NOVEMBER 2016
Greetings all, and Happy Thanksgiving!
I am VERY THANKFUL now that we are entering the Holiday Season to our God for His Grace and Mercy, for my wife & family and for life, friends and my work. I am humbled that He in His Love saw fit to let me get thru cancer earlier this year and here I am a year after being diagnosed with cancer, free and looking forward to every day of life. Really I am having so much fun and enjoyment every day it is amazing. So I wanted start out this months writing with that.
With that, a project that I was excited about was getting a computer setup in our local Denver K-LOVE rack room that will allow me to keep an eye on all my sites from the office central point. Our IT guys back in Rocklin are the absolute best and they set it up to do what I needed, so when it got here I setup some functions that essentially turned it into a “mini NOC” for my Colorado sites. One of the functions that I wanted was to have a spectrum picture of the local Denver stations to be available to keep an eye on our HD signal and local translators. So I ordered a new version RTL-SDR USB dongle as I have written about here before. This one installed much easier than the previous versions and the latest versions of SDR Sharp, are even more functional than the last. As before you can order these thru Amazon, and while costing a bit more than the usual USB dongles ($21), seems to work much better and Windows 7 even installed the drivers for it automatically. I still then recommend running the “Zadig” software that is included in the SDR Sharp software (after running the install file in the SDR Sharp software). The specs are better than the less expensive versions and you can get all the information by seeing the new version dongle at: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HA642SW/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
By the way, “smile.amazon.com” allows you to choose a charity to donate part of your purchase price to a worthy cause. Check it out if you are not familiar with it. This SDR has an aluminum case and SMA female connector that I adapted to F connector (adapters also available thru Amazon) for connection into our receive antenna system. A while back someone asked me to write a tutorial on how to set these up. I actually follow the directions written very well at this page: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-quick-start-guide/ This is a pretty accurate and easy to follow guide that I am using now when setting these up.
The system even decodes RDS. You can take a look at the MPX spectrum too, seeing L+R, L-R, Pilot and RDS levels. Below is the 88.9 signal in Denver. Above is 91.1.
Have you seen the latest MFJ Catalog? They now have calibration loads for antenna analyzers available. This is very cool as this will help make measurements that much more accurate. I am going to order a set of these for my SARK 110 analyzer here in the near future.
As you can see they have available for different connectors on the analyzers too.
Hey Look! I made QST! Guess I was spotted on 6 meters during an opening on May 23rd of this year. This is from page
98 of “The World Above 50 MHz” article in the August 2016 article in QST! I am doing SOME operating still! Gonna fire up more this winter, as I try to work all states on 160 & 80M WJST HF 65. More on that in the months to follow.
Meet Dave, DU9/G8IRC! He is a regular now on the Monday Night Net from his home and IRLP node in Davao City Philippine Islands! Dave is from England originally of course and is now transplanted with his wife in the Phillipines, hence the G8 original call. Very glad to hear him on with us on the Net. Thanks Dave! Great to hear you every week via IRLP. Dave’s well appointed station:
Wanna see a BEAUTIFUL drone flight in North California? Jeremy, N6JER, flew on a beautiful fall day and this is the link to the video of his drone flight!
The view from Jeremy’s drone
And one day I was out for a ride on my Vulcan 900 Classic LT up thru a canyon near our home on the NW side of Denver. Check it out at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcVFwo6mW9k
Don’t forget the IRLP (and Echolink) Hamnet, every MONDAY EVENING
At 7pm Mountain time (9pm Eastern) for radio discussions, both
Broadcast engineering and amateur radio. The first and
3rd Mondays are also SBE Chapter 73’ of the Air NET nights. Details on how to
Join are at http://www.ke0vh.com/net/net.html. I hope
You will be able to join us and share your engineering and
Ham exploits!
73’ & God be with you. See you next time! De KEØVH