Comments by "Bond25" (@Bond2025) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. mb21 and the RA has a list of who uses which site
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  2. Part of Betwys-Y-Coed never had TV or radio - not sure if they have relays now. They only just had phones and when internet took off around 1995, speeds were 4-5Kbps using Demon, or attempting to via 14K4 and 28K8 modems. I used to go on holiday every year and stay near a farm, so got to know the family that run it. They couldn't even get MW stations unless they hooked up the radio to miles of fence. We did that with a CB one day and the result was amazing from about 3miles of barbed wire running 3ft off the road, then up a hill. There were no mobiles back then and no VHF radio, SATTV was not common.
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  3. Urban Legend unfortunately, heard that one before. We know you're only repeating an adapted story because you say "I think" after a very important part as a way of excusing what you claim. Maybe we should do a video on Urban Legends! How many people do you think tell the SAME old stories just with a few changes. It's funnier to finish the story as someone is telling it, they panic and start elaborating on the lies.
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  4. You must be about 130!
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  5. What made you go for inverted L on MW? I used a 180ft long wire from a tall building down to nearly ground at a 45degree angle, an inverted V from the corner of a building and 180ft horizontal between two buildings that were 120ft tall. The best for around a 30mile local coverage using 100Watts on MW was the vertical. The inverted V wasn't much different. The horizontal was not as good for local. SW sounds interesting to try. Many pirates I listened to were around 6205KHz. What I don't like is people that bought amateur radio equipment and put it on SSB, it limits the audience compared to AM. For VHF I used 65Watts in to a slim jim antenna and due to the location was able to get a 40mile radius. Using colinears meant less coverage due to the radiation angle, so it was a trade-off between loads of ERP firing up to the stars, or less gain but a blanket coverage. Radio is for experimenting with ! Tell us more about the SW set up.
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  6. I only got in to amateur radio through CB and pirate radio. I used to tune about on a radio when I was younger and heard music and people having a laugh and knew it wasn't a legal station. After a year of contacting the station when I was at school, they met me and let me go and have a look. I was SO disappointed!!! I am not sure what I was expecting, but the station was in a flat and consisted of a record deck, tape player and a home built transmitter. I remember it was a PCB on the living room floor with other bits of pcb glued on the top and components all soldered on and a bit of coax going up to a dipole on a chimney. Power output was 25Watts. It was powered by a CB power supply and there was a mixer, headphones and mic. It sounded really good on air, but I was expecting some fancy studio! I started learning more and put my own TX together, wiping out a whole street of TVs. Over a few months I refined it, taught myself more and even built a stereo encoder. I was never in to the music side of it then, I just etched PCBs and bought all the bits from my local electronics shop. I then moved in to aerial design, audio processing and really went wild. By this time, raves were becoming popular, so I got in to the dance/trance/techno stuff. I had a few near misses, but was never caught.
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  7. Good job they didn't know about people using amateur radio equipment to tx/rx... loads of people listened to police up until around 2004 around here. They didn't realise other frequencies were used and locals used scramblers. I had a kenwood th42e in 1994 that didn't only cover 430-440 if you voided the warranty and modified it. Imagine the chaos we would have now with all the cheap Baofeng radios.
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  8. I can't tell you how much i dislike those lindenbladd type antennas! In my experience they are not efficient and can easily be outperformed by most other types. A few stacked dipoles outperforms them using much lower power. Circular Polarisation is not effective at VHF. Why have a massive minus dB gain and have to put 6 times the power up the coax, then have slanted radiation which just doesn't work well.
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  9. The problem is that people are being scammed by suppliers now - just as they were with the RaspberryPi. Boards going for £6.99 and now being sold for £25 each. People are buying them all up, stockpiling and selling at 3-4 times the price, similar to the 49p Quansheng programming leads going for £10-£15 each! The best thing to do is NOT BUY for a while, make greedy people stockpiling regret it when they can't sell the boards on.
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  10. Forget it for low power radio station broadcasts. Use a dipole or make a SlimJim that's 2.2m tall, this gives far superior local coverage to a dipole. It depends how low power the TX is. 100mWatts will not get you that far in a built up area, but will if the antenna is on a hill. The only thing to eliminate dead-spots is way more power.
