A good day on the radio
29 January 2012 | by ‘Twas a fine day on the radio. Lots of activity and lots of stations to be worked. I added a few new ones, new ones as far as working for Diamond DXCC goes, that is.
C6AKQ – Bob N4BP in the Bahamas
UT7UJ – Dmitry in the Ukraine
OE5PGL – Peter in Austria
CT8/HB9CQL – Rudolf in the Azores
and ………
HK0NA on 17 Meters this afternoon.
Yay! Finally managed to break through the pile up. The team has been there a few weeks now and the pileups don’t seem to be diminishing at all, they’re still in great demand. Today was the loudest I have ever heard them to date and was lucky enough to get them in my log.
I also spent a few minutes this afternoon working on the antenna setup that I hope to use next Saturday for FYBO. I hooked up the Buddistick to the magmount and stuck it on top of the Jeep. Using an antenna analyzer, I found the settings that I need to be at for SWRs of 1.2:1 on both 20 and 40 Meters. I didn’t make any QSOs but did do some listening. I heard Ken WA8REI in QSO and his signal was so loud, I thought my ear drums were going to burst. One of the few times that I actually had to turn the volume control on the PFR3A almost all the way down.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!
Life’s Too Short
Harvey Adkins, K1ZWK, was found dead in his apartment in New Haven, CT this week of apparent natural causes. Adkins was first licensed in 2000, shortly after retiring from over 30 years of service at Lockheed Martin.
“He was an engineer’s engineer.” said Walter Roomberg, a former co-worker. ”Any challenge you placed in front of him he would attack with vigor. He was always trying to do “one better” than anyone else and would always succeed.”
“After he retired, Harvey was bored and needed something to do. He knew about amateur radio for years, but dismissed it as too simplistic.” said Roger Smith, a local ham friend. “At work he was on complex high tech multi-million dollar defense projects.”
We spoke with Adkins’ ex-wife, Mildred. ”We divorced in 2010. He had always been successful all his life but was failing at this new thing he was working on with his radios called QRP. It became an obsession and he was failing at it. It took such a toll on our marriage that I had to call it quits after forty years.” she said sadly.
Adkins excelled in amateur radio radio shortly after getting his ticket. He acquired Worked all States on four bands within his first three months. DXCC was achieved a few months later and within three years he was approaching the honor roll.
“Harvey operated all the modes at that time, except for CW and some of the slower digital modes.” stated Smith. ”He had to learn the code in order to get his license, which he did easily, but he had no interest in CW. He saw it as slow, simplistic, and too low tech, and enjoyed the ease with which he could conduct a conversation with other modes. In additional to phone ragchewing and DXing, he was doing all kinds of cool stuff like EME and writing his own DSP software, using the engineering capabilities he developed in his professional career. ’Life’s too short for CW!’ he would say. “
Another club member, Elmer Keglovits, gave a similar profile of Adkins. ”He was the Renaissance man of amateur radio. He did it all. Some modes he briefly did but found too mundane or just not that challenging. PSK31 was one of those modes. He tried it for a short time but found the nature of it, macros and all, to be a bit mindless and boring. But he would never put down the mode, and if you ever asked him about PSK at a meeting, he could immediately tell you exactly how it worked and even draw on the whiteboard the modulation technique. It was the same with CW. He learned it to get his license and felt he knew enough about it, and moved on to other more interesting things, for him. He wanted to try everything in amateur radio and learn the underlying technical details. He didn’t find it necessary or worthwhile to dwell on modes that got in the way of his ‘journey of discovery’ as he often called it.”
“One night he was talking about his achievements at our monthly club meeting and someone chuckled and said that anyone could do what he did on QRO and phone and that if he wanted to be a real ham he should do all CW. Something snapped in Harvey that night.” said Smith. ”Throughout his professional career he was accustomed to being recognized for everything. He had thought he had reached the pinnacle of amateur radio achievement and was insulted, but also challenged by this.”
Adkins became introverted and isolated after the encounter, Rogers explained. ”After that night he changed. He studied and practiced CW again and increased from a rusty 5 words per minute to 30 in a matter of two or three weeks. It was amazing. He made some contacts on the air, but he was frustrated as it seemed too easy to bang out quick QSOs, and he felt too encumbered to ragchew like he did on phone. On the other hand, once enjoyable phone operation didn’t interest him anymore with the mode considered tainted, in his mind. That’s when he vowed to go all CW and QRP. He sold all of his gear at Dayton later and proudly purchased and built an Elecraft K1 and began operating a relatively spartan station compared to his previous setup. But for some reason he just couldn’t make a contact, any contact, at all with the rig.”
