This has been a few days of mildly successful radio fidgeting. Few issues diagnosed in the setup, few things fixed and a few things done. First up, the 6" cable I use to connect the FT-100 radio to my tuner has broken. This was replaced (thanks to Ed) and things tuned nicely. This must have been borked for some time - I’m now able to tune up my (roughly) 20m dipole on 30m and 40m no bother - both matching with swr of less than 1.1. No bother. …

WOW I HAVE SO MANY RADIO THINGS TO TALK ABOUT! There’s been lots rolling about inside my head recently, mostly related to radio. I’m doing lots of wee things in the exciting world of amateur radio to fill my time as summer hits. I’m focussing mostly on packet radio and digital modes, and have done various vaguely interesting things over the last month or two. TCP/IP over AX.25 This is a thing that happened with Iain / 2M0STB in mid march. Using our testbed setup of a Yaesu FT-7900 and FT-817, we invoked the magic of soundcard modems (Direwolf and Soundmodem) to make the magic of modern networking happen over a 1200 baud AFSK link. …

This pass started off quiet but got busier towards the end, as the ISS passed over the more Eastern European countries. The APRS software, AGWTracker, had some difficulty as not all station include their Latitude and Longitude data in the packets I was hearing. Also, updating the Keps was a good plan - everything was much clearer, even after our tracking software (currently Nova for Windows) said the ISS was out of range! …

Another busy pass, this time with 12 stations heard and placed on the map! So, we heard and placed Scotland (MM0XXP), England (G4ILO 2E0JXE G6HMS), Ireland (EI2GNB), The Netherlands (PD2RLD), Germany (DB3LA), France (G6EZP), Italy (IK1COA), Spain (EA1JM), Hungary (HA3HT) and Yugoslavia (YU7RD). Yugoslavia’s a new one - pretty far away as it goes (2011.06KM to be exact)… The ISS definately does it’s job for long distance communication on low power! …

This pass was relatively noisy, with 10 stations being heard… Through the space station, I heard England (G0GOO G6UIM), the Netherlands (PD2RLD), Germany (GF8LS DG4BR DM2KGB), Spain (EA1JM), Italy (IK1COA) and France (F6CDZ F4FEB), Plotted below for your viewing pleasure. Not a bad list, overall, but I reckon we can do better. Below is a map of all the stations in Europe that were heard by the Space Station, and we are one of them (as MM3ZRZ), but there are a lot that seem to be missing from my list above. …