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  11. I also had a 40channel mid band rig, AM. It was hooked up to a DV27 in the loft on a biscuit tin with loads of tin foil. I also hid mine behind the tank in the airing cupboard!!! The threat of detection was real enough, especially when a neighbour reported you. I had one visit later when I had a 40ch FM radio. The man in the van went next door and listened to me on every channel using his modified Pye Pocketphone or something very similar. He looked at the licence, come back and said that it was the neighbour's TV. Years later I got a Multimode 2 and then a UNIDEN 2830 I had many contacts on for years. I also had some wild aerials from dipoles to silver rods. Unfortunarly a 5/8 wabe on a 30ft pole blew down. I started using a linear amp at one point and was obliterating TVs and radios a few roads away. I was using a temporary aerial in the garden and one night heard a commotion. A radio amateur two houses away was having his door kicked in by RIS and police. They had tracked it to the wrong house. A few years after moving from there I took my Class B and then my Class A licences, but found amateurs really boring old people. I preferred CB for the people I spoke to, amateurs just wanted to bore everyone about what they had, radio and electronics etc, not everyone wants to talk about all that every day. I prefer data modes now.
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  12. Your lecturer was correct. It was used for years. Hidden in plain sight, no one would suspect a huge long powerline was a VLF antenna too.
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  13. Not the first pirates they helped! What happened to them as they made some really good amateur gear. None of their equipment was used for licenced people - it was only authorised Home Office type vendors that were able to do that. British Gas used Pye Westminsters and got blocked out one whole weekend in 1986/7 by a station near Liverpool, a DJ called Mike Hughes went on 106.2MHz. The whole PYE range was great, starting with the Cambridge. You could just alter a couple of parts and have it on any of the bands so many were put to use on pirate stations. The PYE linear amps were for preset bands, M1 was 88-108MHz. A lot of early station like Radio Julie used a Pye Cambridge, the person behind it, Andy Davies, died a few years ago. He was the first to send the audio down the Rediffusion cables on an estate so the studio and transmitter could be kept apart.
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  14. There was a Merseyside MW station that saw DTI people and dropped an old fridge off the balcony of the flats! One station found that the door intercom on the block they were in was playing the station audio as the TX was around 100Watts on Medium Wave.
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  15. There were experiments with AM Stereo around 30 years ago, nothing ever developed, but it did sound quite good!
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  16. AM is a mode of modulating a carrier...just like FM or SSB, CW, Data etc. AM is not the frequency or band. You can have a 1458KHZ FM or SSB transmitter.
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  17. It's actually quite boring inside them! A few racks with equipment in plain cases, a few power supplies, a backup system with batteries...trays with coax and a few circulators and diplexers, it's a right let-down. The newer ones might have computers or a phone. One in Wales had it's own BT phone inside, but it sounded like the person using it was in a cave due to the brick and concrete building. The most exciting thing i found in one was a 15year old chicken pot noodle, a screwdriver and wire cutters. The Home Office ones were more secure with electric fences, some not even switched on, cctv and alarms hooked up to BT RedCare. One used for police had ANPR cameras! Not that exciting inside really, i am not sure what people expect.
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  18. Good idea, but not practical due to the channel utilisation. A couple of people doing a voice call would flatten the network. In the North West I can pick you up at times via repeaters/nodes, but if people start sending anything the channel is full.
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  19. Don't see the point, it was like when my local substation broke and the whole area was without power. Massive groups of people took to the streets with torches walking up and down. Very very odd behaviour. Everyone will just be asking what happened and block the network completely.
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  20. We already have that, 4G and 5G which is far cheaper than setting up a company to manage a service and equipment plus licences. Mobile phone companies are already offering widespread WiFi from phone masts now. It would have been a great idea to try 20 years ago, but there isn't a demand now unless you live in some remote area and want to set up a 4G/5G to WiFi repeater, in which case you could just set up a phone repeater and get a better service without any licence problems.