Rogers had offered to help Adkins determine what was wrong with his new radio, but Adkins steadfastly refused, seeing it as a failure if he had to seek help. ”At that point our relationship deteriorated.” said Rogers. ”He had gone for about four months without being able to make a CW QRP contact. He bragged in an email to the QRP-L reflector about diving into the QRP CW lifestyle and how much he was enjoying it, but unfortunately was banned for life when he mentioned a Rockmite that he had acquired on eBay.”
The ban from QRP-L added to his angst and focused him even more, but his downfall was beginning. He began gaining weight, his marriage fell apart apart and after a messy divorce funds were limited so he had to move into an apartment where no outside antennas were allowed. This fueled the obsession, with the necessity of stealth antennas adding to the challenge. Two years later and fifty pounds heavier he still had not made a QRP CW contact.
“Local hams could hear his signal very weakly, but no one dared work him.” said Rogers. ”Knowing Harvey, we didn’t want to ruin his challenge. We weren’t rare DX so it probably would have made him go over the edge if someone a mile away worked him.”
But Harvey was already going over the edge. Analysis of files on his computer showed that he had created an anonymous email alias and fake callsign and was frantically emailing QRP-L.org, the other main QRP “watering hole”, for suggestions. Unfortunately his emails were HTML formatted which was forbidden by the reflector, and his emails were silently discarded without anyone seeing them or responding. The lack of response which mimicked his on air struggle was apparently more than Adkins could bare.
After nearly three years of no QSOs, Adkins was found dead in his apartment full of Elecraft rigs, Rockmites, straight keys, and various homebrew stealth antennas. Roger Smith acquired all of the rigs and coordinated an estate sale at the request of estranged relatives who declined to be involved. ”Each rig was modified. There was a resistor pad on the output of each one, reducing the power output. Apparently five watts was too much power for him, or he thought someone would up the ante on him again with an even lower power challenge. All of his rigs were putting out less than a milliwatt. It was very strange.”
No services are planned for Adkins, however local amateurs are planning to honor him by acquiring his ashes and compressing them into an Altoids tin and storing them at their clubhouse in New Haven. Harvey Adkins was 74 and is survived by two children and one grandchild.
The One
Ham radio is an activity that’s been around for over a hundred years and boasts millions of adherents around the world. It should come as no surprise that an institution so ancient and so compelling would harbor a few mysteries.
During the early development of radio the activity was particularly attractive to a certain kind of fellow, one with a keen interest in science and industry and often a fellow whose station in life was a cut or two above that of the ordinary man. The formation of clubs and societies, recondite in nature and hidden within the rank and file of this adventurous lot of explorers led to more than a few secrets.
That much you might know. What you probably don’t know is that a few of these clandestine organizations remain active inside the hobby to this very day.
I’m not personally a member of any of these groups nor do I have first-hand knowledge of who they are or what they do on a daily basis. But from time to time I hear from some of these secret members who drop bombshells on me that strain credulity.
I think they’ve given me a few of these nuggets to distribute because I’m an oddball. Really, compared to other ham radio bloggers I rarely over-hype the hobby and pretend to be its personal spokesman as has become common among those intent on making “X” number of contacts a day and who extol only the virtues while never telling the whole story of what it’s like to be a radio amateur.
That’s what I like to think anyway.
More’s the likely they know I’m close friends with W6OBB and they’re looking for a higher profile outlet in exposing the reclusive activities of the Lodges and are using me to get that information to him. In any event, on occasion a package arrives at my shack, delivered by a personal courier as happened just a few days ago.
This time the package included a short tale of something that happened 35 years ago and it included instructions to share it with my readers, which I’m doing today…
It seems that back in the late 1970’s a distinguished scientist and radio amateur whose name must not be spoken had developed a rather amazing antenna that performed well at high frequencies. It’s precise construction remains a secret to this very day but imagine if you will a six-foot long tube whose diameter was about two-inches. A coil of wire was wrapped around almost the entire outer body and inside there were active components, including a small pump as most of the tube was filled with a Noble gas compound that periodically required refilling.
