Steve G1YBB, Author at G1YBB.uk

Improved car portable cable access

I’ve been using this method of bringing my cables in for a few years now:
Car Portable Cable Access

And whilst this has been OK it has some drawbacks. Once while packing away it blew away so I am actually using the 2nd incarnation! It forces the cables to the very top of the window by design which for stiffer coax like the LBC400 I use can make it awkward to pass it to the far side of the car for the weekend contests using amp(s). Also bugs manage to locate the very small gap there is and attack me as the light it directly above my head in the car.

So time for a new one. Clive G8LNR showed me pics of his which is a piece of thin ply and a letterbox. The letterbox I thought was a great idea so I decided to steal that idea.

So here I describe the making of my improved car portable cable access.

I wanted to make mine inherently waterproof so plastic was the obvious choice so I asked my friend Paul who ran a plastic injection molding company the best plastic to use and he recommended polypropylene so I got some 3mm sheet after measuring the window which was 4mm thick. Some places did 3mm and 5mm, some did 3mm and 4.5mm and some did 3mm and 4mm, alegedly. Following my Moulder principal of trust no-one, I ordered 3mm as I wanted to ensure it would fit into the same channels in the door as the glass does.

Checking the dimensions of letterboxes I realised that I needed the maximum opening I could get at the door pillar end of the glass. I started off by scribing the window curve onto cardboard, cutting the sides to shape then opening the window to the desired amount and scribing the curve again. I had to make a second cardboard one as the ends were truncated but soon had that test fitted:

Then a case of taping that to my 1000 x 500mm sheet of polypropylene to trace ready for cutting:

I then cut this out with a jigsaw using a metal cutting blade. After deburring it was time for the moment of truth. To fit it I would have the window down and insert the narrow end by the door pillar then flex it so I could insert it into the opposite channel then slide it up into the top channel. Then carefully raise the window to pretty much press it into the top channel. Only very slightly though as my car has one of those not required ‘safety’ features that if it detects any unexpected resistance it panics and winds the window back down again. Grrr. But managed to get it just right and et voici:

A bit of wavy line syndrome, both from the cardboard cutting and the jigsaw but more than close enough for this job.
I then used the offcut to cut a thin strip to attach to the outside as a cover for the plastic to glass joint to keep water out. A slot was cut out for the letterbox and everything drilled and screwed together with mastic to seal things up.

But we are not quite there yet.

As by design this is quite flexible, there is nothing to stop it bowing outwards from the glass at the bottom. It shouldn’t much due to being in the top window channel but it wouldn’t be a G1YBB design if I didn’t deal with that.

A few minutes in 3D CAD and a few more on the 3D printer and I had two clips to fit to the inside. It has a 1.5mm thick step (3mm polypropylene + 1.5mm > 4mm glass) and a tab to slide the glass past.

These were fitted then the assembly left over the weekend to give the mastic some time to set.

And here is how it looks on the maiden test fit:

If I can get a photo in the next UKAC I will but setup is now in the dark. I’ll definitely take one from the inside though and update soon!.

Last updated 10th November, 2025

G1YBB now published globally

I have appeared in print a few times over the years mainly for winning the Practical Wireless magazine 144MHz QRP contest. That is I would mostly a national magazine although I know it certainly has some circulation into Europe.
Me as a ‘cover boy’ receiving a trophy for the 2016 PW 144MHz QRP contest:

But this year I have discovered that G1YBB is now published globally!

