AmateurRadio.com

Definitely unprepared this week and the score has gone down appropriately.  I’ve been slowly working to combat RF gremlins in the station.  80 and 40 are now 100% clean for SO2R, but I still have problems on 20 and 40 (both ways).  I think the 20-meter feedline is picking up (radiating) garbage.  I had a number of SO2R QLF moments.  The QRN was pretty nasty here (probably on account of the approach of Hurricane Earl) and I had to work hard to concentrate on the main radio.  I ended up just going to one radio after I went for three minutes without a QSO.

For next week’s NS and the NA Sprint, I plan to be QRV from a different QTH.  More on this when it happens.

NCCC Sprint Ladder - Sep 3

Call: K8GU
Operator(s): K8GU
Station: K8GU

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: MD
Operating Time (hrs): 0.5
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   0      0
   80:   8      5
   40:  12      9
   20:  10      6
   15:
   10:
-------------------
Total:  30     21  Total Score = 630

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

A couple of months ago I acquired a Kenwood TM-D710 dual band FM transceiver with APRS as it was the best solution to the problem of how to operate an APRS gateway without losing the ability to monitor for voice contacts on 2m when you do not have the space for two widely separated antennas. I have been quite pleased with the radio but rather alarmed at the number of reports of loss of sensitivity due to the failure of one or more of the IF filters. I asked on the Kenwood Yahoo group whether this was just a faulty batch of filters affecting radios of a certain age or a generic problem that was likely to affect any TM-D710 eventually and  was directed to this explanation in the blog of Tasos, SV8YM.

It has been a long time since I read such a well written explanation of a technical phenomenon and I'm sure you'll find it interesting, especially if you own a VHF radio with 455kHz IF filters. In fact I'm sure many of you will find other articles of interest in this blog. I've added it to my regular reading list.

As of this moment, it's looking like Hurricane Earl might only give coastal NJ a glancing blow. Current computer models are showing the Cat. 4 hurricane remaining well off shore, with only tropical storm warning posted for the immediate coast.

AmateurRadio.com is offering a free prize drawing!

With the help of our generous sponsor, Wouxun.us,
we’re holding a drawing for a
Wouxun KG-UVD2 Dual-Band HT
(KG-UV2D 144/440 version)
This is a US$107 value.
Enter now to win!

Read the rest of this post

It’s always a good day when that 5×7″ envelope arrives from the W5 buro. Nothing rare in this batch but some nice cards for sure.

 .

.

.

Also in the mailbox was the National Contest Journal from the ARRL. I wish every day was this nice…

.

.

I use a magnetic mount to attach my relatively small VHF/UHF antennas onto the car for my daily activity on the commute to and from the station. I tend to need a new magmount every 12-15 months as repeated opening and closing of the hatchback eventually takes its toll on the coax!

The last but one magmount I had worked really well for the usual period on all the VHF/UHF bands I use from the car. It finally gave up and I replaced it, with one from the same retailer, with ostensibly the same spec. It certainly worked, but particularly on 70cms, the performance was considerably worse. Not catastrophically worse, more like 'conditions aren't very good today' worse - so I just put up with it.

I had the opportunity this morning to try a different magmount - a slightly more expensive model (the original one I was using retail at around £16 and the newer one at about £25). On 433MHz the difference was enormous! GB3TD which had become unusable at the far end of my commute near Didcot, was just fine! I don't think it was just conditions. but it will be interesting to see how the new mount affects the other bands.

So now I'm wondering what was 'wrong' with the old magmount. It's not as if it really didn't work, but perhaps it was just very lossy. Either way, I'm glad I tried the different mount. Your mileage may vary, but you may be well advised to spend slightly more on your next magmount!

Olga and I have returned from a long weekend in London. I took my VX-8GR along, hoping to see some APRS activity or even make some contacts. But I heard absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, not a braap on the APRS frequency nor any signs of life on the simplex or repeater frequencies.

Twenty years ago I lived in London, in Charlton SE7 and I seem to recall that in those days there were four London repeaters on 2m and plenty of activity. I also seem to recall that some of the repeaters were plagued with abuse. Last weeked even a kerchunker or a pirate playing music would have been a welcome sign that someone was using the amateur frequencies.

