MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL from the Shack of KEØVH!
AND, Merry Christmas and God Bless you from the Denver offices of
K-LOVE/AIR1!
Well here we are diving into the winter months in Colorado and a lot is still going on in the state with new transmitters and finalizing up a lot of things for the year. Yearly Inspections to finish up, Arbitron software to update, and just generally getting most tasks wrapped up for the year or planning for next. Snow started to fly in November and now site access isn’t as easy but we are getting the last minute installs and things done before some sites become nearly impossible. Gray Head mountain at approximately 11000 feet, our site near Telluride is virtually inaccessible in the winter months due to snow depth and steepness. We upgraded a transmitter there, and got all secured for winter. Thanks to my good friend Bill Frost, WØBX for the work there, and then Rich Anderson W9BNO and I installed the upper end of our Axia IP audio system installed at Castle Peak north of Eagle CO at about 11k feet AMSl in October, and now we have installed the IPump and Sat receiver at the site down below in Eagle so we can feed audio up to our station above via our Trango STL system. We have been awaiting this for quite a while, and I am very proud of the Eagle site now. I will put some pictures in next months article of that site. We also will have a backup site location for the station above on the little “East Beacon Hill” as Eagle County calls it so WHEN the site above goes down we can cover Gypsum and Eagle from the lower site. The new Thermobond building at the site is really AWESOME.
KEØVH and the Argo at Castle Peak in October
By this time the snowtracks are going to be re-installed on the Argo as it will definitely be needed here in Colorado! Only 4 to 6 inches of snow was on the mountain this day, so the ATV tires did fine, and especially in the mud that was further down. We already used it in “tracked” mode for a trip to Eagle, and more are on the horizon.
I have been reading a lot lately about the capabilities of the FlexRadio 3000 in the Hamshack and continue to be amazed at its capabilities. I have really been enjoying operating the rig with its filters and abilities of pulling in weak signals and working stations that I have a very difficult time hearing on another radio. Check out this article that I found about the Flex 3000. http://www.monitoringtimes.com/0510review.pdf
I also now have another SDR receiver in the Hamshack that receives 100 khz to 1.7 mHz. It operates with the SDR Sharp and HDSDR software I have written about here before. I am really amazed with the abilities of this little self contained HF/VHF/UHF and above receiver. I have been using it to monitor broadcast, communications, track airplanes with the ADSB Sharp software included within the SDR Sharp package, using its Spectrum analyzer features and more. It is the Yosoo 100KHz-1.7GHz Full Band UV RTL-SDR USB Tuner Receiver/ R820T+8232 available as always on Amazon.
This is what you get for around $60 or so
The “set” comes with an antenna that will work fairly well for UHF and even receiving the ADSB from aircraft, but it works much better being connected to proper outdoor antennas. You will need male SMA connector to whatever your coax’s have on them for proper adaption. The box has female SMA’s. The little box connects to USB, and Windows 7 automatically tries to download drivers for it. The USB works just fine but then you need to install the Zadig RTL drivers for the SDR box itself as Windows will not automatically find drivers. I am working on a tutorial video for this as there isn’t a lot of information on the internet how to do this. This is what I used initially: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-quick-start-guide/. I had some experience getting the SDR USB stick I had previously to work with the quick start guide, so I figured it out pretty quickly, but there are a lot of complaints about there being not a lot of real documentation on this little box and how to get it running. More to come.
Hey if you haven’t had a chance to see any of my latest videos, check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ke0vhjacktv
Don’t forget the Monday Night Broadcast Engineering
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 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