Geronimo/370

Antenna preparation – the antennas

Posted on2021-05-142021-05-16

After preparing the cables, next up are the antennas themselves. I have two at the moment: a Diamond Discone (25MHz – 1300 MHz) and a HyEndFed 3 band antenna (10, 20 and 40 meter). The coax plugs have to be weather proofed with vulcanizing tape. Diamond DisconeHyEndFed MK IIIPlug and… Read the rest

Antenna preparation – cables and plugs

Posted on2021-05-132021-05-16

A lot of work goes into getting antennas up and running. First, we have to solder plugs onto the end of our coax cables.… Read the rest

Listening is fun too…

Posted on2021-05-092021-05-091 Comment

Since I do not yet have my license, I listen a lot. Today I made use of one particular feature of the IC-7300 receiver, namely the ability to decode telex (or RTTY) transmissions. I thought this was fun, because I worked with telexes in my time in the military. See… Read the rest

Antenna preparation

Posted on2021-05-082021-05-08

Today, my son in law brought me a piece of 7 meter (21 feet) scaffolding pipe. Together we mounted two brackets to the wall of the house. The brackets need to extend 0,5 meter to allow the mast to go past the gutter. Scaffolding pipe on the deck on top… Read the rest

Radio manuals

Posted on2021-05-082021-05-08

Together with the ICOM radios we get the ‘basic manual’, which is okay to start with. But soon one wants to dive in a bit deeper and investigate the more advanced functions. For that purpose one can download a PDF file from the ICOM website, for both the IC-7300 and… Read the rest

HAM shack

Posted on2021-05-052021-05-05

Made a little riser so the Power Supply Units could have a spot below the radio’s. Nice huh?… Read the rest

Antenna Matching Unit

Posted on2021-05-012021-05-03

1. Today I came across a second hand manual antenna matching unit (an MFJ-971). It can alter the inductive and capacitive impedance of antenna’s so they match impedance of the transmitter. For a description, see this page.… Read the rest

New radio’s

Posted on2021-04-242021-04-262 Comments

Yesterday at HAMshop in Maarsen I picked up my new radio’s and unboxed them. Today I’m looking at all the settings, browsing through all the menu’s. The combination of these two radio’s covers all of the legal amateur bands in the Netherlands. unboxing PSU’sMAAS-SPA-8230OperationalUnbox icom 7300switched onUnbox icom 9700Both radio’s… Read the rest

Silencing my signal generator (2)

Posted on2021-04-182021-04-18

A while ago I lowered the voltage of the fan in my to silence my signal generator. It was better, but over time I still found it rather noisy. So today I came up with a simple solution to silence it some more. Floorboard insulation I took a small piece… Read the rest

First satellite image!

Posted on2021-03-262021-03-26

Today I captured my first satellite image with my SDR. It is a picture that was scanned by the NOAA 19 satellite (ch 1-4, northbound 10E) at 2021-3 -26 14:39 UTC. The pass took about 20 minutes. Granted, the quality is not yet very good, but when you look carefully,… Read the rest

Radio & satellite tracking

Posted on2021-03-212021-03-22

With my new SDR (Software Defined Radio) I am able to listen to radio transmission ranging from 1KHz to 2GHz. This includes most amateur bands, long wave, short wave, HF, VHF and UHF. That’s a lot of options! The radio is a RSPdx from SDRplay: I started out simple by… Read the rest

Silencing my signal generator

Posted on2020-08-302021-04-18

Waveform generator My RIGOL DG1022Z waveform generator made a lot of noise when I first switched it on. There’s a little fan in there, operating on 12 Volts. Having opened up the device, I took out the fan and tried to operate it on 9 Volts. That still worked adequately,… Read the rest

My command center

Posted on2019-12-242019-12-242 Comments

In the image you can see my ‘command center’. I run 5 emulated mainframes, four of them on Raspberry Pi’s and one of the in the cloud. With all five system you see a 3270 terminal and the emulator console next to each other: Top left is my cloud system,… Read the rest

Bench hooks preview

Posted on2019-12-08

I’m creating some bench hooks for my workbench. More details to follow, but I thought I’d give you a sneak preview…… Read the rest

Made my home cloud server

Posted on2019-12-072019-12-07

Today I finished setting up my own home cloud server – on a Raspberry Pi 4. I did that using the software provided by Nextcloud. It’s relatively easy to set up once you have it installed. The installation includes setting up a firewall, a webserver (using LAMP), a self signed… Read the rest