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 collecting and donation. We'd like to change that as we are a bit short on certain resources due to money and club age. You can help by donating 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 people to play on the air immediately
  • 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
  • HackRF One / HackRF Blue with Ham-it-Up Upconverter - We would love to experiment further with SDR

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!!