Following the drama I had getting RTTY mode to work ( https://g1ybb.uk/rtty-setup-on-ic7610-with-dxlog/ ) I have had some good results in world wide RTTY contests. In the CQ WPX RTTY contest I actually set a new single band QRL record which I was really pleased with ( results table ) and also more recently (results released wise) have set a DX (all the World outside of USA) all time record score for a QRP section. This got me (so far) a mention in the August 2025 QST magazine. The report is slightly wrong as I wasn’t using a vertical – I have emailed Jeff to clear that up – maybe I’ll get a mention again in the full article.
Link to the QST article: https://contests.arrl.org/ContestResults/2025/RTTY-RU-2025-FinalQSTResults.pdf

I hadn’t actually noticed this article was online, I found out when I received an email from Hisami 7L4IOU to say congratulations and that he had noticed the mention and looked at my website and thought my contesting information sign was good and could he mention it in the Japanese magazine CQ HamRadio.
https://ham.cqpub.co.jp/

Obviously I said that would be great and we exchanged some more emails and then Hisami said he would send me a copy of the magazine. The last email was dated 6th July 2025.

Well, they certainly don’t mess about in Japan!

I didn’t know if Hisami meant a PDF copy by email or an actual paper copy. But I was only thinking towards the end of last week that if it IS a paper copy he never asked for my address. Then I though I wonder if he will use my (incomplete) address on QRZ as other countries may well not know it is an incomplete address. Before I had any time to think on this further my mum told me a book had come for me from Japan on Saturday 26th July 2025. You can see below the post mark date is 17th July! That 11 days from last email to hard copy in the post. And it’s THICK! And shipped to a partial address!

Opening the package revealed two books. One appeared to be a book of all the areas and regions in Japan and the other thicker one the main magazine.

On opening it I found, not surprisingly, it’s almost 100% Japanese, with the odd sentence/phrase or two readable in English. A good excuse to flick through page by page and see what was in it. I eventually found the section where I thought I might get a mention starting at page 186. (handy the page numbers are readable).
Obviously I can’t read the article but it appears to be a report on the RTTY contet where I get mention with my short call MW1B and some talk about that and then some about the contesting sign and some other general stuff about me from my website. Cool.

It has to be said, Amateur Radio really does cross all boundaries and makes the World a smaller place! Wonder if I can get G1YBB now published globally in another corner of the World?

Last updated 7th November, 2025

Are 3D printed parts strong enough?

I’ve been making 3D printed parts for years now, all functional. Drill jigs, cutting jigs, antenna parts, all sorts. For most of these years I have only printed with PLA+ which is to be honest not the best choice, however it DOES work. You just need to know it’s limitations. The below antenna is one of 5 I made and every element mount, the dipole box and the N type box are all 3D printed in PLA+. I use this antenna portable (sometimes 2, I’ve yet to put any actual RF up 2 more and 5th one a friend uses) and it works great:
However I have noticed some stress fractures in the tops of some of the element mounts. PLA+ is very rigid and a bit brittle. It also will distort in the heat of a parked car in the sun.

More recently I have got a new printer, the Bambu Lab P1S with AMS which I have actually experimented with and switched to using PETG, which I already knew is a stronger material.

Bearing in mind the above you may ask “Are 3D printed parts strong enough?”

Well this week I have come to the conclusion the answer is pretty much yes!

For one of my current antenna projects (will they ever end???) I have designed and printed some drilling jigs (nothing new there) but have decided as they will be used a few times I would turn some small brass bushes to press in so the drill doesn’t wear way any plastic and make the hole fit sloppy.

Here is one. You can see it is 60mm wide and the brass bush has a 6mm external diameter:
I wasn’t happy with that jig so decided to tweak the design and print it again. But I didn’t want to turn another brass bush so needed to get it out. It’s pressed in and wasn’t keen on coming out at all.
No problem, I’ll just break the plastic at the ‘weak’ point where it is fitted and it will fall out.
Erm, nope. I tried by hand squeezing the legs together and trying to break it like a wishbone. All I got was sore dented hands. That PETG just refused to snap on me. I do print with decent wall counts but the fill on this wasn’t excessive as ‘only’ a drill jig.

Time to resort to more forceful persuasion!

