Thursday 10 March 2011

Wind over the willows

Thursday, just 4 days since 2m beam went into proper service. Received my FT-480R back from Castle Electronics yesterday. The fault on this radio which I bought of another amateur on eBay was that the front end was way out of alignment. This is a fault which could not have happened in transit from this Nottingham based guy, so unless he was totally unaware of how deaf the rig was, (very improbable unless a complete idiot), then I had been taken for a ride. The rig ended up costing me £112.00 + £10.00 initially, plus £6.00 postage to Castle, plus £100.00 for repair and return. £228.00 in total.
My advice, unless you can pay by PayPal for goods sight unseen then don't take the risk. This unscrupulous guy refused PayPal, now I know why, there was no comeback under eBay buyer protection.

As a fellow Radio Amateur YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.

Anyway, rant over. The rig is performing very nicely now when connected to the new vertical, so have migrated the TR9000 to SSB duty on the beam. This is working OK, but no real test yet, and need to lift the beam up another 3 feet or so. 10' pole now arrived which will go up soon.

The wind is having fun with the aerials however, just hope they are still up there this evening!

Snowdonia Radio Company emailed me Tuesday apologising for their delay in responding, busy and all that, and requested I send them contact details so that we can discuss the issues I have/questions raised. Did so, but no call yet.

I find the hex beam design for HF interesting, and am looking to adapt this for loft installation for 10m.
Will report if successful or not, but need to get the hang of the aerial evaluation software first. Also working of add-ons to link eQSLcc to Ham Radio Deluxe to automatically update my log with details of QSLs received.

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