ISS, SSTV, CB and Amplified Speakers

I'm still alive. You might be surprised by that given how little I post. 

RS0ISS is back doing testing, and I've fired up the Icom IC706MkIIG to receive some pics. 

 

 

No, you can't click the individual pics. I'm not that organised. Sorry. There's nothing to write home about here anyway. Receive is pretty average on most of them.

To the point of that radio - I turned it on the other day for the first time in months. And I pressed the PTT button and it restarted. I jiggled the power cords around then it was fine for a bit, but didn't receive a thing.

It turns out that it's been windy. And the coax has been ripped clear out of the PL259 at the bottom of my dipole. There's a couple of parts to that antenna setup - including a run of RG58 that goes from the centre of the dipole down to just above ground. There's a box on the fence that it connects to and a run of RG218 hooks in there that feeds it to the house. I use the RG58 for the vertical drop just for its lack of weight - the flag poles that keep it up flex enough as it is without having a heavy feedline attached. 

I come out to find the coax out of the plug. I did have a couple of plugs floating around at one stage where the centre pin couldn't be soldered. I suspect this is one of them. The crimped collar is still on the coax, held in place by heat shrink tubing. I have no spares, so I'm awaiting some new PL259s. 

I've had fairly average results on that antenna for months (and I use a tuner), so I wonder if it's been starting to let go over time and a couple of windy days have finally finished it off. I'm hopeful that's the case.

The Icom has been off because I've had the antenna hooked up to my SDR for the past few months, and I've left that to do the job. 

I've had the QYT KP-WP12 on for most of that time and I'm slowly getting used to it.  That garbage fake Nagoya speaker is gone and I ordered a Diamond P810-A speaker from Strictly Ham before they close up. This speaker is a bit of a unicorn - not a lot of sources for it!

The P810-A is an amplified speaker and the audio quality is night and day over that piece of rubbish I tried initially. The sound quality is far superior. Being a decent sized mobile speaker helps. It's a fraction larger than the radio itself (which isn't much larger than a deck of cards).

What is interesting though is that without the amplifier on, it passes audio through still. If your input is fairly loud, then it will come through loud. If you turn it on, the AF Input control will attenuate it as you'd expect. I was kind of hoping that the "OFF" switch meant the AF would be off rather than just the amplifier, but I can live with it. Either way, it achieves what I need - an easy way to turn the radio down. 

In other radio news, I reprogrammed the IC208H in my Falcon the other day. I decided to use the same configuration that I used on QYT, which means that I can also monitor a range of CB channels. I know, this is all very taboo.  It's also something to listen to when I hit the scan button while the dozens of configured repeaters are all entirely dead. 

Mostly I don't care much for CB - it's not my thing, but some of the random stuff one can hear is good for a laugh. 

I did also discover that it doesn't handle band splits when programming. I like to have the ISS programmed in (not that I'm ever likely to be able to work it from the car. It doesn't like having the combination of VHF/UHF frequencies no matter how I tried to convince it. Not the end of the world. It's just too old. 

Anyway, both vehicle radios are now setup with the same stored frequencies. 

Scanning will be a major draw back with the QYT though. The Icom can get through the 120+ frequencies in a couple of seconds. The QYT can get through a couple of frequencies in a second. That's something I really do wish that the Chinese radio manufacturers could improve on. Still, I'm going to have to live with it.