ISS SSTV - 15th to 17th February 2019

Yesterday I stumbled, merely by chance, on what I thought might be a potential SSTV transmission from the International Space Station, which I did tweet about, confirmed by Trevor M5AKA, and I had a look on the Amsat UK website, my home shack radio for 2-meters is still the QYT KT-8900D and the antenna is currently just the 2/70 TX capable magnetic mount scanner antenna, with rubbish thin coax feeding it, on top of a radiator by the window and received the ISS no problem at all.

Today knowing about this, I was able to decode it, thanks to Carl 2E0EZT who mentioned the Robot36 SSTV app in one of his videos on YouTube (a channel I ended up finding out about thanks to Callum M0MCX of DX Commander fame so both are being credited for this), using nothing more than my phone's inbuilt microphone I was able to decode an image from the ISS when it passed over between 1350 and 1400UTC, my first successful attempt at SSTV rx from the ISS, and pleased is an understatement.

When I initially stumbled on the transmission yesterday purely by chance I had mounted the radio onto something to allow air to circulate around it, and also allow it to be raised a little higher, I have the ISS and a few local repeaters along with both 2-meters and 70cm simplex channels all programmed into the radio, and was turning the dial when I heard the transmission, bearing in mind I was unaware that the ISS was overhead at that time so it really was just luck, and on tweeting about it I got my confirmation.

Though I do plan to do some ATV (Fast Scan) I have for a while wanted to play with SSTV but lacked facilities, turns out to receive it all I need is a mobile phone, perhaps the same to TX it too? we'll see

And this is a screencap from Robot36 of what I received today

Not too bad for a first attempt and with equipment that is certainly not the best.

A good reason to get into the hobby, you aren't limited to receiving communications from stations here on good ol' planet Earth, the challenge with the ISS is, of course, knowing when the astronauts are on air and knowing when it will be passing over, and normally you only have a window of a few minutes. in my case it was 10 minutes and I made that count to receive the SSTV image here.

In some cases it is possible to talk to the astronauts but during this weekend the ISS 2-meter station was being used for SSTV so that would not have been possible.

73 de 2E0EIJ

Progress with the shack workbench

My old shack desk was repurposed into a dedicated workbench for construction, repair and disassembly of circuits when I began work on building my current desk, which has not progressed for a while due to financial constraints, however the workbench has had some things done to it though not too much.

Firstly I decided I really needed ESD protection there and have since laid out my ESD mat and connected it to ground, an ESD wrist band is also provided to make sure that I too am discharged before handling delicate components, it turns out the mat is almost the size of the desk, thus pushing my soldering iron close to the edge though not in a place where it will fall off.

Secondly I fitted a temporary lamp (which I will be replacing with a better one once I can get one), it is set up to illuminate the desk but how well it does this remains to be seen, it also may help when I record video for YouTube for my radio or electronics channel though the newer camcorder has a build-in light.

Thirdly my tools that I use are on what was supposed to be the keyboard tray, except the multimeter which is on the top of the desk on the mat so it's easily accessible, larger tools such as the drill and the heat gun are kept under the workbench, and the clamps I have are essentially clamped to the side of the work bench.

Additions I'd like are a "helping hands" PCB and component holder as it proves a bit hard to work on PCBs and some components without such a thing, a rework station (my heat gun would not prove suitable), and perhaps something to magnify small SMD type components as these can be very difficult to see and check for damage.

Given that I have a few projects planned for the coming months I wanted to get things sorted out ready for these, these projects being (hopefully) an igate when I am duly licenced and can apply for the NoV, a video on the 40m Pixie CW transceiver kit, videos for my electronics channel on YouTube that are not radio related of course, my PMCoffee project (which is homage to the Trojan Room Coffee Pot) that will use RF for remote switching by me (in the LPD433 band on 433.92MHz), and a few other things as well.

I will probably also be doing a video on the importance of ESD protection which will go on my electronics channel and website, as it does apply to Amateur radio as well these days as modern rigs come with more and more sensitive parts crammed inside them so when I do it I'll cross post a link over here too.

I have work in about 40ish minutes so will have end here for now.

73 de 2E0EIJ

Uncovering the "secrets" of the Team RoadCom-FS

I have removed the Team RoadCom-FS from the car to redo the power wiring for it before it goes back on the antenna for another test, and while I had it in the house I remembered that it had some jumpers inside, so I had a look to see what these would do.