To simply say that this antenna worked well would be a serious understatement.
Reports indicated that the antenna was highly effective without a tuner across all of the HF amateur bands. Placed horizontally or vertically in the corner of a room or the attic it was an order of magnitude more effective than any directive array installed at 150-feet.
In a nutshell, it was The One, the killer antenna that the prophets had written about.
This would revolutionize the world of HF communications. No longer would the fellow with the 100-acre antenna farm and California Kilowatt rule the Honor Roll. Now even the lowliest QRPer with his milliwatt homebrew designed gear would be on equal footing with the millionaire.
In essence, the new antenna would instantly turn the 99 percent into the 1 percent and at least when it came to hardware, there would be no more elite amateur radio stations.
Plans were made to manufacture the small wonder. This scientist/inventor wanted to sell the antenna for US $1000 and he fully expected to eventually sell one million of them making him the first amateur radio manufacturer with $1 billion dollars of revenue.
He tried to keep these plans as secret as possible for obvious reasons so he never patented the antenna which would have announced it to the world. His belief was that the gas compound required was so exotic that even if someone managed to reverse engineer the design, the compound would remain the only edge he needed.
The first five-thousand units were assembled in a large, vacant building somewhere in New Mexico.
It was about that time that the inventor discovered that his secret had leaked when he got a call with an offer to purchase the design – which he refused – and he continued to build inventory. But the phone calls and strange contacts never ceased – all warning him to sell the design for the antenna or risk losing it all.
He underestimated the threat and continued in the pursuit undaunted. Until one night when he was visited by four members of one of these secret societies who explained to him that ham radio was bigger than he and his design. And that his antenna while extremely clever would ruin the hobby by allowing those with the most basic equipment to compete on equal footing with those who had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and antenna farms.
Equal wasn’t good nor was it even “fair” he was told.
Unmoved by their threats, he stood to leave so they grabbed him, pulled a covering over his head and tossed him into the back of a dark colored sedan and drove off into the desert where he was never seen again.
The inventory of over five thousand antennas was moved by truck to a landfill outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico where they were first crushed and then buried. Three feet of concrete cover the burial site and while a few of the local hams had some knowledge of this activity, the years have created doubts as to its veracity and scope, leading some to conclude that this was just another urban legend.
But I know better and now so do you.
I can tell you this because the inventor had an assistant.
A fellow radio ham who hid in the shadows when the abduction took place and who watched this all unfold.
And at 85 years of age, he figures there’s no reason to take this story to his grave…
Jeff Davis, KE9V, is a special contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Indiana, USA.
A QSL card that was almost a quarter century in coming!!
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| A contact from 23 years ago |
A QSL card arrived Friday not an usual thing for me but this one was almost a quarter century in coming!! The card was in an envelope on it’s own most of the time QSL cards arrive in a stack of 50 or so from the buro. The card was from Louis N8LA and on the back of the card he apologized for the delay in sending me his QSL up to this point all was normal, then he thanked me for my QSL card. WHAT a QSL card I
have not sent out QSL cards (all electronic cards now) for over 10 years. Now I was just a bit confused…maybe this was a mistake….he must had copied a call wrong and sent me a card……Then I look a closer look at the front of the card….. this card was from 1989!!! To say the
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| The back of the card |
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| The station 23 years ago |
least I was shocked. On the back of the card Louis told me he no longer lives in Michigan but St.Louis now. At the time he was running the Ten Tec argonaut 515 QRP at 3 watts. The antenna was 80m inverted V at 40 ft. I looked up Louis on QRZ.com and he still has the same rig the 515. He is an avid QRPer with memberships with MI QRP # M-0078; QRP ARCI # 4508; GQRP # 5048; NAQCC # 2358; Flying Pigs
# 1974; SKCC # 4327; Fists # 13757; 10-10 # 16161, VP # 868; Member of
St. Louis QRP Society, Morse Telegraph Club, and ARCH Radio Club. I had hoped I kept my logbook from back then as I wanted to find N8LA in the log. I did find the log and he was my 26th contact in my ham radio adventures. I had been licensed for just over a month at the time. My code would have been around 5-8 WPM as nerves would had play a roll in my coping. My rig was the Icom 735 the antenna was the Cushcraft R4, Bencher paddle along side the Kenwood AT-230 tuner. Now how cool is that!!
