Amateur Radio/Wish List

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London Hackspace is helping to bring amateur radio to a new generation in the United Kingdom. Due to the club being somewhat new, our members have not benefitted like other clubs from decades of members collecting and donating their usable wares. We'd like to fix that with your help! You can help by donating/loaning items listed below or pledging towards part of an item.

Radio

  • HF radio - Integrated solid state receivers (circa 1983 and newer) with automatic tuners can prove easy for new hams to get on the air.
    • Additional useful features would include CAT tuner capability / interface, integrated ATU, DSP filter
  • VHF / UHF radio - we would be interested in something that could be semi-permanent in the shack that would help us with VHF/UHF comms, be available for UK Foundation Licensing QSO work, and provide reliable communication.

Antenna & Infrastructure

  • HF antennas - we would love to try more 80m / 40m / 20m QSOs with our antenna masts - but bear in mind we do not have a huge rural garden for gigantic dipoles. :-)
  • VHF / UHF / Satellite tracking setups - we are hoping to make tracking the ISS and communicating with astronauts and satellites a hallmark part of the LHS radio experience.
  • Dog-bone Insulators - we need to connect things up safely and keep them taut!

Test Equipment

  • Lightweight Oscilloscope
  • Portable Spectrum Analyser
  • Arbitrary Waveform Generator
  • RF Field Strength Meter

Dream Wish-List

  • Five or Ten-pack of Baofeng BF-F8+ radios - we'd love to be able to have a rolling stock of 'my-first-radio' to provide to new hams, pre-programmed with local repeaters, enabling new licensees to play on the air immediately upon getting their callsign
  • Byonics TinyTrak4 / GPS2 Receiver - for APRS experimentation with cheap FM portable radios like Baofeng
  • RaspberryPi2 and related goodies - so much cool (radio and more) stuff being built with this low-cost compute device
  • Three HackRF One / HackRF Blue - We would love to experiment further with more sophisticated SDR's in the club.

Please consider the greater good you can make to this young but successful club - if you have anything you'd like to donate or loan to us, please contact us!!