Stuck! Then not so

So On the way home from work on Friday I got a call from a friend, who said that he had got his car a little stuck. Upon getting out to the property where he lives this is what I found:

Now I hadn't expected him to be only a little stuck for him to have to call me. But I hadn't expected him to be stuck because he tried to get through a dam. Moral to the story, you'll get stuck if you try to drive through a dam. Also interestingly enough he probably could have gotten out if he could lock his differentials so that both tires would spin at the same speed.

Thankfully the Jeep was up to the task, however not without low range. It wouldn't do anything in high range 4wd. When I put it in low range I managed to sucessfully dig up 4 little homes where the wheels were:

Not the best photo, but the light was just about gone by then. So after moving a few feet to the right and using a snatching technique, rather than a standing start. We managed to break the chain that was holding the strap onto the Toyota; then finally it was free. And this was the hole it left behind:

Anyhow, all ended well and we had a lemonade at the house then headed home. So it seems I can pull a car out of the mud with the Jeep.

I got a bit of work done on a few projects over the long weekend so over the next few days I'll be putting stuff up on those so keep an eye out.

Cheers,
Rex

Cold weather

So just a short update here. This was the roof of the Jeep the other day at 9:00AM. Admittedly it was parked in the shade, but still.

And yes, this does have something to do with my desire to build a boat and liveaboard it. It's a lot easier to chase the weather when your entire house can move.

Cars, Grounds and Radios

So I managed to get a little done over the weekend. The grounding for my HF radio has always been a little unsatisfactory to me. So I set out to improve that a little. Currently I only have a stake half buried into the ground below my vertical antenna.

 To improve this I have added 4 radials of equal length at as long as possible within my yard. I know that 4 radials is not ideal, however I am expecting a significant improvement over the current system. One of the biggest concerns I have is with my connection point.

This is where the joint between the radials and the wire that will connect to the bracket for the antenna. Unfortunately at this point I tried to heat up my soldering iron and it just won't heat up. So I'm going to have to see if I can borrow a soldering iron from somebody.

So seeing as I couldn't do anymore out here I decided to put my VHF Ham set into the Jeep. This was one of those projects that I got a little excited about so I don't have any photos of that. But I still have to mount an antenna so I'll get some pictures then.

After I finished setting up the radio I decided to chase some wires that are attached to what seem to be microphones in the cab. Chasing those lead me to this little box:

Chasing the wires from the other end of that box lead through the firewall and eventually to this box under the bonnet on the passenger's side:

Upon unplugging this and removing it from the car I was quite surprised by what I found on the opposite side of that box.

So this was not really expected and thankfully off and not activated, otherwise we could very well have had a very exciting time getting to this stage. I have it off and on my desk at the moment so I'll see if there is anything useful or interesting and I might put it back in. Otherwise I will see if I can remove all of the wiring that it has, just to minimize the spaghetti mess inside the car.

More Radios

Hi All,

I got another chance to play with the radios. This time I decided that I would see if I can connect to the Mt Bindo Repeater using one of the radios that have been very generously passed onto me. Looking through the ones I had it was looking like I was going to have to give one of the two Icom IC-22S units that I have a go. The only problem is that I was told one of them doesn't work and I couldn't remember which one that was. So it was time to start experimenting.

The first problem I had was that on the end of the power cable away from the radio there was a plug that looked like this:

Now I have never seen a plug like that and couldn't find a socket here for it to plug into. So I cut it off with about 4 inches of cord still attached so that when I find a socket for it I can still use this. Once that was sorted and connected up to the 12v power supply I connected up the older looking dustier unit that had some of the programmed frequencies written on paper taped to the top of it. At this point I fired it up and tried to call into Mt Bindo; which didn't work. However everything appeared to work and when the squelch is turned down you can hear static so I think this is the good one. I might have to read up on the instruction book to see if I can work out how to make it trigger the repeater and I'll also check that the crystal is in there and is the right one and looks like it works. Otherwise I might order a new one that I know will work to try and get this working.

As to the future of the IC-22S units. Well I'm not sure, if this one turns out to work well it will probably stay here as my base station VHF transceiver, and possibly if I get into some of the other things that get done on VHF, particularly those that are connected to a computer I will probably use one of these as the frequency is fairly rigidly set.

On the HF front I also tried the Yaesu FT-7 transceiver that I have, however while it seems to receive fine it doesn't transmit when the PTT button is pressed so that is something that will warrant further investigation.

As a final note, if anyone is interested here is a photo of my operating station. I know that there are a number of things that are less than ideal, however this is my attempt based on the compromises I have to make at the moment.

I'll be back soon.

Cheers,

Rex VK2FADB

Out.

Rainwater and Radios

Hi,

It's been a while but I've finally gotten into some stuff that isn't for work. Recently I have been working on a few projects at work, one of which has involved me learning about setting up Microsoft Access databases with nice interfaces for data input and also for reports being produced.I have also been spending many weekends down at the Tall Ship James Craig where I have been crewing on daysails and helping with other activities.