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| The log (N8LA at top of log) and QSL |
Not quite what I suspected
You know what they say about conventional wisdom – that more often than not, it’s wrong.
I got my QSO in tonight on 80 Meters, which was again practically deserted. Scanning the entire CW portion and only hearing a handful of QSO/signals is depressing. We have all that beautiful spectrum and it’s like no one is using it!
Anyway, after a QSO with Burt K1OIK who lives on Cape Cod, I decided to do a little experiment. I wanted to find out, using the Reverse Beacon Network, what the difference in performance is (roughly) between the 88′ EDZ and the Butternut HF9V on 80 Meters.
Since activity seemed to be light at best, I figured I could call CQ for a good amount of time without any takers. Unfortunately, my assumption turned out to be correct – even though that turned out to be good for the experiment. I wouldn’t have minded being interrupted in order to have a good rag chew.
I called CQ for ten minutes using the wire and then ten minutes using the HF9V. I figured that would give ample opportunity to be heard by a variety of skimmers. My hypothesis was that the wire would be a better performer on 80 Meters.
My hypothesis seems to have been proved wrong.
There were some slight differences, but at most (at most!) the differences were only 1 dB. And that could have been due to normal QSB as the 1 dB difference was not always the same. By that, I mean the vertical wasn’t always 1 dB lower compared to the wire – sometimes it was 1 dB higher. Of course, I was comparing reports from the same skimming stations. Many times the reports were dead even between the two.
My modus operandi up until now was to pretty much use the HF9V for 20 Meters and higher, while using the wire antenna for 30 Meters and lower. I think that will change. The Butternut has always been a solid performer and now I think I will be using it on the lower frequencies a lot more than I have been.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!
200′ Doublet – The Hook Up
First things first. Before you drill holes and whack out expanded steel with your grinder, as I did, move your gear to a safe location. Or, if you’re lazy like me, just use a drop cloth.
Once the drilling and cutting was done, I ran PVC pipe through the holes and inside that some 1/2″ flexible tubing to center the wires and to provide some strain relief going in and out. I’m not grounding the feed line, but did insert a heavy duty cut-off switch on the outside wall.
Where the ladder line drapes under the eave before entering the shack I added a short standoff to keep it a foot or so from the metal frame of the fascia and to provide a bit of support for the 35 feet or so of line leading up to the antenna.
Inside the shack the ladder line goes directly to the Johnson Matchbox “Lite”, with no intervening balun, and it seems to work fine. I haven’t yet noticed any RF side-effects, but I haven’t run more than 40 watts through it so far. The second tuner is a homebrew unit I obtained from G3VKM years ago. It is a simple L-C tuner that can also be configured in a serial arrangement. It’s not quite up to that task of tuning random wires and doublets as the Johnson unit is, but it works well enough. I have it now hooked up to the 400′ Loop. The tuners are required for the Ten Tec Scout since it has no ATU built-in (never did, never will).
An arrangement of coax switches brings the tuners’ outputs to either the Scout or the currently in-repair K2. This allows me to A/B antennas for a single rig, and to A/B rigs for a single antenna. It’s a bit awkward for the K2, however, since it has its own ATU, but its a workable configuration for now. The coax bypass switch in the upper right of the photo is not in use at the moment, by the way.
I made up a spreadsheet for easy reference to the manual tuner settings for both the Loop and the Doublet. I initially made it thinking I was going to only use the Matchbox, but the addition of the open-wire feeder made that impossible without adding some more external switching, which I think would be over-kill, so I brought out the G2VKM instead.
The Loop is pretty amenable to all HF bands hooked up direct, but the doublet looked a little hopeless on 30 through 80 meters at first. The Johnson brought down those high SWRs just fine, though. The highlighted entries are just notes that those particular bands could be handled direct if I had a bypass switch in the tuners or externally. Note that the G3VKM really doesn’t help enough on the 30 meter band on the Loop, but it’s not terrible.
Once it was all hooked up I did some A/B reception tests and the doublet is clearly louder by about an S-Unit over the Loop. The Loop, as loops should be, however, sometimes had the edge because of a better S/N ratio, but generally signals came through more readable on the doublet.
