MW1CFN

@MW1CFN@mastodon.radio
521 Followers
405 Following
3.4K Posts
All home ham stations are rubbish, compared to a 1/4 wave vertical at the coast. Pilot, motorcyclist and industrial archaeology nerd. Author, 'Marconi's Carnarvon Station 1912-1939' - get your copy here: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/marconivlf

The never-ending story of bad grounding information.

Follow Yaesu's advice in the new FTX-1 manual (accessed online, 14/06/25) if you have a PME supply and you would contravene UK regulations. During a neutral break, your house may burn down as your ground rod becomes the sole path to ground for several houses around. Your home insurance would be invalidated.

For PME, you need to also install 10mm2 (min) earth cable directly back to the incoming mains*.

*This is my info, not advice.

Great place names! Had active thunderstorms here in north Wales this morning. Didn't last long. Enjoy!

There we are. Thanks to Mastodon, normality is restored to my Linux laptop and its relationship with my rig.

I tried masking MemoryManager first, which worked.

🙏 🙏

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was born on this day, 13 June.

To celebrate, why not buy a Maxwell's Cradle Kit.

https://extkits.co.uk/product/maxwells-cradle-kit-ii/

and have a play with some magnetism and simple harmonic motion.

Maxwell's Cradle II Kit - Extreme Kits

A desktop toy kit that shows the power of magnetism. A steel ball runs on a slightly curved acrylic track as a desk toy

Extreme Kits

Not a good day. LoTW is reporting all sorts of weird and nonsensical "issues" with my callsign certs.

One is a supposed conflict, causing a refusal to upload a renewal request, between a SES call certificate under my main callsign being an 'England' DXCC, whereas the certificate itself is correctly shown as 'Wales'.

These are all things that sprang from nowhere in the past few days.

Time to dump LoTW, actually. I only ever applied for awards because they were there, not because I wanted them.

There's an odd thing: old laptop with Linux Mint worked fine for days with my transceiver. But this morning, it was sending a continuous TX-activation signal to the rig.

There was an update yesterday. I wonder if that changed something?

Sound can be such a pain on computers.

Sadly, the previous Windows laptop is now back inline - works fine so not a rig issue.

Pretty lively this morning. All antennas disconnected for a while.
If anyone's got a simple, affordable way to add an optical encoder and readout for an ATU, please give me some tips!

Some thoughts after this week's ATU purchase:

https://mw1cfnradio.blogspot.com/2025/06/last-of-many.html

Last of the Many