Well, I had not heard till I read the program schedule of LARC-7 today. Most of you would be familiar with uBITX which has gone up to version 6. Some of you would be aware of sBITX, which is quite an advance over uBITX. Almost daily I am meeting a new uBITX user on the band, most of them using additional linear amplifiers. That made me join the BITX group on groups.io , where I am getting messages from uBITX and sBITX users from all sides of the globe. Still I was not aware of zBITX and that made me look around and came across two references. One was the video of a talk by VU2ESE at QRP ARCI . Another was an email in the BITX groups.io which was citing the former. zBITX is a new transceiver from VU2ESE based on Raspberry Pi Zero for 20W, having CW skimmer and FT8 modes in addition to the regular SSB mode and waterfall display which the sBITX also has. zBITX is quite small, just 3" x 3" x 1.5" in size. It is a Raspberry Pi Zero based 20 W software defined radio which h...
This week, every amateur radio satellite enthusiast is busy decoding and posting SSTV (Slow Scan TV) images from International Space Station. Now what is SSDV? SSDV is the abbreviation for Slow Scan Digital TV, in contrast to SSTV which is analog and has been there for a long time. It has been mentioned that SSDV is a packetised digital form of SSTV. I heard of SSDV first when I read about the recently launched ASRTU-1 amateur radio satellite, which has a UHF SSDV in addition to the V/U transponder and 10GHz high resolution image downlink onboard. UBSEDS24 Balloon with SSDV launched from Bristol, UK sometime back had recorded nice SSDV images of the clouds from above. Lunar-OSCAR-94 which went into lunar orbit had transmitted SSDV images back to radio amateurs on Earth. WSJT JT4G was used for messages and transmissions were on 435.400 and 436.400 MHz. Transmitting power was about 2W, using VHF/UHF SDR transceivers. It was the world's smallest spacecraft to enter lunar orbit indep...
Started by calling CQ on 7065 kHz using my automated CQ call which I had described yesterday. VU3RFT joined first followed by VU2EHA. Had a good discussion on Center Fed and End Fed Dipole Antennas. VU2EHA and VU3RFT participated. All of us were using inverted V dipole antennas. VU2EHA had 40 and 20m dipoles on same mast. VU3RFT was using 1:1 current balun. I mentioned that I am using 40/10m center fed dipoles with 1:1 current balun. VU2EHA asked about 15m dipole. I suggested that the 40m dipole will work well on 15m as it is an odd harmonic. He mentioned a problem because his IC-718 does not have an autotuner. We lost propagation at around 7.35 am IST. Wonder whether there was a geomagnetic storm? Number of waterfalls on 40m band decreased very much at that time. Planning to try again tomorrow at the same time. SWLs can monitor at http://vu3wew.ddns.net:8073/ , the OpenWebRX by VU3WEW, located about 10km from here and likely to pick up my signals very well. Being a WebSDR, it can...
Comments
Post a Comment