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  21. It is a legal requirement for site operators to know what they have operating as they get called when there is a problem. Any loss of service causes a problem and interference is a legal issue. Everything is licenced and the operators and RA check regularly. They also do spot checks. In the days of pagers around 94 i was at a hilltop site in Wales when the RA turned up to do field strength tests. A VHF pager was splattering and when i let them in the building they found the 10Watts from the TX was going via a 400Watt RF amp in to their own aerial on the mast - around 137MHz. They had the site owner and company rep there within 45mins and took the amp away. Had they not complied, the equipment was going to be switched off and removed. The way the sites work is that you have a few wideband VHF and UHF aerials for general use. You can use your own or you can use a wideband RX one for VHF and another for UHF and TX through your own. There are circulators fitted, but it depends what room is left. The old PMR repeaters would use a common receive aerial at the top of the masts and TX on their own. That's because the common aerial would be a 68-88MHz, 160-180MHz for example, or 440-460MHz, so never cut for one frequency, but good enough in that location. That was only one part of the mast and buildings. There were relays, links, commercial stations and 70cm / 2m repeaters in some. Now they have TETRA and Cellular. Sites i went to were never alarmed either. It was just a case of being issued with keys. One site had about 8 padlocks all joined to each other and wrapped around a gate, you opened your own to get in! Sadly, pirates would install equipment on some of them with 10GHz links, steal electric and splatter and interfere.
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  22. Did you ever know about ECHELON, the taps that were put on lines, Radio Communications Agency installing SDRs in 1994 so they could remotely monitor the spectrum and direction find in each area, or Security Services installing their SDRs with transmit capability? The SDR cover was blown by a news channel in the UK in around 2007, and the story was that local WiFi was being monitored to protect people and inform them if they were using a weak password. The real story was that it was for "packet injection" and repurposing WiFi equipment for surveillance purposes, not to mention snoop on people and attack those that "air-gapped" computers thinking it would keep them safe! There was a lot going on in BT exchanges and there still is to this day. Don't ever think that phoning a charity to report a crime or using 141 protected your identity, your full details were still logged, it just didn't appear on your phone bill. Police used to abuse their position and that of others, or use Special Constables, who worked for BT, to perform checks on numbers for example. Nothing was ever logged.
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  23. Well I can tell you that is nonsense, all in your head. Forces have their own staff to do that sort of thing, they NEVER call in outsiders to deal with their networks. Anyone who has served in the forces will tell you this. Why lie?
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  24. Don't bother, you are 30 years too late! There is nothing interesting to listen to, only aircraft, marine, amateur and the odd shop security radio if not DMR. Absolute waste of money now. There are NO secret frequencies!
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  25. I had a QSL from Radio Fax on 6205KHz i think.
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  26. So did I - but mine was a week ago, they are in UK Customs right now!
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  27. Police in the North West caught people near a cemetary by giving out calls relating to UFO sightings in the early 90s. As people turned up, they were searched.
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  28. AM is a mode of modulating a carrier. It is the frequency that gives good coverage and the required properties.
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  29. SCR? As in Storeton Community Radio on 1026KHz? Anyone from the North West will remember that station from around 1982 onwards, then NCR North Coast Radio 1350KHz and Radio Merseywaves 1242KHz. All had fairly good coverage from different blocks of flats. One of the best was Mersey Heights in Tranmere, Wirral. That had outstanding views for miles. It was possible to see the Winter Hill TX, also down the East Lancs Road and across to Southport and Wales. I remember the panic when an electric company thought people were stealing electric by running wires from the roof on the flats down to lamp posts, they had no idea it was a medium wave aerial and were up on the roof touching it. In the North West everyone remembers Radio Julie 104.8 stereo and Slag Off International 105.3 who blocked the gas board in 1985 by using 106.2MHz. This was in the Liverpool Echo. A lot of the people involved in Pirate Stations in the North West have died. Famous people like Andy Davies who inspired a lot of people - then the larger than life Dave Collins, who ended up on Internet Radio Stations. Many stations were raided each year.
