Ham Radio Operator - M0YKS

Greetings friends and followers around the World! 73 Seasons blessings and good will and health to each and all! Merry Christmas! I received a nice diploma on Christmas day for receiving SSTV images which commemorate 20 years of onboard amateur radio activity. It was easy enough to obtain via  ARISS SSTV Award  link.  Here is an earlier one from the Sputnik series. Its great fun receiving images from ISS and can easily be decoded using MMSTV free software on your pc. There are a few apps for phones and tablets that work well also. Check out my latest video as I decode ISS SSTV images if you want to see how easy it is.  Also if you like that you might want to decode weather satellite images which is a very similar method apart from you need a slightly more complicated decoder which again is free and is called WXtoImg Above is a recent image from NOAA 18 below is a video showing how I successfully decoded the weather image. Keep yourself amused this Christmas as we all stay safe, have a

What a year we have been having with little sign of any significant change as of yet. Some of the  Positives of this year for myself  Have to of been Ham radio. I have  met many new amateurs and SWLs since lock down began on the air and online, I formed a Facebook group and doubled my YouTube subscription. Also I carried out maintenance on all of my antennas and made a new one along the way.  Ham radio has been a great choice of passtime this year and I would like to thank all of you guys and girls, new friends and old friends for all comments and encouraging feedback that helps keep me going. HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone ❤. This week was my last working week at college, I'm finally on holiday for two weeks and hope to get on the bands. Earlier and through the week I have been active and I was also able to make a few videos of some of my qso and radio fun. Catch up on my YouTube channel . This week I worked some mobile and base HF, Satellite and ISS. I even decoded a

I noticed a swr variation when I switched between my dipole and vertical hf antennas. The swr reading on my Hustler 6btv was 1:6 and I noticed that when I switched back to it sometimes it was up to 2:0. I played around with the switching mechanism and sure enough it was back to 1:6. The next step was a quick inspection of the internal contacts and switch housing. I noticed that the central spindle was worn and this was allowing the switching pole to lean slightly towards the dipole pick up point. The slight movement rectified the closeness but the switch was well worn through years of operation. So I treated my station to a new better quality replacement as seen below.  my old switch has served me well but the new high power Avair switch has better isolation and is much nicer to operate.  I hooked it up and to my pleasure saw the SWR fall to 1:4 which is even better. Let's hope this nice neat upgrade has a good long lifespan as it seems pretty cool on day one of operati

Hi All! Hope you are keeping safe... We are in the same position as most regarding lock down and other than going to work I have been stuck indoors a lot lately. So, off outside into the garden it was and antenna building time once again was here.  I decided to replace the prototype 40/80 fan dipole that has been in use since the end of spring. It has been working really well even though I made it from some random used wire, I bought three reels of SotaBeam military spec heavy duty wire which come in 50 meter reels. The wire is stainless coated multi strand 50 ohm and is in a low impact green colour. It is very good for antenna elements or radials and solders up nicely.  I also decided I wanted to try out this new build double dipole with a suitable 1:1 balun that would help prevent unwanted coaxial line transmission and also help reduce unwanted reception noise on the feed line from random electrical sources nearby. The balun also helps to isolate the returning RF at the feed point a

  As we move into the last couple of months of 2020 which has been defiantly a year to remember for obvious reasons, we can look forward to getting back down to the lower HF bands such as 80m. I really enjoyed the winter DX last year and made plenty of good qso across to USA, Canada, Caribbean and South America whilst operating on the 80m band. This year I have the 40m/80m home brew Fan Dipole which has already proven to be an awesome asset to my HF station. For those of you that have been coming back to my call on the regular YouTube live streams you have already sampled its performance h.i. Thanks for the super qso's guys, I look forward to catching you all again over the weekend this coming Saturday evening about 10.30pm local (21.30 utc). So, the homebrew Fan Dipole worked out well for me. I must admit I am quite impressed with it, I have some brand new SOTA beam wire reels in my possession which at some point will be used to build a brand new replacement which will be cut to t

 Hi everyone I hope all is well? It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted so thought I'd drop by and update you of some of the activities I have been getting on with. First I will start with the card I received this morning confirming a great qso with ON3ONX who was worked via SSB Satellite XW-2A.  Over the past fortnight I spent a number of evenings trying my hardest to get into the new ISS repeater, I have probably tried around about 50 passes which I would say out that I made a qso 5 times giving me a 10% success rate. At first I thought I had an issue at my end but soon realised that the majority of stations in the UK and N.W Europe that were getting in each time (the same stations) are in fact running higher power than myself. This of course is quite unnecessary as well as out of order lol. I guess some people are so desperate to make it their own personal repeater hi hi that 300w is acceptable. I cranked it up to 50w and still struggled and at one point went the wh

 Its been just over a month since I purchased the COM 232B antenna rotator interface.  The neat little box sits nicely on my G-5500 control unit and is hooked up to my Windows 10 PC running Orbitron and WiSP DDE tracking software. The auto tracking of the antenna has made making a contact into the satellites much easier allowing me to focus on the reception and uplink signal out from my FT-847. I am looking at the next step which is configuration of the cat control for auto frequency doppler correction but at first glance its a bit of a faff and is not something I have the time to commit to setting it up properly at the moment. However, I spent a couple of hours last night trying to get it functioning on Orbitron but had no success so far. I more than likely will have to try something else if I want the auto frequency control, possibly GPredict.  I made a new video of my satellite operation which features CW, SSB and FM communication. Best 73 from the family and myself and we will catc