vk2rh: a blog about ham radio

  • US exams at Wyong

    About midway through January, I heard via a Sunday morning WIA broadcast that a group of ARRL Volunteer Examiners was offering to hold exam sessions at the Wyong Field Day at the end of February. I passed my original amateur license exam here in Australia almost 40 years ago. My AOCP (Amateur Operator’s Certificate of…

  • Hygge DX

    Just read about Scandinavian versions of untranslatable concepts (like German’s gemütlich or Portuguese’s saudade) at Quartz. One example is the Danish word hygge (pronounced ‘hooga’)… There’s no direct English translation for hygge, but the word evokes both coziness and togetherness. “It’s not just cozy with a blanket and a glass of wine,” Kurtz tells Quartz. “It’s also interpersonally cozy—so having a few people…

  • Smartlock

    The Smartlock is an accessory for my SGC SG-239 HF Smartuner, and other ATUs they make. It can be bought ready made or built. There are indicator LEDs that signal status (TND, l ‘Z’, 2:1, PHZ, FWD, Auto & Man) on the lower section of the PCB of the SG-239 but they are only visible…

  • Success!

    Great moment this afternoon when the Automatic Loop Controller fired up as it should. Happy days. When I first fired it up, after loading up the Arduino program, all I could see was a dull green glow on the screen. It wasn’t until I remembered a comment from another builder about adjusting the potentiometer on…

  • Antenna tuning by stealth

    One of the most important documents for anyone who wants to know what makes a magnetic loop tick is Leigh Turner VK5KLT’s “An Overview of the Underestimated Magnetic Loop HF Antenna” which can be found on his club website. Midway through building my version of Loftur Jónasson – TF3LJ / VE2LJX‘s Automatic Loop Controller, I came across…

  • Walter Winchell

    I was meandering around the web this morning and stumbled on to a page where famous key collector and curator Tom Perera W1TP had re-created the morse key setup used by Walter Winchell to introduce and punctuate his radio and later TV broadcasts. They were a pair of Vibroplex bugs. I grew up in Sydney in the…

  • Buddipole vertical for 80m

    I spent the pleasant sunny part of the final day of autumn testing a vertical antenna for 80 metres using Buddipole parts for home. The back garden space here is barely 4 metres by 4 metres and for the moment the chimney is out of reach. While I have dreams of a magnetic loop for…

  • Roll your own valves (tubes)

    A few weeks back – in the post about wartime crystal production – I made a tangential reference to my all time favourite YouTube video – Claude Paillard F2FO distilling down to less than 20 minutes his meticulous work making a triode valve, effectively by hand to create a very cute looking valve wearing blue shorts. F2FO,…

  • Grinding quartz and holding a frequency during World War II

    I’m a great fan of the Prelinger Archives which is home to so many items like this video I’ve heard about recently from various ham radio email lists. I like how the components of the earliest electronics and wireless were so basic and ‘natural’. Think of hand made capacitors and resistors using traces of graphite on paper.…

  • Reading in your head – the long path to morse code bliss

    I’m one of those people who learnt morse code completely the wrong way. Starting off in the seventies with no guide I simply tuned into nightly morse transmissions sent by local hams at a very slow rate. I think they started at 5 words a minute. The main risk there was nodding off between words…

  • Lightweight portable VHF antennas

    One of my favourite sites is Martin DK7ZB’s collection of pages detailing the construction of practical antennas for VHF and UHF. I first visited the site following a link to designs for lightweight portable yagis that would be suitable for SOTA VHF activations. Under the link ‘2m/70cm-Yagis ultralight’, Martin describes a number of yagis for 2m and…

  • SOTA launch in VK2

    News is just in that SOTA – Summits on the Air – starts in a number of new call areas tomorrow including my home state New South Wales, VK2. I understand that Queensland VK4 and Hawaii KH6 may also be launched tomorrow, 1st September. The new VK2 association adds over a thousand summits to the SOTA database.…