G'day A couple of weeks ago, Tom W8JI wrote a critique of phasing/direct conversion front-ends with DSP 'hearts' for use on 160m in reply to a posting I wrote about them. As I also received a lot of
G'day Thanks to all those who wrote emails to me, expressing interest in the idea of 160m-only direct conversion receivers with DSP 'hearts' and the idea of integrating a number of these with a singl
G'day Greg Zl3IX raised the following great point about noise (see below), which Phil VK6APH has commented on and should be of interest to those wondering about how such a system could improve noise
Hi Jim My first 100 countries were worked with an 80m doublet about 45' high - with 66' of wire added to each end of it, which were sloped down to the fence lines, so the ends were about 8' off the g
G'day Waved goodbye to Charlie VK9XG this morning, who will arrive on Christmas Island today (Monday 27 Oct) and stay for 13 days. Charlie's main priorities will be the low bands on CW (particularly
G'day Charlie VK9XG reports that he hopes put up his phased pennants 160/80 receive array today (28 October) - this has been delayed so far because of a big game (yesterday) on the cricket pitch wher
G'day For those in Europe, Charlie VK9XG will try to be active approximately one to two hours before his sunrise, on 160/80. Please could those who have worked VK9X before on 160/80 let the 'first ti
G'day As most will have guessed, the solar flares have made life impossible for VK9XG on topband. Charlie sent me this report. He has excellent antennas for 160/80m, with a Force 12 vertical, dipoles
G'day all For those who wonder why Charlie VK9XG is sometimes on 20m RTTY when 160/80 sound good at your end, the answer is all too simple - 160/80 at his end is so full of QRN that 'S' meter is cons
G'day Bad news from Charlie VK9XG. He has been on the band every night/morning, but the QRN has been terrific and the conditions abysmal - making 80m operation also hopeless. Conditions has been so b
G'day Bad news I am afraid for those still wanting VK9XG on 160/80 - Charlie has had to QRT on these bands. After a construction truck had a smash-up nearby, the 50m-high crane Charlie was using as h
With regard to a 'budget rig' for 160, 80 and 40, there are a couple of good cheap older radios, which have good strong signal performance, are nice to use and easy to find secondhand. Much of my fir
G'day I have received a number of inquiries about the 'Uzi' 2-element delta loop array that I currently use (three-quarter-sized loops, linear loaded in the bottom horizontal portion of each loop by
G'day, Those who are interested in contacting historic lighthouses around the world may like to look out for VK6VZ/6 in the Stew Perry Topband Distance Challenge on 27/28 December. I will be re-activ
G'day all I am trying to track down a pair of Mini-Bloc, ISOTOP or SOT-277 style power FETS for a lightweight 160m linear amplifier. These look like bridge rectifiers, with a square bolt-down package
G'day all It has been interesting reading the discussion about DX windows. As W8JI says, many of the same old arguments have come out. However, this is one of those discussions we probably need to ha
G'day all Although propagation in the Stew Perry 2003 was only marginally better than in the previous year at VK6VZ/6, the conditions were probably the strangest I've ever encountered in the event -
G'day It seems that the days of converting 1.8MHz signals from analog to digital at our antennas seem just about here. On October 14 last year Texas Instruments released its ADS7881 A to D converter
VK6VZ replied: Tom makes a good point - as he points out, the IM3DR of the stock radios most of us use is hardly better than 70dB or so - see his web site receiver section for details. As he also say
VK6VZ replied: Hi Rick Thanks very much for the thoughts. I am currently using an experimental direct conversion receiver, using a four-section tuneable Cohn filter (in front of a 10dB RF amplifer, f