AmateurRadio.com

Shortwave, in its many forms, has been part of my life for 35 years. And even though it is next to impossible to enjoy the high frequencies at home now it doesn’t mean I am ready to give them up. I still have my KX3 and MP1 to work portable and this years teaching schedule does leave me with some excess time to work the bands from my school ground. The funny thing is that I moved from PL04ou to PL04pv and my school is only a 10 minute walk away from my old home in PL04ou. At least my old QSL cards are still valid to confirm those portable QSOs then.

My school is located at the top of a plateau and the view is breathtaking when the sun is out. I am usually able to set up my gear around 0800 UTC and have some 45 minutes of fun before heading back home. My KX3 shack-in-a-box and the MP1 can be set up in 5 minutes if I use a mag-mount on the car. Unfortunately the frequent autumn winds are very fierce, so then a stand with guy wires is needed which takes 10 to 15 minutes to set up.

What a joy to operate without any man-made interference. More than often I think either my KX3 or my antenna is not working properly; it is that quiet. If the sun has some spots then working Europe on CW is possible, but I am happy to work Asian stations as well. I even added the DXCC entry of Tuvalu to my list last month, working them split with 5 Watts on 20 meters.

0800 UTC is also the time that 40 meters start opening up and what a joy that is. Signals from all over Asia and the States are booming in. My MP1 tunes to 40 meters well, but it is still a coil-fed vertical without a proper set of radials and then the lack of some power means I can’t make a fist. I am still trying and hopefully one day I will send my puny signal on 40 meters all the way to the States.

…last year December. A real fixer-upper: 35 years old and not maintained at all. But the price was right and it had a large size plot of land that came with it. Buy land, get old house for free. It is large plot for Taiwanese standards. In the States and Europe you would probably laugh at the size: 180 square meters. Most houses are here are built on a third of that. I will not complain, though, because having a garden, even though a very modest one, is a dream come true. We are already eating organic veggies from our own plot and those are yummy.

There was a lot of work to be done on the house. We put on a sheet metal roof against leaking, changed the layout inside to get the most efficient use of all the space and we added a utility room. All the water and electricity had to be refitted, too, so it was quite an undertaking. Unfortunately the end result was not what we had hoped for. I won’t say much about it, because the Internet never forgets, but these words from the main contractor sum it up quite nicely: “It’s not my house, so I don’t really care.” They took our money, ran and left us with sub-par work. Not one wall was ready for painting when we moved in last July. There was electricity and water, but most power outlets and faucets were fitted so poorly that I had to have a shout out with the sub-contractor before it was done a bit properly. Getting them to put in a good ground system was another big struggle. I need at least a year to finish the walls, ceilings, doors and the roof, fit all the lights, curtains, hang the paintings and get my shack in order.

Of course, not all Taiwanese are selfish rip-off artists and we did meet some really nice and honest people, too. The man who did all our metal work was made of pure gold (pun intended). Because of good connections we got a bargain on the solar water heater (one day of sun, three days of hot water) and the store where we get our paint gives us a steep discount, especially when we buy paint from Akzo-Nobel (a Dutch buying Dutch deserves a good deal).

So I have been very busy with plastering and sanding walls and ceilings and I’m getting pretty good at it. Work on my new shack is starting soon now that the living room is nearly done. But so many months without a radio fix was too much to bear and early September I quickly put up a 2×5 meter dipole. Unfortunately I was met with this…..

It seems things never go smoothly for me. Other people throw a wire into a tree and start enjoying the bands, I put up a decent dipole and get a bucket load of QRM. As you can see the noise blanker can filter out some of the noise, but not all. 7 MHz and below are fine, though, and oddly enough 17 meters also doesn’t suffer that much, either. But 20, 15 meters up to 6 meters are almost useless. An X-Phase noise eliminator might bring some relief here, but right now I don’t have time to build one.

My wife would say that this is the year of the sheep and as we are both born in the year of the sheep this is not our lucky year. She slid of her scooter two months ago and hurt her knee pretty badly, so she might be on to something. So….radio back in the box till next year? Or maybe time to reconsider what I am going to do with this hobby of ours. For DXing the top bands I need to build new antennas, VHF/UHF/SHF in Taiwan is all but dead, APRS is not that exciting either. So what is left? Satellites maybe?

This is the current look of my shack and my antenna farm. Everything packed up and ready to leave Longtan (a.k.a. Dragon Lake). Four years after we moved back to Taiwan we had saved enough money to buy a house and we found one to our liking in neighbouring Daxi (a.k.a. Big Creek). Because the lease of our Longtan house was due we decided to move in even though nothing is finished. Really, we don’t have doors yet and not even one wall is plastered and painted. The best parts of the house are the bathrooms and the kitchen which are 80% done. Radio activity is limited to monitoring local radio, especially the nearby airfield, and the medium wave band with a small loop antenna. Yes, even indoors this is possible now! My summer will be spend plastering and painting, but it will be worth it: my new shack will be 6 by 2.4 meters big. I’ll be back in the fall. Cheerio!

