Ham Radio Operator - M0YKS

The Latest 2E0HTS Mobile Station  This years summer holiday started by changing our vehicle from the Toyota Rav 4 for the shiny blue Toyota Avensis as seen below. This presented a new install for me to figure out, I soon came up with a plan and carried out my new installation. In this picture you can see my Maldol HFC-20 HF antenna mounted at the rear. I ran a short ground wire from the antenna base directly to the chassis and managed to get 1:1 - 1:3 right across 20 meters.  As for the rig I decided to give my FT-100 are well deserved rest and try out my FT-857. The first thing I did was in my workshop where I folded up some sheet aluminium to cradle the FT-857 face panel. I wanted to be able to clip it to the ashtray avoiding any permanent fixings. Once I fettled the bracket to fit and work as I required I ordered a separation cable from ebay which arrived a couple of days later. I wired up the FT-857, fitted the separation cable, clipped the ashtray bracket in and b

I like playing around with the many different apps freely available to Google chrome users and earlier this evening I tried a program/app called Photo Collage. I found it at the chrome web store and simply added it to my chrome web browser. After about ten minutes I created the picture seen above from some images that  I had previously saved to my pc drive. It was really quick and easy and I think the result is quite good, hope you like it! 73 have a great weekend.

Once again another college year comes to an end after a lot of hard work. I have enjoyed teaching all of the students and as you can see by the image below its now time to celebrate success and wind down for the summer holidays.  In case you are wondering? Yes, we were on board a space craft, however the unbelievable bit is that I am the one wearing the tie! To infinity and beyond! Thankfully, I shall be back down to Earth soon and able to crack on with blogging and get some more radio play time too. 73.

As I made my way to work this morning I came across a strong signal coming in on 20m via the long path from Tasmania. It was infact VK7AC - Norm with a 5/9 signal in the clear. I gave Norm a shout and was recieved back in Tasmania with signal report of 5/7. Not a bad way to start the working day!  VK7AC - Norm's Shack 

I have been enjoying my radio equipment a lot since I settled on my preferred layout of my amateur radio station. The shack is working well as are my antennas, all that's left to do is to get busy making plenty of qso's. I am going to start making more of an effort to call CQ rather than my usual style of replying to someone else's CQ call. I guess I am a lazy operator, hopefully next time I post it will be about the stations that came back to my call as I aired my hard to catch call sign. 73!

I am always happy to exchange qsl cards and have collected far too many to count over the years. Today's package arrived via the qsl bureau and contained some nice cards. My favourite this time around is a Japanese qsl card pictured above from JA3EGZ - Mega. Happy DX, 73!

Earlier this evening ARISS participated in another successful  International Space Station school contact with Sir George Simpson Jr. High, Canada. The qso took place at around 20,00 utc,  I received a good signal from the ISS crew which can be heard in the video below.

I have been enjoying my Easter break with the family and getting about as well as playing radio in between. Finally the sun has been visible throughout the weekend which was all that was required to enthuse us all to venture up to our moor top holiday home. When we got there the snow drifts were still hanging around despite the pleasant temperature of 8 C. Dudley our dog enjoyed sniffing out the many rabbits to be found as we walked around the moor top retreat.  Inside the shack (B) the amateur radio gear was thankfully still working very well. I dusted back the sheets and I enjoyed playing radio on my good old FT-767 HF transceiver & delta loop antenna. My little FT-2600M & the rest of the VHF kit that I have set-up was also still good including the home brew IO-10 Sat beam and rotator. I worked some nice stations on 17m, 15m and 12m throughout the afternoon and had a good time hanging out with my lovely family with some juice, hot drinks and chocolate biscuits.

The HF bands have been quite good here in Yorkshire of late.  I was surprised just how good 15 meters is right now during a nice long qso with a US West Coast ham station KU7O - Jerry, from Washington. Jerry was calling CQ on 21.290 MHz at around 21.30 utc with a cracking signal to my cobweb antenna &  FT-1000mp transceiver when I answered his call. Our signals were strong enough to maintain a reasonable exchange of information throughout the qso, it was definitely an armchair copy! Jerry was 5/8 - 5/9 and my report back was 5/4 which was pretty cool. I am impressed with the performance of 15m band tonight and shall be getting back to it after this post to catch the rest of the signals I am hearing during this nice opening. 73 Happy Holiday!

I finally got around to re running the carolina windom feed line to try and gain an improved/optimum arrangement. The previous arrangement was temporary as the feed line intercepted the balun at around 45°. The new feed line installation is now at 90° and allows the feed line to terminate at the choke with much more of a straight drop. As an idea to try cut down unwanted QRN, I  added a short ground wire to a copper stake which is attached to the base of the choke via the plug connection. This is a simple experiment that I have been pondering over for a while. So far I have noticed signals received seem much quieter with very low noise levels on 80M as well as improved noise levels on 40M. I shall be once again comparing and experimenting as I switch between my other antennas as I conduct some tests. It will be interesting to see if the different feed line route changes the direction of the radiated RF field from the antenna and hopefully help it work even better.

Shack - B locked down for the winter!

When I got in from work I grabbed some camera shots of my antennas handling our first significant snow fall since moving into this QTH just over two years ago. My Satellite Array for 145/435MHz  Here you can see the wire antenna which is a Carolina Windom 80M - 10M.  Its up at around 25ft  and is 131ft in Length.  The picture below shows my CobWebb and Hustler 6BTV looking upwards.  The view in horizontal gives you an idea of how well my garden is elevated The nearest chimney can be seen in the lower part of the image. Finally a picture of my Tri-band Snow-linear, I mean Co-linear vertical antenna. The next thing to do is to see how the SWR is before any transmitting takes place, snow can cause undesirable effects to SWR.  These two don't really care about the SWR they just like to play out in the snow! 73 de Simon 2E0HTS

Follow the link to see if you card has made it to my QSL Gallery 2E0HTS - Latest Received eQSL cards 73 and thanks!

The Eu AmSat Forum has recently migrated to a new web address. The forum is well worth a visit and will be particularly interesting if you are a satellite fan or operator!