My Penketh Shacks ( Nos, 1,2,3 & 4) I moved to Warrington in 1967, passed the RAE in the May 1969 examination, went to the Liver Building Liverpool for the CW and got my call in April 1970. My first shack was in the main bedroom. The transmitter was a kit version of a KW Vanguard AM/CW 30w out covering 160m to 10m. The receiver was a Hammarlund 129X and it all fitted into a table

top 19" rack. I was soon relegated to the bottom end of the garage so I guess this was shack No.2. I gave my receiver to a disabled RAIBC member in exchange for a damaged AR88 and after some major rewiring it worked. The weather soon had me fitting a staircase into the loft of the bungalow so shack No. 3 arrived along with a new receiver a Trio 9R59DS. The transmitter did good service after several rebuilds of the modulator, the PA and the Pi tank. The PA and tank coils used to fizz with RF before the penny dropped and I learned a bit about matching HI. The loft shack got a new Trio TS510 transceiver in 1972 which ran

Cont’d on page 3.

2

ContentsPage Title Author Call Sign

1 My Penketh Shacks 1,2,3 & 4 Albert G3ZHE

3 Letters to the Editor Ron G0WJX

4 Vinyl LP to CD-R Recording John M0ANM

5 Dxpedition to Friedrichshafen July 1982 (part 1) Jim G3NFB

9 YES It's Another Antenna Tale Albert G3ZHE

10 Simple Lead Acid Charger Albert G3ZHE

11 Raffle Power George G0MSF

12 No Railtrack Problems Here Ron G0WJX

Club ProgrammeDate Title Speaker

March 6 Speaker neededMarch 13 Final Norbreck planning meeting March 18 Norbreck Rally March 19-25 National Science WeekMarch 20 GB2NSW on the airMarch 27 Norbreck & NSW PostmortumApril 3 Top Band Antennas Jim G3NFBApril 10 Book Auction Jim G3NFBApril 17 Picatune ATU Bill G0PZPApril 24 New Developments in Radio Albert G3ZHEMay 1 Discussion on future Contests & Social EventsMay 7 My Most Satisfying DX QSOs

3

for 10 years with the help of 3 pairs of 6146 PA bottles, one driver, one PA cathode resistor and a pair of mica capacitors between the PA anodes & the Pi tank. My 2m rig was an ex RAF 128 MHz AM transmitter modified to give 5w AM single channel transmission with a 4 to 6 Mhz converter to my HF receiver.

Rigs came & went. Trio TS120S, Yaesu FT101, FT102, FT767. Our son Andrew married so in 1990 shack No. 4 occupied his bedroom. At present my HF rig is an FT1000MP with DSP. It’s the best receiver I have ever used. Other HF gear is an MFJ Cub 1 watt on 40m and several 80m home built QRP rigs. The HF antennas are a 90ft doublet about 30ft up fed with 300 ohm ribbon to an MFJ ATU, a Lazy "H" cut for 10m which is always 2 S points better than the doublet on 10m. Worst thing I ever did was to sell my Trio TS751E multimode 2m rig. The present 2m rig is a Yaesu FT2600M with an FT290 standby. The 2 metre antenna is an old "J" Beam C52M colinear which I put up 18 years ago and is now showing its age with a rising SWR - alas change is in the air. My first log book took 10 years to fill, now a log fills in about 12/14 months The shack also boasts a spectrum monitor, oscilloscope, RF/AF signal generators, a grid dip oscillator, an antenna analyser, photo cell battery chargers, and a PC with printer etc.

My major radio interest is QRP operating, mostly CW, building QRP gear and HF listening. Recently the PC has allowed Doppler shift detection on meteors as they burn up in the air. Jim G3NFB, John M0ANM & myself have combined to track showers since August 2000. In late 2000 the BBC left a 300 kW World Service transmitter on 18.068 MHz from 2100 hrs until 0600 hrs for 4 nights so that eleven registered users of the "R" Meteor program could carry out tests. We had fun and got good results. Astronomy is also an interest here, the two activities go well together.

Of course my brain was removed in 1956 when I got a motor bike which may explain why I can't understand all this PC stuff that gets talked about.

73 from Albert - di di di dah di dah.

Albert G3ZHE

..from page 1.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR I would like to have a section of the magazine devoted to letters from club members. It is envisaged that these might be comments, questions or even a platform for putting forward controversial views which might stimulate more discussion. Here is a chance too for those who feel unable to write an article or give a talk to contribute. Answers to questions about radio, electronics or computing matters will be sought from experts within the club and printed for your information and delight. If you are shy or unwilling to display what you regard as your ignorance and wish to remain anonymous that is fine just leave your name off the letter. Anything libellous won’t be published but is highly unlikely from members of our club!

