EI4FMG still on test, but not for much longer..

EI4FMG on test in my Shack.

I have not posted about the 4m Gateway EI4FMG in a while, that’s because I have been having a small issue with it and it took a while and a bit of head scratching to sort it out.

The gateway works perfectly when on test in my shack, but as soon as I bring it to site it plays up and picks up a steady noise level on the interface when everything is connected up.

I brought it up to a friend’s QTH recently with a view of leaving it there on test and see how it behaves but the issue was still there, after turning off his electricity in his house and connecting a portable generator the problem was still there.

So we disconnected everything and brought it home, set it up in my shack on a dummy load and it was fine!!!! 

I reckoned it was an grounding  problem and went through it all again, took it off my power supply and put it on a temporary power supply  and the problem returned, so all I done was connect a wire from the chassis of the radio to the chassis of the computer and the noise disappeared.

So now the plan is this week to locate the gateway to a secondary testing location, it will probably only be on beacon mode for a while to ensure that it keeps performing to proper parameters.

Tait TM8110, Altai 5-7amp Power supply, EI4JR interface.

On test.

When the gateway returns to service it will be operating from a new radio, a TAIT TM-8110, running 15 watts and an Altai 5-7 amp power supply, also updated is the computer, the old one became faulty; the sound card started to play up and did not want to accept any input audio…

The interface by EI4JR will still be used, the gateway node number is still the same: 57006.