First I crushed the legs together in the drill press vice (because it’s more handy than my 6 inch vice) and I did break it at the middle point, but it still refused to let go of the brass bush.
So next I lay it across the jaws and split it sideways with a cold chisel (as that was close at hand too).
This did the job:

I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised at the length I had to go to in order to break this! When you look at the amount of material at the break below (that bush is 4mm tall) it’s really quite impressive.

So my conclusion is when asked “Are 3D printed parts strong enough?” is that yes they are if printed in the correct material and with an eye for manufacture at the design stage and with correct settings at the print stage.
PETG isn’t even the strongest material we can quite easily get and print with. But it is very readily available and as cheap as PLA/PLA+ pretty much. Some of the stronger materials like ASA need more consideration on fume handling etc so for now I am pretty pleased with the performance of PETG and only wish I had made the switch before!

Last updated 19th July, 2025

Don’t go home ’till we worked

Just a bit of fun this time. When I am out portable contesting and chat to other contesters before the contest starts I always say to them “don’t go home ’till we worked” because sometimes you just forget to work some stations that are otherwise easy to work, especially if you are both busy during the contest. So it’s kind of my catchphrase amongst the UK VHF contesters.

I am not really a fan of a lot of AI, the AI generated results on web searches are often complete rubbish, but I have seen some quite good AI generated songs so I decided to try it out.

I used one website to generate the lyrics, with hardly any key phrases:
I was quite impressed with the first go of the lyrics so went to another site to generate the song itself using the lyrics. Each time you generate the song you get a slightly different version. I did two and the first one I liked best!

I then decided to add it to some contesting photos to make a video as it’s often hard on social media to share just and audio track.

So here it is, I present to you for your amusement:
Don’t go home ’till we worked by G1YBB

I quite like it. It’s actually quite catchy.

Last updated 5th July, 2025

Arbor press bending brake press

At first glance my arbor press bending brake press modification might not seem amateur radio related but in fact the first job for it will be element mounting plate support brackets for a 10m moxon.

As a hobbyist we have probably all bent sheet metal in a vice tapping with bits of wood etc but it’s always a bit of a poor job at the end, certainly when I do it anyway! But some time ago I got hold of a small vice based bending set like this:
At the time I didn’t actually have a vice only having a drill press vice but the jaws on that don’t open wide enough to take these so it sat around doing nothing for a while.
I did then decide I needed a vice for this and other jobs so got myself one and did some small brackets for my TMF-3 based DXcommander style vertical portable antenna.
But in making these simple L shaped brackets I noticed a couple of things. It’s really hard to make a fold the exact angle you want at all and even harder to make more than one the same! Also, as my ‘workshop’ is usually the bench in the garden so my vice is packed away when not in use and not bolted down to a bench like most I have to clamp it down to stop all the weight at the front tipping it over. Additionally there is very little ‘throat’ so the longest flange you can make is about 3 inches, the distance above from the bending V to the top of the sliding body part. So I decided I would utilise my arbor press. continue reading

Last updated 27th June, 2025

Mini lathe cross slide modification

You may wonder what a mini lathe cross slide modification has to do with Amateur Radio but it is a tool I use a lot for radio gear. Mostly for the plastic bearing rings on my coax loop free guy rings ( https://g1ybb.uk/g1ybb-coax-loop-free-guy-rings/ ) but also for other little items like the YBB Washer ( https://g1ybb.uk/the-ybb-washer/ ) so very closely related to my radio activities.

My lathe is a cheap Warco mini lathe that I bought from an old friend G3LZM (now SK) and it sat unused for a LONG time. But now it sees more action and as a good friend of mine recently bought the Warco super mini lathe and has corrected some of the cost saving shortcuts I am trailing along adding a few to mine. So this one deals with the cross slide, or to be precise, the lead screw.