Ron G0WJX

4

Vinyl LP to CD-R Recording

Since my talk to the club some 18 months ago on vinyl long playing records and re-recording them on to CD a good deal more information has come to light via the

internet. At the time I explained my interest was to save some of my old vinyl long play records of 1950 vintage by transferring them to CD and demonstrated the technique I used at that time (see flow diagram).

First a brief word on the computer specification as any recording process on the computer needs speed, memory and a large capacity disk drive. I use a Pentium II 350 MHz with a Creative SoundBlaster Audio PCI 128 sound card and a Mitsumi CR-4802TE CD write/re-write with various software, more about this later.

Before undertaking any recording task defragment your hard disk, close down as many running utilities as possible, turn off virus programs and any screen savers as any internal switching inside the computer may interfere and spoil the recording.

From here on follow the flow diagram. Connect your sound source to the input of the sound card and with suitable software running on the computer start the source material playing to build up a ‘Wave’ file, when satisfied record on to CD, yes it is just as simple as that – the complicated bit is cleaning up the old recording, ridding it of clicks, tracking errors to obtain a fairly clean, I say fairly clean, because with old recordings you can clean them up to a standard where all ambience of the original recording is lost. Experiment, having made your original wave file, keep it separate and rename each subsequent modification i.e., JoeBloggsOrig.Wav – JoeBlogs1.Wav – JoeBlogs2.Wav etc. Remember you will need a lot of hard disk drive space, a one minute of raw recording (PCM Wavefile) consumes 10 megabytes of disk space.

There is a lot of brilliant work in this field to be found on the internet, from casual articles to full scale step by step instructions. So here are some of the sites worth a visit. http:\\www.ganymede.hemscot.net/ - A tutorial on vinyl audio restoration using ‘Wave Corrector’ – this program can be downloaded in a restricted version for a trial that will allow two minutes of recording. Costs £28 to register for full version, well worth a look. http:\\www.goldweave.com - Another site worth a visit. http:\\www.syntrillium.com/cooledit/index.html - professional software company, very good, enables filters to be tailored to your own requirements, later versions very expensive (£500) but search for CoolEdit 96, which can be found on some sites, can be down loaded as trial for test purposes.

Recordinput

ComputerPC Sound

Card

Record as.wav file

withCoolEdit96

Edit.wav file

When o.k.

Record on HDD

C:\Win\Tem

Retrieve .wavfile (Temp) with

Win-on-CD

CheckRecording

if OK Burn CD

If OK Clear.wav file

from HDD

5

Http:\\www.hitsquad.com/smm/news/382 - a site of some interest try it, there may be something of interest to you.

These sites have been tried out by me this year (2001). There are many more sites, but watch out some private sites have not been updated for years, so look for the last update of the site before you spend surfing time on them, the technology has moved so fast I should not bother with a site that is not regularly up dated. I have not made any mention of MP3, this is a subject on its own, again there is plenty of information on the internet. Ask your search engine to look for MP3, you may get a thousand or more hits. Have fun!

John M0ANM

NOTE Following a brief discussion a short while ago at a club meeting it was suggested that we should re-print some of the articles which appeared in the "Journal of the Warrington Amateur Radio Club" produced in the 1980s. The following is an abridged version of an article first published in Vol 1 No. 10 March 1983:

G3NFB Dx-pedition to Friedrichshafen - July1982

The idea of making a trip to Friedrichshafen, which lies on the northern shore of Lake Constance (Bodensee) in Southern Germany, occurred to me when I was toying with

the idea of taking a weeks holiday on my motorcycle. My aim was to visit the annual ham radio exhibition and meet Max DK7EO, Rudi DL3TN and Reinhard DK9JQ, members of the Hilden Club who would be there. A detailed look at a map of Europe indicated that the best route would be:

Warrington - Dover Dover - Zeebrugge Zeebrugge - Cologne Cologne - Bodensee and return by the same route. It seemed reasonable to camp overnight at Dover, Cologne and spend two nights at or near to Friedrichshafen. The journey, both ways, would then be broken up into easily (?) manageable, approximately equal stages of 280 to 300 miles per day.

I had decided at an early stage to travel as light as possible and to take only as much as would fit into the top box and panniers of my Honda 400N. Tent and sleeping mat would ride pillion. My planning included wet weather gear and changes of clothes which, in the event, were not needed as the weather turned out to be very hot.

Despite my careful itemising, planning and packing there was no room to take my 2mtr handheld, and as most of the items taken were non-disposable, there was no room on the return trip for any duty free.

