Is there a doctor in the house?

Yeah, the old joke – someone sticks up his hand and says, “I’m a Doctor of Philosophy – will that do?”

I have kept you up-to-date with my later-in-life university career. You may recall this post about my Bachelor’s degree, and this one about my Master’s. Well, I have now had conferred upon me the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews. Wow. Yeah. I know.

Is that the end of things? No, even in my 70s I am applying for research fellowships, and I have so many ongoing research projects that I sometimes feel I’m working harder now than I was on my thesis!

And meanwhile, how about amateur radio? Well, I’m back at home after the three-year stint as part of the resident warden team at one of St Andrews’ student residences (in my case a complex of flats with 1600 occupants!), so that means my study/library/computer room is – guess what – also my radio shack. At the moment I’m concentrating on 10m, mid-afternoon and early evening, when there appears to be a regular opening to South America. Not sure of the “mechanics” of that, but if I hear more, I’ll let you know.

Anyhow, my amateur friends locally in Perth wanted to see pictures of my graduation, so I’ll put up a few here. With me in the graduation procession is my friend Roberta – we were the only two new PhD graduates this year from the School of English.

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What, me solder?

GM4ULS station place in the ecosystem.

I knew there was another use you could put an MA5B to!

My film star motorbike – gone!

“Captain Black,” my faithful BMW R1200S that I have owned since 2007, has now been sold. It has gone to a good home, and although this means that I am without a motorcycle for the first time since 1975, I have plans to buy a new one in the next few months, so keep an eye on this page.

In 2021, a film crew came to my house, headed by director Luka Vukos, to make a short “ficumentary” (at least that’s what I call it) about a bored radio ham sitting at home during the 2020 covid lockdown, listening to signals from the International Space Station. The film is called ISS_Overs, and you can see it here. It has gained places in several festivals since it was made.

The bored ham does escape, defying the lockdown travel restrictions. That’s where the real star of the movie comes in. As a farewell to this lovely bike, I shall share some stills from the movie with you.

Very little radio news lately, I’m afraid. I spend most of my time in a ground-floor flat in a large complex of student apartments in the University of St Andrews. By this time next year, however, I will have defended my thesis and be able to hang the title “Dr” before my name, which will mean more free time to play radio. And, I hope, to ride a new motorbike.

Sometimes someone sends you a cracker!

This card arrived today in a small bundle from my QSL Manager. It is probably the most flamboyant piece of “wallpaper” I have ever received. Thanks, Eric.

I have also just acquired an LDG IT-100 automatic ATU. This works very well with the IC-7300, which was a little unhappy at certain band edges. It tunes very quickly but, unlike my (dead) MFL-993B, does not simply work from your transmission and remember its setting, it requires you to hit the tuning button every time you arrive on a frequency with a problematic SWR. It does remember that it tuned there before, or that it tuned to a close frequency, but it still requires a push of the button.* The IT-100 tunes up to 6m, so while the sporadic E season lasts, I’m thinking of employing a coax switch, so that I can use my temporary dipole. I’m not a great believer in having lossy devices in line, but I will do some comparative tests.

[Edit: The tuner did not like looking into the coax switch, so I’m thinking again.]

[Edit: *Only if you don’t read the blinkin’ instructions!]

Well actually, Boromir…

one can simply plug in an IC-7300 and start to operate. On the other hand, though, it does pay to spend a day watching the YouTube videos by WA2IVD to get to know all the touch-screen bells and whistles.

Here’s my new IC-7300. It’s monitoring Shannon Volmet, 5.505MHz, on a memory channel.

I decided to blow some savings and buy myself an early birthday present / reward for passing my 1st year PhD upgrade. My HF station was getting a wee bit tired. Odd inconvenient (if non-fatal) faults had developed on my FT-101ZD and my FT-847; my Ten-Tec Jupiter hasn’t transmitted at full power for a long time. Asking round the dealers, the choices seemed to be the Yaesu FT-991A and the Icom IC-7300. The Yaesu is a wonderful rig, but my UHF/VHF activities didn’t really warrant a rig that versatile, and it is on HF that I go for multimode operation. The attraction of the IC-7300 is, for me, the superb receiver – this morning I’ve been listening to WWV on 10MHz AM, a very weak signal that might have been below the noise on some of my other rigs. And to contradict Boromir again, yesterday I plugged it in, switched it on, and had a QSO with KL7KK in Alaska on 20m. He heard me on my second call, in a pile-up just as propagation was changing. Now, I know that this was 99% propagation in my favour, but when it happens on a new rig, you’re hooked!

