Topband: Fishing beacons redux

[Keith Jillings (G3OIT)]

On 02/10/2012 01:43, John Langridge wrote:

> They are probably as CW literate as most pilots that rely on NDB's (do they any
> more?)  Their charts literally have dots and dashes listed for the various
> beacons.

NDBs are rapidly disappearing (thanks to GPS).

The pilot doesn't have to be CW-literate (it baffles the examiners that 
I am), but he does have to have the ident running the whole time if he's 
flying an approach based on an NDB.

There's no other way of knowing the NDB just went off-air.  I have happy 
memories of flogging down the NDB to Marco Island when it all went 
silent and we returned to Naples.

A friend of mine bought an HF radio to ferry an aircraft.  It was a 
*very* nice piece of kit with SSB general coverage of the whole of the 
HF spectrum.   I made him an offer for it, but its value to ferry pilots 
was more than its value to me for amateur work.

The geniuses who installed it in the aircraft put the automatic matching 
unit on top of the transceiver, with coax from that to the antenna.  It 
didn't work till I moved the ATU (and tested it by working an LA station 
on 20 metres).

Hope to be able to make myself audible on top band this winter!

Keith  G3OIT