A little update to my Tango Mike CB callsign and the TM DX Group’s directory listing.
I moved from Lancashire to Shropshire in 2013, but, I forgot to inform the Tango Mike registrar of the move, so the directory entry for me, 26TM998 no longer reflected my QTH and so needed updating.
Today, I kindly heard back from Simon, G7UFS, that the entry has been updated.
Many thanks Simon.
Here is the Tango Mike directory listing for England.
Today (Saturday 19th October 2024) the 1st Ashley Air Scouts had a very successful JOTA (Jamboree On The Air) from Hugo Meynell school in Loggerheads with help from the Staffordshire and District Amateur Radio Society along with myself.
My main role today was educational, to teach the Scouts, Cubs and Beavers some of the phonetic alphabet and explain why we use call signs to identify stations and why we speak the call signs in the phonetic alphabet they have just learned due to poor operating conditions. Some already knew their phonetic alphabet, and as one young cub pointed out, I didn’t even know the normal alphabet..! I was just testing them, or rather, that was my excuse. LOL
After their lesson, they were let on to the club’s HF station, an Icom 7300 connected to a DX-Commander operated by Paul, and with his assistance, contact was made with other JOTA stations, and very basic messages were exchanged, like names and with what they had just learned, the spelling of their names phonetically.
Between 10:30 and 15:00, I believe contacts were made in York, Hebden Bridge, Jersey, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Vietnam, Mauritius and Taiwan.
The conditions of the bands were very noisy, 40m being the worse, so in the late morning, I got the impression that everyone was crowding on 20m in order to make a JOTA contact. In the afternoon, the 40m band picked up again, but, signals seemed distant, quiet, and faded in and out. A very difficult band to work today.
Due to these really difficult working conditions, GB1SDS did try listening out for GB4FAS (operated by my radio club The West Manchester Radio Club), but, despite trying, GB1SDS simply could not hear GB4FAS 70 miles away.
Overall, a very busy and fulfilling day, I would definitely do it again.
I would like to say a big thank you to the members of the Staffordshire and District Radio Society for their assistance in helping this local scout group do this and the troop gain their JOTA badges.
An antenna analyser question. I have a MFJ-266B, note the “B”, the later improved version, and have had it for checking HF antennas for about 10 years. It always gives the same SWR as a meter on HF, so I have never suspected it, or doubted it, until today.
Today, as it is my birthday, and I fancied spending it playing radio, I thought I would have a go at making a home made mobile 2/70 antenna on a quick release to go on my cars mag mount.
With all the components assembled, I am expecting a 1/4 wave to be between 19″ and 20″ to be resonant around 145 MHz and 435MHz ish.
The analyser shows the 19.4″ whip to be resonant at 113MHz, 130MHz, 446MHz, and 471MHz. No amount of adjusting the length of the whip causes the analyser to deviate from these resonant frequencies.
These numbers just don’t look correct. Surely, the UHF readings should be somewhere near a multiple of x3 of the VHF resonant frequency.
Putting my 10m antenna on the car, it shows a resonant frequency with the analyser of 28 MHz, which is expected, as I also use this antenna for UK FM CB as well as for 10m.
I have never used this analyser for VHF and UHF before, and I am suspecting it is not reading correctly above HF.
Has anyone used an MFJ-266B for VHF/UHF before? And, how accurate are they on these higher bands? Thoughts everyone please…
Kindest 73’s,
Mark M0INI
mark@m0ini.radio
#AntennaAnalyser #MFJ266B #M0INI