I dusted off my old Philips portable chassis, bought a new LiPo battery, and paired it with an Anytone AT-6666 I had that was not being used. I needed to 3d print some side brackets to attache the radio to the chassis but they were easy enough to print up. I'm considering whether to add in my LDG Z11 tuner which will mean another set of 3D brackets. Not sure yet.
I recently finished some antenna repair work. One HF vertical was repaired and retuned to 10m and a 2m/70cm dual band yagi was also repaired and put into service. Temps were 33 degrees although it was nicer to make the repairs in that heat rather then the next day's forecast 36 degrees.
My new QSL cards from Gennady - UX5UO have arrived. First cab off the rank was a return QSL to Peter DE9JLX.
Well they've landed, have setup camp, and are transmitting.....but sadly I can't hear a thing :-(
I'll need to try harder. Their website is www.3y0j.no and you can find the dxpedition being spotted on dxsummit.fi
I picked up a new to me YouKits TJ2B last weekend. I liked these some years ago but it seems YouKits are no more and have been overtaken by other SDR radios from the likes of Xiegu and others. Renowned for poor speaker volume this one was beyond a joke as you needed headphones to hear anything coming out of it. In hindsight it was a gamble as I could not tell if the speaker was the issue or if the receive section was deaf.
After taking it apart and doing some research I found a section in the TJ2B build instructions on this being an issue caused by cold solder joints on the mini transformers T1, T2, and T3. Problem was that the build instructions were for an older model and the PCB was different. I reflowed them anyway and problem solved with an actual sound coming out of the speaker for a change. I then proceeded to stuff up the assembly 4 times and could not understand why I did not have access to all of the tuning options. Well after taking it apart again I finally noticed I had put a screw through the ribbon cable from the main tune control. With that repaired, normal service was restored and receive was fine. It currently puts out a 3W carrier and I have no confirmed contacts with it yet even with local hams assisting in testing. We can hear each other but signal is so low as to be unintelligible and barely even able to tell when the over has ended. More testing to come.
After spending a week playing around with making a loaded vertical for 20m I finally admitted defeat when the best I could do was move resonance from 25Mhz down to 18Mhz but no further. At that stage I remembered the EFHW from BH7JYR I had purchased and forgotten about. I was happy to see it was a quad band with 7, 14, 21, and 28Mhz. Bit of messing around (and a lick of sunburn) and we're on the air on 20m and making the trip to France (F5MSE - Thierry) and New Zealand (ZL2ML - Caleb) and receiving 57/56 signal reports using 50watts. Happy Days.