As Steve announced a week ago, CLE192 was a special NAVTEX edition. I like NAVTEX for several reasons. It’s an open format, easily decodable and messages are mostly in plain English. Then it’s just like fishing with a fish pod: you can leave your setup on over night and in the morning see what nice DX you have caught.

Normally I use the FRISNIT software for decoding NAVTEX. It’s plain and simple and messages are stored in plain text files. This time I tried YaND (Yet another NAVTEX Decoder) and found it to be better in decoding weak signals than FRISNIT. I don’t like the interface and message handling, but those are minor issues.

Here is my list of catches:

YYYYMMDD HHMM KHz ID CALL STATION,COUNTRY DIST (Km)
—————————————————————-
20150327 1604 518 $13A UIK Vladivostok,RSE 2377
20150327 1656 518 $11F HAS Bangkok (Nonthaburi),THA 2525
20150327 1700 518 $11G JNB Naha ,JPN 723
20150328 1500 518 $11H JNR Moji,JPN 1359
20150327 1507 518 $11I JGC Yokohama ,JPN 2199
20150330 1737 518 $11J JNL Otaru ,JPN 2730
20150326 1519 518 $11K JNX Kushiro ,JPN 3010
20150327 1812 518 $11N XSQ Guangzhou,CHN 773
20150330 2218 518 $11O XSL Foochow ,CHN 235
20150327 2234 518 $11P XSX Keelung,TWN 1600
20150328 1053 518 $11Q XSG Shanghai ,CHN 704
20150327 1901 518 $11R XSZ Dalian ,CHN 1656
20150330 2150 518 $11L VRX Hong Kong, HKG 0
20150327 1801 518 $11M XSI Sanya, CHN 0
20150330 1900 518 $11S XSV Tianjin, CHN 0
20150328 1613 518 $11U 9MG Penang, MLA (tent.) 0
20150326 1933 518 $11V HL.. CHUKPYONG, KOR 0
20150329 1942 518 $11W HL.. PYONGSAN, KOR 0
20150327 1740 518 $11K JNX Kushiro 0
20150327 2140 518 $11K XVT, Da Nang Radio (tent.) 0

The catches with 0 km distance were not automatically identified by YaND and the two tentative catches were identified by the content of the message, so 99% sure it was them.

The last reason I like NAVTEX is the content being broadcast. It provides a window on a world that most of us don’t know much about. Most messages are warnings about military exercises, weather reports and changes in locations of buoys, etc. But occasionally you see distress messages and then you realize how much hardship and suffering there is out at sea and how mighty it is. I’ll leave you with two of those messages from the last few days. 73

—–

2015-03-28 13:20:15> ZCZC ID86
2015-03-28 13:20:19> 281320 UTC MAR 15
2015-03-28 13:20:21> OVERBOARD NO.141
2015-03-28 13:20:26> ONE PASSENGER FELL OVERBOARD FROM
2015-03-28 13:20:33> FERRY ISHIKARI ALONG TRACKLINE BETWEEN
2015-03-28 13:20:36> NAGOYA PORT AT 261000UTC
2015-03-28 13:20:41> AND SENDAI PORT AT 270740UTC OR
2015-03-28 13:20:46> SENDAI PORT AT 271040UTC AND
2015-03-28 13:20:51> TOMAKOMAI PORT AT 280200UTC.
2015-03-28 13:20:57> SHIPS ARE REQUESTED TO REPORT ANY
2015-03-28 13:21:03> INFORMATION TO 1TH REGIONAL JAPAN COAST
2015-03-28 13:21:08> GUARD. PHONE 81-134-276172.
2015-03-28 13:21:09> NNNN

2015-03-27 17:40:15> ZCZC KD57
2015-03-27 17:40:18> 271740 UTC MAR 15
2015-03-27 17:40:20> CAPSIZE NO.139
2015-03-27 17:40:27> TUGBOAT CAPSIZED IN 41-45N 140-44E
2015-03-27 17:40:30> AT 270610UTC.
2015-03-27 17:40:33> CREW WENT MISSING.
2015-03-27 17:40:39> SHIPS IN THE VICINITY ARE REQUESTED TO
2015-03-27 17:40:46> KEEP A SHARP LOOKOUT AND REPORT ANY
2015-03-27 17:40:52> INFORMATION TO 1ST REGIONAL JAPAN COAST
2015-03-27 17:40:56> GUARD. PHONE 81-13427-6172.
2015-03-27 17:40:57> NNNN

In the few free moments I could spend the last week I made some progress with the Arduino. Bought a whole kit with an Arduino UNO, breadboard, wires and all and mounted it on a…..breadboard!

My son’s Windows 7 installation was so slow in compiling sketches that I wiped it and installed Linux Mint. He wasn’t pleased with it in the beginning, but he likes it better and better now. He played with some LEDs, but I tried to get some sensors going. The thermistor was quite easy and after looking at some code and getting the appropriate libraries the 1-Wire temperature sensor put some temperatures on the serial monitor. That gave me hope because my 1-Wire weather station is getting old and Maxim has phased out some essential ICs to keep it running. A new station based on Arduino boards could be a great alternative.