The jumpers of interest were a set of 4, specifying where the radio would be used, in two settings it appeared the radio only did the 80 German channels (of which 40 match the EU channels), another setting put it into a mode with a few channels with frequencies ending in 0, which I could not figure out where they would be legal, another setting did a block of 40 that were again frequencies ending in 0 (perhaps the Polish market version), another setting that basically rendered the radio locked to the UK 40 and the EU40, and perhaps one or two others, no export mode that I could see and no wideband so not possible to convert to 10-meters as far as I can tell though without SSB, CW and repeater shift it isn't a lot of use on 10-meters anyway, I have since set it back to the configuration it was set in.

There are other jumpers within the unit, one of which is glued though that's not going to stop me switching it to the other position, there could be other secrets this radio holds, I've not seen any documentation suggesting what all the jumpers do however I have noted their factory settings.

All other adjustments within the radio remain untouched by me and therefore it remains within legal specification, at the moment due to feeling a little under the weather due to things beyond my control I will follow this up at a later date.

73 de 2E0EIJ

Rallies this year

I have plans to attend all the rallies I make attempts to regularly attend, and I now have some dates on which rallies I can most likely attend this year.

These are:

• Ripon: 14th April
• Blackpool: 28th April (though I may go over on the 27th or 26th) and make a weekend of it
• Bowburn: 26th May (It is taking place this year and it was a good day out last year)
• National Hamfest 2019: 27-28th September (I regularly attend and will be again camping this year)
• BARAC rally 2019 at Spennymoor: 24th November

The last two years I've missed the rally at Spennymoor, and last year due to work I missed the Blackpool rally, and I hope to attend both this year, and planning is already underway for Hamfest 2019.

If you see me at any of these rallies, feel free to say hi.

73 de 2E0EIJ

An APRS black hole to fill?

Perhaps, looking on ukrepeater.net shows that MB7USD is no longer licenced, so as soon as I have my full licence this may be an opportunity to fill in a gap in APRS coverage and packet access to and from the APRS-IS.

My plan is to run an igate or digipeater, whichever, to cover the area once covered by MB7USD, using a self-contained setup of a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (or whatever will be the highest performing Pi by that time), with solar power, a reasonably high capacity battery (probably a leisure battery), and my Leixen VV-898 for an output of about 10 watts, hopefully linked to my home WiFi and kept in my shed to start with until I can find a suitable place elsewhere.

The VV-898 being a 10 watt radio should more than suffice for this job, and being a cheap radio to get hold of should it fail I can swap it out for another one, and being low power draw it is suited to this ultra green setup.

I need to fit a shelf in the rear of my shed which means moving some of my antenna mounting hardware up to the shack, there are already mounting points to do this and a convenient air vent at the rear, though I suspect I ought to tread carefully as I did see a wasp nest near the vent and therefore there could be wasps but the nest may be derelict or all wasps in it dead due to this very cold snap we've had lately, the air vent is convenient as that will serve as a path for coaxial cable to feed through, RG8-mini preferred as that is small enough in diameter and low loss compared to RG58, the vent will also serve as access to solar panel power cables.

The need for GPS is not required for this setup as it is fixed, it's precise location will, for its and my security, be off slightly (appearing on the map on the roads near to my home QTH.

As a temporary antenna I could use an off-the-shelf mobile antenna on a magmount on top of a suitable piece of metal, I have an old magmount that I got with the Team RoadCom-FS that I don't plan to put on a vehicle, I just need to change the coax (with RG8-mini) as it needs a coax change anyway

I've not even started my training for my M0 call and I am already planning on what NoV to get when I am able to, and when this is done I hope to restore local APRS-IS access in the local area.

73 de 2E0EIJ

The dilemma of my soldering iron

Almost every Amateur will have a soldering iron in their shack, given that Amateur radio operators are more often than not building their own gear, some have a basic cheap soldering iron, some have a temperature controlled soldering station, I have the latter, and the one I have is a unit sold by Maplin under their Precision Gold label, trouble is now that Maplin have gone bust getting new tips and irons may prove a challenge.

