4 metre Band

Hi, 
I was seduced by a little anytone 4m box on ebay and bit the bullet, is the band busy or very quiet?
I don't mind either way as i'm happy playing around trying to pick signals up.
Having never tried 4m, I'm unsure what to expect.

Tam

hi tam i live in teesside i have 70mhz an ascom fm and a spectrum 25 watt transverter i have a 4 band vertical and a hang up wire dipole not much local qso some locals prefer yagi for dx if you have a local net its very much like 145mhz fm i fitted my ascom with the rats 4 chip and the build of the ascom is very good ask local hams in your area as you will find them very helpfull my qso is very local with some stations on ssb i listen on 70.450 fm enjoy paul m0kbd 73s

Nice one Tam.  

I've played on almost every band allowed under the Foundation ticket but must admit I've never used 4m.

Hope you have a lot of fun with it and you'll have to let us know how you get on.

73
Victor

rabbi wrote:

hi tam i live in teesside i have 70mhz an ascom fm and a spectrum 25 watt transverter i have a 4 band vertical and a hang up wire dipole not much local qso some locals prefer yagi for dx if you have a local net its very much like 145mhz fm i fitted my ascom with the rats 4 chip and the build of the ascom is very good ask local hams in your area as you will find them very helpfull my qso is very local with some stations on ssb i listen on 70.450 fm enjoy paul m0kbd 73s

Thanks for the reply rabbi, I am very wet behind the ears with all this stuff but happy to play around and see where it takes me. I struggle for antenna possibilities so it will be a whip or dipole in the loft. Hey, what is there to lose?

Victor wrote:

Nice one Tam.  

I've played on almost every band allowed under the Foundation ticket but must admit I've never used 4m.

Hope you have a lot of fun with it and you'll have to let us know how you get on.

73
Victor

Thanks Victor, as I say I will play around with wires and maybe even get up my local hills in the car and see what happens, i'll certainly post how I get on.

Tam

When four goes it goes.
When I first got going on four I used a Spectrum transverter kit.
In the summer it was very easy to work Gibraltar with 10watts and a coaxial dipole in the loft.

There were very few countries on four back then but now a good portion of Europe is on four.
Look out after April and through to September for the Es, you will find there are Europeans on FM.

After a 40m contact with an old friend from my 11m days (couple of decades ago) we met up, and from him I now have in my possession an old PMR VHF low band FM transceiver that has been set up for the 4m band

Think it might be the type of unit Paul rabbi mentions he has. It's an Ascom SE550. I haven't done much with it yet other than fit a power lead with an inline fuse as it didn't have one, and power it up just to check it's alive. It is, and is open to transmit pretty wide actually from 70.0125 to 88.750 MHz. The speaker works, but has seen better days, I'll probably run the little BHI one I have on it to lower the FM hash when the squelch is fully open.

Wonder if anyone else has these? I've read there were a huge amount a company stopped using and a ham club converted them and sold them on to be used on 4m, so imagine there's quite a few out there.

I've never used 4m so, once I've made a half decent antenna for it, will look forward to trying to make an FM contact with any of you who use when the conditions allow.

Interesting little radio you've got there Neal and looks like the battery backup version. (That little flap to the top right? Pretty sure that most of these didn't have a speaker but maybe it was converted for such.)

Haven't seen one of these in many years and must admit that I've not worked 4m in any capacity since becoming licenced myself. I might just have to scour around for such an interesting radio gem or something similar to play with.

Have fun with it there Neal, I'm sure you'll knock up an antenna in no time.  

73

Victor
All the more reason for getting the 991a lol.

Hey Alan, I don't think the 991A doesn't have 4m, unless I'm missing a trick. That's why my old friend passed me this unit to play with. Think your 7300 does though?

Victor, that little flap is a codeplug, a programmable eeprom. It briefly displays PA4DEN alongside the firmware type, so looks to be one of the ones he coded. It does need to be pulled out to reveal one of the screws to take the from panel off, of which I've done out of curiosity. It has has had a battery backup mod done to it as detailed on a few web pages.

Unsure if originally came with a speaker. It has two speaker out wires from the back of multi connector witch are hard wired into the one received with it. They may of been used previously to be hard wired into the speakers of a vehicles entertainment system possibly.

I plugged it into the 10m delta loop via HF matcher yesterday (far from ideal antenna I know) and my daughter could hear me (more on that in a sec) at my better half's work place 500m from my about QTH as the crow flies with me transmitting on low power (it has four power settings) and I believe the lowest power is around 2 watts, though I don't have an accurate meter for this frequency.

