Comments by "Mike H" (@Mike-H_UK) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. Brilliant. One day, I wouldn't be surprised if these videos get used for education on the history of radio. It great that you are documenting these antennas before nature reclaims them completely.
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  2. The police turn a blind eye when they are helped..... What about the Baker Street bank robbery where a radio amateur heard communications from the robbers and alerted the police. He was eventually convicted of illegally listening to radio broadcasts! Now that was more than a tad unfair....
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  3. I heard from someone at Cisco.(don't know how true this is) that there were some Cisco routers in the basement of one of the original WTC buildings. After the building collapsed, they continued pinging the outside world until the UPS battery became flat and they died. Pretty impressive if correct.
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  4. Submarines use Meshtastic on 869.525MHz. The range isn't always great, but if you get a few subs close together they can relay messages back to Blighty in a series of hops. My mate Bob (actually a woman) told me this, so it must be true.
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  5. It's great that you are documenting these for posterity before they all disappear completely. Cheers!
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  6. In order to obtain these recordings, Lewis must have put his Baofeng UV5R into Chinese mode and pressed the up/down arrows after having selected an option. That sounds much the same....
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  7. Yes please for a dedicated tour of the Buxton transmitting station!!
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  8. A separate phone call between Charles and Camilla was recorded and made public very shortly afterwards. The coincidence was too great. At the time I thought (and still do) that there was more to this than we knew.
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  9. Oh, come on Lewis. We can't all be as passionate and enthusiastic as you are.
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  10. You forgot to mention the repeater frequencies where I can swear at people at will and play 'The Laughing Policeman' 24/7. Seriously though, we got our money's worth with that video - you didn't pause for breath! Lots of great info as well and I liked the format of arranging by type of broadcast.
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  11. I know everyone has their own preference, but if you want to use your own radio rather than access someone else's via the internet, I would be very tempted to try a SDRPlay RSP1a. They are priced around £100 in the UK and allow reception on all bands from 1kHz to 2GHz, using all regular modulation modes (AM, FM, LSB, USB CW etc. In addition it has a spectrum plot, waterfall plot and a range of noise filters. One requirement is a computer or laptop with a USB connection, but most people can provide this. I have received just about all of the number stations available in the UK that Lewis has described with a SDRPlay RX and a small Wideband loop antenna.
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  12. No less than I would expect from a smooth criminal!!
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  13. I like listening to The Police. Message in a Bottle and Synchronicity are the best.
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  14. Very interesting. I can't remember if you have covered the Joan Eleanor (J-E) radio system. It was used by the OSS in WW2 so that spies on the ground could conmmunicate with reconnaissance aircraft. It was 260MHz (VHF) and AM and made by RCA. A very clever design.
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  15. I see that you live up to your name...
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  16. If they need another frequency for additional transmissions, I've heard that 1215kHz has recently become available for yet another 100kW transmission ;-)
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  17. Hi Lewis, Great video! I had two thoughts that I considered noteworthy, but you may want to disregard completely!: 1. Why not try it out with your radio and see how it degrades normal reception even though the woodpecker is not present? 2. Clive Mitchell (Bigclive) on his own YouTube channel does excellent product analyses and I'm sure he would love to have a look inside, reverse engineer it, make great comments and end it back to you in one piece!!
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  18. Another fantastic video Lewis. It is very interesting about the mystery jammer and the pilot tone. It was obviously someone quite technical. Probably something that the Andromeda crew had the expertise to do, (like Mr H.) but almost certainly not their style with an old friend.... Were the perpetrators ever identified later?
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  19. Using a very primitive set up with just a short wire antenna and an RSPduo SDR, I can pick up the LO from a small handheld MW radio about 5metres away - so not much. Has anyone any idea of the range with a more optimised set up (good directional antenna, LNA and a professional spectrum analyser)? I imagine that tube receivers with an attached outdoor antenna were also much better radiators.
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  20. Lovely building. One would hope that it can be saved from further deterioration. Making a building listed often means that it is just neglected until it falls apart and has to be demolished!
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  21. E24 - Allo Allo - Listen very carefully, I will say this only once.....
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  22. Please give me a list of all of the UK number stations to which I am not allowed to listen, and I will avoid listening to them in the future!! ;-)
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  23. Wow! 'Secrets of the Railways by Ringway Shenanigans.' Get in early to own the trademark before some blighter with a Saab beats you to it.
