Category Archives: QTH

APRS, 868 MHz, inband, SK3W and more

Sorry for the poor update rate, It’s been a lot of people around a lot this summer and I don’t really get the time to sit down and do these things. I spent a few days to build a wooden deck which we also bought new furniture for, it turned out really great!

After I had been down to SK3W a couple of guys from SK3W (SM3XIK & SM3SGP) came up to help me out a bit. We had plans to put an APRS I-gate up in the 60m tower and also the 868 MHz repater (XBEE) that will be used to control the inband tower site and also such things as RX 4-SQ etc that is located far away. It went well and one funny thing was that we lost power from a lightning storm and was just about to put a raspberry pie in the oven. After a while when the power hadn’t come back SM3SGP reminded me that I have an single phase oven in the barn that had never been used and was donated by SM3WMU a few years ago, when I had plans to rebuild the kitchen. So we went out and cut an extension cord which we hooked up to the oven and voila a while after we had our pie 🙂 The power came back again after a few hours.

The project went well but I do suspect that the 5 GHz Ubiquiti links causes some QRM on the APRS frequency because it feels like the I-gate does not hear as well as it should. The 868 MHz repeater works great with really good coverage several km away.

SM3SGP took down the small WARC beam which I lated put in vertical position and improved the tuning a bit so that SM2OKD who will use the beam in the future does not need to do that. I also had some resonance at some winds in the reflector that I hopefully fixed. I think SM3SGP thought it was very nice not needing to do any more climbing, getting to be the ground crew for once.

I also attached a modified 3×1 switch to the 15m tower to switch between the big 15m stack and the new WARC duoband yagi. Some work was also done on the cabinet which will be placed at the inband tower site.

WARC beam up and carpentry

The weekend was a great success! The weather was great plus I got very good help from SA2KNG “Knegge” who spent the weekend at the QTH helping me with various projects. SA2KNG is a very skilled ham who got his license just one year ago but is very interested in pretty much everything mechanical and electrical, so he is a great addition to the team. We managed to get the WARC beam finished, tuned and hoisted plus we also fixed the party tent.

I have purchased some nice Hitachi power tools as an early birthday present, so I felt like building something and it ended up being the door for the coax inlet positioned on the barn. I am extremely pleased with the tools and now it feels really fun to build, having the tools at an arm length not needing to get extension cords etc. Anna painted one side of the house and I also did some painting on the white details of the house.

On Sunday me, SM2XJP and XJP son went to remove some branches and trunks from some trees that SM2XJP had cut down. It was a good exercise considering the rather warm weather (we are not used to these temperatures yet).

One thing that happened when we had hoisted up WARC beamen and I had gotten it attached to the tower, was that I found 2 pieces M4 allen screws in the pocket that should have been on the driven element for 12m. After a few profanities I unscrewed the antenna and we took it down again. As I was feeling exhausted after a long day in the sun I felt we needed to call it a night and SA2KNG was nice enough to stay one day longer so we could finish the work which was highly appreciated.

Unfortunately, it was the aurora when I was going to test and compare with the old antenna but hopefully I will get more chances. What was planned to be a little 4+5el duoband yagi ended up being a long boom (15.2m) with 17m (5EL) on 13.5m boom and 12m (6EL) has 14.2m boom.

I’ve thought about running the CQ-M competition this coming weekend but we will see how the weather will be. Bad weather and I might consider doing it but if the weather is good I might work outside instead because I feel extremely motivated right now which is fun.

Electronics

Not that much radio related has been done so far this year. I have spent a few weekends at the QTH but not done much major stuff, just some organizing in the basement etc. Now however sun has appeared again and my motivation is getting better and better. Plans for this spring is to finish up the house and the inband tower. I will also try to get the WARC beam up. There is a lot of minor stuff I also need to spend this summer doing, such as small houses for all rotors to the towers etc. There is also plenty of work to be done getting inband to work with remote access link for antenna switching etc which will be run over XBee. I have been looking at making some HPF for them to make sure I don’t get any interference from the HF bands, I dont know how much I should trust the RF-frontend on those modules.

This weekend me and Hicco will go down and hopefully weather is good enough so I can do some outdoor work.

Stay tuned…

A shitty welcome

When me and Teemu (SM0W) arrived at SJ2W today after a nice weekend in Umeå at an SSA ham meeting and I got down into the basement I was met with 10cm of water on the floor with poop floating around. Luckily it was about 2cm from the granger amplifier so we arrived just in time. After a few hours of work from a clean up crew they did emtpy the crap-well. So now we will see how much I get from the insurance company but luckily no radio gear was damaged. However one room in the basement has got a wooden floor which is now ruined. This kind of sucks the motivation out of me and we will see how much money I will have left after this for antenna projects, might need to put all the plans on hold (aaargh!).

Anyway, I showed a video tour of SJ2W during this ham meeting and I have published it on youtube. Currently it is in Swedish but I have plans to make a dubbed version in English.