The band stacking display on the rig doesn’t show either the 5MHz or 70MHz bands, This means one has to programme the 5MHz channels and some handy 70MHz spot frequencies into the memories. I’ve done that, along with such things as RAF Volmet, Shannon Volmet, WWV/WWVH, the bottom edge of short wave broadcast bands, and 27.555MHz USB – the latter is the calling frequency of the unlicensed 11m “freebanders,” and I use it as a handy indication of whether there is sporadic E propagation. As soon as I hear signals there, I switch to VFO and tune around 28.500MHz. It’s a lazy alternative to monitoring the beacon sub-band. I still have to programme 10m FM and AM channels, including repeaters, and spot frequencies for 70MHz.

The only real niggle I have – and it’s a tiny one – is that there is only one antenna socket. For a rig that covers HF, 6m, and 4m, that is a bit inconvenient, and either involves fiddling around behind the rig or setting up a coax switch. I prefer to have as little as possible between rig and antenna.

I love SSB, but I fancy trying some different modes. I have an SSTV programme on a Macbook, but as I don’t own a Windows PC I’m finding software for various data modes difficult to access. I want to try FT8, but the one WSJT programme for Mac seems to crash on my laptop and on my iMac. A friend has promised to lend me a Raspberry Pi after lockdown, so we’ll see…

PS. This is the first Icom rig I have had since a second-hand IC-215 in 1983. It can be seen in the rather fuzzy shack shot below. It was a lovely rig. I went from that to a Belcom Liner 2.

Tnx OM Boromir

That station on Mockingbird Lane

Well, it makes a change from Tony Hancock.

This is how things stand…

A lot has been going on lately, starting in November last year when I graduated with an MSc with Distinction, in Literature and Modernity, from the University of Edinburgh. No, I have no idea why a postgraduate degree in a Humanities subject attracts a Master of Science tag either. Since then, a lot of time has been spent trying to organise a PhD place somewhere and arranging for funding. I’m doing all this during what is in effect a ‘gap’ year, having taken time off between the MSc and starting the PhD, which is due to go ahead in September this year.

Radio? “Who has time?” he scoffs. But actually, I haven’t been totally inactive. However, it was only recently that I have seriously switched on my rigs and other equipment to see what needs opening up and the dust blowing out. What I found was a heck of a lot of niggles and narks. Let me take you round the shack.

• The ancient Fujitsu-Siemens PC that drives the Perth Echolink Gateway MB7APT-L suddenly refuses to find the operating system, and so boot-up fails. The darn thing is seventeen years old, after all!

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• There is still a big hole in the shack line-up where the FL-2100Z used to sit. It blew within eight seconds of the touch of my toe on the foot-switch. Martin GM8KPH currently has it, and I feel he might have a shock when he opens it up.

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• The Ten-Tec 538 Jupiter suddenly refused to put out more than about 4W pep on USB. The company in the USA that owns the Ten-Tec brand suggested a factory reset, which was a good idea anyway. But after I had done it the 4W had gone down to an indicated nil, and I could only get 1W with the key. The rig has been taken out and will go to the menders in Wales.

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• I think some of the others might be heading after it. For a start the FT-847 has an annoying fault with the MEM/VFO CH knob, in that it sometimes refuses to advance, and even goes backwards, when turned. This isn’t a major fault, but it is a minor inconvenience. The FT-847 remains the rig that is still functioning reasonably, but I might send it away to be fettled. If the Ten-Tec never works again, it would be good to have the FT-847 opened up on 60m/5MHz (though this isn’t a perfect option), so it might go away to the menders too.

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• The FT-101ZD has developed a fault with the AF Gain. The fault behaves like a “dirty pot” on both speaker and headphones output. This has been happening for a while, and I have been putting up with it. However, I noticed a couple more niggles yesterday. Firstly, my WM-308 desk mic no longer seems to want to speak to the rig. Hitting the PTT mutes receive as normal, but nothing happens when I speak (the mic works with other rigs). I did manage a QSO on 20m using a fist mic. However, when I switched to CW and hit the key, there was a noise reminiscent of a dying cat, and no transmit…

The good news is that I have been promised a nice old TS-930S on approval. This is a rig I once had on loan, I believe, and it is currently part of the estate of the late Robin GM3WFJ. However, if service is back to normal here at ULS Towers, it’ll probably be just in time for me to start back at university and be too damn busy to operate!

Always look on the bright side of life.

A couple of Munros, Spring 2017

Ruth, MM3YVQ and I climbed Beinn Ghlas (1103m) and Ben Lawers (1214m), the latter being the 10th highest Munro. GB3PR and GB3PU repeaters were end-stopping signals from there. The climbs are not technically difficult, but they’re hard work.