Archive for the ‘Car’ Category

It’s been months

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

It’s been months since I last posted here. Getting on for 2 months! That’s worrying. Since then, a lot has changed. I’ve bought a new car:

My New Car!

That’s been the main thing. I’ve had a really bad cold. The radio club, BRES, has finally closed, with members moving on to two new clubs, LEFARS and Havering ARS; I joined both. I’ve worked on a few projects, and done various other smaller tinkerings. Easter has happened. I updated the menus on the website. However, I’ve done very little on my PhD. And tomorrow, that must change.

I mentioned the cold; that’s kept me from working on my PhD since the Easter break finished. I’ve felt very bad and run down from that. The thought of sifting through code to find the small bug just made me feel queezy. Tomorrow the fun starts. So this was just a heads up that things would be changing and I need to get back into the swing of things. Yiannis isn’t going to put up with this crap any longer, and to be honest, I don’t expect him to – He shouldn’t have to. So goodnight world. Expect an update soon! Night!

Posted in BRES, Car, Clubs, Electronics, Family, Havering ARS, Loughton & Epping F. ARS, PhD, Radio, Social, Website | No Comments »

CQWW Contest

Saturday, October 29th, 2011

Today started as a mad dash to get everything done. I had to organise all the radio gear for the contest, as well as get my car in a working order once again. Digging out the Linear amplifier and associated stuff had me have to fix the Bird Thru-line which took a while (just had to re-glue the meter glass). Once that was done, we were on our way. The main website has a few pictures of our CQWW set up.

All told we worked about 40 people today. Not particularly many, but the weather was cold and we had some antenna issues too. Turns out you can have an random wire antenna too long, and as such the ATU did not have enough capacitance to match the wire on 10 metre band where all the DX seemed to be. We did work Montenegro, Australia and the USA, amongst more local stations. We, Dave and I, are unsure if we will be going tomorrow.

Posted in Car, Radio | No Comments »

A belated post for Yesterday

Friday, October 28th, 2011

So yesterday was a bit of a busy day. Mum and I went to get Alice’s car from the dealers as it had to have some injector seals changed (you could smell fumes in the cabin with the engine running). Then we went for lunch at Burger King before spending the afternoon reading papers for work and helping Alice with her Physics/Maths homework.

The radio club held it’s AGM where it was discussed about the future of the club. I then ended up with a Tea Urn to sell on eBay. We returned the 50m of Coax to Dave Mills, G7UVW, (we went halfs on 100m drum).

After the club meeting, I finished of the final part of my Twitter Ticker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIzpQmczljQ

Posted in BRES, Car, Electronics, Food, Lunch, Radio | No Comments »

Car Electrics

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011

Today’s project was to fix the fault with my car. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had to jump-start the car on Friday nights. I’ve use the car all weekend. When returning to the car next week, I find that the battery is once again completely flat. I had the battery checked and tested good! Returning home with the battery, I gave it a full charge on a 10 amp power supply. Reconnecting it to the car we measured a 1.16 amp idle current, when the car was locked, which dropped to 380 milli-amp after 5 minutes. I expect this is far too high a value which explains why the battery discharges over the course of a week. I wasn’t sure if the Mobile APRS hardware was causing issues. Time will tell. I will remove fuses from the fusebox to see how this affets the current.

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