Hamming Fun

Category: My Friends

  • The Great South African G90 2021 Tour

    I used to own a Yaesu FT-857D, three of them, in fact. With them I made all sorts of contacts: straight contacts, QRP digital contacts, mobile FM contacts, and they even pushed my FL2100Z amplifier to full output when I needed to. I loved them and trusted them. While the screen might have been a little small for my older eyes, the radios never ever let me down. I still miss them a lot.

    But times are moving on and instead of following the way of the FT-101 and other dinosaurs (don’t get me wrong: They were excellent radios) I wanted to get some first hand experience of the more current SDR radio trends. First I bought a mcHF portable 5 watt radio which was a great buy and I’ll talk about that more in another post, but then I wanted to but a really “complete” radio for the bush. Smaller than the FT-857 but bigger than the mcHF and an all-rounder. The dice was rolled and fell on the Xiegu G90 which arrived in my shack a few weeks ago. While we can discuss all the details at length in other posts, this post is to let it travel around the country and experience different operators and conditions and antennas.

    Thus, the idea of “The Great South African G90 2021 Tour” was born. I decided to let my baby go visit some new places. My ICOM 7100 will have to do backup duty in the shack while the baby is travelling.

    First stop of the tour was my bush camp. I took my Xiegu G90 on a week long tour to the bush in Dikhololo (north of Brits and Hartebeespoort Dam). I have to admit it was a lot of fun to operate, even though the noise levels were appalling and in many cases made operating impossible on a particular spot.

    In summary I was very happy with it. It is not a big radio but it can stand its own.

    • The cabling takes up a lot of space
    • Look at that noise!
    • My assistant helping me with the antenna
    • My little assistant providing comments
    • A standard 49:1 toroid from my shop hastily mounted in a small box
    • A hastily cut EFHW resonates perfectly
    • Quickly soldering the balun in place
    • Hiding in the corner is the G90
    • The support kit takes up most of the space

  • New Call Sign ZR6LU

    My new call sign arrived today – ZR6LU. Shorter and easier on PSK31 which is my favourite operating mode. Hope I don’t get tonge-tied the first few times!

    From now on I am ZR6LU and not ZS6ALU anymore. I invested a lot in the old ZS6ALU call sign, I created this website, I built a following on some publications, I have a Gmail address. Shucks, I hope I don’t forget something. But if there is one thing life taught me, it is to move one. Don’t sit still. Hence, when the regulations changed the seeds of change were sown.

    Karel Bezuidenhout says on Facebook Group ZONE 38 Amateur radio Chat: Geluk Leon. Vir diegene wie nog nie verstaan: Beide ZR en ZS is klas A. D.w.s. dieselfde status. Geen onderskeid. Juis daarom het my twee seuns ook besluit op ZR6K en ZR6O. Lekker kort en inderdaad meer gewild op die DX-bande.

    Thanks for the encouragement Karel.

  • Ham Radio Operators Do It

    Engineers
    Engineers
    And now for some engineering funnies:

    Ham Radio Operators do it with more frequency and less resistance.

    And:

    Three guys in a car: A mechanical engineer, a Ham Radio operator and a MicroSoft employee are on their way to a meeting when suddenly the car in which they were riding breaks down.

    “It’s probably the cable that opens the valve on the carb has come loose, pop the hood and I’ll have us back on the road in no time.” quipped the mechanical engineer.

    “I doubt it,” replied the Ham Radio operator, “It has been observed that 83.2 % of similar failures result from the distributor contacts becoming corroded or misaligned, I’ll clean the contacts and we’ll be on our way.”

    “No, no, no!” cried the MicroSoft employee: “This car is equipped with a state of the art computer, what we need to do is turn the key off, all get completely out of the car, then get back in and it should start like normal.”

  • Huisbesoek: ZS6UT Ed Willers

    Ed Willers ZS6UT
    Ed Willers ZS6UT
    I had the privilege of visiting Ed Willers ZS6UT at him temporary QTH in Faerie Glen recently. It is always a privilege to meet one of your fellow hams in person, and Ed was no exception.

    The background is as follows: You will read about the noise (QRN QRM) at my QTH, and my attempts to reduce it to lesser levels. I’ve tried just about everything. I’ve been offered a “noise cancelling speaker” by OM Sam ZS6___ who runs Radio Accessories and is a good friend. I’ve put tons of ferrite beads on every wire in and around the shack. I’ve made good earths. Everything helps a little but, but nothing makes a huge improvement.

    Except the literature on Small Magnetic Loop Antennas keeps on popping up. Everybody seems to say that they are small (about the size of a bicycle wheel) but that – for their size – they perform quite well under noisy conditions. And in true ham fashion I start phoning around. Not too long and OM Hans Kappetijn ZS6KR gives me the number of Ed ZS6UT, who was keen to show me what he had done.

    So I popped in for a quick visit. Ed runs a very nice shack and while he is in a temporary QTH he hasn’t installed his magloop. Instead he depends on a multiband vertical and a 80m horizontal loop. He jokingly shows me how he used his fishing rod and a car spark plug to get some fishing line into a bluegum tree. I was surprised by how quiet the loop is in comparison to the vertical. He has a vacuum cap that he is going to use on his small magnetic loop as soon as he can put it up. Awesome item. After Ed’s advice I now know exactly what I should be looking for.

    Thanks for the hospitality Ed. We’re going to cook the bands with our loops.