Winter 2003 Issue

Transmitter card.

Amateur Fast Scan television has been a part of the hobby that has fascinated me since my early days in amateur radio. I can still remember the thrill of watching those early 70-cm black-and-white transmissions using a modified domestic TV set I acquired from a trunk sale. My first real introduction to Amateur Television (ATV) was as a young man through a local ham, Barry White, G8YGT. He proudly showed me his beautifully kept Pye Image Orthicon camera and home-brewed 70-cm transceiver in his small, home-built studio at the back of his house. Barry kept my imagination flowing with stories of his days as a cameraman for prestigious, and now historic, TV programs such as Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

Those stories and visits to his studio gave me an interest that has never left me, and over the years I have enjoyed numerous bouts of ATV activity on 70 cm and 23 cm using both home-brewed and commercial equipment. In recent years my ATV activities were curtailed because of antenna problems at my small QTH, but a recent move to a new QTH and access to wide-open space brought me back to ATV with a renewed enthusiasm to “get going again.”

I was quite shocked, however, when I picked up a copy of the British Amateur Television Club (BATC) magazine, CQ-TV. Technology certainly had moved on during the few years I was away from it, and the pages were now packed with readily available equipment for 23 cm, 13 cm, and even 10 GHz. The impact of the SATTV (satellite TV) market was also readily visible, with some of the vendors offering a variety of modules and surplus equipment from the market for use on the amateur bands. The introduction of other technologies, such as Wireless PC networking, also seemed to be having an effect, with readily available equipment that was only dreamed of a few years before. Things certainly had moved on very quickly, but all to the ham’s benefit, that’s for certain!

I decided that a good start would be to build a new station using some of the available modern components rather than try to resurrect some old equipment I had, which definitely was in need of some TLC to get it going again. Finally I decided I would build a new transceiver for the 23-cm ATV band using some of the ready-made modules available on the pages of CQ-TV. This course of action would allow me to construct a new transceiver that would perform well with the minimum amount of construction and alignment time. These modules certainly seemed to be able to offer quick access to the band with the minimum amount of fuss, a far cry from a few years ago.

After some deliberation I finally decided to buy some of the products from Giles Read, G1MFG. Giles runs a small, but busy internet and magazine mail-order business that specializes in ATV products (see <http://tvham.com>). He also has a great customer approach and a keen interest in home construction. I was pleased that he could answer all my queries quickly, and a set of modules was soon on its way to Scotland. Incidentally, Giles has a U.S.-based presence as well and has been featured in the American ATV magazine ATVQ. He has become quite well known on the other side of the pond for his ATV activities.
 

Click here to return to this month's highlights
 

Click here to subscribe to CQ VHF and read more of
A Modular, High Performance 23-cm ATV Transceiver

_________________

© Copyright 2003, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.