As seen in the exploded view above the lead screw (item 5) has a shoulder on it that sits in a machined recess in the cross slide boss (item 4) and it trapped up against the main body of the carriage (item 52). There is no bearing at all and the boss is aluminium. You can see this in my photo below: continue reading

Last updated 27th June, 2025

DXlog RTTY setup on IC-7610

As I had a terrible job managing DXlog RTTY setup on IC-7610 (NOT DXlog’s fault – it’s the RTTY side that is the issue!) and I know others have given up, I thought I would share what I did and my settings.
I AM NOT AN EXPERT – BUT – I have got it working very well in the end.

To start, this is on Windows 11 Version 24H2, however, I got it working on Windows 7 SP1 prior to this, noted all my settings down and got it working on Windows 11.

DXlog I am running V2.6.11 which as I write is not the current version but it is not broken, I shan’t fix it just yet!
I’m sure those running N1MM+ or WinTest etc can find similar settings. As said the biggest issue I had was knowing what settings to use.

Radio end.
Starting at the Icom IC-7610 end I am using a single USB cable for everything. This is using USB port 1 on the IC-7610:

When active that gives me these two COM ports:

Yours will be different most likely but I think if yours were say COM2 and COM3 then wherever I use COM4 you would use COM2, and same for my COM5 v your COM3.

In Windows Control Panel/Sound, I have renamed the default device names for the IC-7610 to something sensible that I can recognise:

I had my first success (after walking away to calm down more than once!) using the radio’s RTTY mode which is FSK keying. I have since managed to get AFSK working but I don’t use that on the IC-7610.

And these settings for RTTY are important (certainly the first 3, I haven’t touched the bottom one). Yours will probably already be set the same by default:

This setting I believe enables CAT to work on the first of the two COM ports the IC-7610 creates and RTTY to use the the 2nd COM port the IC-7610 works. It’s certainly how my radio is set and I have CAT control and RTTY working!

The following settings I didn’t cover in my own document to make RTTY work as I had already made some settings previous;y getting FT8 and CW etc working via the PC. So these may or may not have any effect:

PC end – DXLog & MMTTY.
Again, I am not claiming to be an expert on the IC-7610 or its settings, but these are taken from my working well setup.

Firstly, this shows the single radio entry in DXlog configuration using the first COM port my IC-7610 creates, COM4:

And the settings from clicking the Setup button on screen above:

The MMTTY version I use is the engine version downloaded from here:
https://hamsoft.ca/pages/mmtty.php
and the Engine only version because I am running inside DXlog:

This is UNZIPped into a folder on C: drive. No installer, just UNZIP. You can see that I have actually 4 folders. You can unzip the engine into multiple folders and when you choose that folder from DXlog and settings made are saved ONLY inside that folder. You can see I made 2 extra folders when I was getting AFSK working. That way my working MMTTY1 and MMTTY2 didn’t get broken!
I have two FSK folders and two AFSK folder because I tried to get dual rx/tx going so I could run on TRX1 and S&P on TRX2 but I couldn’t tx on TRX2 so I just use the one RX now, but I have left the folders there in case. You will also notice I have a 2Tone folder there, which I use as my 2nd decoder on RX1. I won’t cover setting that up, but it went quite well and is highly recommended.

To use FSK you need to add a small program (actually a DLL) called ExtFSK into each of the MMTTY folders for FSK to work. You will find the ZIP file download right at the bottom of this page:
https://hamsoft.ca/pages/mmtty/ext-fsk.php
Just UNZIP the files into your MMTTY folder above.

In DXLog RTTY settings I have these settings made. I have highlighted the settings for getting going with just one MMTTY instance for TRX on RTTY. For 2nd decoder if you leave as default MMVARI (I don’t have that that I know of) I see only the one decoder for MMTTY:

With the settings above made and opening an RTTY contest in DXlog you should see an MMTTY window like below appear. If not, in DXlog go to Windows/Digital Modes and tick next to MMTTY Radio 1:
Mine looks like the above as I ticked in the settings window “Only show FFT spectrum, waterfall and XY scope”. I did this to save space. I never touch the settings that are visible other wise so decided I didn’t need them.

