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I've been slowly getting back into backpacking shape. Not only physically, (I recently had my annual physical and lasted 16 minutes on the treadmill test(faster and steeper every 3minutes), not bad for an old man), but also getting my equipment, both radio and packs, etc.., updated. So it was time for a real test to see what works and what doesn't as well as what I forgot to include.

So a few days ago, my son AB5EB, invited me on a backpacking trip with he and my two grandsons, Reid, KF5GYE and Boogie, KF5GYD, ages, 10 and 12 respectively. Well, of course I could go. Our destination was Lost Maples State Park in the Texas Hill Country. What a beautiful spot. We would hike 4 miles to one of the high points in the park, ~2,300 ft. elev., making a 550 vertical climb and camp for the night. The last 330 feet of the climb come in the last quarter  mile of  the hike, so it's pretty pedestrian until that point.

From the backpacking perspective, I planned pretty well. A lightweight MSR Nook tent served me well, however, my old 20 degree sleeping bag and Thermarest  pad need updating, lighter versions exist. My titanium alcohol cook stove and titanium cook pot worked great. One omission, I didn't bring any thing to sit on, so I need to get a Thermarest chair set-up that allows me to make a seat out of my sleeping pad, sitting on ground gets old. I used to have one, but I have no idea where it is. One lesson that I haved learned when carrying everything you need on your back is to dual purpose your gear as much as you can. And example, for eating, I carry a plastic spoon and a coffee cup. If  I don't eat the backpacking meal from the bag, I use the coffee cup to eat from and I have very little clean up. While I didn't bring a trekking pole on this trip, I could easily one to mount the 13' pole on, after I figure out the adaptor issue. A trekking pole also works well as a base for the Buddi-stick vertical.

I would also say the radio set up worked as well. My main goal was to test the new 13' telescoping pole that I bought from SOTA Beams. I like this pole because it is much easier to pack in a backpack and it fits easily into a suitcase. Of course it's only 13'. I set it up on the $10 tripod that I use with my AlexLoop, that gives it another 4 feet or so. Both the telescoping pole and small tripod slide easily into the slot behind the sidepockets on most backpacks.

Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

It rained ALL day, for the most part.  Not really heavy, but a good soaking Spring rain.  Just what I need to get the grass growing again after I mowed it Friday night!

I started the day with a nice rag chew with Joe W2KJ. I always get a kick out of working Joe.  He's an outstanding QRPer; and it's always a pleasure to chat with him. But I really get kick out of the W2KJ to W2LJ thing - our calls being one letter apart.

This afternoon, I worked VQ975FOC/MM. If he was in the Chagos Islands, where the call sign is from, that would have been quite the QSO at 9,366 miles away.  But as he was signing /MM, Jim could have been just about anywhere on the face of the earth. Shortly after working him, I got a tweet from Chris KQ2RP. He was intermittently trying to work the same station in between shack cleaning chores. When Chris heard the VQ9 come back to me, he redoubled his efforts and got him in his log, also.  You know what they say, "QRPers of a feather, flock together."  Cool, Chris, I'm glad you worked him too.

I worked VP5/W5CW down in the Turks and Caicos on 20 Meters.  I have worked Dave several times over the years in the big DX contests. I guess he's down in the islands getting ready for the CQ WPX Contest, which is next weekend.

I also got a new DXCC entity in the QRP log today.  By working CP4BT, I worked Bolivia with QRP for the first time.  I've worked that country several times over the years, but it was always QRO in the past.  This time it was with 5 Watts.  I am going to have to go through my log and see how many that brings me up to via QRP.  I think it might be somewhere close to 130 now.

I finished the day by giving out points in the monthly Run For The Bacon.  It seems pickings were sparse this month; and that might be no surprise. I am willing to wager that a lot of my fellow piggies were returning home from Dayton today and were just too tired to hunt for bacon!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least! Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Last years shot of my planned location for today

It turned out to be a fantastic day  lots of sunshine and temperatures in around 23C. I was long over due and it was time to  pack up the KX3 and go on an outdoor trip with the rig. I brought along the Alexloop as well to give it a go outdoors.  Part of planning is making sure you have all that you need for the trip and not just radio stuff. There is water, one of those chairs you sling over your back, hat and sunglasses without these the trip could be not as comfortable. I arrived at my "spot" that I have gone to in the past found a nice parking spot in the shade. I then proceeded to unpack the car but could not believe the amount of mosquitoes that were buzzing around me. If planning had been better repellant would had been on the list but in all fairness at this time of year mosquitoes were the last thing on my mind. It was now time for adaptability and move to another location.

