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Wiki-d Pirate Site
2006-12-23 03:48:02
Was doing a bit of 'Googling', as you do, and came across an attempt by Anthony Page (of Radio Nemesis fame), to start a pirate radio Wiki .The page at freeradio.wiki-site.com mostly recounts the history of many of the pirate radio stations who graced the airwaves in the South Yorkshire and Derbyshire areas in the 1980's and 1990's; but it's also not a bad attempt to try and define some of the terms such as 'stereo' and 'link' so it get's an 'A' for effort, though at present probably no more than about a 'C' for achievement. With help from people such as you (yes, you) then maybe it could get a lot better. There's also a good description of a number of the pirate stations that used to broadcast in that area including: * Rebel Radio 105.2 (with Scooter Jones) * Ocean FM 106.3 from Rotherham (which is nowhere near the sea!) * WLNG 104.9 of Scunthorpe (who get a mention here) * Radio Britannia from Barnsley with ...
More About: Pirate , Site , Rate , Irate

Skywave Striptease
2006-12-20 03:46:07
Here at Wireless Waffle, we have spent the last month tracking down the perfect Christmas present for the radio enthusiast. Something classy and stylish that would enhance even the lamest of radio installations and make them sparkle and gleam. Something that will make everyone look at your aerial with amazement, requiring double and triple takes in order to believe the awesomeness (yes, that is a word!) of your antenna.And after literally minutes of research, we have discovered the 'Antenna Doll' - an authentic plastic pole dancer who is already stripped to her undies and is ready and willing to spruce up the season with her sexy moves. According to the packaging, special features include:* Fits on Standard Car Antennas* Heavy Duty Plastic* Moves with Motion of VehicleWhat's more, this must-have gift for the wireless wayfarer comes in several different variants guaranteed to make your pole stand to attention including the ravishing dark haired damsel 'Raven...
More About: Trip , Strip , Ease , Wave , Teas

Antenna Plural Bugbear
2006-11-14 21:54:17
Aaaaargh... Why is it that so many people insist on using the wrong plural for antenna? It's soooo annoying. There are two plurals of the word 'antenna':Antenna s - a technical term meaning more than one antenna or aerialAntennae - a zoological term meaning more than one antenna of an insect natureDon't confuse the two! I often see articles where people say that they have erected 'antennae' at home. Really? They've spent an afternoon mounting insect feelers on their house? Interestingly the entomological community rarely make the same mistake. It's not common for them to claim to have found a new kind of bug with aerials growing from its head!If you don't believe me, take a look at the screen-shot above taken from answers.com which clearly defines the two different plurals and their different meetings.To avoid all confusion, try using 'aerial' to mean a radio antenna, that way there's no confusion as the plural is quite ob...
More About: Plural , Al B , Ural , Bear

A noisy noise annoys a noisy oyster
2006-11-09 21:48:02
When I'm at home, my receiver is usually switched on monitoring one frequency or another, commonly 145.500 or the local 70 cm repeater. Yesterday I was doing the latter and it soon became apparent that there was some active tropogation around. In addition to my local repeater, other amateur repeaters from typically 300km distant were fading in and out with regularity. What I noticed, however, was that the audio for all these distant repeaters (and, mysteriously, the local ones too) was accompanied by a rather annoying crackle.My first thought was that the coax cable feeding the antenna must have a dry joint in it somewhere and the gentle wind blowing it back and forth was causing an intermittent connection. But I checked reception of repeaters on 2 metres and these were clear of the crackling noise which indicated that the effect was real, and was being received right across the 430-440 MHz band. The next port of call was the various items of household equipment that could c...
More About: Noise , Anno

London Airport Frequencies
2006-11-02 21:42:02
As if this site isn't littered with enough useless information already, here's a load more. Having travelled to and from the various London airports on a number of occasions, I thought it would be nice to have an up-to-date list of the various air traffic control frequencies used at them (so that whilst en-route to the airport or waiting in the lounge I could tune-in to see exactly how delayed my flight is). Using the all-knowing Google proved rather confusing as lots and lots of differing lists appeared, so I decided to compile the lists together and then take a listen to see which channels were clearly active and which were now obsolete.The results are posted below and only those frequencies heard to be active during random monitoring sessions in October 2006 are listed. The frequencies shown in italics were listed on a number of sites (sufficient to believe that they are for real) but monitoring showed that there was no activity, so they're listed just in case! ...
More About: Airport , Port , Ondo

Tropogation
2006-10-20 10:21:03
Most day-to-day 'DX' propagation experienced by radio users at VHF and UHF frequencies relies on some interaction between their signal and the troposphere (the troposphere is the lower layers of the atmosphere extending up to about 10 miles above sea level). For anyone wanting to find out more about the different modes of tropospheric propagation, there is an excellent article by William Hepburn that describes them all. The same web-site also gives 5 day predictions as to the possible level of tropospheric propagation that can be expected too - very interesting.Having recently installed a simple VHF antenna on my house, I thought I'd do the usual thing and tune around the various amateur repeaters to see what kind of coverage I was achieving. According to predictions that I had done, I expected to be able to just about receive transmitters from a maximum of 80 miles away (my location is nothing special). I was a bit surprised to discover that I could regularly hear...