I took a laptop with me - the small Eee PC running Ubuntu Linux, with APRSIS32 under wine - to monitor activity and see if my RF beacons were heard. I received a greeting from G5YC via the APRS-IS internet network and that was that. What a contrast to Prague, where I was a month ago, where the APRS activity just didn't stop.

Tim, G4VXE, posted yesterday about creating APRS objects for repeaters using OpenAPRS.net. I commented that it was all very well, but these internet created objects are never transmitted on RF so they never fulfil the intended purpose of the mode which is to inform visiting mobiles of the local repeater frequencies. Unfortunately with the lack of radio activity here in the UK one cannot deny that APRS works much better as an internet application than it does over RF. Anyone who has a computer can call up aprs.fi and see the local picture - if anyone has taken the trouble to create the objects. If they were transmitted on RF, would anyone hear them?

I could say much the same about 2m FM. If I'd had an iPhone I could have made some contacts using the newly released Echolink app, which again is more than I was able to do using my Yaesu. What has happened to ham radio that one can't find any activity even in the UK's biggest city? It seems to me that we have all decided that cellphones are a much better tool for contacting our ham buddies. If we lost the use of the VHF and UHF bands would anyone actually notice?

Sunday I got the itch to get online. That means backyard portable when you live in an antenna restricted condo. So I put a card table up in the back porch and my 20 ft Jackite and 20m End Fed Half Wave in between the buildings.

Doggone noise and weak band conditions ruined the day so I decided to experiment with the new C Pole antenna that  Neil W0VLZ had suggested. To get rid of a hunk of fiberglass gel inside the barrel of one of the Black Widow Crappie poles I used my cheapo Harbor Freight rotary tool which is a lame imitation of a Dremel tool but gets the job done. A few minutes of fitting and I was good to go.

I’m pretty impressed with it though conditions did not allow for any QSO’s yet. I cut the wire a bit longer than Niel’s directions but it tuned up 1:1 at 13.889 on my MFJ 207 Analyzer. At 14.060 it was a bit over 1.4:1 which is plenty usable. Next time out I’ll do a bit of trimming and be right on the money! Compared to the EFHW in a 20 ft L configuration, it did seem a bit noisier but with condx so difficult it would be hard to tell without some instrumentation.

LESSON: The C Pole is a pretty fine design. I need to work on the physical setup to improve the way the antenna hangs. The crappie poles I used were a bit too flimsy on the top section and leaned inward from the weight of the wire. A better tippy top support system is needed.

LESSON: Niel’s C Pole base design and specs worked very well.  Lacking an empty plastic coffee can, I used a quart diet soda bottle of the same dimension and it worked very well for the balun section. With winds of approximately 15 mph and gusts to 20+ the antenna was stable and I did not use the spikes for the outriggers that I had prepared. Great work Niel. The weight of the base makes it a good choice for backyard or campground use.

LESSON: The C Pole would be a fantastic portable antenna sans the earth side supports. Chuck Carpenter W5USJ has posted a picture of this configuration. Take a look. One point hanger  and spreaders at the top and bottom and simple stake to the ground for anchoring it and you are good to go. I will be testing this next time out by the lake. Winner!

LESSON: The off center fed dipole folded like this and deployed vertically is a good compact option for antenna restricted hams. I bit more work on the frame and support system may pay good dividends in stability and efficiency.

Hope to fly this new antenna in its tree configuration this weekend. I’ll update my results then.

72,

Kelly K4UPG PB #173

Old news to anyone who has a K3 but I’m gonna write it anyway…and I’m kicking myself for not recording the whole thing. I will next time since I’m not aware of any YouTube videos specifically demonstrating the K3′s amazing selectivity and how that characteristic manifests itself in a pile-up.

Wayne Burdick N6KR recently made a posting to the Elecraft reflector on how he goes about DXing on CW with his K3 and P3 panadapter. I’m pretty bare bones here – just the 100W final and a 400 Hz filter. Not sure what I may eventually add to mine as it seems perfectly suited to the task I use it for as is, but who knows…

A few hours ago, Tom 9X0TL (Rwanda) was working through one of those unending pile-ups his callsign generates on 20 meters. I’ve seen him spotted before, but never at a time when I could get on the air. He was fairly weak but solid copy with slow QSB. And you know how unruly big pile-ups can be with 1 or 2 lids always calling the DX on his transmit freq, then the 5 or 6 “helpful” ops sending “up, up” over and over.