The same unit is sold by Rapid Electronics under the Atten brand (which appears to be what it actually is), the iron is rated at 28V AC rather than the 24V AC some other generic Chinese soldering stations are rated at (though the measurement I got with my multimeter suggests the voltage out of the transformer is in fact around 30V (I put a voltmeter across the two yellow wires inside the base rather than across the connector), I also discovered construction of the unit is similar in fashion to units disassembed by Clive on his 'bigclivedotcom' YouTube channel, however the wires are connected onto the board using connectors rather than solder)).

The fact the transformer put out 30V did puzzle me at first, though I suspect this is because I am supplying the transformer with 240V on the primary, and it is labelled for 220V on the primary, though I have no means to test my incoming mains supply, the only sure fire thing I know about the iron is that earth is connected straight from the iron to the earth pin on the plug, thus backing up the ESD safe claim and meaning I can replace sensitive components without risk of ESD damage, modern radios do use a lot of solid state components so this is critical.

So Rapid sell a replacement iron for the pricely sum of £10.90 exclusive of VAT, add the VAT (at current rate this is 20%) it is more like £13, all the irons I found from China are in fact for the 24V stations and presumably are not compatible. the iron I have is the third for this unit and the final Maplin sourced one, so new irons would have to be sourced from Rapid or CPC Farnell as I suspect they are the only other supplier and sell this same station though under the Tenma brand, new bits can come from China as they fit a number of irons

So as long as the station is being sold I should be good for a new iron should I need one as they'll always be available separate to the station (though the last two were destroyed while being used at the same time as my former PMR446 gateway was in transmit, though when I say destroyed it is more likely they need a new heater element).

Naturally this only occurred to me while the iron was being used for component salvaging in the shack, and I don't want to be without my soldering iron, as it is the most useful tool any Amateur could have and I certainly plan to use mine for as long as possible, and also so I can actually turn the temperature down a bit I plan to switch back to leaded solder, a lot of the hams I know that solder prefer it.

not too much radio related but it does go with our hobby, and with that I could see if it is possible to repair the Intek DRS-5070 as I suspect the finals have failed inside it.

73 de 2E0EIJ

The beginning of my journey to my full licence, and a few bits of electronic salvaging in the shack (with some interesting discoveries)

As you will recall, at the back end of last year, I enrolled on Steve Hartley's Bath Based Advanced Distance Learning Course, which will take me to the Advanced licence all being well.

The course starts properly a week on Friday, so I hope to get some revision in before then, bearing in mind I have work and will be busy, I have already signed up for the system the course is using though have not had a chance to look at it properly, though that will be something I can do after work tonight (I start 40 minutes or so from time of writing).

I already have the book, a scientific calculator, and the RSGB radio communications handbook, I may benefit of course by getting some other books, I look forward to completing this course, and ultimately getting my full licence before the syllabus change in August of this year and also before the National Hamfest.

So the journey now begins, and I look forward to the challenges I will face, as I love a good challenge, keeps the mind active and healthy.

I also spent the last few days salvaging useful electronic components, I have an old power supply that I have spent years stripping down slowly, some of the electrolytic capacitors on it appear to have failed and show some bulging on the bottom which makes me think if they failed the time the supply itself went pop and a cloud of smoke emitted from it, the actual failed capacitor was removed a long time ago, the resistors, other capacitors and diodes seem fine.

I also cut the connectors off a load of old computer fans that I'd not likely be reinstalling into computers, which run happily of 13.8V DC (they are rated 12V DC and an extra 1.8V should not harm them considerably), the wires then stripped and tinned, and the fans retested on the bench supply, all seem happy and I do plan to put them into service at some point later on, preferably with a thermostatic controller to stop them from running all the time, I also salvaged components from my Internet Radio project including the speaker still inside the box, the amplifier is  still in situ, I removed its regulator and the 5V regulator I used to run the latter of the two Pis, this regulator is a 7805 and puts out around 4.98V DC when fed from a supply greater than it, I might use this as a USB outlet regulator and have a handy charge point in my shack, of course I do need to provide adequate filtering and tie the data lines to tell the phone what it can pull, though that information should be readily available on the Internet as a lot of phone chargers should now be reverse-engineered (the regulator is 1A though is fitted with a heatsink so may at a push work higher).

So tomorrow I may tinker a bit more if I have time and start extra revision on my Advanced tonight again if I have time.

73 de 2E0EIJ