The above snap show’s my take on a pro whip antenna – fishing rod vertical antenna 10m high and with four ground plane radials 10m long the black box is a ununs rated at 200 watt SSB made by Pro whip antennas. costing £15 the wire and insulators I brought from Henry Westlake. and the coax RG58 we brought from Martin Lynch & son’s. I brought the fishing pole from Sandpiper Aerial technology Aberdare South Wales a couple of years ago when I visited there trade stand at the West London Radio & Electronic show at kempton park for about £20.

After breakfast I assembled my home made version of a pro whip antenna The vertical wire is 10m long and the ground plane wire is 10m long I tied the fishing rod onto the washing line tuned up on 40m and worked GM100RSGB located up in Thurso my signal report was 5/9

After lunch I thought I would check how well or not my home made fishing rod vertical antenna will work on 20m I chose to use WSPR pronounced whisper implements a protocol designed for probing potential radio propagation paths with low power each transmission carries the station’s callsign: Maidenhead locator: transmission power in dbm:

I would like to experiment further with this antenna it tunes easy on 40m with a external ATU I used the MFJ deluxe versa tunner II  model MFJ-948  However the atu inside the ft-950 tuned the antenna up when I changed to 20m.

 

 “Foxdelta FoxTrak”

Part 1.

Last may 2011 Peter 2E0SQL brought himself a Foxdelta FoxTrak I had never come across this unit before Peter paid around £14 plus P&P So far so good as is often the case a lead or two has to be home brewed some times that easy but I was soon to discover a few pit falls were waiting for me to fall into hook line and sinker that came in the way of serial plug 3.5mm 4 pole and battery connector that we brought from maplin I had no problem with the battery connector however I soon fell into a large whole regarding the serial plugs however after a couple of tries I soon got the lead made up properly however it took a little longer for the penny to drop that regardless the maplin 3.5mm jack just did not fit correctly into the VX-150 handheld and the next hole came as a complete surprise I own two Garmin e-Trex’s GPS the newer one for some reason did not supply the NMEA data but the older GPS did much time could have been saved by trying the older GPS first. Peter Got a lot of fun using this set up bicycle mobile also I could monitor his progress in the shack.

For some reason Peter thought it might be a good idea to use this set up in the shack with the GPS handing out the shack window so it could and more often than not – did not pick up the satellite signal that would supply the location He was transmitting from  – I asked Peter was there any chance of a different unit that has a programmable pic that we could program  our latitude and longitude instead of risking a GPS I was delighted to learn that there was and it was called the Foxdelta Foxview 3 So I ordered one so that Peter could use this in the shack.

Part 2.

“The Foxdelta Foxview 3 APRS”

The Foxdelta Foxview 3 APRS viewer Peter had ordered the MX614 chip from Argent Data in the states and this arrived first Getting it all connected up was easy enough to start with we used the lead for Yaesu VX-150 handheld as the connection was the same as the Foxtrak but later on I made a new lead up so it would work using the FT-7800E and this has been very success full one of the big advantages of the Foxdelta Foxview 3 APRS view is that it is a stand along unit and does not need to be connected to a computer because it has its own display.

The Foxview features are

APRS viewer on a 4×20 LCD

APRS Position encoder (Fixed or GPS (not easy to setup)

Digipeater

APRS TNC

Peter 2E0SQL has had a lot of fun out of this unit that only cost’s a few pounds and perhaps an hour helping peter set the unit up. Since Christmas 2010 peter has taken this one set further and you can read about this on his website