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  24. It would appear that Gordon was actually pretty good at his job. Another great video from Lewis - you have me waiting for the next installment.
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  25. I would listen to that occasionally on my crystal set. How could they think that saving the cost of a 200kW transmitter is reasonable I'll never know!
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  26. Maybe time for the return of the AM pirates if the official stations don't want their allocated frequencies!
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  27.  @RingwayManchester  Not to the viewers of this channel.....
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  28. Looking at this some more, it appears that Lewis's summary is accurate. Stubblefield did transmit audio without wires before anyone else, but he did not use electromagnetic waves (radio waves) but a time varying magnetic field. I suppose this means that it is not technically radio even though it was a major development in itself.
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  29. Makes a change from thinking about the service stations on the M1. 🙂
    10
  30. The SX1262 integrated circuit has a clamping mechanism to back off power to the antenna when an antenna mismatch is detected. So the danger in operating without an antenna is often overstated. See SX1262 data sheet, section 15.2 & 15.2.1 for more details.
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  31. Spectrum Communications is still running from the same address. I bought some ferrite cores from them a few months ago! Antony Nailer's call sign is g4cfy according to the data sheet for the ferrites that I bought. Small world!
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  32. Great video Lewis, but more bad news. When I design aperiodic magnetic loops for 200kHz to 20MHz operation, I have historically used R4 Droitwich on 198kHz, R5 Live (693kHz & 909kHz) and Talk Sport on 1053kHz for calibration purposes. Looks like I will need to think again!
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  33. Maybe Lewis will let you have a cameo role in the future if you speak nicely to him.....
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  34. Pirates stealing transmitters??? Well, that's no less than I would expect from pirates of the high seas.....
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  35. Yes please to more videos like this. They are very interesting and help identify antennas on other buildings close to where I live.
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  36. Another excellent video Lewis. I'm surprised that the DF was accurate enough to pinpoint the house from any reasonable distance away, enabling them to subsequently search it, but maybe the antenna at the back gave the game away. Still, finding the TX behind the bath panel was far better detective work than I would expect from the police these days.
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  37. I'm gonna have to tune into Johnny Tobacco. He sounds like an interesting guy!
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  38. What is less well known is that there was a feature as part of the diagnostics in analogue cellphones during the early 1990s to remotely activate the transmitter section when the phone was linked to a basestation. Actually, this was part of a whole suite of interesting but not particularly sinister debug features. I often wondered what covert use was made of this feature.
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  39. All true, but worth mentioning that even though you can open up communication on a repeater 72 miles away, that doesn't mean than the signal received from your transmitter is intelligible enough to be understood once forwarded.....
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  40. Probably worth disconnecting the power first...
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  41. I think Bill Clinton also had a CB radio while at The White House. Apparently, the handheld transceiver called the ''President Randy' was named after him, but I am not 100% sure about that.
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  42.  @nicc5122  Thanks. Yes, I bet the museum is interesting. I last visited NY after the 9/11 attack when it was still being debated what would happen to the site. What you say sounds very reasonable. Interestingly, I was visiting TI in Dallas at the time of the 9/11 attack, and, in the morning, was doing a UK colleague a favour by checking out the feasibility of accessing UK servers from a laptop PC in another continent using ADSL/VPN and performing graphic-intensive chip design. That was fairly new in 2001. Of course, the internet was totally clogged up, and the only phone call that I could make to the UK was on the dedicated company lines, so the experiment was totally inconclusive!! I'll never forget that day!!
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  43. The British called it 'Transmitter Under Rectal Detritus' or TURD for short.
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  44. Not only is it a shame, but since the LW transmitter at Droitwich is the only one that can cover most of the UK when on on maximum power, it takes away a single point of communication to most of the nation in times of national crisis.
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  45. A dual-feature video with Jon would be great. Just make sure that he does not buy you a Christmas pressie from the motorway services......
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  46. This may well have been a compromise antenna, but what was a better indoor antenna for people so constrained?
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  47. indeed, It isn't a particularly plausible sequence of events.
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  48.  @simonneep8413  Blessed are the antenna makers for they shall inherit the roof space.
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  49. When someone has a medical emergency and needs to make an 999 call then an antenna on a church roof is certainly helping someone in need. Besides, what harm does it do? Churches need money to survive.
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  50. Captain Pugwash was pirate TV.
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