Episode: 2486
Title: HPR2486: Some stuff I bought at a recent amateur radio rally
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2486/hpr2486.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:00:58

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This episode of HBR is brought to you by Ananasthaus.com.
With 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Hello and welcome Hacker Public Radio audience. My name is Mr X and welcome to this podcast.
I just start by thanking the people at HBR for providing this great service.
I've really gone to a great deal of effort to streamline the whole process,
making it super easy for people to contribute shows. HBR is a community-led podcast
produced by the community for the community. I'm sure you must have something interesting you
could submit. Instead easy, pick up a microphone, your mobile phone,
play there something to post it. Simple as that. Okay, so this episode is just an off-the-cuff thing
that I thought you might find vaguely interesting. I was at recently at Ata,
Ananasth Radio show. We call it Ananasth Radio Rally here. This used to be called
this particular one in the Malok area. It happens once a year. It used to be called a junk sale,
but obviously it's got a new name now. I'm going to be a bit more up-market. It's now called a
mini rally. So there we go. I didn't notice much difference myself on my submit,
but junk sale sounded a bit too low class obviously. Anyway, I usually go to these things and
with a wallet full of money on the off-chance of buying something. If I'm lucky, I spend a pound,
and that doesn't include the cake and drink that I end up, the refreshments in the food.
So I'm usually too mean to spend any money at all, but this year end up spending quite a
bit of money. Well, not really a bit of a lot of money, but you know, in relative terms,
you can put it on with spend. And I thought maybe share with you my purchases.
I'm trying to recall the order that I came across. It all can happen quite quickly in the first
one or two stalls. I came across it. It's a tiny wee haul. It's maybe about 20 tables or something
like that. So it's not a big rally, gathering of amateurs, basically. And things they want to
offload, basically. And so I think the first thing I picked up was perhaps a Kindle. And it was
not the, I don't know what the model is, it's not that the paper white model. I'm pretty sure
notes and fine and I'll link to the model it is. It's not got the keyboard on it. It's the one
before the paper light Kindle. And we've brought one in the house already, but being mean,
it's kind of a shared one, shared. And it was also being a Kanye Scott mean. It was a kind of
ex-demonstrator thing. And I got to tell you, it cost me 60 pounds. And it'd been used so much
that the screen, you could see some of the words on the screen, you could see, you could, it
was almost burnt into the screen, so to speak. There was also marks on the screen and the buttons
that advanced and retard the pages on the right hand side didn't work reliably. So this was
a current Kindle. This one, the same model I picked up for 15 pounds. And it was a macula.
And in fact, when I got it home, I discovered that when I took the Kindle out the case,
there was four or five sheets of neatly handwritten paper with books that the owner had
had read. Now far bit from me to passing a judgment on their reading choices, but they did seem
predominantly to be romantic love story type books. So perhaps it didn't belong to the amateur
himself, but you never know maybe he had a, you know, a liking for that sort of thing,
and who am I to judge, you know, but anyway, so the Kindle I got home charged up, works great,
fantastic, delighted with it, 15 pounds great. So that was purchase number one,
purchase number two was a battery charger, but no ordinary battery charger, it was,
I would call it, it's a PowerRex MHC9000. And I'm just, it came in a box, it was just a brand
new, you know, all the pieces of insight, in a cardboard and such like in a box was there. So
you know, it looked like I just, like I just purchased the thing. And it came with a glossy
brochure, advanced fast charger and battery conditioner. And approved by the toughest customers,
Milachin Defence NASA, Kodak, Rockwell and many more, so let's sort of guff. And so as you go,
it can charge double A or triple A batteries, you know, nickel cadmium or nickel metal hydride.
And it does double A triple A sizes, four at a time. You've got an up and down button to select
various modes, I've got a slot button and an enter button. So the various modes you've got,
you've got a charge mode, do you want me to be able to get my head down just because it's actually
quite a bit, a bit to read with a supplied manual, but essentially you've got one, two, three,
four, five modes. Mode one gives you charge and it just charges that the cell. And so you basically
put one cell in the mode arrow flashes on one of the modes. If you don't do anything, it just
picked a default charge rate and just charges a battery. But you also get that default option
charge. It asks you what charge current you want to charge it at. And the default is quite
sensible, but you can drop it up a down sort of thing about a faster charge or slower charge.
Second mode is refresh and analyze. And basically that just to, I think it charges a battery,
wait until it cools a bit, this charges a battery and logs the melee and power ratings of the
battery. But down to a voltage I think one volt and then recharges it again. So that way you get an
idea of what the capacity for individual cell is. And it does that for each of the four.
And they recommend you do that if your battery hasn't been used for
is it two weeks, something like that. If it hasn't been used for, was it two months, I can't
remember, then you use a breaking charge and that charges it very, very slowly over 16 hours.