New setup in town

 There is no way I could have setup and been comfortable with the bugs at this location. I was now heading back to town and to another location. This one was along the river in town and always has a nice cool breeze off the river. I found my spot and setup did not take long at all and there was a table that was available as well. The Alexloop was very easy to setup and very fast to get it tuned up on 14.060. The KX3 was set to about 2 watts output and so began my CQ's. About 15 minutes into the portable operation the KX3 went

All packed up.

dead!! This has happen to me in the past with this radio and I knew exactly what is was! It was very poor planning on my part....the KX3 batteries were dead. Well not dead exactly but below the minimum voltage needed to operate the radio. That was the end of my out door adventure for the day and the radio is now at home getting it's batteries recharged. Monday is a holiday up this way and depending on the weather maybe I will give it a go on Monday.Going to have to look into a second set of batteries so I always have a charged set ready to go.

KX3 charging

Mike Weir, VE3WDM, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Ontario, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

Last week I noticed that the Raspberry Pi camera was available. At the princely sum of £20 including VAT, I ordered one from CPC It arrived very quickly but I didn't have time to do anything with it until yesterday.

The camera is a PCB on the end of a ribbon cable - all very simple. I found the following instructions on the CPC site for installing the camera. OS and firmware updates are required to the Pi in order to use the camera. I followed the instructions through and didn't encounter any problems, although somehow I managed to download the wrong script for the rpi-update (in the end, I used the procedure here https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update)

I did have to take the Pi out of its' case in order to connect the camera - and I have seen some correspondence which suggests that a case which accomodates the camera might not be far away.

Getting the camera going was fine, although this is where the CPC instructions fell down.  They mention software on the Pi called raspicam. I tried running it, only to find that the software wasn't there. Initial reaction was that I'd messed up, but actually no, the software had been renamed and you need to look for raspistill and raspivid

I found the easiest way to attach the camera to something to hold it still was BluTack although trying to make that work on an odd angle, pointing the camera out of the window was a little frustrating!

Picture quality was good. It struck me that you could easily use the Pi and the camera for a shack webcam.

My other Raspberry Pi is dedicated to running my DSTAR gateway. I thought that I would upgrade the OS  in the same way today, although I've not upgraded the firmware as I didn't want to use the camera on that machine (doubtless there are other improvements). The upgrade procedure took over 2 hours.

I also took the opportunity to upgrade Jonathan, G4KLX's DVAPNode and Gateway software to the latest version. First time I brought the system up, the processor went to 100% and stayed there and I wondered what I had done! However, after a rather inelegant shutdown, involving removing the power - and bringing the system back up everything seemed to be working as it should, once again.

Proving it, I had a really nice DSTAR QSO with Horacio LU1BJW in Buenos Aires. I understand that DSTAR is not everyone's cup of tea, but it does enable some very interesting QSOs to be made. Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].

I just finished a contact with a very loud Austrian station, OE3DIA on 10 metres, who took time out while working a string of stations to give me a complimentary audio report, quite unsolicited. It's good when that happens! The comment was "Very nice audio cutting through the QRM" I was using the K3 at 80 watts and the mike was one of those Heil mikes with the dual insert, set to "narrow". The K3 transmit audio equalisation is factory standard, in other words flat.

As it happens I had just been doing some audio comparisons between the KX3 and the FT-817. There has been a thread going on the KX3 Yahoo group started by a disenchanted American ham who claims that the FT-817 has punchier audio than the KX3. It's rubbish, to put it politely. The KX3 has a built-in speech compressor, while my 817 has an RF processor made by Joachim, DF4ZS (more details on my FT-817 page) built into the microphone. Without it there is just no comparison.

I recorded some audio clips so you can hear for yourself:

• FT-817 with standard microphone, no compression
• FT-817 with standard microphone and DF4ZS compressor
• KX3 with MH3 microphone, mic gain and compression both set to 30

There is a bit of distortion on those clips which was not noticeable when listening on the radio. I think I might have a problem with my sound card.

I'm not sure if the difference are that noticeable in those clips, but when you look at the needle of the power meter the KX3 certainly has the more punchy signal.