So I dug out a spare HIH-4020 humidity sensor and getting that to work was also trivial. Next was a photo diode and the one on hand was the SFH203P. The current produced by that sensor is so tiny that it can hardly be measured by the analogue input on the Arduino. The answer is to use an op amp, but the only one I could find in my junk box were some UA741s. They are special to me, because I used these to build some projects together with my father when I was young, so they must be at least 30 years old. But they require a bipolar voltage rail and can’t even work rail-to-rail. I tried them anyway, using a unipolar voltage supply, but no dice.

I had some other op amps lying around, but they were all surface mounted devices and I couldn’t find the matching break out boards. Guess I will have to find some through hole versions, like the TLC271CP which sell for a buck a piece here in Taiwan. Can’t go wrong with those for that price, I guess.

Yes, I did it again. Needed a 25 cent Molex connector and while browsing the electronics supply store I bumped into a rack with Arduino stuff. Maybe it was the Buddhist music playing in the background (the owner of the store is a devout Buddhist and only meditative music is played in the background), but I suddenly felt the urge to buy one. Now remember, I have a love-hate relationship with computers. I prefer having nothing to do with them, but since I cannot avoid them I just go with the flow. Apart from that, I never really got the coding bug.

But for some reason the urge was too strong this time. And so I spent 15 bucks on a Arduino Duemilanove and 3 bucks on two add on boards: a 3 color LED and an analogue temperature sensor. Not much money to try it out and if I don’t like it then no big loss. Because of the name alone you should buy one, too. Can you name me an electronics product with a sexier name than Duemilanove??? And it just means 2009!!! Sometimes I wish I married an Italian girl, then I would be living in Italy now and be immersed in that wonderful language every day.

Back home I found out that installing the IDE was a simple “sudo apt-get install arduino” and I was connected. It took me all of 15 minutes to get the 3 color LED blinking and I was hooked. This is not difficult at all and a lot of FUN! Now it’s not that I have all the time in the world to start learning to write sketches now. Far from it, I’m as busy as ever. But after introducing the Arduino to my 11 year old son he started playing with it and it took him an hour to make the LEDs blink his name in Morse code (because that’s the only Morse code he knows). This might turn into a nice father-son play-thing and who knows, maybe I finally start to get the coding bug.

Some nights 40 meters have been very good recently, with north American and European stations coming in. Other nights you might encounter a lot of this….

It’s annoying, but at least you know propagation favours southeast Asia. To get some perspective on these “pirates” I googled a bit and found a post from 2003 on eHam.net with some insight from John Davies, 9V1VV, whom I worked recently. Let me quote him….

We in Singapore face daily obstacles getting through SSB pirates on all HF bands. They operate up to 5KW in all sections of the bands including the designated CW portions. On the lower bands, the only way to hope to work DX from here through the QRM is in the middle of the night when the Indonesians are sleeping.

Not only the Amateur bands, but ALL frequencies from 1.6 to 30 MHz, are affected.

The reasons are complex, and no efforts by radio amateurs will change matters.

I was involved in a large Indonesian Government project in 1996 as installation and commissioning engineer for 15 Marine Coast Stations, in locations across the length and breadth of Indonesia from Sumatra to Irian Jaya and north to the Philippine border. It was a great adventure for me, and I have many tales to tell.

What is of interest here is that the radio operators in these remote islands would hold evening nets on SSB for the mothers and fathers, uncles and cousins, of young men working in other regions, usually in the cities where they had gone for work. Operators in the big cities such as Jakarta or Surabaya would arrange with these young men skeds for many islands all over the vast country, for a small fee of course. These larger city Marine Coast Stations often use up to 5KW PEP, free-running transmitters. The stations I was commissioning were only 600 watt, but they were also free-running 1.6-30MHz.

It is not only the marine radio operators that cause problems. The police, army and airforce bases work on the same lines. There are thousands of Japanese rigs out there free-running in the hands of as many operators all over the archipelgo, all using radio as a kind of community service, in a country where landlines and cellphones cost money and are far from reliable.

The operators are poorly trained or dismissive of the niceties of international regulations and procedures. For example, a common calling frequency is 10.000 MHz !! It’s an easy figure to remember. The low portions of the amateur bands are fair game. The operators often remark on the “birds” tweeting (CW ham operators) but ignore them or force them off the air. I have heard a QSO between villagers in the coastal town of Panjang in southern Sumatra talking with their relatives in Yogyakarta on 9.750 MHz, right in the middle of a commercial band!

I do not see the situation changing in the near future. The pirate Indonesians will continue undiminished in number. There is no local authority in existance to challenge them. And the Indonesians are a gregarious people and thrive on chat and scandal. Radio is the medium for this.

It makes working the ham bands in southeast asia a real adventure at times.

I have successfully chased away some rogue operators from the 20 meter CW section who interfered with me, so it can be done. But since 2003 little has changed and working the ham bands in Asia is still a real adventure at times.