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The two Motorola GP300 radios that I bought for parts / not working actually work. I cleaned up the corroded terminal tabs on both handsets. Batteries are shot which is to be expected on radios this old. I tested both handsets, one has a sticky transmit and the other is perfect both are around 425 MHz... I look forward to working on these properly and getting them programmed up on HAM bands.

The old antennas are worn and rubber coming off but I'll be able to rebuild these antennas into better ones. I removed the belt clips from the old batteries, its always good hanging onto these. I would also like to salvage the radio rentals stickers that are on the batteries before I discard the old batteries.

There is nothing like getting an old Motorola radio or any PMR radio and getting it all cleaned & fixed up, programmed and working. I particularly like the old Tait T2000 series radios. Those can be fun to work on as well as Motorola's. Its all very well buying a cheap baofeng or whatever but having fun repairing old equipment is enjoyable, something that is slowly disappearing from the amateur radio hobby.

As the batteries are totally dead I was thinking about breaking them open and taking out the dead cells then soldering some wires to them and making a backpack Motorola battery pack but I will need a circuit to build to drop 12 volts DC down to 7.5 Volts DC...
 
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Or maybe I could try and do a AA rechargeable battery mod to the old batteries... its times like this I wish I had a 3D printer I could build my own.
 
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I've just been looking at the Baofeng UV-25. A nice big chunky radio that is said to output 10 watts. From tests I've seen the radio outputs 9 watts on 2 Meters and 8 watts on 70CM and it has air band AM receive, however the big battery could have a higher capacity as its a bit low considering the size of the battery.

It does come with some interesting looking antennas, I'm not sure how they perform but what I do know is that the 28.5 inch Abbree antenna does perform decently from experiments I've seen on YouTube.

There are a lot of cheap Chinese radios but all do more or less the same thing. I would really like to see something else that has a 6 Meter band or maybe even a 11/10 Meter Baofeng in the style of the UV-25. A 6 Meter version would be cool & bonus if it included the 4 meter band and possibly have SSB rather than just FM. If the Chinese market started to produce SSB & more bands other than 2/70 FM only radios they would make a lot of money from making these.
 
I've been thinking a lot about 6 Meters, I could make a dipole for 6 meters and hang it out of my bedroom window but it would have to be horizontally polarized which is good for SSB modes. Hanging stuff out of my bedroom window it really the only place I can radiate signals in to the sky maybe not so good for FM for 2/70 tho because you need height for those higher frequencies.

I have nothing for 6 meters, so I'll need to hunt for a 6 meter transceiver...
 
I've been looking more into HF and what is possible. I'm not one for giving up easily, there is always a way even if its better than nothing.

First I'm going to look into just receiving at this point in time where I can at least have something setup at home, one thing I've thought about is a long piece of wire that goes around the edges of the ceilings in a big square type thing with a transformer on the end where the coax then connects... I forget what these antennas are called, now this alone could be good for receiving HF signals or maybe not but worth a try because you never know and Ham radio is all about experimentation after all. Who knows I may even be able to transmit on low power into it.

I know people have had success with small compromise HF antennas in there attic so its not impossible to have something going even if its not very much its a start.

I do have a bit of an attic "no roof access" so something might work up there although noise floor will be high so I will need to eliminate that challenge, a mag loop with auto tune would be a dream... I'm not clued up on HF antennas as one could probably tell but there has to be a way.

I remember some time ago I was able to travel a fair distance when I setup a half wave V dipole in my living room on 11 meters without too much of an issue but it wasn't piratical and nobody wants a huge antenna dominating there living space, the fact that it worked tells me that something is possible with an end fed random wire style HF antenna indoors.

In my bedroom I have just about enough ceiling space for a quarter wave 20 meter antenna along the ceiling, I can drill a small hole into the living room to fit the other leg of the wire dipole so then it becomes a half wave antenna on 20 meters.

Now I know there was some roof work done recently so I don't know what is on the other side of the ceiling but there is only one way to find out. I will cut out a small section of the plaster board and if I don't see any foil insulation then I'm good to go. I do know I don't have it in the attic so maybe I'm in luck. I do know that there are metal studs in the ceiling that hold the roof tiles in place.
 
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The AM PRO antenna looks like something that could work for my situation for 80 Meters, is it the best antenna... definitely not... well it work maybe... at 245 CM that's around 8 foot bearing in mind I will need a ground plane of some kind or two AM PRO's in a dipole configuration although all is a bit hopeless without getting it outside, I could probably hang one leg of the dipole out of the window. Unless there is a better way idea. It all sounds iffy but this is the best I can come up with for 80 meters, however 20 meters is very doable and 40 meters can be done with a mag loop or compromised shortened wire antenna.

Edit: I may just scrap the idea of 80 meters, I may just settle on RX only for 80 meters. I'll aim to do something for 20 meters instead and then go from there. 40 meters possible. I think 80 will be out of the question at least for TX.
 
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Just remember that with any indoor aerial that you're going to get RF in the shack so you will need a lot of ferrite chokes for pretty much any bit of wire otherwise it's going to be mayhem.

CY9C is doing a grand job from St Paul Island. It's not been activated for five years or so and although I worked them back in 2012, I've been picking up a few new slots. They're very strong and pretty easy to work.
 
Feek said:
CY9C is doing a grand job from St Paul Island. It's not been activated for five years or so and although I worked them back in 2012, I've been picking up a few new slots. They're very strong and pretty easy to work.
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Ten slots so far, all FT8 or CW. I’ve not heard them on SSB yet, they’re concentrating on CW and FT8 to get as many in the log as possible.

The last couple of evenings, they’ve been incredibly loud on both 10m and 12m with huge pileups.
 
I've not even heard them on 15m CW and SSB and I'd quite like to pick up those slots but doing OK though. They're not difficult to work.

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Cosimo said:
Just got them on 17m with FT8 F/H.
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Nice, I think they've swapped to the standard F/H mode now.

I picked up 15m SSB earlier today but didn't manage to break the pileup for 20m SSB and I'm still looking for 15m CW. I've now got a HamClock running on a Pi in the shack and it's really useful for an instant glance of what propagation is doing.

The best DX Cluster for HamClock

How to configure the HamClock application to connect to the best DX Cluster node.
hamclock.co.uk hamclock.co.uk
 
VP6WR in Pitcairn Island is active now. I woke up this morning, drifted into the shack, switched the HamClock screen on and as I've got him in as a watched callsign, he was showing highlighted in red.

Turned the wireless on, tuned the SteppIR to 20m and saw he was very, very strong running multiple FT8 streams, it looked like MSHV with no special messages so rather than assume he was only working stations above 1000 Hz, I called below him and made the contact very quickly for ATNO #305.

Now just managed on 10m as well, that took a bit longer as he wasn't especially strong and just two streams. This time, it looked like full FH mode so I was calling up high.
 
Did anyone do anything for CQ WW this weekend? Conditions were generally decent and 10m was heaving all weekend, although I only made 70 or so contacts on 10m. I was concentrating on a semi-casual entry on 15m where I managed around 500 QSOs, 107 countries and 32 zones.
 
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