My Blog
Welcome to my Blog, this is my personal journal.
Random thoughts, squawks & plaudits found here.
The good, the bad and the sometimes ugly.
On this day in May 2021, I was allocated the callsign ZL4KJ!
This will become my primary call sign for use on air, I am in the process of migrating over to the new call sign and building a new log.
I have archived both the ZL2KEJ website and logbook. New logbook generated for ZL4KJ and the website address has been modified to reflect this change.
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- Category: Amateur Radio
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Any Amateur Radio Operator should know what a signal report is. The R-S-T system is a good way of being informed how well you are being received by another station.
For those who need a refresher, I suggest having a read of VK5PAS Signal Reports webpage. His article was also one of the reasons I decided to write this blog post.
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- Category: Amateur Radio
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I've been getting some queries with regards to the modification to allow the FT-818ND transmit on 60m.
While this has been done on my Yaesu FT-818ND I never documented or filmed the process as there is already plenty of information regarding this on the net. Basically you need to remove some 0Ω resisters or bridges from the back of the LCD PCB.
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- Category: Amateur Radio
- Hits: 5435
I've had the Yaesu FT-818ND for nearly 3 months now so figured it was time to do an actual review on the rig.
I got hooked on the idea of FT-818 from a friend who had one given it's much smaller and lighter than my FT-897D I thought it would be ideal for portable operating.
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- Category: Amateur Radio
- Hits: 5499
After operating my Yaesu FT-818ND for several days, I noticed that even though the backlight was set to auto in menu option 10. The backlight was never actually turning off.
Thinking it may have been the mod that allows the radio to TX on 60m (yes, I have a sub-licence for 60m so am allowed it) I reversed the mod to confirm this.
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- Category: Amateur Radio
- Hits: 5336
I recently converted to Microchip Tech PIC micro-controllers after using AVR from Atmel, I found myself enjoying the learning process and challenges that came with it. Getting my head around MPLAB is an on going process. I often see people bag MPLAB but honestly, it works. It's not as nice as AVR Studio (which I'm use to given that I use Visual Studio too)
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- Category: Electronics
- Hits: 4615
Read more: PIC Micro-controllers and 74HC595 Shift Registers
I ran into an issue with my C# development, in the mdi-child forms being allowed to be opened multiple times. Which for the application I am developing at the moment, is not a good thing.
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- Category: Development
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I've managed to get version checking working within my application that I'm porting to C# from VB .net.
This may not be the best method, but it appears to work quite well. I do have it checking against a file on a web server to get the latest available version, that involved streamreader and a webclient. But for this example I simply hard coded the updversion as a string.
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- Category: Development
- Hits: 3345