144 MHz FT8 communications

I was curious to see if an old 2 m transceiver was able to handle FT-8 signals. Therefore I removed the dust from my 40 year old Sommerkamp FT-480R and connected it to my pc via  a simple interface.

After waiting a few minutes, the internal oscillator of the FT-480R appeared to be stable enough to make good FT-8 contacts. Both in low power (1 Watt) and hi power (10 Watt) I could make nice QSO’s around 144.175 MHz. FT-8 activity in UK, B, F and D allowed me to make contacts with the neighbour countries .

145 MHz transverter

Currently I am working on a 145 MHz - 50 MHz transverter. I combined various circuits and built it in Manhattan Style. 

The core is a 96 MHz oscillator that enables me to tx and rx from 144...146 MHz in all modes available (FM, SSB, AM) on the HF transceiver (dial IF 48...50 MHz). 

Blockdiagram is as follows:

Ordered a nice frequency counter and DVM from Ali and drilled some openings in the casing to incorporate them.

Yesterday I made my first QSO with Rob PA0RPA on 145.625 MHz via the Bergen op Zoom 2m repeater (The HF transceiver enables the use of -600 kHz freq shift / 88.5 Hz tone for repeater use)

I still have to connect the 250 uA meter. I will install a simple fieldstrength detection circuit for it.

First results in SSTV mode look promising;

Received from PE1NYG in Pijnacker via SSTV repeater PI1DFT on 144.8875 MHz in Delft.

OZ on 160m

I made some nice QSO's on 160m, 1840 kHz, lately. Of course my longwire antenna is much too short for this band, nevertheless I was surprised by the amount of stations I could see in FT8.

Jan, OZ1ADL, rewarded one of the QSO's with a nice eQSL.