I´m certain that a CW keyer could be built with this gadget.
Here are the instructions to assemble the DrawDio
On December 3, 2009,
in Amateur Radio,
by TF4M
On October 17, 2009,
in Amateur Radio,
by TF4M
Today the winds finally settled and in between freezing rainshowers I decided to hoist up the 60 pound insulators and antenna wires for the King´s antenna.
The antenna wires are #8 CopperWeld – copper covered steel wires with a breaking strength of 2500lbs / 1100kg.
My good neighbor, Finnbjörn from Litlaeyri, Airport Manager, came to assist me on the ground and he took these photos on my camera.
I began by pulling up the right hand side insulator and antenna wires while still on the ground. I then attached a climbing rope to my harness and the other end to the left hand insulator and antenna wires already assembled on the platform.
Attaching the right hand side insulator went well, but the climbing rope attached to the other insulator managed to wind itself around the feedpoint box at the bottom of the pole.
Finnbjörn came to the rescue and untangled the rope, saving me a trip to the platform and back up again.
It was extremely difficult to attach the second insulator until I discovered that one of the antenna wires had snagged on the platform. Finnbjörn also saved me a trip back down by untangling the wire.
This was the most difficult part of constructing this antenna and I am glad it is behind me. I must be getting old 
On September 20, 2009,
in Amateur Radio,
by TF4M
Yngvi, TF3Y operated TF4X in the 51st Scandinavian Activity Contest on CW over the weekend.
The day before the contest, he made around 800 contacts to get acquainted with the new shack.
The score is higher than last year´s winning score in the Single Operator – 20M category.
Yngvi, TF3Y operating TF4X
At this point it looks like TF4X has the highest score in this category – this may of course change as scores get submitted…
I made some recordings of the contest with my Beverage antenna system and the PERSEUS SDR.
You may download a file (147 MB) of the last few minutes of the contest spectrum on 20M CW and play back the spectrum using WinRad on your own computer.
In order for WinRad to be able to play back recordings made by the PERSEUS software, you will have to download the PERSEUS DLL for WinRad and extract the files to the WinRad directory.
If there is demand, I can provide larger files of the last hour of so on 20M during the contest.
The station performed as expected, except we discovered, when I operated TF4M on 80M, that the 80M antenna is located too close to the JA rhombic, causing 80M operation to trip the protection circuits on the amplifier on the 20M station.
I operated TF4M on 80M for 45 minutes out of the 24 hours and made 50 contacts.
Without bandpass filters in place, this discovery would have followed the total destruction of the 20M transceiver. As it were, there was no damage, although the JA rhombic was picking up 50W or so from the 80M antenna….
The first indication of a problem was that I could hear faint noise coming from the 20M operation when listening on the TX antenna – there was no trace of any noise using the Beverage system.
I cascaded two sets of bandpass filters on both 80M and 20M stations, but I could still hear faint interference and then we noticed the faulting of the 20M amplifier when the station was switched to the JA rhombic.
I will solve the problem by relocating the 80M transmit antenna.
On September 8, 2009,
in Amateur Radio,
by TF4M
As a new radio amateur in 1984, I noticed a spelling error on the Post Office in Selfoss. The text is meant to be POSTUR OG SIMI, but a tile is missing causing the letter U to be misspelled as H !
I spoke with the station manager in 1984 who promised to see to that the error was fixed but the spelling error is still there !
Unbelievable.
On August 13, 2009,
in Amateur Radio,
by TF4M
Today, the call TF4X has been issued for use at the TF4M station.