Both the FT-817 and the KX3 were running off 13.8V and set to 5 watts output. I couldn't compare them on battery power as I don't have the charger board for the KX3 and the external battery pack (10xAA NiMH cells) I intended to use appears to be past it and the KX3 kept cutting out on voice peaks. Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

But I'm willing to lay down a bet that they didn't have one of THESE there! And no, it wasn't for sale!


A large one to tack onto the shack door and a small one to slap on my tool box.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least! Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

No contacts heard or made but it's working

Good afternoon from the shack of VE3WDM, it's a long weekend up this way with Monday being a holiday! I have been seeing lots of posts about Dayton and a huge amount of tweets. It would seem that most if not all major manufactures have some new goodies they are premiering at Dayton. For those of you who read this blog and are sending use the news of Dayton.......KEEP IT UP!! So what's new around here.....well I have updated my VE3WDM K2 build blog with a new page. This is my second Elecraft K2 I have built and I wanted to blog about it. I want to highlight the build as well try to make this blog a good resource  for ham radio kit builders. This K2 build is taking longer with taking pictures and blogging about it but I am having a hoot. Today I decided to get WSPR going once again in the shack, well I must admit that at first it was to TRY to get WSPR going again. I did have WSPR installed and running with my K3 in the past and for some reason (as I have found many digi modes do) the rig would not come out of transmit. No matter what I did I could not  repair this odd event. Today I decided to remove the WSPR program from my PC and start fresh. I am happy to say that all is working well agian. A fellow blogger Bas had mentioned to me while I was comparing my attic dipole to my new Alexloop antenna that WSPR would be a very good way to compare the two. At this point this evening I am just making sure WSPR is functioning as it should and so far all looks well. My next step will be to put the attic dipole up against the Alexloop. Mike Weir, VE3WDM, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Ontario, Canada. Contact him at ve3wdm[email protected].

It's been a good Es day. From the time that I came into the shack this morning, 50MHz has been open pretty much all the time - sometimes a little less and a little more. There have been some nice contacts to be made, nothing very distant or rare, but very enjoyable none-the-less. And some 70MHz Es too - always welcome.

Zipping up and down 50MHz this morning to see what was on, I was surprised to note a fair amount of PSK activity around 50.250. So much so that I stopped off there, and started up the Datamodes window in PZTLog. There was even some PSK63. However, all my QSOs were on PSK31, the best DX being IK8YSS down in JN70, who actually, I could barely hear on the speaker (always a test of a good QSO!).
A call that got my attention coming back to a CQ on PSK was YV5JDT/I1 !

Plenty of more traditional CW and SSB QSOs during the opening, but I shall have to keep an eye on the datamodes section during other openings. I did try a couple of CQs on JT9-1 around 50.293, but had no takers - although I notice my signals were heard by IZ0MIT, IK2WJT and my neighbour, Neil, G4BRK. It would be nice to find JT65A activity too. Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].

So cheap you just have to buy one! According to the the listing it's VHF or UHF not dual band. Thanks to Steve G1KQH for the tip-off. Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

This Saturday morning there was a big Sporadic-E opening on 6m. There were some pretty big signals, though once again I seemed to be on the edge of the opening. The Sporadic-E seemed centered over northern Europe and you can see from the map that it was pretty intense!.

6m on 18 May 2013 at 0930z. Map from DXMaps.com

I had KComm's DX Cluster window open. I don't use the cluster on HF and dislike it intensely, but spotting stations on the cluster (in a specific format with locators for both endpoints) is how VHF contact information gets to DXMaps.com.

I saw a couple of contacts from Ireland spotted on 2m so I switched bands.

2m on 18 May 2013 at 0940z. Map from DXMaps.com

As you can see, two lucky EI stations managed to work into northern Italy, one of them using a vertical antenna! Signals must have been strong but when I QSYed to 2m I didn't hear anything. The Es must have been over the northern French coast and you can see that the same Es cloud must have permitted F6HTJ to spot the GB3ANG beacon and enabled DG7IG to work EA1CCM as the paths intersect at the exact same point..

I wasn't lucky on 2m but I was a bit more successful on data and tuned to the PSK part of the 6m band just in time to catch a French station signing off with Tim, G4VXE. I managed QSOs with Gerard F4LKG and George EA4GB but I don't think many stations were listening because my CQs went unanswered.

It seems as if the 2013 Sporadic-E season is off to a good start!

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].