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I made my first QSOs of the year this past weekend. Haven’t been on air since late last year, mainly due to the sun not cooperating when I spent a few minutes in the shack. But – true to my suffix – Any Bloody Thing goes, so I did some medium wave listening instead. Still good to be back on air and conditions were not too bad so VK5CZ on 10 meters was my first contact of the year. Ian had a wonderful signal and we had a pleasant conversation, so cheers to him.

And as an SKCC member I tried to gather some points during the WES and contact some K3Y stations. Andy E50A and Jerry DW3GKT are in my log for Saturday and Lyn VK4EI on Sunday. Rather a successful weekend.

I don’t think I will top the 614 QSOs I made in 2014, anyway. Late last year we found a house with a garden, in a location that we liked, and thanks to the excellent negotiation skills of the realtor our bid was accepted. The only downside: it is a very old house and noy vert well maintained. It needs a lot of work (and money) before we can move in there, but we already had architects, contractors and designers to look at what can and has to be done. Precious radio time has to be spend on getting things in order. But with our own house there are also possibilities for better antennas and so sacrificing some radio time now is going to be rewarded. At night in bed I already dream of stacked monoband yagi antennas on 40 meter masts in our garden. The reality will be a bit different, though, but more about that later. 73

A warm Christmas wish to everyone celebrating this holiday. Over here in Taiwan it is business as usual since December 25 was axed as a day off many years ago. Nevertheless, we do have some Christmas cheer and we will save up the rest for Chinese New Year next February.

Like many of you, I also haven’t had much radio time lately. Life is busy with my three full time jobs (father, housekeeper and teacher) and both the sun and local noise haven’t given me much pleasure when turning on the radio. But I did get a new toy and have been playing with it for the last two weeks. My always lovely wife was so nice to purchase some telegraph keys in China on her last trip there. The one I’m playing with now is this beauty….

a NOS D-117 straight key from the Tianjin City Xinxing Communication Devices Factory. All shiny and very heavy: almost a kilogram. Unfortunately the box had been taped over, but after carefully peeling away the paper the stamped on date of packing was just visible and it read 1973. So I got a real piece of history in my hands as it was made during the cultural revolution. Even after 41 years the spring was still as stiff as a board. After keying with it for only a few minutes I could already feel my wrist getting sore. 24 hours of compressing the spring helped a bit, although my elmer and QSL manager PG2W would still find the tension too high. As faith would have it, my first on-air QSO with this key was with BG3FB who happens to live in Tianjin City, the place where the key was made 41 years ago.

So how do I like this key? It’s a joy to operate. Solid as a rock and if I bring the spring tension further down (and reduce my heavy pounding a bit) even the last bit of sliding will be gone. In overall performance I rate it just below the Junker key; you can’t beat German excellence. A keeper and if you can get your hands on one I recommend it heartilly.

A couple more days till Straight Key Night and the SKCC January Celebration. So get those straight keys and bugs out and start practising. 73!

It was really all that on the bands last weekend. Easy fun as well. Just dial in 10 or 15 meters and stations back to back, with great signal strenght and from all over the world. Just blurt 59 24 into a microphone and the other party is as happy as a clam. My radio was alive and despite me being not too keen on contesting I did spend quite some hours on Saturday and Sunday giving away point, just for the heck of it.

More importantly, I did a side by side comparison of my 5m and 12 meter verticals. The 5 meter one is hooked up to a transmatch, the 12 meter one to an CG-3000 autotuner. The latter is prone to RF feedback, but since being partly above my roof it did perform better. I haven’t found the perfect lenghth of wire to cover all bands with the CG-3000, but for now I am satisfied with it.

I didn’t work any special stations, only VK9XSP from Christmas Island. They were easy to work in CW as well, because of the few takers. Unfortunately it left me with no time to participate in the CLE-188 as advertised by Steve VE7SL. I think I wouldn’t have heard much either, because when I tested the setup on Thursday there was so much noise I couldn’t even get clear signals from the local beacons. Never mind, there is always next time.

The only thing that made this weekend a little sad was to learn of the passing of Julian G4ILO. His blog was great and I am glad to have exchanged some mails with him. He will be missed. I hope conditions are always top where he is now.

I can’t seem to find the time to do something substantial in the shack lately. If I’m there it is usually to tune around a bit, having some QSOs, but mostly lacking enough energy to build or repair something. It happens to us middle aged men, with a busy job, a family and kids to attend to. But I still have this itch to do something radio related and it needs to be scratched.

Luckily I have 10 minutes between the classes I teach and once in a while I get the urge to do something computer related. Now my computer skills are as good as my electronic skills: I don’t know much, but enough to get the job done. And when I get the job done the sense of achievement makes me happy for the rest of the week.

So for the last few days I have been spending those 10 minute breaks on automating the uploading of my logbook to my website. My coding skills are limited to Perl in combination with Linux shell scripts (plus PHP and HTML for the front-end). Luckily I can force myself to be structured, so I started with the sequence I had in mind:

1) retrieve the latest adif archive from CQRlog
2) unzip it and rename it to a standard name
3) read every QSO record into an array and filter out the ones you needs
4) extract the fields from a record and write it out to a HTML file
5) ftp the HTML file to the server

The great thing about Perl is that someone has probably done before what you want to do now. Retrieving the latest file from a directory is standard procedure, so a quick Google search provided some code I had to modify only slightly. Reading an adif file into an array has been done by Ted Pride as you can find here. Thanks Ted, now I only have to write out to a file, which I have done many times before. Easy peasy! Last step is to ftp it to the server, but Perl has an awkward procedure for that, so a bash script takes care of that.