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  30. Not always accurate or covering every detail. The remote monitoring stations used SDRs from around 1992, they were located at every BT phone exchange building and monitored the spectrum in each area. Pirates were identified quickly as there was a setting to only show new stations that were not known. They were also combined to give direction finding. This same system is still is in use today and is VERY accurate now, accurately locating people within a few metres. I have seen it in action for locating people jamming emergency services. Once a report was made, the source was identified and located within 30mins. It used to concentrate on anything 4M and above, not it does HF and in to the microwaves. The equipment is also used by GCHQ to monitor WiFi and was tested in a program of WiFi interception by monitoring home WiFi in a particular area and using packet injection etc. WiFi has a number of vulnerabilities so it is possible to force disconnects to get a password for example. Security Services were using this and still do. The official line in the Press when someone found out was that they were looking who had not secured their WiFi to try and help them improve security. Your local BT exchange has a lot of extra equipment installed used by many agencies...look at the aerials on the roof that are not for mobiles or TETRA.
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  31. That should be a dynamic feature of the software and other equipment should build up a list. Don't forget Radio Amateurs have had the Packet Radio network since 1988 using TNCs over radios. LoRA software could be developed a lot as most of the errors were made with amateurs and fixed.
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  32. This is the problem that the Storeton TV TX had when it first went online. Locals got no signal and it was a big story in the newspapers, but a bit further away it was full strength. It was the wrong type of antenna in use. Once changed to tilt the radiation pattern down correctly, it covered the required areas. It was an example of poor design and understanding of RF. People think RF comes straight out and all around. It doesn't, it can be steered and set at different angles depending what the installation is for. That's why phone masts tilt the radiation pattern down to give a more blanket coverage with a lower range. The same for broadcast stations, you don't want a fancy 6dB colinear with a 30-35degree takeoff , you want a simple aerial like a slim jim, J pole or mixed polarisation dipole that will cover the local area and not win a DX award. Sometimes people will get NO signal or a very low one due to multipath interference, two of the signal arriving at the same time effectively trying to cancel each other out! That can be rectified by moving the aerial, or in some cases fitting two aerials and a splitter and messing with them. I used to have two very long Group C/D aerials pointing at Winter Hill to get OnDigital when it first come out. I tried them phased side by side, then stacked for more gain one above the other etc. To get shut of multipath I spaced them side by side and then moved one aerial back about 2ft and it cured it. I also fitted a masthead preamp to overcome coax losses. There are lots of interesting things you can do with aerials.
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  33. I always wanted to run on Medium Wave, but lost interest. I did have a 1 watt oscillator and got a few miles on a long wire, but no way of amplifying the RF. Years later I realise I could have used low cost Audio MOSFETs. I even tried a 6L6G in to two 807 valves, but that was a disaster too.
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  34. You should have gone down the M53 to Clatterbridge Hospital. They have a very small licenced 1602KHz AM hospital radio transmitter. It's a box in the car park and a small loaded pole antenna of about 30ft on a post! It does the job across the site and sound quality is really good. It was at the car park were the injections were being given a few years ago...can't remember the name of the building itself.
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  35. It would be for the people living near that getting blasted with 1500Watts of RF day and night. There is no way it wouldn't affect their health.
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  36. It makes NO difference unless the glass has some metallic coating or you put it near a metal frame. On glass it makes no difference to RF.
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  37. Believe that and you believe anything. BT Engineers would not have used the restaurant in a building, if you ever worked for them you would know why... BT did not deal with the Data Links or IT side of things, it was a subcontractor and still is.
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  38. 2.1dBi = 0dBd so no gain!
