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Friday 17 April 2020

Garrard Zero 100. From Zero to Hero.

Many moons ago, I was seduced by this oddball Garrard turntable.


It's that weird pantograph arm. It should track perfectly. I spotted this one, at one of those audio jumble meets. It's missing a lever or two, and the selector switches are sort of hanging there, the plinth battered and bruised.. £18 and it followed me home, much to the delight of the long and suffering Mrs Doz.

It's seen a bit of action. There's the usual "Garrard glue" to deal with, but the main issues are with the control switches...

There's some sort of mounting bracket missing or broken.

A quick look at the exploding diagram shows it's no 126...



I managed to score a few parts on eBay, but sadly not the bracket. Those levers are in better nick than mine though...

So a suitable bit of steel was cut and filed to shape...

That looks like it should do the job. There's an issue though. The screws originally fitted into the plastic top plate, where there's a reinforced bit. It's broken off...
I removed the levers (I wanted to change them anyway), and put some epoxy down to build up a layer to support the screws. 
and while that's going off, I swap the levers over, and sort out removing the sticky grease from the rest of the mechanism.. 
The speed change detent arm was exceptionally seized up, and required plenty of heat to get it to free up.










Once the epoxy had cured it was flattened off, and it was at this point I realised that the top plate was no longer secured to the chassis. as again there were sheered off screw fittings... a change of tack was required, there just isn't enough strength here......







The bracket is reversed, and bonded to the chassis with some of the UV cure adhesive I've tried before... now I take it the UV has only cured the outside part, but it seems to be holding. Where the plastic top plate is broken off, I used the glue gun to fill the void, and fit a screw through my previous epoxy repair to secure the top plate at the other side. The clamp is simply holding the top plate flush.




... and the following morning, all the gluing seems to be very strong... good. Pretty it isn't, but it's now at least functional.










The deck is flipped back over, and the platter removed, by removing the rubber mat, and removing the wire clip securing the centre spindle.
























The platter itself has the strobe markings on it's underside...











... which are viewed via a mirror in the "subterranian" strobe housing. It'll need removing to clean the mirror.










Two screws either side, and it drops down...












 ... and we can clean the mirror. The small plastic window can also be removed and cleaned.














A quick note on how the speed adjust works.
The manual speed adjustment knob under the speed selector operates a lever, which moves the idler up and down a tapered section on the motor drive shaft, thus changing the speed. A bit "lenco" really...











There's more grease to be cleaned up and replaced on the top. This lever is seized solid, and, once again, needed a bit of hot air to tempt it off.

The motor mounts are still supple, as is the idler, so that's good news.








Now to the Zero 100's arm. This is what interests me about this turntable ... it gives it it's name, Zero tracking error. The headshell actually moves as the arm moves across the record, removing the error. This one is horribly wobbly. Now because the headshell is articulated, it's never going to be the stiffest tonearm, but this is wobbling around from the pivot end.





One screw removes the perspex gimbal surround, allowing a better view.


Sure enough a tiny screw is missing, which secures the arm tube to the bearing. A replacement is found, dropped, lost and found again before being fitted.
















Now the arm is given a quick buff up to remove the worst of the corrosion on it's surface, and the brass cover on the counterweight is treated likewise.. Looking quite smart now :)









Fitting a cartridge. Now the Zero 100, in common with a few other Garrard decks of the time uses a convenient cartridge slide. Convenient that is, if you happen to have one... I knew mine was missing, so I'd previously stopped into my favourite purveyor of Garrard bits, and managed to procure a new-old-stock slide. The contacts are a bit tarnished, but that'll soon clean up.




My friend John had sent me a previously enjoyed AT95 a while back, so that was mounted onto the slide...











Normally the Zero 100 came with a perspex alignment gauge, that slid over the slider, and you just set your stylus onto the cross-hairs, and all is done. Obviously this was long-gone. As our arm compensates for any tracking error, using a conventional protractor and setting Stevenson, Baerwald etc is irrelevant.  After nearly starting a fight on a Garrard forum (some people eh?)  I hatched a plan... the arm should track something near parallel, so all I need is a line from the centre spindle out, move it about until our cartridge is on the line, move the arm in and out, and set the cartridge position so the line is followed.

A piece of cotton is pressed into service, and the cartridge position set. There is a light curve to the track, however.

Tracking weight and anti-skate are set up as per the manual.








And successfully plays through the workshop test LP, scratched and warped though it may be.










Now to think about doing something to tidy up the plinth.

Saturday 11 April 2020

NOAA APT reception on Raspberry Pi



Having been caught by the APT bug again recently (as you may have seen in a previous post) I thought I have a go at building a stand alone system.
I've had some results using my ageing Icom IC-706MKIIB and WXtoIMG on my Ubuntu computer, connected to my ham-radio 2m antenna, but this is less than ideal.
The Evesham receiver uses my employer's wide band Discone antenna, and manages to pull some decent signals in mostly, but doesn't have the required receiver bandwidth, as it's using my FT-817 under CAT control.

OK, Lets start with an antenna....

A QFH antenna would be perfect, but are difficult to make accurately. I found a superb article on a V-dipole antenna here. Some aluminium was duly ordered, and an antenna formed. Tests with the IC-706 gave much improved results. 

The antenna was mounted to a box, using some ordinary chock-block, and also added a low noise RF pre-amp, and bias-tee to power the whole thing from the co-ax (I eventually shortened that piece of co-ax looped round!)