Then I think it discharges it and recharges it again. Now I don't know whether it recharges it
slowly at the second time, I'm not quite sure. There's a discharge mode that discharges any cell
down to one, one volt. And finally you've got to recycle a cycle mode which will cycle charge,
discharge, charge, discharge, charge. And you can set the charge rate, the number of times
you want to cycle it. And the discharge rate, it dollars as well of course, because you can also do
the discharge mode too. Yeah, I mean it's quite bulky. It's got to be stand on the back, but super
geeky. If you want to see the performance of batteries. And in fact, I had two batteries that
I hadn't been using. I just kind of swapped them out with a GPS unit. And I discovered that one was
duff and the other one was good. In fact, the other one was better balanced. It was at a higher
capacity than the two that I was using, one of the two that I was using just now. So I swapped
one of the two overs. So they're better balanced basically, which is again, it's a good idea. I
always want the capacity, the batches to match as closely as possible. So it's a good way of doing that
sort of thing. Of course, I thought about it after I got the thing home thought that's a bargain
creating or I think I was about £100. And I think it was £20 I paid for it or something like that.
But then I thought about it, but what did I actually charge? And there's only these two 80 batteries
that I charge and I actually was done the GPS unit because nowadays everything comes with an
inbuilt battery. So in reality, I probably won't use it very much. And it's probably why the owner
got rid of it. So what seemed like a bargain? Maybe it wasn't, but it's a fun of another paid
that for a £100 for a fancy charger like that. So that was a purchase two. Purchase three
was a Watson FC-130 frequency counter. And I wasn't going to buy this in Hamdenhawden. I've
looked at these things before and vaguely thought about it, but I would never I would never pay
the money because there are about £100 these things. And so it's basically tiny handheld frequency
is battery powered. And it comes with a telescopic quip. And the idea is, I thought it might be useful
if I was in an area and I wanted to save on that shopping centre and you thought, oh,
I wonder what frequency they're using and what they're, you want to work out what frequency the
local PMR radios were being broadcast on, let's say the security guard. I put this scanner,
this counter on and it'll, as long as you're not too far away from the transmitter,
then it'll pick up and log the frequency that the radio is transmitting on. Now, that's what's
one fun use for it. You can always use it to check your equipment, your amateur equipment,
make sure that it's in frequency, although precisely how accurate the thing is, is slightly
questionable, particularly the higher frequencies. But it's a fun thing. It's got an on-off switch,
a range which is either three gigahertz or 300 megahertz, a hold button so that if you get,
if it picks up a signal, you can hit the hold button in a display freezes. And a gate
button which takes a bigger sample of the frequency and so it takes longer for the frequency,
the frequency counter to pick up the frequency, but you get more accurate reading basically.
And of course, I thought, oh, what kind of batch is it got inside this thing? I said to the
owner, I said, oh, it's got a batch inside it. Is it okay? I said, I charged up yesterday,
so the other day, and it's absolutely fine, he says. And he said, you can just take this button,
there's a button rubber thing on the bottom of the thing, you just pull it off and can replace the
batch if you need to, but the batch is absolutely fine, he says. So I got it home and discovered that
the batch wasn't fine. In fact, you got to be, batch symbol appears when it's needing charged
again. And it really doesn't take long for that to happen. And I gave it, it takes 16 hours to charge,
I think, which is quite slow. He knocked five pounds off it, so we got it for 45 pounds rather than
the 50 pounds, but he did assure me that the batch was in good condition. So I'm slightly disappointed
about that, but ah well, it's not in the world. I looked on eBay and I found, well, first of all,
I think we look for the manual for the counter. Again, it came in a box with, and it looked like
as if it was new, other than it had a, didn't have the manual. And I think it says that it's a
600 milliamp hour nickel cadmium batch, so it's quite an old unit, obviously, because you don't
can't get nighcads nowadays. So I had to be looking eBay and I came across a six hundred, I think
it's a 500 milliamp actually, but I came across a 600 milliamp hour nickel metal hydrate batch,
which is close enough, and that will charge fine with the charger. So I've just purchased that,
so that came to 6.50. So it won't take long to come in a couple of days time, and obviously,
to take the screws out and resolder and whatnot. So I took the screws and I had to look anyway,
and that bottom cover isn't how you get into it at all, because it's actually stuck one with the
dollars of tape. I nearly pulled a thing off trying to get to the batch, so that was another thing
it wasn't quite too either. But I guess this is up your buy secondhand stuff, and you give it
a chance, but I would never have paid that money for all these things, and so I've got my Kindle,
£15, charger £20, counter £45, was there anything else?
An egg roll, a cake, a drink, so I think that was about it.
But these things are great to catch up, it's just like the catch up with other amateurs and whatnot.
I guess it's just like going to the first day in all this sort of thing, it's sort of kind of
forced in for amateurs. I'm sure in the States and other countries have much bigger ones,
because this one was absolutely tiny, but third I enjoyed myself anyway. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed
this podcast, I'll leave it at that, I don't think I've got anything else to say, I hope I've
bored you too much. If you want to contact me, I could be contacted at MrX at hpr.googlemail.com.
Until next time, thank you, and goodbye.
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