Comments by "Chris Cain" (@buffplums) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. This could revitalise Ham radio and it’s got that mode of operation that is reminiscent of CB radio.
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  2. A few of my colleagues used to work there but couldn’t discuss because their security clearance was a lot higher than mine… need to know lol 😂
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  3. It kept us safe simply as that sometimes you have to break the rules because you can’t reason with terrorists
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  4. Really good video chap, nice to see someone who knows their subject. Intake it you are either a broadcast engineer or have a practical interest in radio? Where I lived on the Wirral (Pensby) we used to rely on Winter Hill until they built the Storeton repeater in the 70s sometime, however I seem to remember that it was t there to serve our area so much so we stayed on Winter Hill which I think, back in the day put out something in the order of 100kW. WH being a primary radiator was horizontally polarised and Storeton being a repeater was vertical. Where we were we could also see Moel Y Parc in North Wales (which incidentally had R6, the HAM VHF repeater channel) which used to broadcast HTV a so we had a second antenna facing that and we fitted an antenna changeover switch (yeah, cheap and nasty and very lossy but the signals were strong enough, what’s a little bit of grain) so we could have the benefit of receiving both Granada and HTV a as well as BBC North West and BBC Cymru. What was good with the Granada / HTV arrangement was because HTV used to transmit English and Welsh news (BBC generally did most of its regional programming in Welsh) often the late film was often repeated in HTV an hour behind Granada so if there was something good on we would watch the whole film on Granada and then watch the last half again on HTV if it was good. Can remember watching the Italian Job once in this fashion…. Hahah thanks for the memories… hopefully I got all of my facts right, it’s been 40 odd years since I left the Wirral 😂
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  5. I’m an ex RAF comms tech and I designed a concept system used for training at the RAF Cosford No1 Radio School which mimicked the principle of frequency hopping. My demo used DDS tech as opposed to older school PLL with its slow capture time. It always amazed me how much money the government were screwed for new tech … yes of course it’s expensive to develop, design and manufacture from scratch, plus Britain had become Stone Age in the running for new innovation .. it just used to frustrate me having the ability to knock something up in a relatively short time a very simple but effective technique. I mean the system could be implemented using existing off the shelf hardware that was already in place you’d just need to modify the base stations with a simple processor synced to an accurate time source from GPS and modification to any synthesised analogue handheld transceiver adding a small SM PCB with a GPS receiver, embedded controler and a bus path to the synths divide by N counter. Yeah probably a little bit of work but nothing beyond a team of reasonably switched in techies to install. If anyone fancies having a look at what I did click on my “face” and scroll to the bottom of my videos , there’s a load of crap in there but you will see my DDS freq agile transceiver that I knocked up back in 2010 ish … even with the demo I did with just 10 frequency’s and very predictable sequence code and 1 second hop, you can see it wouldn’t take too much effort to have a fairly secure system… yes of course having a wideband receiver might recombine all of the channels … but just a thought it was an interesting experiment and it was only for training our techies and slow enough for them to easily see what was going on.
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  6. But by the way fantastic channel mate, your knowledge is brilliant. Wonder what your background is, what you did
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  7. It’s a discone antenna, wideband receiver aerial
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  8. I remember once going on an HF Chirpsounder course at a company called Marlborough Communications … can’t say what else they did there but it was a bit like visiting Qs lab… plus the staff Wee a great laugh and used to take us out to lunch each day. Before we went out we had a weigh in and when we got back we had a weigh in once again. You weren’t allowed to go for a shit or a piss until after the weigh in. Whoever had the overall net gain in weight won a big box of Choo Olathe at the end plus a special certificate 😂 I miss those sort of laughs and also working to component level on radio kit as a maintainer in the RAF and even working to sub system level A/B a on a mobile radar system was still interesting enough to maintain … where the hell has Britain gone … we are last in everything these days
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