Drive levels…

Over the last few years I have not had to think too hard about ensuring I’m driving my FT-2000 at a good level.  i.e. its not being overdriven.  It has an Automatic Limit Control (ALC) meter and its been a matter of…

TSGARC – A short history

In September 1987 I joined the Thornbury Radio Club as I had recently passed the Radio Amateurs Examination (RAE), in those days we met in the upstairs hall of the United Reformed Church (URC). We had a variety of radios…

Receiving Packets from the ISS

One of my main interests in amateur radio involves picking up radio signals from satellites and (one day) talking to astronauts on the space station. Getting a contact with the ISS may be difficult, but there is an easier thing…

Software Defined Radio

The RTL-SDR is an inexpensive software defined radio dongle based on the RTL2832u chipset. The dongle was designed to be used as a digital video and radio receiver, but with some custom firmware can be re-purposed as a wideband software…

Back to the Future. Part 2

I could not resist the name of this article, it seemed so obvious 🙂 I’ve been in the radio room this afternoon listening to the 2m VHF band, calling CQ on CW and listening to the beacons.  The Scottish beacon,…

Back to the Future…

Back in the 80’s I received my first amateur radio license, a ‘B’ license as it was back then entitling me to use, if I recall correctly, bands above 30 MHz only.  We didn’t have 6m and 4m band allocations then…

Jamboree on The Air (JOTA)

This weekend just past (16th – 18th October) saw TSGARC members establishing a JOTA station for Olveston 1st Scout Group. John, Garry,Paul, John, Richard, Andy, Rob, Susan, Peter, Peter, Rex, Mike and others attended the 1st Olveston Scout hall from…

A Belated Congratulations

Congratulations to Nick Jon and Christian, pictured below who passed their Foundation Exam on the 8th October. Well done Gentlemen. Their thank I am sure go to Peter, Rex and John plus others who have given their time to aid…

SDR & GNU Radio

I’ve been using SDR and in particular, GNU Radio a lot recently. If anyone else is interested in comparing notes / experiments it would be great to catch up. GNU Radio’s flow graph method of constructing working ‘devices’ (pictured below) has been…