AmateurRadio.com

We all know those “before” and “after” photos where you have to spot the differences, right? Well, here are two for you to dissect.

BEFORE

AFTER

No no no, the Chinese medicinal hair growth tonic didn’t really work: my amount of hair is still the same. But a trained ham’s eye had no problem in spotting the change on the desk, not?

When my TS-440S broke down – again – a couple of months ago I was pretty upset. I was just getting back into DXing on long- and medium wave and winter was coming, which means more fun on 160 meters. My semi-QRP TS-130V was just not up to the task, so I had a tough decision to make. After telling myself “carpe diem“, “you only live once” and “come on, ease your mid-life crisis a bit” for a week I finally sold some of my mutual funds and ordered a KX3 kit. Being a very responsible husband and father I had bad feelings about diverting some family funds for my own pleasure. But boys need toys and I just don’t feel right without a decent rig (or some wheels, a guitar and Dutch cheese for that matter).

Now you just can’t let Elecraft send over a transceiver to Taiwan, because the customs people just don’t allow that. Importing transmitting equipment is strictly regulated and quite a serious matter to the government of Taiwan. Importing papers have to be arranged and customs forms signed, money has to be paid and stamps stamped on a multitude of documents and receipts. So, the average Taiwanese ham doesn’t bother with it and neither did I. Elecraft sent the KX3 to a good friend in Colorado who repacked it and send it in two shipments to Taiwan. The replacements parts for my “weather station” arrived safely and a couple of days later I had my KX3 ready and was back on the air.

Happy happy happy, but then I started to feel the limitations: the KX3 can only put out 12 Watts and even less if you want to do digital modes. Elecraft has a 100 Watt amp in their product line and it looks very nice……only its price not so much. And I am not a QRPer. I need some powerrrrr to compensate for my lousy antenna system. Most ham equipment over here is imported from Japan and so I started to look for a decent (read “cheap”) QRO amp. I first tried the second-hand market, but I ended my search at Amazon.co.jp where the ICOM IC-7200 was being discounted 31% to only 72,800 Japanese Yen. That translates to 720 US dollars and is in my opinion the bargain of the century. You can hardly get a decent second-hand amp, let alone rig, for that amount. And why buy an amp if you can get a whole new radio for such a nice price? So I ordered one, my good friend JA1RZD tested it in his shack in Tokyo and an acquaintance then brought it with him on a visit to Taiwan.

Now I am the happy owner of two very modern rigs. It’s quite a culture shock compared to the old Kenwoods I have, but I am beginning to feel the advantages of having DSP, computer control, very narrow filters and independent pass bands control. And you know what? The remainder of my mutual funds did so well since I sold a portion that I already have “earned” back the IC-7200. All’s well that ends well.

The fire crackers have been lit and the red envelopes handed out: Welcome to the year of the horse. Listen up for some extra activity from east Asia where we all celebrate the beginning of a new lunar year. Gongxi Facai to all of you.

73 de Hans

It’s always nice to find that other people’s findings match your own. PA0RDT is famous for his design of the mini-whip, a very small but effective long- and medium wave antenna. Roelof found that the magnetic component of a radio wave could more easily go through obstacles, while the electrical component was more contained within a closed space, like a house. This means that the electrical component of noise generated by appliances in the house stays inside – mostly – while the magnetic part travels outside the walls. Thus his mini-whip design picks up the electrical component only and amplifies that. If the antenna is placed some distance from interfering obstacles it will result in a strong, but relatively noiseless signal. I build one and can say it really works.

But amplification comes at a price: IM and overload. Passive loop antennas have non of the afore mentioned problems. Since the beginning of my radio days I have always had a one metre square loop antenna for MW and LW and deep in my heart I longed for one. So I build one again, but this time bigger: 180 cm square with the corners clipped. Tuning is done remote with a BB112 varicap. The circuit was once published by the Benelux DX Club and I’ve had it for over 25 years, but never build it to this day.

Because of bad weather I could only put it up last weekend and boy, what was I disappointed. It seems it picks up all the television noise from the whole neighbourhood, with added noise from within my own house. The mini-whip is clearly better than the loop, so PA0RDT is right. But using another laptop power brick helped a bit and after firing up Argo it seemed that despite the noise the loop was still proving itself useful.

The loop tunes from 136 kHz to just above 400 kHz, which covers most of the NDB frequencies. Even though long wave beacons are on the decline there are still a lot of them. I heard some 30 new ones over the weekend, both in the daytime and at night. Argo is a great tool, sometimes beating my ears in picking up signals. Here some screen shots.

Locator “O” on 201 kHz and PQ on 202 kHz, both unidentified.

An odd one heard on 220 kHz: BRBA5. Notice that the dash in the letter “R” is longer than the other dashes. Ears won’t notice this, but with Argo you can see it.

Three beacons on the same frequency of 380 kHz: LM, OB and sandwiched in between YU from Hualien (Taiwan’s east coast).

NDBs are fun to DX, but my goal is to do some 2200m DX. Without any voltage applied to the varicap the loop is tuned to 136 kHz, which means I can leave it on all night and hope that I can detect some signals from Japanese hams, or maybe the Philippines. Unfortunately Chinese hams are not allowed to use 2200 meters and I don’t know of any Taiwanese hams operating this low. Help! I think I am becoming “low-nely.

