I am surprised that I actually managed to do something useful today. For a while now I have been meaning to put a Cross Country Wireless HF/VHF/UHF antenna splitter to use and today was the day. It is now sat upside down on the top shelf above the radios, fed from the discone in the loft and feeding two little LoRa modules, one for TinyGS and one receiving radiosondes. The TinyGS receiver had been running for some time sat in the loft and was previously the only thing connected to the discone. The radiosonde receiver had a 70cm ground plane in the shack and never received anything. Since reorganising the feed it has burst into life, rather surprisingly finding a balloon quite close to this QTH which was apparently launched from somewhere to the west of the Lake District but the data does not show the launch site. Looking at the altitude figure in the data I suspect it is already sat on the ground. Pity I cannot go out right now to see if I can find it.

Now, the cabling is RG58 and so not particularly good at UHF. The next step is to put a pre-amp next to the discone, and then to run some Ultraflex 10 instead of RG58. It’s only a few metres but every little helps.

TinyGS info can be found at https://tinygs.com

The software on the radiosonde receiver is rdzTTGOsonde and information can be found at https://sondehub.org/

Time to replace several lengths of coax and run new… 100m ought to do it!