6

On the day of my departure, after filling my tank, doing last minute packing, and bike checks, I set off from Warrington at about 9-30, and by 6 the same evening I was in the vicinity of Dover enquiring about campsites. The journey so far had been quite uneventful.

My enquiry at the Tourist Information Kiosk on the A2 outside Dover, led me to a campsite at Hawthorne Farm in Martin Mill just off the Dover-Deal road. I was directed into the motorcycle section of the site and found myself mixing with a variety of folk a "couple ' of years younger than I, who all appeared to be foreign cyclists.

There were also two Swedish lads who had been touring Scotland in the rain for the past two weeks on a BMW800 and were taking the opportunity of this first dry hot day to dry out in preparation for their return to Sweden via Amsterdam.

After pitching my tent and unpacking the necessities for the overnight stay I went into Dover to book my passage for the next morning.

7

The crossing to Zeebrugge next day was quiet with the sea a flat calm and visibility good. As a biker, one gets preferential treatment when boarding the ferry as all the bikes are loaded first and chained to the sides of the car decks before the other vehicles are loaded. This also means that you get choice of seats upstairs, and being at the pointed end of the boat you disembark first.

As expected, there was plenty of shipping to be seen in the North Sea which helped to pass the time away until we landed, one and a half hours late due to "mechanical trouble", at 2-50 local time. One of the ships which we overtook on the way was a Russian "trawler" bristling with antennae, but, as I did not have my trusty hand held with me I was not able to call them, but I am certain that they must have heard of the Warrington Radio Clubski.

Before setting out from Zeebrugge I checked my trip indicator and saw it was reading 269 miles. At Koeln (Cologne) another 210 miles had been added during which I had passed through the smells of Belgium and chuckled as I saw the signpost indicating the proximity of the "Militarishe Sikkenhuis" so well remembered by certain Club members who went on the trip to Hilden in April last year.

As I approached Cologne I started to think about where there may possibly be a convenient camping site and decided to stop and ask at Frechen service station where we had been met by the Hilden Club on the way to Hilden last year. It turned out that there was a large campingplatz at Rodenkirchen just south or Koeln in the direction of Bonn. This was reasonably well signposted from the autobahn and I had no difficulty finding it, which was just as well as it was then 8 in the evening and the sun was quickly setting.

A quick tour or the site found me a convenient camping place and estab¬lished that the site was on the west bank of the river Rhine with a good view across the water and tug-barges to the city on the other bank, After pitching my tent, organising myself for the night, and a quick inspection of the bike I went in search of my first German beer of the trip and a bite to eat. Finding that the campingplatz. restaurant was closing, I decided to go in search of sustenance to the bar, which was hosting the very noisy supporters of both opponents of the France -v- West Germany World Cup Soccer match being shown on TV

Next morning, the third day of my journey, I was awake at 5 precisely. That I will never forget. What woke me was the gradual realisation dawning through my morning-after-¬the~night-before, that there was a ticking noise near to my head and on opening my eyes and turning over, I found, close to my head, a very large chrome plated alarm clock with two big bells on it.

As I mentioned earlier, I had brought with me no excessive luxuries (if that is what you can call an alarm clock when you are on holiday) and a great deal of conscious thought convinced me that it did not belong to me. But where did it come from? How did it get there?

It finally dawned on me that the clock was not mine but I could not imagine how it got into my tent. Eventually I was spurred into action and, seizing it I opened my tent flap and was about to throw it out when a middle aged man put his head into the tent and spoke to me in a language which was neither English nor German. Not understanding what he had said, I asked him in both languages what he wanted but he said nothing, grabbed the clock and

8

ran. I did not see him again but still remember him with extreme puzzlement.

Later, as I breakfasted, the weather forecast told me to expect temperatures of 32 C in the afternoon. My route this day was to take me on the E5 Autobahn south through Bonn, Koblenz, and to Offenburg on the western side of the Black Forest. The plan was to get to within easy striking distance of Bodensee and find a campsite which would enable me to make a reasonable trip to Friedrichshafen the following day and camp for two nights. My original intention was to stay with the autobahn and skirt round the west and south of the Black Forest past Freiburg but I met another biker on his way from Heidleburg University to his home in Schramberg in the middle of the Black Forest, he recommended that a better, more picturesque route would be to leave the autobahn at Offenburg and cut diagonally across to Villingen and Schwenningen thence to Donauschwingen on the Danube.