Being a new K3 owner, I still like to compare what I can do now to what I had to settle for pre-K3, in terms of selectivity. “Selectivity” in this case means QRM/lid elimination. Pre-K3, I had 500 Hz as my narrowest option so that’s what I initially dialed the K3 down to as I went after the 9X. There were the on-frequency callers and the UP’ers along with Tom on his transmit freq. Mental selectivity, of course, is used to separate  the DX from the masses in these cases.

And that’s how it went in the old days.

But this ain’t the old days, so I dialed selectivity down to 100 Hz and then on down to 50 Hz. And magically, no more QRM, because even though we say “on freq” to describe where the non-split lids callers are, they aren’t (and rarely are) exactly zero beat with the DX. They’re maybe 150…200 Hz away – a distance that I did indeed once consider “on freq” but not anymore. With a 50Hz bandwidth dialed in, I’m happily deaf to and unaffected by what’s going on in Lidville.

As an added bonus, the 9X was noticeably more copy-able with a better signal to noise ratio with no ringing that a 50Hz bandwidth would cause in any other rig I know of.

So 9X0TL goes into the log as #263, an all-time new one, already confirmed in his online log.

Incidentally, Tom was using a K3 as well.

.

.

I know this is short (very short) notice in blog land; but I am the 20 Meter Fox tonight in the QRP-L Foxhunt. If you have NEVER given this a shot ..... it's entertaining and fun!

I think Silvano I2YSB is more responsible than any other single person for enabling me to add new countries to my logbook. As Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing”.

A retired Italian Air Force officer, Silvano’s niche in ham radio is traveling around the planet and activating rare countries for folks like me (and you?!).

Somalia, Niger and Tokelau are in my log on several bands courtesy of the strong signals and excellent ops on these DXpeditions.

In about 6 weeks, I hope Silvano’s next DXpedition will help me to finally work Togo for real. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I “worked” 5V7VJ on 30 meters – or so I thought. No QSL ever came and an email inquiry brought those dreaded words: Not in log.

From October 10-23, 5V7TT will be on the air with seven DXpedition-experienced ops, three K3′s, and a good assemblage of aluminum. Me, I’ll be energizing my dipole for all it’s worth.

See you in the pile-ups…..

.

.

I'd wanted to create an APRS object for the Ridgeway Repeater Group's two voice repeaters, GB3TD and GB3WH for a while. In practice, this just means making sure that they show up on the map in the right place, when someone goes to http://aprs.fi and looks at the area.

I wanted to display an icon for them, showing the approximate position and their callsign, and some detail available, if someone clicks on the icon. I'd looked at various ways of doing it, but found OpenAPRS the best method.

I'd looked at doing this a few months ago, but had stalled, because OpenAPRS required me to verify my account using an 'RF APRS client' which I didn't have - all my APRS interfacing is done through the Internet. Without verifying my account, I couldn't create objects on the APRS map.

When I was looking at OpenAPRS the other day, I noticed that they were offering another method of verifying accounts, using Paypal and a small (dollar or so) donation. I was happy to pay this and sure enough the account was verified very speedily.

Having done this, it was straightforward to create an object for each of the repeaters using Tools/Create Objects and then clicking on the map in the appropriate place and entering the information. In some ways, rather than clicking on the map, I'd have preferred to manually enter the latitude and longitude, but this didn't seem to be possible.

Either way, GB3TD and GB3WH are now represented on the APRS map. I like this - and it provides some useful information to people about where they may find activity in particular localities.

Is it just me or have the 'zed and eHam had significantly less article comments over the past six months or so?  One reason could be the bands, though I think there would be more people surfing the Internet and sharing their radio artisan enthusiasm online if that was the cause.  Perhaps Facebook and Twitter are taking their toll?  We'll have to see if this trend continues; perhaps we're entering a Maunder Minimum of ham forum activity.

While we're waiting for better bands, enjoy this video:




Hmmmm.  Maybe Youtube has something to do with this lack of activity....

later this week - a lot wet!

