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You may well ask!
So, everything became unexpectedly Tom & Dick after the last club night's rushed attempt to choke-off some perceived RF in the club shack. The diagnosis was subjective, but not unreasonable and likely correct to some degree, but after a handful of us attended the 'bunker' this morning, we discovered that there was more to it than a waft of Radio Frequency where it wasn't welcome.
Frankly, it's been a right dog's dinner in there since the major antenna work took place in the autumn, with no-one able to commit the time to straighten it out in a calm and logical manner like you would do in your own shack, but this morning we were determined to put that right.
Disappointingly, no-one thought to bring any breakfast, but I guess that just made us more motivated to get it finished, and after three hours, we were out of there.
Other than some serious tidying up and cable re-routing, I managed to re-house the KiwiSDR in its own plastic box (thanks to my local Chinese take-away) whilst Merv was rather insistent on wrapping it in aluminium foil - which would have looked much better in gold 😝 - but should help with shielding. I also re-soldered a nice BNC plug on the coax coming from the antenna in place of the ropey PL259 which was decidedly suspect and candidate #1 for the intermittent issues we've been having, to my mind. We also found a new home for everything up on the shelf, along with the WiFi access point/switch. I also stuck the RF protection unit and Wellbrook pre-amp together with some double-sided tape to help tame the writhing snake pit of mini-8 coax. I just need to make up a nice short link-cable to refine the job at my leisure.
Meanwhile, over in the Flex corner, Phil was doing battle with the rather odd problems on transmit. This seems to have got worse over the last few weeks, and wasn't resolved by the rooftop remedial work that was attempted a little while ago. A lot of diagnostic work and plenty of on-air testing determined that the radio was fine, and after cutting and re-soldering the coax plug a number of times, due in part to the discovery of some strange looking teeth-like marks in the coax (very odd, but now removed) it was decided to perform a continuity test on the antenna/coax.
This showed up an unexpected 62Ω resistance (should be very close to zero), indicating that there is something amiss with the antenna itself.
Unfortunately, this will entail another rooftop excursion to determine exactly what's going on. Phil will make sure he's in attendance when this happens, as he built it in the first instance and is best placed to see what's failed. Whilst this might be regarded as bad news, it's actually good to know that we found something wrong and can therefore fix it. Assuming we can also prevent a reoccurrence, it's got to be a positive result.
Between now and then, the Flex is only really useable on Rx, whilst the Kiwi is back in action and available via the Homepage banner once again.
Your friendly local news reporter, on the scene in Burgess Hill.
Berni M0XYF
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We're really pulling in a promising number of new members this year, as the profile of the MSARS website is definitely starting to pay dividends.
Robert is the latest to join. He is looking to take his Foundation licence soon, and is currently listening on his trusty Baofeng.
Welcome Robert, and maybe we can catch up on Zoom one Wednesday evening? No licence required!
I can most whole-heartedly recommend the Essex Ham Foundation preparation course. Take a look here:
https://www.essexham.co.uk/train/foundation-online
as well as obtaining and studying the beginners 'Bible':
https://www.rsgbshop.org/acatalog/The-Foundation-Licence-Manual-1711.html
Berni M0XYF
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The WebSDR is currently (effectively) non-functional. It seems to fluctuate in its Rx levels anywhere from zilch to normal, and will require a proper visit to the club shack to resolve this issue. Regular club nights are not really feasible for this purpose.
In the meantime, I may be able to rig something of an alternative using OpenWebRx on a Pi from my own QTH, but it just depends on how much free time I have available.
If you want to know if I've managed to achieve this, just click on the banner on the MSARS Home page, and I'll temporarily modify the URL on there. We are aware that there is a problem, and you don't need to report it to us. The Flex is equally unpredictable right now, as evidenced by Mervyn on the last Sunday Morning net. Reason unknown at this time, but most likely related to the Kiwi problem.
Wednesday's lunchtime net was bonkers. Ken's linear went west, we had big signals from a couple of guests - SP8 and IZ4, and as the title has already given away, the strongest signal on the net by far was Barry in Sweden. Even with the broken WebSDR, he could hear himself on there! I was listening in too, and his was the only station I could receive.
Bob N4XAT was remote on my Yaesu, and we all enjoyed his company. I jumped on my own radio at the end, and landed at S9+20 with Barry, as did several other 'local' Sussex stations, so all in all it was one of those magical radio days when the stars were aligned. Excellent fun.