This route through the Forest proved to be more arduous than I had first believed, but the extra time it took me and the intense heat of the day through which I had to ride were compensated by the extraordinary beauty of the mountains, woods and rivers. The temperature soared to an unbear¬able level during the mid afternoon and under my black Belstaff jacket I was melting. Deep in the Black Forest I was forced by the effects of the heat to stop, strip off and bathe in the shadow of a bridge in a river - the Kinzig at Hausach.

Refreshed, I resumed my journey passing through small hamlets and villages smelling strongly of pinewood which had been cut, planked and slatted ready for making into the cuckoo clocks of which I saw many different shapes and sizes as I passed by the village shops.

Feeling very saddle sore after travelling 314 miles that day, I arrived in Engen-im-Hegau and found a small campsite about a mile to the west of the village.. The first task, as always, was to pitch the tent and unpack after which I sat in the shade of the tent, for it was still too hot even at 7-30 in the evening to sit in the direct light of the setting sun, and made my daily entry into my journal from which this account is written.

Typical of most German campsites, all mod-cons. were available on site and that evening after showering and changing I dined on the restaurant terrace in the clear warm air.

Of the few people I met during dinner, by far the most interesting was an elderly, local chap - Friedrich, who had been a POW in Canada in the last war. With him I spent the last hours of the day in beer and conversation until just before midnight when we parted. Thankfully it was downhill to my tent from the patio.

The next day - Saturday - the day of the exhibition, it was misty when I woke but during breakfast, as the sun rose, the air cleared and by 8-30 I was doing a steady 60 down the autobahn towards Friedrichshafen. There was no traffic on the road I arrived safely in Friedrichshafen and was at the Messegelaende (Exhibition Hall ) shortly after 9 a.m.

The total distance I had travelled from Warrington to Friedrichshafen was 857 miles.

After finding a convenient parking spot and changing out of my bike gear I bought a day ticket and a catalogue and joined the considerable crowd already assembling in the exhibition.

Jim G3NFB

9

YES It's Another Antenna Tale

When I was an Apprentice Electrician in the early 50's I met Joe Alker at St Helens Tech, and we became friends. A few years later we found ourselves working together

at NCB Sutton Manor Colliery. Joe was interested in building a transceiver for top band. He had already acquired an ex WD Bendix RAIB. These receivers were very compact and fitted into the tail end of a Dakota with Bowden cable drives to a remote front panel (you see there is nothing new Hi).

The AM transceiver was built and worked well with about 8 watts output. In those days before 2m FM if you gave a whistle over the top of the Anglesey beacon you would raise several other stations onto a well known part of the band in the middle of the Loran navigation beam.

Joe, later to become G8CHV started to eye up the colliery chimney. One night shift we measured out a distance from the chimney base until we could sight the top of it over the top edge of a piece of cardboard with a string and bob weight attached to the top corner. When the string showed an angle of 45 degrees our base line was the same height as the chimney plus the height from the ground to our eye level. The chimney turned out to be 135ft high, and a quarter wave at 1.9 MHz is about 132ft. Running up the nice, er, brick mast was a lightning conductor so we made plans!

With a piece of matching copper flat bar e.g. 2 inches wide and quarter inch thick we cut a 6 inch length and drilled a series of holes in it. Then at a convenient height we used our flat bar as a template to drill a set of matching holes in the lightning conductor. Now we bolted the copper bar to the back of the lightning conductor and put a hacksaw through it, sealing the joint with denso tape.

On several occasions on future night shifts we broke the joint and worked into Europe with ease. Eventually I left Sutton Manor and the sealed joint was probably still ok when the chimney was knocked down about 8 years ago.

Sadly Joe died in his mid 40s and I lost a good friend.

Albert G3ZHE

Internet Sites of Interest More sites for you to try in those spare moments when the XYL isn't on the 'phone!

Sad to say the www.SMSboy.com site mentioned in our last issue and which allowed you to send messages from your computer to mobile phones has been suspended. I guess the mobile phone companies realised that some revenue was not going into their coffers.

John G0RPG has submitted the following three sites which he says may appeal to members "of a certain age" - What can he mean? Free historic maps. www.old-maps.co.Uk

10

A Simple Charger For Gel Cells Or Sealed Lead Acid Batteries

Trickle chargers for I2 volt batteries have been around in the shops for several years now but the better ones can be expensive and I think my cheapo low tech method is just as good. I have used the idea for about 20 years now and have never lost a battery yet All you need is a standard 12 volt charger for a car battery and a few silicon diodes. If you connect a standard 12v charger to an ex 12v alarm battery, switch on you may see a 5 amp charge and after a while it may drop to 2 or 3 amps. At these charging rates the battery will start to gas off and it will damage itself. There is no free acid in these batteries to slosh about. The acid is contained in material used to separate the lead plates, so that any gassing will vent off and the battery will soon boil dry and become useless. If the vents don't open the battery will blow up (balloon like) and eventually will split the case.