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  39. Stacking beams one on top of the other is for gain, handy for longer distances. You might only get 3dB more, but that is double, so worth it. Putting them side by side tends to be for dealing with reflections, you can slide one beam forwards or backwards to eliminate multipath interference - or it is to tighten the angle of reception but keep the same gain. Think of changing from floodlight to torch beam. I don't think they would use two lots of RX. I used both methods to overcome rubbish signal when Winter Hill was on reduced power as it was being changed to Digital. 2 x 10 element group CD wasn't good enough. 1 with no preamp meant no CH4/5 and breaking up ITV. A preamp got ITV and CH4 was still bad. I tried the 2 x 10 element stacked by the length of the dipole. Then i got 2 x 18 element and that was better. I had an indoor preamp at the time, but you can't amplify something that isn't there. I used a masthead preamp and got a good picture for years. Others were being ripped off, a neighbour paid £250 for this huge aerial and coax and it kept breaking up. They even had one about 6ft long pointing to Wales and that was no good. My TV aerial now is a log periodic with amp on it that's on the pole supporting a washing line in the garden. Perfect signal. It was only temporary after getting shut of VirginMedia for doubling my bill, but it works really well, so i left it,
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  40. WOW, I remember listening to Laser 558 !
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  41. I might have to mention another system you are probably not aware of that was given the project name "CELLDAR". This was tested in the mid 1990s and a Gov Dept using a company name of Roke Manor Research had various test facilities, including a large stately home. The basic idea was to do something with the reflected waves from high frequency transmissions emitted from cellular phone transmitter sites. The reflected waves built up a 3D model that was fairly crude, but showed anything moving within the space monitored as it interrupted it. It looked more like a waterfall display you see today on a SDR. The early tests showed a blob moving, not even the shape of a person, there was no real definition. The aim at first was to use it for passive aircraft RADAR, but it didn't work due to the frequency and downward tilt on directional aerials. Lower frequencies from broadcast and TV stations could never work. It had to be a short wavelength. It improved to a point of being able to detect people and vehicle shapes and worked in built up areas better. The project was stopped as the results could never be improved upon and would never give the definition required.
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  42. You could certainly apply for licences and put different radio services up like PMR, digital community repeater services, phone relays, point to point microwave services etc. I still can't believe no one living by that mast suffered any health issues as a result of living next to high levels of RF. Even working near a TX or mast, you are only allowed to when power levels are dropped right down and it's only for a set time in each hour of a day for example. Imagine sitting in your house or garden getting 1500Watts minimum transmitted at you all day and night. When there were multiple stations the risk would have been far greater.
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  43. It would be possible to use it for RX, but due to public safety not on TX. There would be issues with joins in lines, breakages, constant impedance changes etc. What you might like to look at is how HV electrical cables were used as VLF aerials. All those pylons... Many things are "hidden in plain sight". Some fields have miles and miles of fences, trying measuring for RF on them with a frequency counter etc.
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  44. It depends what he means by monitoring. RF or Internet? Internet is monitored at every DataCentre, connections in and out of the UK and Internet exchange centres. RF monitoring is via the existing network of SDRs that are in nearly every BT phone exchange and have been since the early 1990s. They can mess with WiFi through them, but OFCOM also uses the various monitoring stations for Spectrum Compliance. He probably doesn't tell you what he does as he doesn't want you telling everyone on the Internet.
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  45. It depends on the aerial. If you only want local coverage, a single aerial with medium to high angle radiation pattern will cover the locals if it is low down. If it was high up, a downward tilt or something like a Slim Jim or J pole would be better to give a blanket coverage and not get too far. No need for higher gain aerials there.
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  46. Yet another Urban Legend - heard that one before too, with various combinations of articles and containers. All very entertaining, but once you hear different people telling the same stories you wonder why. Is it for attention or trying to be part of something?
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  47. Very true, you could use a few simple components. A coil around a ferrite road, tuning capacitor (not even always needed), a diode, capacitor and crystal earpiece hooked up to a long wire and earth. I bet a lot of the locals had tuned circuits rigged up to get a bit of free power!!! Inductively couple free power.
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  48. Test the antenna on a radio with SWR meter! If it works on 2m it will work on 70cm as they are directly related. If it doesn't work on 70cm then it can not be a reputable retailer.
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  49. Google and other youtube videos, he just compiles it all in one place for us all which is handy. Many would never think of searching for some subjects,
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  50. I can't imagine the sort of health issues from living within 50ft of a 1.5KW minimum AM TX. Did anyone ever have any issues! What about the interference from them ? I bet you could hear the stations on everything.
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