A few more steps taken today. Not being able to wait for the final part (the antenna connection between the M802 and the AT-140) I drove round to radio shack to get a substitute. I connected all the parts and made an antenna out of some mains cable I had spare. The weather in NJ is lousy today so there was no way I was going to go climbing trees let along simply going outside and getting wet. So my Mk I antenna is strung up indoors from one of the house to the other. Not sure if Helen is overly pleased by this but she’s letting me play for now.
I don’t have a proper ground so I’ve made a counterpoise based on some recommendations I received on the internet. The radio seems to work but few channels are in use. The M802 comes with many preprogrammed channels (frequency, mode, etc.) so it’s easy to run through these. I was able to find a time signal and a weather fax channel. I also opened up the HAM channels using a technique I found on the internet and was able to scan the HAM bands. I managed to listen in briefly to one side of a conversation on the 20m band. I guess the other guy was out of range of my ramshackle set up.
Back to the weatherfax channel I downloaded SeaTty 2.0 and plugged my laptop mic into the transceiver. After some messing around this is the best I could get.
As you can see it’s a bit fuzzy. Chances are this is due to my setup. An ex-neighbour emailed me to say indoor antennas are not very effective. This means I can look forward to some improvement when the weather lets me start climbing trees in the back yard / garden.
Weather faxes over the sideband radio are very important to the sailor – particularly when far from shore. Learning how to capture these effectively is a skill I need to develop. I’ll upload more as I get better.
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