High above the world we can dream.

April 15th, 2006

Woke up this morning and felt the urge to get out in the open, so trekked off to the top of the downs and had a good old wander around and cleared my mind. Found a good position to build my house about 400feet above Willingdon, just need to get onto the council for planning permission and be prepared for an answer along the lines of “You’re ‘aving a larf! Now Sod Off You Time Wasting Twonk!” But hey we can all dream… I had noticed that throughout my walkabout on the downs a single Magpie was always in front of me, strange I thought. I usually have a lone Magpie in my face before a particularly distressing event, so when I got back to the car park I notice an official looking dude in a hi-vis jacket wandering around, and yes I had a parking ticket! So that poxy Magpie was telling me, har har, you’re now £60 worse off! I should of stamped on its head…

Chain invited me for a cuppa tea which was very well received, had a play with my pocket PC before heading home…

Recently I bought a 70cm hand-held radio and, to put it bluntly, it’s a bit crap, thought I’d put my technical abilities into use to improve the radio’s performance and set about armed with sodering irons, DVM’s, Scopes and tea. A little dissapointed, managed to get rid of an annoying tone that played everytime you turned it on, had to drill a hole in the front of the case for the microphone element. Not sure why the manufacturers didnt do it? Maybe they thought it’s such a crappy radio that whoever buys one will probably never use it so why bother. The next thing was to improve the audio quality, it sounded rather muffled, half due to the lack of passage for sound through the case to the mic, the other half I believe to be bad pre-amp design. Modestly adjusting the filtering for the mic pre-amp made a slight difference, the next stage was to find out where the background noise was being generated. This apparently, after reading forums and reviews, is characteristic of this radio. Got as far as proving it wasnt the mic pre-amp stage causing the noise, more likely the problem lies within the design of the RF stages and will be impossible to eliminate. So all in all, The JingTong UHF FM Tranceiver is quite naff, but it looks nice. Having reassembled it it seems a new noise has popped up, and I couldnt be bothered to rip it apart again. Another day, thanks to Chain btw for patiently monitoring 70cms while I tried several mods on the radio.

Entry Filed under: Personal,Technical