Gps

Portable Radio Setup

I’ve been wanting to document my portable radio setup for a while, so finally here is that blog post. This is a QRP setup, intended primarily for digimodes on HF.

HF antenna set up on Elrick Hill, Aberdeen

First I want to talk about the antenna setup. Pictured above is the antenna set up on Elrick Hill in Aberdeen. I walked straight up the hill last weekend with the kit and had the antenna up in under 10 minutes. The lower guy ropes can be put in without assistance as they are short enough to be able to hold the mast while you push the pegs in. If it had been windier I’d have done those and then I have a second set of guy ropes that go half way between those and the top.

Light OpenStreetMapping with GPS

Now that lockdown is lifting a bit in Scotland, I’ve been going a bit further for exercise. One location I’ve been to a few times is Tyrebagger Woods. In theory, I can walk here from my house via Brimmond Hill although I’m not yet fit enough to do that in one go.

Instead of following the main path, I took a detour along some route that looked like it wanted to be a path but it hadn’t been maintained for a while. When I decided I’d had enough of this, I looked for a way back to the main path but OpenStreetMap didn’t seem to have the footpaths mapped out here yet.

OpenBSD with GPS synchronised NTP

I wrote on Monday about how I’ve swapped my home router for an OpenBSD box. One of the fun things I’ve done with this box is configure it as a network time server using ntpd(8).

Synchronising time with servers on the Internet isn’t that exciting, but I’ve had a USB GPS dongle sitting doing nothing for a while. I originally purchased it to use with amateur radio projects but I haven’t done much radio recently. It looks like you can pick these up on eBay for around £11.00 and the newer ones also support GLONASS (mine only does GPS as far as I can tell).

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
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