This should have been a piece about my adventurous adventures in radio land. But alas, last week during the reception of a Wefax image the display of my not-very-trusty TS-440S went completely blank. It is not the first time this 23 year old rig is going cold on me and – yes, I know – if I want reliability I should buy myself a new rig. No problemo! I have money in the bank and could buy the new IC-7100 right away. But that is money we put in the bank for our first house, the kids tuition, a new second hand car and what not. It’s not easy being a poor ham, but I won’t bother you with my misery. Time for ACTION! If I really want that new rig then I have to make some extra money on the side. So I dug out my investment portfolio details, but…..no win, no loss. So, I took an extra hour of teaching English, but that is only making me 10 dollars per week. By the time I have enough money for a new rig the next solar maximum is already upon us.

Then I stumbled onto this video by VK3YE, Peter Parker in Melbourne, Australia. If you never seen any of his videos, then it is heartily recommended you check them out. His unique presenting style, clever video editing and outdoor QRP operations make them very entertaining and interesting. And this video is especially unique in that he is wearing a suit! You don’t see hams in suits often, so grab the opportunity.

But….making money with ham radio? I don’t think it is for me. So, after a deep sigh I dug out my TS-130V and also put the FRG-7 back on my desk. The TS-130V is only putting out 15 Watts so it feels like I am working QRP right now. But….but….I don’t want to be a QRPer! I want my 440 back!! MOMMY!!!!!

Yes, that is a Raspberry Pi on the bottom of my rubbish bin. I’m not saying the RasPi is rubbish, but I am not weeping about its loss, either.

As with many new things there is a hype and with the RasPi there was no exception: “What a bargain to get so much computer for such a low price.” Well, you pay for what you get, so when I got mine last year September I soon found out I also got a lot of problems to solve. More than I was willing to. The USB/network problem has been mentioned a lot on various sites. Stable power would solve that, so I build a very stable solid state PSU with 78S05 regulators and 6800uF capacitors. Even after that you just had to look at the USB ports and the network would come crashing down. Since I was running the RasPi headless this meant rebooting over and over again.

So my plan to build a solar powered weather and APRS digipeater were soon abandoned and with only a single USB 1-Wire dongle attached it just collected weather data. Uptimes were great, the longest one being over 100 days – until I accidentally switched the power off.

Then we had this, on July 14….

http://youtu.be/fLqZ32XTbbg

I shot the video just after fixing a drainage problem: the water was almost entering the shack. At 14 seconds you can see the first flash of thunder (the EMP hit the camera). It was a forebode of what was to come: a hit right behind where we live. The result: all the garage door openers and video doorbells were broken within a 50 meter range. Two of our routers were out and……the weather station. Network cables make great antennas, so the 1-Wire dongle didn’t respond to incoming signals after the hit any more. The RasPi was also dead, but later that night I put 5 Volts on the GPIO pins and it came back alive, albeit running very hot. I had a spare 1-Wire dongle, so the weather station was up and running again – for the moment.

But not a month later the expected happened: slowly the colourful LEDs on the RasPi main board dimmed until there was no life in them left. It must be a problem with the on-board voltage regulator, but they are glued to the board (yes, I tried removing one), so the rubbish bin it is.

Added bonus is that I now have a much cleaner spectrum, too! There have been projects to get the RasPi transmitting using the GPIO pins on the FM band, WSPR and what not. I found out that the RasPi was acting as a little spread spectrum transmitter, putting out carriers every 30 kHz on HF and 6 meters via the network cable. Unplug the network and it’s gone, plug it in and you broadcast 24 hours a day on multiple frequencies.

I already had a Atom board prepared and with some extra time spent the weather station was back up in a jiffy. My little PicoLCD screen also worked with the new set up, while with the RasPi it would just stall. Therefore, you can surf to pa2bx.nl, again, for the latest weather in Longtan, Taiwan.

So, the Pi is dead, long life the Atom!

It’s been almost a year since I wrote something for Amateurradio.com. We all go through rough times and I certainly had my share of downs in the last 11 months (and not many ups to compensate those). I am even a bit ashamed to say that I didn’t surf over here for a while, so I did miss out on a lot of posts from Larry, Paul, Julian and the others.

This coming teaching season is going to be a little less stressful and so my good intention is to write at least one article each month. In the mean time you can visit my newly revised website with my radio blog, logbooks and weather. Yes, I did manage to put the 1-Wire weather station back in operation again. All the sensors are out on the balcony, with the pressure and a temperature sensors in the shack. Being high summer in sub-tropical Taiwan daytime temperatures usually hover around 34 degrees, with 26 degrees at night. The shack heats up so much in the daytime and stays hot at night that the temperature hasn’t dropped below 30 degrees for the past few weeks. Still, I am quite active at the moment, but more about that later….

It is now official: I have a fixed amateur radio station in Taiwan. Very interesting that the licence shows both my name and call, which wasn’t the case in the past.

Yesterday another gruelling teaching semester has started. Like so many I need to put extra effort and energy in my work just to be able to keep the job I have. Apart from that, I need to work on my physical well-being also (being 45 and all), so I have joined my kids in their Taekwondo class. It is going to be busy and tiring for the next half year. The little time I have to myself I’m going to spend in the shack, not behind the computer. So, I’m going to be quiet for while, not writing anything except for the occasional entry in the diary on my own web site. But who knows, maybe we will meet on air before I return here. 73 from Taiwan.