I will put a 1/4 up for the band in the loft tonight, depending on how today goes. That's got to be a bit more efficient than what I used above. I believe there's an RSGB 70MHz contest on this Thursday evening, so a good time to listen for activity, though I guess many will be on SSB not FM? ...no idea really as the band is still all new to me.

Regards my daughter listening, if any of you have a Baofeng UV-5R, and possibly similar models, if you switch it to broadcast radio mode you can switch it between two bands with the band button. One band covers our usual 88 - 108 MHz frequencies, or thereabouts, but the other band covers over 20 MHz lower and so can listen to the 4m band on it. Only in .1 MHz steps, but that's 6 exact frequencies you can listen to 70.0, 70.1, 70.2 etc and with wide bandwidth receive and poor rejection of the little Chinese HT, transmitting on 70.150 for example can be heard on 70.1 and 70.2. Just thought I'd mention this as a lot of people have these HTs so some of you will have 4m RX capabilities even if you think you have no radios in your collection that cover the band.

Hi Neal,

Glad you've been having a little fun with your 4m rig and that's a good little tip for those with a Baofeng.

I've only just realised that although I have no transmit I do have receiving capabilities for 4m on my IC706. I may well have to have a listen out for the RSGB 4m activity tomorrow evening.


73

You could be right there Neal.
The 991a is used on wires-X and the 7300 is covered with post-it notes lol.
I use the ftdx-10 or the ft-710 mostly but must give the Icom a bit of a run.

You've got so many radios there Alan I'm not surprised you got confused.

Ha! Ha!

some times i do check there for the oirt band normal radio dx catches ... from time to time i get a strong buzz at around 71.5 mhz, some times is at 71.60 or 71.8 not sure if is from amateur ... right now is at 72.35 mhz buzzing for few seconds & then starts again

edit ... moved to 72.45 for short time & back to 72.35

I am getting some buzz on this band to Babis, but it is not amateur it is my neighbours CCTV system that plagues me every 30 KHz from 15m to 2m.

Interesting you listen there for normal radio DX. I might start to listen on the Ascom for it or my UV-5R when I am out and about. The RX on the Ascom is actually 64.1 MHz to 99.9 MHz.

An edit on my previous post I have found the true TX to be from 64.1 - 90.8 MHz. Above 90.8 MHz it starts to do some weird stuff, and honestly for me 70 to 70.5 is all I need and am allowed to use anyway.

To steer back to Tam's topic, I wasn't sure what to expect around activity on the band. Last night's contest brought nothing to me, not even the sound of SSB noise which I thought I might of heard indicating some activity. However Wednesday night just after I made a 2 legged wire 1/4 wave in the loft I put out just 3 CQ's on 70.450 and G1ERM came back to me and we moved to 70.400. Only in Swindon about 15 miles away, but we had a good chat and it does mean at least one person monitors the band.

If anyone is looking out for FM activity I see in my Swindon group's email flyer they do a 4m net on Wed nights on 70.400 from 19:30 to  20:30. I don't know if that's still a thing as my QSO with G1ERM finished just before that, but something to listen out for.

Victor wrote:

You've got so many radios there Alan I'm not surprised you got confused.

Ha! Ha!

You have 4m well i know you are getting it anyway 710 ??.

Did a bit of 4metres during the Es but not as much as other years.
Worked a lot of the workable grids in Europe best DX out to UN3M in Kazakstan.
Few to get in Norway, Spain, Ireland and Balkans.

Have tried contest in the past but do not hear much.

I'm planing on setting up a 4 meter station in my livingroom although FM only. I have antenna restrictions so I am limited with what I can do antenna wise, however I've figured out a way how to get my 5/8 70MHz wire antenna outside although the antenna can only be temporary. I'm currently working on an easy to deploy system for 2/70, and I can include 4 meters in to my quick deploy antenna system.

Its nearly Christmas so I could probably get away with leaving up my 2/70 or the 4 meter antenna "can't do both at the same time" I should have more of it done tomorrow.

I tested out my 5/8 wave 70MHz antenna indoors and I made a 16 mile contact "I have high ceilings" so it should work even better outside. In my area there only seems to be a very minimal handful of people like 2 or 3 people on 4 meters, its mostly a dead band where I am. There was somebody who tried so hard to promote the 4 meter band and even had a Wednesday evening net but the net had very few people, sometimes none. I think its a shame because 4 meters is an interesting band. Conditions on 10 meters have been mind blowing for quite sometime now as well as interesting things happening on 2 meters but 4 meters is sitting there with nobody using it, I heard stations in Hull coming through on 4 meters FM into London a couple of weeks ago so who knows what else we are missing out on.

We need more people on 4 meters...