It seems that I've been doing more RTTY contesting lately, and on Saturday, I spent about 8 1/2 hours participating in the SCC (Slovenia Contest Club) RTTY Championship contest. This was a 24 hour contest, running from 8AM Saturday to 8AM Sunday (local time), and it's one of the contests where anybody can work anybody. I like those, because even if propagation isn't cooperating, I can usually work someone in the US. This is a good thing, because propagation wasn't all that great, and as it turns out, just about 50% of my contacts were with US stations.

There are some interesting scoring rules in this contest that I haven't seen before. In many DX contests, you get more points for working DX which favors certain parts of the world where there are literally dozens of countries in an area the size of the US. However, for this contest the rules are set up so that within "big" counties (like the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and others) you get extra points for working stations within that country but who are in different call areas, provinces, or oblasts. I wish that some of the other DX contests would use this system which seems to level the playing field a bit. One other scoring rule that is fun is that the multipliers are the year that you were first licensed. I worked a few stations who were first licensed in 2010 (all of which were, I believe, specially issued callsigns), but it was fun working stations who were licensed in the 1940s and even in the 1930s. I worked a couple of stations who were licensed in the 40s, but both of them turned out to be using club callsigns, which of course were issued when the club was originally founded. (Still quite impressive to be sure). The oldest non-club call that I worked was Charles, W0HW, who was first licensed in 1937. According to the information on qrz.com, he was born in 1922, so Charles, who is now 88 (and obviously still active on the air) got his first license at age 15. I'm sure he's got a lot of interesting stories to tell.

As with a lot of my contesting, I tend to fit it into the "space available" on a weekend. For this contest, I didn't get started until around 3:30PM (local time), at which point I configured my contest logging program for this contest and got on the air. I listened briefly on 15m but since I only heard one very weak signal, I decided to start off on 20m. For about the first half hour, I ran in Search & Pounce (S&P) mode, working just under 20 stations. As I was tuning, I found an open frequency right at the lower end of the 20m RTTY sub-band (14.084Mhz), and I figured that I'd try to see if I could switch to Run mode. As I've mentioned previously, being able to run stations really improves you rate and it's also a lot more fun. It's usually difficult for a low-power station like mine to hold a run frequency for long (because usually a higher-power station will just sort of take over, despite the fact that it's poor operating practice, at best, so do so; it's arguably illegal as well), but I was thrilled to be able to stay on that same frequency for around 4 hours. I can't say that I had huge numbers of stations calling me the entire time, but there were periods where I was working about 2 stations per minute continuously for several minutes. For this contest, it seems that 2 per minute was about the maximum achievable because the rate of information exchanged is fixed (a characteristic of RTTY), and the amount of information that had to be exchanged was of a certain length. Unlike a CW or Phone contest, you simply can't go much faster. (Yes, there are some shortcuts, but they don't make that much difference, especially when you don't have a continuous pileup.) I was very pleased to be able to continue my run for that amount of time.

I took a break and went out to dinner with Sharon (who, as usual, was being very understanding about the contest), and got back to the radio at around 9:30PM, worked a few stations on 20m, then moved down to 40m. The conditions on 40m seemed to be surprisingly good, and I was able to work a good number of European stations first running S&P and then later when I had a run frequency. (That run wasn't nearly as good as the 20m run, but it was still quite productive). After a while, I seemed to have run out of stations on 40m, so I moved down to 80m to see what I could find. During the summer, 80m isn't great for DX because it's noisy due to the thunderstorms that are common during that time of the year. After a while, including a period where I had a rather unsuccessful attempt and running station (plenty of frequencies were available, but apparently nobody could hear me), I moved back to 40m again. Somewhat to my surprise, the propagation had improved, and by that time, some of the early-risers in Europe were awake to work the night-owls in North America. (It was around 1AM at that point.) I continued to work stations on 40m, but at 2AM, I finally threw in the towel and finished up with 207 (non-duplicate) QSOs in the log. As it turns out, I was up for over an hour after that acting as the family "IT guy", fixing a problem with Sharon's BlackBerry. Needless to say, I didn't get up early enough to put a few more QSOs in the log the next morning, so that was my final total.

Here's my detailed score summary for the contest:

Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
 3.5      29      57   25
   7      67     168   42
  14     111     268   50

Total     207     493  117

            Score : 57,681
    

This was my first effort in this contest, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I was very happy with the results.