So on the window above click Option(O) then Setup. This takes you to all the settings on 7 tabs. These are my settings and may not be perfect but I am making QSOs!

Demodulator tab:

AFC/ATC/PLL Tab:

Decode Tab:

On this next tab TX, you need to select EXTFSK as shown from near the bottom of the list of possible COM ports:

When you select EXTFSK as above, you should see a small window appear to make some settings. Here you can see I have selected the 2nd COM port COM5 that my IC-7610 creates. Also check the FSK output and PTT output as if you have set yours identical to mine they probably need to match up:

Font/Window tab:

On the Misc tab need to set as highlights for COM-TxD(FSK). For source you can probably leave as Mono. I have told my windows to make the sound card for the radio to stereo for dual rx. For single rx default and mono should be fine:

Clicking the USB Port button above looks like this:

And the final settings tab, Soundcard:

One final setting that I was told to do when I was struggling to make it work is to right click in the decode window and tick the 2125 setting as shown. I’m not sure if that is essential now but I still have it set like that!

This is the end of the settings.

If you tx now from DXlog either via macro key or via ALT K and the free type window you should see something like this twin peak signal on your radio and hear the two tones going:

If you can find an RTTY signal on air you can use the inbuilt decoder in the IC-7610 to decode it and check MMTTY is decoding something the same!
You will see garbage like in my image above the last one. That is what MMTTY has decoded with no antenna connected to me IC-7610.

I hope this helps get more people going on RTTY as I for one found it VERY hard!

Last updated 21st February, 2025

The YBB Wire Winder system for radials

This page describes the YBB Wire Winder system for radials for amateur radio vertical antennas and why I have come up with this design to make winding up vertical antenna radial wires easy.

I’m in the process of using my 50 foot fibreglass push up mast as a multiband vertical antenna as often referred to these days as a DXCommander. The build of that is detailed here:
https://g1ybb.uk/tmf-3-based-dxcommander-style-vertical-portable-antenna/

But one thing I have already discovered in various tests is the wire radials for the ground plane are a complete pain in the butt to deploy and untangle. If you do not spend some time at pack up taming the wires you are surely going to regret it next time!

My radials are in bunches of 6 soldered into one ring terminal per 6. Six wires really love building birds nests for some reason. Currently I am coiling up each wire and securing it with tape, then putting the set of six into a bag to isolate them from all others. This works but is very time consuming and will fail when raining as the tape won’t stick. Here is one set:

As I have several sets of radials of differing lengths I needed to come up with a better solution to make it faster and easier. After some pondering I have come up with The YBB Wire Winder System for radials. continue reading

Last updated 27th June, 2025

The GM3SEK mains filter

I’ve looked at the GM3SEK mains filter several times but nevertaken it any further. My worst noise at home varies with beam heading on HF so I suspect it is being received by the antenna itself and assume filtering the mains would have no effect. But recently I was testing an antenna on 80m and noticed quite a bit of noise from the Honda EU10i generator I have which wasn’t there (as I remember) some years ago on 80 using the EU20i. So I decided I would build a GM3SEK filter to try to stop the generator noise and as a side effect, could see what happens at home!

The starting point is on Ian’s site here:
https://gm3sek.com/2019/10/11/clean-up-your-shack-2019/

Last updated 27th June, 2025

TMF-3 based DXcommander style vertical portable antenna

This is a build of a TMF-3 based DXcommander style vertical antenna for portable use because at home I just do not have any space for anything on the lower bands. Also, when I did put up an inverted V once for 40m (hell of a job) it induced so much RF into the house it was not a great plan.

The basics of the DXcommander style verticals are well know, I won’t be going into that. This is focused on making use of my TMF-3 50 foot (15 metres) heavy duty fibreglass push up mast that O bought during lockdown, used for a while to support my lightweight 20m moxon but has been doing nothing since.

This video shows the TMF-3 mast and the guying points I have already made for it (excuse wind noise):

Last updated 27th June, 2025