We went for a 3 day trip up to Lake Arenal right after I got this all connected, so I didn’t get a chance to try out the doublet on TX until this afternoon. Though I didn’t do any A/B QSOs with the two antennas, the doublet was performing very well into Europe today on 30 meters. I didn’t give it enough time on 20 meters, only working a couple of Stateside stations on that band. It seems that it’s going to be a satisfactory antenna and I’m really looking forward to giving it a more thorough shake-down when the K2 is back in operation. If it turns out that the Loop is only useful in a small number of QSOs then I may convert it to a second doublet with a different orientation than the new one, fed also with open line, of course!
Stupidity and inspiration
Argh! Sometimes I feel like such a dolt!
80 Meters was quite vacant again tonight. Spinning the dial, up and down, looking for someone to talk with. I hear a loud station down near 3.511 MHz calling CQ. Notice that I said I heard a loud station calling CQ. But as it turns out, I didn’t listen!
The operator was Car N3AS and when I called him, he politely chatted with me for a few minutes. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and the QSO was very brief. After we bade our good-byes, Car starts to call CQ again. But this time, I was truly listening, and I heard him calling “CQ DX”.!! He must have been wondering what kind of moron from W2 land would call a W3 station calling “CQ DX”? And he would have every right to think of me as an idiot – I had made the classic mistake of hearing, but not listening.
I felt about an inch tall. A QSL card with an apology will be going out this weekend.
Then I got a totally unrelated inspiration for a topic of discussion. I get many private e-mails with regard to the contents of this blog. And of all the questions that I get asked, the one I receive most often is (generic), “Larry, how do I get started in QRP and how can I do it in the least expensive way?”
And that’s when it hit me that I never really covered this.
The answers are many – it’s almost like asking 100 different people what their favorite ice cream flavor is – you’re going to get 100 different answers. But there are some basics that we can cover.
First and foremost, the easiest and most inexpensive way to get started in QRP is to use the radio you already have! Yes, most (if not all) modern rigs will let you turn down your output power to 5 Watts. And as we all know, 5 Watts for CW and 10 Watts for SSB is considered to be QRP. If your rig will not go that low, then you can hook up an attenuator between the output connector and the antenna. This will effectively get you down to QRP levels. In fact, I just recently posted about the new attenuator that is being offered by Hendricks QRP Kits. Of course, if you have a decently stocked junk box you can easily roll your own with parts you may already have. Googling RF Attenuators is a good place to start. I believe that John K3WWP covers this quite nicely at his Website. Going this route, you can have a full featured radio that you’re already comfortable with for QRP.
For those of you who truly desire a dedicated QRP radio, there are several ways to go. Pre-owned (as the car commercials call it) or new. By keeping your eye on eBay, QRP-L, QRZ classifieds and eHam classifieds, you can probably find an HW-8, or a Ten Tec Argonaut or any of a myriad of used QRP rigs for sale. One tip that is not generally known ….. if you can find yourself a used Icom IC-730 at a decent price, you might want to consider it. There’s a pot under the top cover that will allow you to set the minimum output of this radio to as low as 100 mW without affecting the 100W top setting. I had one until I foolishly sold it a few years ago.
Another thing to keep in mind. As the Elecraft KX3 becomes available, there just might be more and more K1s, K2s and KX1s coming on the re-sale market. Those of us without deep pockets have to find some way of financing a new purchase!
If money is a real problem, but you still want to be involved in QRP without taking out a second mortgage, there are alternatives. Building a kit is one of them. Dave Benson, owner of Small Wonder Labs offers several kits that will yield you a high quality radio when you are done building, without breaking the bank. Another source to consider is Rex Harper’s QRPMe kits Rex offer Tuna Tin 2s, companion receivers and accessories at amazingly low prices. Yes, these aren’t deluxe-do-everything radios, but if your budget is tight, sometimes you have to go with what you can.
If you can spend a little more, then there is always the aforementioned Hendricks QRP Kits, Elecraft and Oak Hills Research for more expensive, but more feature packed radio kits. And I am sure there are others that I have not mentioned here – again, you can always Google “QRP kits” and do some exploring yourself.
The bottom line is that QRP can be as expensive or inexpensive as you want it to be. But the great thing about this facet of Amateur Radio is that a huge, horse choking bank roll is not needed to get started or to keep enjoying it.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!
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