Hi Nigel,
Yeah, there are also steep hills in Vancouver, Canada where I grew up.
One seemed like 1 in 1, but probably wasn't that steep.
I was roaring down in my DIY kart, then I saw a big truck (lorry?) coming up the hill toward me. When I turned the steering a front wheel came off my kart and after many sparks I got stuck under the truck. I ducked my head down just at the right time. (Scraped my back a bit on the truck's underthings).
Have you ever poked around with an FM, uh, SCA sxxcast I think (can't remember what the subcarrier is called) that was used for restaurant music? Some stations transmitted other neat stuff up there like instructions to their field crew, weather forcasts, etc.
Hi Zach,
Your radio shouldn't be bad, it has good reviews all over the web. Maybe it just needs a proper PCB instead of Veroboard.
What interests you down at 70MHz? The only things that I've heard near there are wireless mics used by amateur singers and fitness instructors, and wireless boardroom-table mics.
I was installing those boardroom-table conference mic systems. I souped them up so that they sounded crisp and clear (+10dB peak at 3KHz, don't tell the telco). When a major insurance company found out that they were transmitting their secrets to their competitors across the street, I quickly made them a scrambler.
First I made a single-sideband, suppressed carrier scrambler from a balanced modulator IC, and simply repeated it at the receiver. The brass at the insurance company were really impressed. I put scramblers in two of their wireless boardroom-table mics. At their next important conference with their shareholders, the mics sounded like they were slowly drifting in and out of phase. They were! An executive would sound nice and loud at first, then it sounded like he was walking away, then coming back. I quickly turned off one of the mics and the conference proceeded alright.
Having no way to syncronise the scramblers, I changed the scrambling method to AM, single inverted sideband. Low audio frequencies were converted to high frequencies and high audio frequencies to low. Pretty good scrambling. It worked well.
The insurance company went bankrupt and lost their brand-new palace and conference system, because it turned-out that they cheated their shareholders. Maybe their competitors across the street heard their secrets and cheating before my scrambler was installed, and blew the whistle on them.
Lots of fun with FM.