G7GGW - Making sure the world is my oyster!

I'm currently on vacation in Spain.  I've been able to string up a 23m long random wire into a balun and am currently running FT-8 as EA3/G7GGW. I've been heard from Japan to Chile with my FT-891 running 25W with a LDG Z100 plus tuner. I've also made antennas for 6M  and 2M based on instructions here https://vk1nam.wordpress.com/6m-sota-antenna/ from VK1NAM's website so thanks to him for posting that. The antenna is attached to a 6M long carp fishing rod from Decathlon that compacts down to about 40cm when travelling and costs about 17 euros to buy. There is some activity on 6M and I have been received at a distance of more than 2000km!

I've got two MMDVM hotspots with me here in the Spanish Pyrenees. One is a Jumbospot on a Pi Zero W and the other is a dual antenna hotspot on a Raspberry Pi B. When on the dual antenna hotspot I noticed that at the end of a QSO I could hear the last two seconds of my own voice when I de-keyed. I suspect, but haven't measured, that a dual antenna hotspot in duplex mode uses twice as much data to send an receive the QSO. So on holiday a simplex hotspot will use half the data during a QSO when compared to a dual antenna hotspot. I suspect the test will be to see what happens when only TG9 is running with no Internet connection. If I hear my own voice then the hotspot re-transmits the received signal rather than the stream if receives from the network the Brandmeister/Fusion server. Testing this is left as an exercise for the reader, I'm on holiday! ;-)

Yesterday, I connected to a WiFi AP at a cafe I was drinking coffee at and decided to update all my apps, download the news paper from the last few days and back up all my photos; basically all the stuff I'd do at home via WiFi and not via my phones data connection. It was only then that I discovered that I wasn't connected to the WiFi AP in the cafe after all (stuck in Captive Portal hell) and I'd just used up all my normal 1G data bundel for my phone SIM in 20 minutes. So, I went to the nearest mobile phone shop and got a Lebara SIM with a Spanish number.You have to ID yourself (I used my driving license) but that was not a problem and within 5 minutes I had a working Spanish mobile number. I'm a fan of Lebara's mobile network. They offer SIM cards in most european countries. Before leaving, I'd purchased 7GB of data with roaming for use with my hotspot and once I got the APN settings right it's been flawless. My phone accepts two SIM cards which

My hotspot is setup to connect to three WiFi networks 1) my home network, 2) tethered to my mobile phone and 3) my hotspot. The Pi-Star wifi settings (and for most Linux distrubtions are stored in a file located in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. Mine looks like this: #cat /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev update_config=1 ap_scan=1 fast_reauth=1 country=UK network={     ssid="wifihome"     psk="mypassword"     id_str="0"     priority=100 } network={     ssid="mobilephone"     psk="mypassword"     id_str="1"     priority=99 } network={         ssid="holidayhotspot"         psk="mypassword"         id_str="2"         priority=98 } Note that each entry has a unique id_str value. Additionally I have set a preference order for connecting using the priority field. The higher the value the higher the preference. If you want

I spent a good morning trying to get my hotspot working this morning. I'd verified if before leaving for Spain but once here I could make a receive calls and text messages but not data. It turned out the APN settings were incorrect. Once I'd found what they needed to be I changed them on the hotspot and once again, the world was my oyster!

A picture of my holiday shack!