[450] Very Strong 70cm Beacon

[John Foege]

The stick works pretty well. I use mine with SDR Sharp (freeeware) on Windows. I have two. One tunes a range of 50-2200 Mhz (with the Elonics E4000 tuner chip) and the other one I have has an FC0013 Tuner and does 22-1200 or something if I recall correctly.

Obviously with the I and Q samples getting fed directly into the computer, you can decode any mode, so long as there is software to do it with. SDR Sharp does your standard NFM, AM, USB/LSB, WFM, and CW U / CW L. It sounds good on all modes and the RTL232 chip dumps in about a 2 MHz or 2.3 MHz wide swath of the band at once. It's very wide and makes, like Dave said, an awesome band scope for $15.00. I imagine pairing a stick like this with a broadband discone antenna that also is tuned to receive in the 50-2200 Mhz region and you'd have the worlds cheapest and best scanner setup :P

I have seen the HF converters for it as well on eBay for around 70 Euro or something. Definitely worth taking a look at.

I made an adapter to go from the PAL antenna connector on the stick to a PL-259 and have some leftover gold plated PAL to F connectors if anyone is interested. (I had to do PAL to F female - then F male to BNC femalce - then I have a pigtail BNC to PL259). The Frankenadapter actually doesn't look nearly as bad as it sounds. Dave has seen it.

I've yet to hook the thing up to my loop in the tree...but I might just do that later tonight. I'd be interested in what I can hear.

All in all, I can highly recommend it. For the price it's a lot of fun and highly versatile. I've seen guys using these for just about any thing you can imagine.

If anyone wants pic of the setup or audio captures etc., just let me know!

Cheers,

John

PS

Anyone hearing the K1IIG beacon down around 60 Mhz as well?
Sent from BlackBerry® from Vodafone

-----Original Message-----
From: "George Andrews" <gandrews at ntplx.net>
Sender: 450-bounces at lists.vhfwiki.comDate: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 16:42:02 
To: <450 at lists.vhfwiki.com>
Reply-To: 450 at lists.vhfwiki.com
Subject: Re: [450] Very Strong 70cm Beacon

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