Some pipe clips were fitted so it would be easy to mount.











The box was sealed from the elements with some liquid rubber.












A low current LED was also added to show the presence of bias.












The Receiver

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
I loved the idea of a self-contained receiver. It can sit on the shelf, doing it's thing. Some parts were duly procured, a small case, a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, an appropriate micro SD card, and a slightly posher SDR tuner with a TXCO (big mistake).


I followed this Instructable to get the basic receiver up and running. It didn't work, so I've updated it...

Grab yourself a fresh install of Raspian stretch lite. I did try a later Raspbian, but Predcit doesn't play nicely with it. Set up SSH, because it helps...

sudo raspi-config

and set up your Pi if you want to change the password, sort out the wifi, I always expand the filesystem too... Allow the Pi to reboot.

then

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo reboot

So everything's up to date, once we're going again...

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0 cmake git sox at predict libxft2:armhf

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/no-rtl.conf

and add the following to the text file.


blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
blacklist rtl2832
blacklist rtl2830

CTRL+X to save and quit.

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/keenerd/rtl-sdr.git
cd rtl-sdr/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ~
sudo cp ./rtl-sdr/rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

sudo reboot

wget http://www.wxtoimgrestored.xyz/beta/wxtoimg-armhf-2.11.2-beta.deb
sudo dpkg -i wxtoimg-armhf-2.11.2-beta.deb

Now reboot, and plug in your SDR....

sudo rtl_test

You should see something like the following...

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ rtl_test
Found 1 device(s):
  0:  Generic, RTL2832U, SN: 77771111153705700

Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U
Found Rafael Micro R828D tuner
Supported gain values (29): 0.0 0.9 1.4 2.7 3.7 7.7 8.7 12.5 14.4 15.7 16.6 19.7 20.7 22.9 25.4 28.0 29.7 32.8 33.8 36.4 37.2 38.6 40.2 42.1 43.4 43.9 44.5 48.0 49.6 
Sampling at 2048000 S/s.

Info: This tool will continuously read from the device, and report if
samples get lost. If you observe no further output, everything is fine.

Reading samples in async mode...

Press CTRL+C to get out of that ... 

As the original instructable says, if you get any errors there, you'll need to troubleshoot them...


You can now type

predict

and follow the instructable from part 3, until you get to "Once all three scripts have been created, we need to make the executable, by issuing the following commands:"

You'll need to add sudo ...

sudo chmod +x *.sh

Now you can proceed with crontab-e as described...

OK, except thing's weren't OK.

Every time I recorded I just got static :(

Nothing, nada.

I checked my dongle on my main PC, and it worked great. On the Raspberry Pi, it passed the rtl_test every time.... I was convinced there was something incompatible with the "posh" SDR receiver. This project stopped here, for about a year... then Covid-19 struck, and it's time to resurrect it!

So I bit the bullet and purchased the cheapest RTL dongle I could find....

Bingo...!

I modified the receive_and_process_satellite script to create some prettier pictures, add some friendly folder names, put the received files there, delete the .wav and map files, and chuck the lot onto my web space. I also added samba on to the raspberry pi to make accessing it directly a doddle.

#!/bin/bash

# $1 = Satellite Name
# $2 = Frequency
# $3 = FileName base
# $4 = TLE File
# $5 = EPOC start time
# $6 = Time to capture

# reads and creates folder with current date / time (i.e 05-30-2019_07-48 *windows friendly*)
NOW=$(date +%m-%d-%Y_%H-%M)
mkdir /home/pi/weather/Folder${NOW}

sudo timeout $6 rtl_fm -f ${2}M -s 60k -g 45 -p 55 -E wav -E deemp -F 9 - | sox -t wav - $3.wav rate 11025
PassStart=`expr $5 + 90`
if [ -e $3.wav ]
then
/usr/local/bin/wxmap -T "${1}" -H $4 -p 0 -l 0 -o $PassStart ${3}-map.png
/usr/local/bin/wxtoimg -m ${3}-map.png -e ZA $3.wav ${3}.png
/usr/local/bin/wxtoimg -m ${3}-map.png -e NO $3.wav ${3}.NO.png
/usr/local/bin/wxtoimg -m ${3}-map.png -e MCIR $3.wav ${3}.MCIR.png
/usr/local/bin/wxtoimg -m ${3}-map.png -e MSA $3.wav ${3}.MSA.png
fi

# copies files to the new folder and deletes the original ones
cp /home/pi/weather/*.png /home/pi/weather/Folder${NOW}/
rm /home/pi/weather/Folder${NOW}/*-map.png
rm /home/pi/weather/*.png
rm /home/pi/weather/*.wav
wput -B -u --dont-continue --reupload --tries=5 --binary --verbose --reupload ftp://yourusername:andpassword@yourwebspaceprovider.com/ ~/weather/Folder*/*.*

The Raspberry Pi, Bias T (getting it's 5 volt supply from the raspberry Pi itself), and the SDR receiver are all mounted up in a small case. Sadly I didn't notice the Raspberry Pi had moved to an odd angle before the epoxy set :( ... nevermind. 







The case has an attractive smoked top, which allows me to see the status LEDs. Workshop penny shown for scale.










And finally Mrs Doz states the antenna can live on the corner of the shed.  Mr Pigeon agrees.




















.... and quite unbelievably, whilst the antenna was on the ground during assembly....













... it managed to receive this!