Oh, and while I'm at it, welcome to Henry M0VHR! Great to have you join MSARS. We are picking up a steady stream of new members now, which is absolutely fantastic. Please feel free to drop us a note via our contacts page, via our Groups.IO channel, or join any of our nets or Zoom meetings. You may also request access to the super-secret members section of the website here:
https://midsussexars.org.uk/members-only
That's where we keep all the good stuff 😃
73
Berni M0XYF
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Steve Shorey G3ZPS was kind enough to present a very slick and professional overview of the communications systems and protocols employed by the emergency services here in the UK to members of the society back in December.
I've only just received a copy of the video, and I note that Steve has requested that we do not upload it to our YouTube channel, so I will of course respect his wishes.
Steve has put together a version of his talk specifically for members of the Mid Sussex ARS, and I have therefore uploaded a copy to our website and posted a link to it in our members section. If you do choose to download it, please only circulate it to other club members.
The talk is very entertaining, and covers the earliest days right through to the current time, where funding, technical restraints and politics have all had an impact on delivery of the latest generation of emergency services communications systems.
Please log in to the members section to access the download. It's a shade under 200MB in size, and well worth a view it you missed it or want to re-watch it.
Thanks again to Steve. We are very fortunate to have such talented presenters take time out to educate and entertain us.
Berni M0XYF
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A Quick Round-Up of This Evening at the Hall
Loads of quick bits and bobs to pass on, none of them too waffley, I promise.
A huge turnout of people, which was brilliant to see. Several new faces (to me at least) and a real buzz about the place. Even better, most people were clutching laptops, phones, iPads and tablets. I guess most of that hardware was Windows-based, and everyone seemed to be successfully running the Flex software and accessing either the MSARS or Worthing club radios - maybe others too.
Really happy to see that. So many people running SmartSDR in one place! Couldn't believe it really. That absolutely justifies the acquisition of the Flex radio to me. Even if the number of actual users doesn't immediately shoot up, there is clearly a significant level of interest and I'm sure that eventually, there will be far greater patronage as people get properly comfortable with it.
I wasn't planning to do a 'talk', but you know what happens when I get yapping. I hope everyone got a little something out of it.
Towards the end of the evening, I sneaked into the shack, and together with Phil and Merv, managed to clip-on around a dozen cheap Chinese ferrites I picked up off eBay this week. Alan also dug out and re-connected the shack mains filter (I didn't know there was one in there!) which will do no harm at all. It still needs a darn good tidy up back there, but I think that all the common sense shack housekeeping measures are now in place.
Testing Update
As soon as I arrived home, I grabbed some dinner and was straight on the Flex to see what effect all that ferrite material had made.
As it's the issue that's been keeping me off the club radio since before Christmas, I fired up some FT8, and over a period of about half an hour, gradually dialled the power output up to around 65W - and no blown fuses! Have we finally fixed it? Maybe we have :) If you're going to use full-duty cycle digital modes, please be kind to the radio and keep it under 70w.
Then I tried some tests on the KiwiSDR. It had automatically performed a firmware upgrade when we power-cycled it, but it came through that OK, and I can confirm for sure that it's now far less troubled by RF from the Flex than at any time since it was installed. Less in fact than when it was installed here at my home QTH. Way less overloading and it displays a much more civilised output from the Flex on the waterfall, except when you're really booting it.
So then I tried the Flex for it's audio output level and quality. Wow, what a difference. It's now possible to turn the mic gain up quite a bit more, and even turn on the Processor (at any of the three levels) and still project an acceptable audio profile. Of course, you can still overdo it, but when used in moderation you can have it sounding pretty good with compression turned on. The other upside to that of course, is that you can obviously stuff much more power into the envelope. Very happy with that result, but will reserve final judgement until we've hijacked a few of Ken's nets with it and obtained a lot more reports. Who would have thought that a bit of stray RF could have so many negative effects? OK, most of you experienced guys, and to be fair, I think it was more than a little bit of RF.
By the way, for those who expressed an interest in running digital modes remotely on the Flex, this is the YouTube video I mentioned.
It explains the basic configuration far better than I can. You'll have to set up your own COM port and data port definitions, as they'll differ from machine to machine. Shout me if you get stuck.
That's it for now, catch you all again soon... and great to see Russell tonight too. Hope you're finally feeling better. We were getting worried about you.
Berni M0XYF