Albert's method uses the idea called constant voltage charging, where the charge voltage is constant and as the battery charges up its rising voltage opposes the charge voltage with the result that the charge current drops. It's a sort of fail-safe system. It also uses the fact that a silicon diode will not pass current until it has about 0.6 to 0.7 volts across it. Put together, the ideas let you drink too much beer, forget it, and go to bed, while the battery will just sit there with a safe trickle charge until you remember it.

The idea is to make a string of silicon diodes in this case 6 1N4007, 1 amp or equivalent, connect one end to the charger positive and the crock clip along the diodes until you have a starting charge current of about 200 milliamps. After a few tests you won’t need any meters you can just leave it to do its work. The diagram (next page) shows the circuit.

Tests done on one of the 1 2v 6 Ah batteries you have seen in the club raffle shows the battery with a start voltage of 12.87v and my charger with an output voltage of 15.6v (note this charger voltage is full wave DC and our meters will indicate the average value of 0.636 of

Bletchley Park. www.bletchleypark.org.uk/index.htm Battle Cruiser Hood. www.hmshood.com/history/History.htm From Bill G0PZP we have http://antiqueradio.org/index.html which is self explanatory.

Adrian M1KAS suggests http://www.mapblast.com for maps, locations, addresses and directions and http://www.peaksys.fsnet.co.uk for packet software from G1IDE. Also http://www.mods.dk/ for modifications to ham rigs and http://www.itis.net/eqf/ for ham radio software. Now some from Ron, G0WJX! If you want to see the space station as it flashes over Manchester log on to this one and click on sightings over cities. http://spaceflight.nasa.gov Hubble Space Telescope - information and wonderful photographs. http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html If you like Private Eye try http://privateeye.uk.msn.com

11

Raffle Power

At the Obey residence battery power is always in demand. The main recipients are a pair of swinging mobiles which cause severe cases of cold turkey when their batteries give

up the ghost and cease their comforting swinging rhythm and light deflection.

The running cost of these optical dummies is about one pound a week so winning a twelve volt seven ampere hour monster battery in the raffle set the grey matter off on a dream of a longer lasting, cheaper source of renewable, (rechargeable) power for the beasties.

peak volts so peak volts is 25.5v With all six diodes in series and the charger crocked onto position "A" I had a start-up charge rate of l40 mA. See list for other typical start-up charge currents

A 140 mA, B 200 mA, (the "B" or "C" position is nice and safe on this battery) C 250 mA, left on "C" for one hour current dropped to I50 mA, D 300 mA, E 380 mA, F 500 mA, G Too high.

If you can’t get more than a m/a or so through the battery and you find the charger and battery volts are about the same it means the battery has a very high internal resistance so it may have already been cooked and its time to throw it into a skip.

If the charger fails or is switched off during charge the battery cannot discharge as diodes will block any reverse current flow. Nice Eh!! 73 from Albert - di di di dah di dah

Albert G3ZHE

Charger

Battery

MA B C D E F G

No Railtrack Problems Here We know that our members are multi-talented because discussions in the bar before and after meetings are often on subjects other than amateur radio and from time to time we have had presentations on members’ other interests. When I heard that Cliff, M1CNP, was planning to make his garden track available to members of The Association of 16mm Narrow Gauge Modellers I engineered an invitation to visit.

If Railtrack thinks it has problems with leaves imagine the effect they can have on this scale but such difficulties were not apparent when the beautifully engineered and constructed steam driven locomotives were brought by their proud owners to Cliff’s QTH. It was no surprise that radio control plays a part in the operation and I saw at least one example of the control of regulator and forward and reverse on a loco. As our picture shows the modellers had also laid on perfect weather for the occasion and my one regret was that I was unable to accept the offer of lunch and, of course, the chance to stay longer and see more models “in steam”.

Ron G0WJX

A call at Maplins one Sunday supplied the sockets and corresponding plugs which would replace the PP3 battery connectors. A small hole was drilled into the base of each of the mobiles and the wires that had been attached to the battery connectors soldered to the socket terminals which now occupied these holes. The plugs were soldered to thin twin core at one end and spade connectors at the raffle prize end and hey presto, two long lasting mobiles were swinging merrily away for a long time to come. BUT, the XYL wanted to know if we could still use PP3s while the raffle prize was being recharged and that’s when I realised that all I had to do in the first place was buy another pair of PP3 connectors and plug them in back to front reversing the polarity of the wiring to the raffle prize. Oh well it should fill a page of the magazine Hi.

George G0MSF