Author - M0YOM

Made some progress at the weekend on the mounting brackets for the new VHF/UHF/Microwave stack, these are modified 24″ K brackets. Some of the brackets have been cut away to allow them to be mounted side on to the supporting brick post on the roof. Also got the drilling finished for the new connectors on the SixPak we will be using for antenna switching.

New Rotator (Create RC5-1) and rotator control cable arrived last week.

High Power Stub Filters Completed

3rd March 2010

Over the last couple of days i’ve managed to finish off the High Power Stub filter system. Last time we used this it was a bit of a lash up, so i’ve now completed the Band Pass Filter to HPF Junction Box system.

New connectors fitted to the SixPak’s, not sure why they don’t fit connectors normally, i suppose it keeps costs down.

Connectors fitted to the junction box.

Wiring of the junction box in progress

The completed junction box wiring

SixPak wiring completed

Testing of the system, you can see one of the BPF filter boxes below the junction box, this drives the SixPak relays.

All in all this should make for a much neater and easier installation of the stub filters.

New Shack Build Update

23rd February 2010

It’s been a while since i posted an update however things have been progressing nicely. The First fix is now complete on the new shack, it should all be completed in time for CQ WPX SSB. The new shack is just over 6m x 3m in size, should be a pretty good size for our operations.

View looking towards the rear of the new shack

Looking towards the door to the new shack

Entry for the new earth system, the new shack has it’s own TT earth system seperate from the rest of the building which is on a PME system.

Cabling ready for the new consumer unit dedicated for the new shack.

Plenty of power available for all the equipment.

Data Cabling ready for the wall mounted comms cabinet, the new shack will have a Gb network.

The other end of the data cabling, just waiting for the plastering so we can terminate these in wall boxes.

The new 3-Phase supply for the building, the new shack has one of these phases dedicated to it.

Thats all for now, i’ll post more updates as work progresses, see you in WPX.

James M0YOM

Full Licence

8th November 2009

Amateur Radio

Some of you may have noticed that the site has now been re-branded to M0YOM. Despite having overdone it slightly the night before at the RSGB convention, it turns out that my full licence exam went succesfuly so i am now M0YOM 🙂

New Stub Filter Switches Arrived

19th October 2009

The new switches we ordered for use with our high power coax stub harmonic filter system arrived today, they are ArraySolutions SixPak http://www.arraysolutions.com/Products/sixpak.htm switches and should do the job perfectly. The UK supplier for these is http://www.vinecom.co.uk/.

Work has now started on interfacing these to the BPF system so all the filtering is automatically switched.

CQWW Prep Work

18th October 2009

We continued the prep work for CQWW SSB this weekend and got the 40m VPA (Vertical Parasitic Array), our Caribbean Array, built and tested. It appears to be performing as expected and should improve our rates on 40m significantly. Photo’s coming soon.

Shack Decoration

29th September 2009

With CQWW looming and it becoming certain that we would not be in our new shack in time, we decided that our current temporary shack could do with a clean up and a fresh coat of paint. So over the last weekend we stripped out everything from the shack, painted and cleaned the room then put it all back together again.

Much cleaner now the walls are painted

It’s amazing how much kit we had in there.

We also took the opportunity to get on the roof and do some work on the matching system for our top band dipole.

CQWW International Invitation

21st September 2009

Friends,

The UK Scout Contest Team is putting on a high power Multi-Two station for CQWW from Dorridge (24th / 25th October 2009).

Would you like to operate a mega-station? The station details are genuinely very impressive and would blow away anyone’s capability they might have at home; from full sized 160m dipoles at 70 feet to 3-element arrays on 40m to the USA. Both multi-band stations have an ACOM 2000 fed by either an FT2000 or a K3. We have station filtering to allow simultaneous high powered operation by two stations just feet from each other on adjacent bands and each band will have at least two antennas available. It’s pile-up heaven.

Stub tuning completed

21st September 2009