Yesterday after getting home after a great time aboard I felt the need to do something at home. So I decided to move the water cube that will become a rainwater tank. I have been putting it off for a while because the place I wanted it to go looked like this:

So I cleaned it up, a lot. Then cut out a piece from a pallet I had laying in the yard. As I didn't really have the right tools I cut the skinnier longitudinals with a hatchet and managed to find a bow saw with a slightly loose blade that I used to cut the rest on it as it was too thick to cut by hand. Unfortunately I got so excited while doing this that I forgot to take a picture. So with the base finished and a space cleared all I had to do was shuffle the tank a couple of meters and lift it about 2 feet onto the pallet. This is the finished product:

After getting that finished and everything cleaned away I raked a heap on junk that was lying in the yard up to the back so that hopefully the grass that is starting to grow will be able to continue and cover the entire yard.

Once I had cleaned up and admired what little of the cleanup I could see in the dark. I went inside and while on my laptop, running off 12v. I noticed that my VHF radio was receiving a signal. Upon turning up the volume I realised that it was a WIA broadcast that I was receiving from Mt Bindo. While listening I realised that the broadcast was also being sent on HF so I figured this would be a good chance to have a play around and see if I could get the reception better on different bands. I have decided that for now at least I am going to log these reports here so I have them all in one place and so anybody who wants to can follow along with my attempts to improve reception.

I could receive the signal on my Icom IC-730S only on 80m, all of the other bands were empty as far as I could tell. I am thinking this is largely due to my very poo earthing setup that I'll probably show you in a few days or weeks time. On 80m I could pick up the signal fairly well, but I was having a very hard time understanding the words due to some kind of distortion. Hopefully I will get my desk cleaned up and I can plug in my Yaesu FT-7 that I haven't had a chance to try out yet.

I'll be doing my best as I go through my plans to improve my signal. I already have some ideas to improve my earthing so it shouldn't be too long before I get some information up about that.

Cheers,
Rex

Work on the next project commencing

Over the weekend I got to start some work on the next project I'm starting. This is the car one. The plan is to turbocharge my mate's 2001 Ford Falcon AU II 4.0L inline 6. The first step in this process is going to be replacing the stock ECU with a custom DIY one, most likely rusEfi. So we went out to my "donor" car that I rolled a few years ago.

It isn't in particularly good shape, but before water got in it too badly it would run. However now the excellent smartshield immobiliser system is working (BEM and ECU or Key Barrel aren't talking I think) and won't let us even turn it over. We headed out to this in an attempt to get the diff out so we can weld it up and make it "Locked" rather than an "Open" diff. That didn't work because we realised that to get the centre of the diff out we would need to remove the entire back axle assembly.

As you can see the outside of the diff was fairly dirty and the muck made it a little difficult to get the cover off. An interesting point to note is the cover had some rust in it, possibly from sitting for too long in a paddock?

Deciding that would be too much work we put the cover back onto the diff and went to work on removing other more interesting things. Julian began removing the remaining few intact windows. He had a process of putting a piece of small wire (from an old tire actually this time) in behind the glass from the outside and working it backwards and forwards until it heated up enough to cut through the caulking holding the glass in place. An easier way to do it is with jumper leads to a car battery so the wire is heated by electrical current rather than friction. However as we don't car about the condition of the body of the car and we didn't have any jumper leads with us we just used friction which also damaged a little of the paint.

Here Julian is trying to cut out a piece of the trim around the second window so we can get to the edge of it. In the background you can see the damage I managed to do getting the ECU out. That was the other thing that needed to get done while we were out there. So I can easily swap between the stock and custom ECU I am hoping to gut the original enclosure and use the original socket. To get the ECU out of these Falcons first you need to remove a rivet that holds the enclosure down. I didn't have a drill so I used the grinder I got for Christmas.

In my case there was also an earthing wire attached to the rivet that didn't really get much in the way of getting it out. Once the rivet is out then the enclosure will just lift off with a little jiggling and rotating.

With the enclosure out of the way the ECU just lifts out of the way allowing me to remove it from the car. Either through the week or possibly on the weekend I will start tearing down the ECU to see if I can re-use the enclosure and/or the plug and socket. For now here are some pictures showing more details of the ECU and it's plug/socket.

Cheers,
Rex

New Project. Fireball Dinghy

At the end of my last post I mentioned that I had some new projects coming up, one of which involved a long roadtrip. The trip has now been completed and I can show what it was for.

I know it's not a very good photo of the dinghy itself but better photos are coming. The jeep made the ~2000km trip well, with the transmission getting a bit too hot up some of the hills but that's partly down to practice on my behalf.

The plan is to get it out and rigged this weekend if the weather holds. So once we do that I'll be putting up some more interesting photos. In the meantime here's a link for me to remember: http://www.fireball-rigging.co.uk/schematic.html This is a link to a page that has some very nice diagrams of the way these get rigged.