using the 435 part of the antenna Vertically Polarised.
I have had much better incoming signals from the “FM Birds” since I adopted this layout.

The signals are still fairly weak but readable, I don’t suppose I can complain considering the Sats are only putting out 620 MW. I certainly would love to get my hands on a decent 70cms preamp, it would aid the excellent Yaesu FT-847 and an elevation control would be very, very nice indeed. In the meantime here is the final Cross boom assembly IOIo.
The next stage of the holiday was spent burning lots of diesel as we set off down to Cornwall In the south of England.
On the way down I made some QSO on 20m during the journey operating the Yaesu FT-857 and Maldol mono band mobile antennas. Playing /mobile Ham radio is in my opinion the best way to keep alert on the road during long hauls and I enjoy the challenge making low power world wide contacts from the mobile very much. Once we arrived at our on route Campsite which was in Devon, we got some sleep and in the morning I changed the antenna to the 40M Maldol mono bander. I made a lot of QSO that day on 40M as we continued to Cornwall and once we arrived the band became open back to Yorkshire and at 400 miles distance, I had long time buddy Keith -M0TKD in the mobile Log close by to Lands End 5/9 +. I worked a number of stations that day and they can be seen in the earlier posted log.

The next Day we met fellow You tuber and Radio Ham Lawrie M3UHQ from Penzance. I made Lawrie a Cup of Coffee on the good old Coleman petrol stove and it was great to finally meet him.

Later that day we went to the Marconi Centre located on the Lizard PointI set up with the Yaesu FT-470 but the 2m/70cms band was very quiet.
Back in the mobile parked up on the Marconi Site I caused a nice little pile up on 40m and made it across the pond in true Marconi style on 20m. The recently posted video shows some of the activity from the Marconi centre in case you managed to miss it hi.

The next place of interest that we got the opportunity to checkout was Goonhilly, which as you can imagine was very exciting to a Satellite addicted Operator, like myself. The YL Louise – M3TLL also enjoyed both radio related visits very much as well.
The little FT-857 saw some action during our holiday and performed well. As far as the Vehicle,it is very expensive to run. We will be saying good bye to it and collecting our newly purchased second hand Toyota Rav 4 (much more fun and more economical). More about reverting back to the Rav 4 and the new installation in the very near future. Thanks for passing by 73.