It’s almost like playing with Lego. Take some blocks and build it into something you want. Sounds easy, but it can be frustrating, especially when you don’t understand the code from others, or when you make syntax mistakes. But Google is such a treasure trove of knowledge that you can usually find the answer to your problem very quickly. This time I got stumped by the fact that some code wouldn’t run straight from the command line. One 10 minute break was spend on searching and it turned out to be a new line problem, caused by some code having been written in a Windows environment. Dos2unix took care of that, so my Wednesday morning didn’t end in frustration.

So from now on every visit to the shack will end in running a single shell script which will update the logbook on my site, as well as all the QSO maps plus do a backup of some important files. Saves at least 10 minutes each time and a sore wrist from all those mouse clicks. You can see the result on pa2bx.nl –> Logbook.

With the temperature in the shack finally down to a more comfortable level I decided to get ready for the winter season and set up my medium/long wave outfit. The PA0RDT mini-whip was put in the mast, the Jackson Harbor Press long wave converter installed and all cables checked. I have been DXing NDBs on and off since my teenage years, and Steve’s (VE7SL) inviting announcement about the CLE186 made for a good excuse to check the whole setup with some NDB DXing.

Of course, there were a couple of snags. When I hooked up the mini-whip I remembered why I didn’t really like the original version: too much signal coming in resulting in some overloading and intermodulation products; LORAN C could be heard all over the place. Last year I made the alternative version of off PA0NHC’s hand, which performed much better. Alas, it fell a few storeys down from the balcony, which is not good for the health of electronics. I will have to build a new one these days. But after reviewing all the documentation on these whips I had my “duh” moment: I hadn’t filtered the coax and my ground connection was in the shack, not outside. Half a pound of ferrite clamps later and things sounded a lot better, although not perfect.

The other snag was the receiver. Originally I wanted to use my KX3 to free up my IC-7200. With both the mini-whip and the 12 meter vertical connected to the long wave converter reception was very disappointing. The IC-7200 did do a lot better, although not as good as what I remembered from using my TS-440S. The IC-7200 also did a good job without the converter, so I used both configurations.

But when Saturday came I was ready to do some serious listening and check out which NDBs could be heard. CLE186 focused on 350 to 369.9 kHz, but only a few stations were heard there. I found that conditions weren’t that great. Here is my entry:

0800 357.0 LU TWN Keelung S3
0802 362.0 HL TWN Houlong S5
0834 363.0 LA ? ? S4 1x ID then 7 sec pause
1139 369.0 ZF CHN Helou S3

I checked the whole long wave band and found plenty of other signals and I compared with my log of last year. Couple of new unidentified stations and two heard for the first time, the others being regulars. Our powerhouse NDB AP on 250 kHz was strong on Saturday, but off air on Sunday. I also heard TEST being keyed on 290 kHz instead of the regular BM from Makong, so I suspect there are some changes going on in the Taiwanese beacon scene.

Lots of fun and my focus for the coming weeks is clear: get better reception by building an improved mini-whip and improve my filtering. Who knows, maybe this season I will be able to receive some Japanese NDBs or radio amateurs on 2200 meters.

…..the long spell without rain that is. We had over a 100 mm during the last 24 hours in Longtan, but the south of Taiwan was worse off with some serious flooding. The temperature has dropped to a cool 22 degrees Celsius, but the forecast tells us that it will be back up to 35 degrees in no time and it will stay that way for the next week.

Despite it being hot and muggy I did spend some time in the shack on Sunday. Tried to fix the fan in the radiation shield of my weather station, but then my digital multi-meter refused to cooperate. Put the fan aside and spend an hour searching for the problem, but without a second DMM it is kind of difficult. I’ve had this DMM for the last 20 years and it was a gift from my father. It gave me a lot of joy during that time, but there is an end to everything so I am not too sentimental about retiring it. Besides, 20 year old technology is rather dated.

But what to buy as a replacement? The market is flooded with Chinese equipment delivered directly to your door. I am not a professional and only use a DMM for basic measurements and one of those Chinese ones should be good enough for me. On the other hand a nice Fluke would make my future measurements look a bit more professional. So I turned to the internet and the EEVblog website for some advice. Dave has made a buyers guide special on digital multimeters and it is both fun and entertaining to watch. Funny to see my 20 year old instrument in a slightly updated version passing by, but Dave makes pretty convincing points to not buy a similar model again with safety (actually lack of) as the main point. So go for quality and higher specs, but do I really need accuracy better than 0.5% and true RMS measurements? Probably not. But maybe once I get more options or better readings I find that they are really handy and then why have I waited so long in getting them?

Usually I try to find the best value for money. By searching RS and our local eBay site I narrowed down my list to the Agilent U1232A and the Fluke 115, because they are brand names and come out great in tests without being shabby on features. I also looked at lesser known and Taiwanese brands but funnily enough Taiwanese brands like Brymen are hard to get here Taiwan. Chinese brands, on the other hand, are not and one brand stood out a bit, namely Uni-T. Martin Lorton had very indept review of the Uni-T 61E on YouTube and I guess I will go with one of those. They are not the latest greatest, not the fastest, but they seem well build, accurate, safe and only a third of the price of a Fluke 115. A Sunday afternoon well spent and another problem solved.

…..the summer of 2014 that is. Boy it has been hot lately. Last Monday we had a record for September: over 38 degrees Celsius and my own weather station peaked at 39.0 degrees. And the end is still not in sight. Tropical storm Fung-Wong will bring some much needed rain this weekend and with it somewhat lower temperatures. But after that it is back to spending day after day with sweat soaked clothes stuck to your body. With the shack on the top floor and without airco it is now oozing heat, even at night. And I so long for heating up my iron and getting ready for winter DX fun on the lower bands. Patience is a virtue and I need lots of it. 73 and stay cool.