SELBYHAMRADIO.COM DX GROUP

For good quality cable! Aircell 7 from Diode and the results are astounding! Germany 5/9 on 10watts! Please take a look at his site.

Tony M3UEO often appears on tv and radio talking about UFO's.

http://www.youtube.com/TONYOPSUFO

The general election has proven to be a winner from the point of view of M3VDH who must be a Mason as he predicted the outcome of the general election, we also have sent a warning to all fellow hams that Anton M3VND is now on Facebook, the enduring image of Anton as Bert from Sesame Street on his Facebook has left us all laughing. One thing that has not made us laugh is Anton’s purchase of the latest ICOM radio fitted with DSTAR, which has overheated on a couple of occasions, we feel that the radio is plastic fantastic and not of the design build that ICOM radio’s should be. This is makes us all wonder if the quality of some of these radio’s are becoming degraded. Listen to some of the boys on two metres and we hear them using ex PMR gear, gear from the seventies that is still going strong, I did have a Kenwood TR5000 that had great audio on it and was very sensitive. A fine example of fascination over the HF bands has been the big sound from the big apple W2PY I attempted to work him QRP but to no avail, what is amazing is that he uses a Swan HF radio not sure of the make, but after all these years the radio is still going strong, and he can be heard all across Europe. One thing that I am a fan of is the tv series The Professionals, and I have often kept a close eye on the radio’s Bodie & Doyle use, which has mainly been the PYE radio’s. What is fascinating is the story behind the small handheld radios that they use during some of the scenes, one such radio which I shall look out for at a rally working or not, is the PYE PF8; Step forward G3XBM has he tells a story of how his design of the PF8 found fame with CI5. During the seventies it was quite a radical design, with AM and and an output of approximately 500mw on a single channel. The design was radical for it’s age and G3XBM was proud to be the designer of the antenna in the PF8 which consisted of two metal plates he says, “The design is essentially a plate antenna i.e. a plate above another plate with radiation off the edges. In essence it was a dipole with capacitive end loading, but no real dipole wire. Instead this was just a hairpin loop inductor tuned with a small 1-5pF trimmer. As the capacitance would have been too high with a solid "top" plate I replaced this with a skeleton plate using a wire defining just the outside of the plate. The tuning was very sharp (indicating low losses for a very small antenna) and indeed the antenna did perform very well indeed. I have often wondered about scaling this up for VHF or HF.” G3XBM comments that his design for the audio of the radio was also incorporated into other designs, by increasing the pre-emphasis gain this ended up making a very nice 200mw handheld for AM. A good time was had by all at the Tees Barrage Caravan site, where once again the local 2m quiz was on air, and the usual PMR signals were very active, if you are in the area of Teesside a very active frequency is the Tees VTS (Vessel Traffic Service) which is on 156.700, other river traffic was also heard on 156.450, this frequency is often used by river traffic in our area and Goole. That is all for now, the pub beckons for heated discussion......73s M3UEO. Thanks to G3XBM for the interesting story.

Dave M3VDH

Paula M3VTX

Anton M3VND

Take a look at our YouTube video’s just click the link! I also have my own Youtube site doltare

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Tony M3UEO

The best site on the net for D-Star is the South Yorkshire repeater group who are very helpful! Please support the group as they have the best D-Star repeater in Yorkshire.

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