G4APV's Amateur Radio Page

On of my spare time (when I have some) is Amateur (Ham) Radio. For the past 24 years I held a British Amateur Class A licence with the callsign G4APV. I have various pieces of equipment, some of it modern, some of it not, some very good, some pretty awful. For your information, a brief list of equpment etc is:

HF

Transceivers and Amplifiers

ICOM IC735 All mode transceiver, 100W output
ICOM IC706 All mode transceiver, 100W output, HF plus 2m, normally in the car on 1.8MHz
Yaesu FL2100Z 700W output linear amplifier

Aerials

Cushcraft R5 vertical All HF bands from 14MHz to 28MHz
3/8 wave end fed wire 50 feet above ground for LF band use

VHF/UHF

FT530 FM dual band hand held transceiver
Belcom Liner 2 Ancient and awful 2m SSB transceiver
Various old bits of PMR stuff

Beyond UHF

G4WIM design 1250MHz FM TV transmitter
23 element long yagi for use with above
0.9m dish for use with old satellite TV receiver for receiving TV on 1250 MHz
1.8m steerable dish for use on 4GHz and 11GHz satellite TV stuff.

Current Project

At present I am trying to get a system to allow me to send fast scan TV pictures from home to the TV repeater GB3TT at Bolsover near Chesterfield. This is some 15 miles away and is not line of sight. The 3W from the transmitter seems to be able to get to the repeater but not at adequate strength yet. This probably due to lack of power, lossy cable and a badly orientated aerial. On receive, at present the two low noise preamps that I am using are adequate when connected to the 0.9m dish, but the home made one is prone to turning into an oscillator! Also I need to get the dish plus preamps outside and mounted a pole - that then brings water proofing problems.

Some interesting places to visit

Callbook Servers

UK Callbook

US Callbook

Finnish Callbook (well it could be useful!)

Organisations

AMSAT

TAPR

ARRL

SAREX

Information

QRZ Ham Radio CD ROM

Amsat FTP Archives

University of Manchester's Mirror of the UCSD FTP archive

University of Buffalo ham radio FTP archives