The Digital Dividend: How does that work then?
2006-10-20 10:21:03
As anyone who has bought a new television in the UK in the past year or so will know, it is the Government's intention to close down all analogue TV transmitters by the end of the year 2012. It's main reason for doing this is to release some of the channels used for broadcasting so that they can be used for 'new users' (presumably ones that they see as being more lucrative!)The plan is for a rolling conversion of all television transmitters in the country to change from analogue to digital. In doing this, of the four existing analogue frequencies used to carry BBC1, BBC2, ITV1 and Channel 4, only three of these will continue to be used - one will be freed for the aforementioned mysterious new users. The three frequencies still in use will carry three digital mulitplexes ensuring national provision of all BBC, ITV, Channel 4 services including CBBC, BBC News 24, ITV2, ITV3, E4 and so on, so there's no need to worry about people losing their favourite progra...
More About: Work , Hat , Digital , Digi , That

All-band Antennas for Skinflints
2006-10-20 10:21:03
With apologies to anyone who may be offended: radio amateurs tend to be a tight-fisted bunch. Often this attitude perpetrates from having other priorities in life (family, holidays, beer etc); sometimes it stems from wishing to prove the age-old maxim 'any fool can do for a pound, what a good engineer can do for a penny'; sometimes it is as a result of having grown up scrimping and saving for the latest hi-spec transistor (which are now available for 5 pence from RadioShack); and sometimes, to be fair, it's just because they don't have much money.However, it's equally fair to say that radio amateurs tend to be very ingenious. They have often been at the forefront of the development of new radio technologies, and even today, when technology has massively overtaken the capability of most amateurs, they still find clever solutions to a range of radio problems. One problem which amateurs have been finding solutions to for years, is the problem of installing a...
More About: Band , Skin , Antenna

2dBi or 2dBd, that is the question
2006-10-20 10:21:03
Something that I found confusing when first learning about the 'black art' of radio is that there seemed to be some argument about the gain figures quoted for antennas. Take a look at this example: The gain figure quoted for this Comet GP-3 dual-band 144/432 MHz antenna is shown as 4.5 and 7.2 dB respectively for the two bands. But any 11th grade physics student will tell you that dB or 'deciBel' is just a ratio between two numbers. So a figure of 4.5 dB is meaningless unless it is 4.5 dB with respect to some reference or other - and this is where the confusion arises...To circumvent this confusion, an additional letter or letters is usually added after the dB to indicate what the reference point is. So 'dBuV' is 'dB relative to 1 microVolt (uV)', and 'dBm' is 'dB relative to 1 milliWatt (m)' and 'dBW' is 'dB relative to 1 Watt'. So what is the reference point for our antenna gain, and why is there p...
More About: Question , Hat , Quest , That

Mystery No. 29612 - Solved!
2006-10-20 10:21:03
Tuning around the amateur bands during recent sporadic-E openings, I regularly stumbled across voice traffic in a slavic language on 29612.0 kHz USB (upper side band). The format of the traffic was clearly not amateur, and given this, and the fact that it is right in the middle of the relatively active 10 metre FM section of the band but was not FM made me wonder what it might be. Enjoying a mystery I managed to make a short recording of some of the traffic [304kB windows media file] at around 14:15 GMT on 17 July 2006.Not speaking whatever language it is I posted a message on the Utility DXers Forum message board. What a great set of individuals! Within half a day I'd received a response that the most likely culprit of the signal I heard was the Russian Air Defence (the Protivovozdushnoy Oborony or PVO) who track all aircraft through their airspace giving a continuous read-out (quite literally!) of the sector quadrant and the corresponding coordinates of each aircraft.It tur...
More About: Mystery , Myst

Sporadic-al-E
2006-10-20 10:21:03
Driving along the M4 motorway yesterday evening, I was trying to listen to the news on BBC Radio 4. As usual, the RDS Alternative Frequency (AF) service was doing a good job at re-tuning my radio to a new transmitter once I disappeared out of the coverage of the one I was tuned to. Not long into my journey I noticed that my radio was struggling to find a clear frequency and that even the best it could find was swamped by interference. Having experienced this before, I wondered whether there might be Spor adic-E propagation around. A quick tune to the low end of the FM band confirmed there was.Sporadic-E propagation exists when the sun's radiation ionises layers of gas in the 'E'-layers of the ionosphere. These ionised layers refract radio signals, often up to high VHF frequencies, enabling signals from far afield to be easily received. Usually such ionisation forms in relatively small 'clouds' such that the signals which are refracted in any one area mi...

Wire-More LAN (Part III)
2006-10-20 10:21:03
Looking back at the analysis of WiFi antenna performance I conducted recently, it struck me that to maximise the performance of a Wire less LAN there are two factors at play. One is the strength of the signal, clearly enhanced by the higher gain antenna. The other is the amount of background noise. It is not for nothing that the quality of the link from the wireless access point to the computers is measured in terms of 'signal to noise'. Wireless LANs (at least variants 802.11b and 802.11g) operate in the frequency range 2400 - 2483.5 MHz (this extends to 2495 MHz in Japan only, and not all of the band is available in all countries, noteably France which does not have access to frequencies below 2450 MHz), known as the 2.4 GHz band. This band is not exclusively set aside for use by WiFi equipment, but is in fact shared with many different users. The transmitters of each of these users will increase the overall background noise in the band and if strong enough, will ca...
More About: Part , More

ITU Frequency Allocation Tables
2006-10-20 10:21:03
Something that's always been a nuisance is that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has made it's frequency allocation tables (i.e. the table which shows which frequencies are allocated to which services in which countries) something that has to be paid for if you want a full copy. The 'ITU Radio Regulations' is a large set of documents that describe radio usage and the heart of it is a set of 3 regional tables that allocate frequencies to specific uses and currently costs 252 Swiss Francs (about GBP107 at today's exchange rate). If you just want to know whether fixed links have an allocation at 8 GHz in France, that's rather a lot to pay.I was delighted, therefore, to discover that the Region 1 (Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asiatic Russia) and Region 3 (Asia and Australasia) information can now be access for free on the web-site of telecommunications consultants 'InterConnect Communications'. Their Electronic Frequency ...
More About: Cat , Tables , Location , Tabl , Loca