I’ve had a plan to build a 1/4 Wave Ground Plane antenna based on this calculator and the data available on that site for some time. I’m doing the 2m band first (144MHz) - I’ve got piece of 4mm brass diameter pipe for my driven element, and 6mm aluminium pipe for my radials. The radials are to be angled at 45° from each other, at 45° below normal. Click the link for what that looks like! …

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. …

This is a continuation of this post about my previous failures at DATV. Debug, Defrag, Defuzz and Start Again Okay, so Bournemouth didn’t go so well. Let’s try again - this time reading manuals and stopping to think. The goal for this project is simple - transmit and receive a DVB-S signal. Hardware What tools do I have available? CCC Camp Badge (HackRF) RTL-SDR Numerous Raspberry Pis Laptop (Linux) Probably a whole other pile of things Software There’s a few things I know about that could use: …

Digital Amateur Television After the RSGB Convention’s DATV talk, I’ve been super curious about playing more with DATV (Digital Amateur TV). It’s pretty cool - transmit broadcast standard video using low powers and homebrewe equipment. I remember many moons ago Iain, tj and I came up with an MPEG4 proof of concept and streamed Citizenfour between a hackrf and rtl-sdr. Naturally, to do it properly, I’m going to have to advance my license (work in progress, honest). Before we hit that stage, though, I can work on receiving and fiddling about on an SDR at home. …

See Day 1 notes for the first half of this piece! Convention’s over! I left Milton Keynes at roughly 1630 after a full day of lectures and after a stopoff in Glasgow made it home at 3am. Total round trip of 1003 miles! That’s a long way to go for some radio chat. Day 2 was again insteresting, enthusing and inspiring - here’s a compressed colletion of the notes I took. …