AmateurRadio.com

It’s been a very busy week for me both at work and at home following my vacation, so it’s taken me a while to find the time to start writing this. I’d hoped to provide a few more updates while I was in Costa Rica but I never found the time so I’ll do my best to try to remember what happened. I’m going to try write a number of shorter postings so hopefully I can get them all out over the next couple of days.

In my last posting, I’d talked about how it had been rainy all week. That weather continued, but I finally did figure out a way to get on the air for more than 10 minutes at a time.

The problem was that my initial setup was on part of the outdoor deck with everything exposed to the elements. I would have been happy to bring the feedline inside, but the air conditioning system in the house we were staying at has sensors such that you can’t leave the sliding doors open even a little without the system shutting down. Considering the temperature and humidity, that wasn’t a realistic option, so I had to operate outside and hope for the best. In the picture, you can see the antenna in the background and I’ve got the power supply sitting on the chair with the radio on a little table. As long as it was dry, this worked out fine. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay dry long enough for me to spend any significant time on the air.

On Friday afternoon, the weather was once again uncooperative, and I was starting to think that I’d wind up leaving Costa Rica with only about 5 QSOs. However, Sharon pointed out that the deck next to the common area of the house had a pretty big overhang, and I realized that even with some of the really torrential downpours we’d had that area had stayed dry. I moved down to that location and set up the antenna there, configured for 15m, and brought out the rest of the gear to the new location.

Sure enough, after a few minutes of respite the skies opened up again, but although the antenna was getting wet, the radio, power supply, and my iPad (used for logging) were dry. (As you can see from the photo, I did have a towel ready, just in case.) I got on 15m at just about 21:00Z and called CQ and was answered by a station in Brazil. Being in Costa Rica, that wasn’t quite the DX that I was hoping for, but very shortly after that I got spotted on the DX Clusters and started getting a lot of calls from Europe. All told, I was on the air for about 40 minutes (we had plans and I had to get ready) and worked 33 stations that day. (I’ll have some details about the countries I worked in a future posting.) Although I’ve worked from a DX location before (as ZF2DK), this was the first time that I ever had what I would consider to be a full-blow pileup. I think that I did fairly well in managing things, managing to at least get enough of a partial call so that I could respond back with “the station ending in xyz only please” on almost every call. I don’t have enough experience yet to be able to pull full callsigns out of a pileup every time, but I know that’s something that comes with experience. By the second day of running stations, I could tell that I was doing better.

Part 2 of this series continues here.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature has not been cooperating. I’m writing this from Costa Rica and we’ve have a lot of rain here. I was able to get on the air very briefly after arriving on Sunday, making a single contact on 20m mostly just to make sure that the gear was working. I got a little bit of RF into the radio (which I’d seen while testing at home) but the ferrites that I’d brought cleared that up.

The next time I was about to get on the air was Tuesday afternoon, also relatively briefly. I set up for 15m and the antenna behaved very well there, easily tuning the whole band. I worked a few stations in the US southeast (Georgia & Florida) and a relative local in Venezuala. But as the title of this post indicates, rainy season has started here and it’s been raining a lot since then.

Obviously a Buddipole will work in the rain, but the way things are set up here it’s not practical to leave the antenna up and run out in a near-monsoon to make an adjustment to a whip. Of course, trying to do that when there’s lightning around, which there has been, was an even worse idea.

Wednesday was pretty much a complete rainout, though my friends and I were able to go out on the water and jet ski for a couple of hours. (No, I did not attempt to operation TI7/K2DBK/MM). Did I mention that it rained constantly during that whole time?

Today (Thursday) started off looking bad again, raining for most of the early morning, but it did clear up for the majority of our day which included a sightseeing tour to the Rincon de la Vieja volcano. Right at the end of that trip it starting pouring yet again, and while there was a very brief respite after we got back to our residence here, it’s been raining steadily ever since along with a lot of lightning. Needless to say, no radio.

The weather forecast for the next couple of days calls for more of the same, although our touring plans are done and since we’ll be around more I hope that if we get a break from the rain for a few hours I’ll be able to get on the air.

I am disappointed that I haven’t been able to get on the air more, but I’m trying to stay positive and see if I can get on the air for at least a few more hours before it’s time for us to leave.

I just wanted to post a very quick update regarding my TI7/K2DBK operation that’s coming up in a few days. I see that my announcement to the various DX Publicity sources that I’ve collected has done the job, as I’ve been mentioned in most of the major DX announcement lists. As mentioned, this is a “holiday-style” operation which means that operating will take place when I’m at the QTH where I’m staying (as opposed to sightseeing, etc.)  and not otherwise occupied with other important things, like working on my suntan, swimming, or consuming the occasional “adult beverage”. (Come to think of it, I could do at least some of those while operating, but I think I’ll skip trying to operate from the swimming pool.)

Although I wasn’t home to take advantage, I noted that 6m was open today and if that happens again while I’m there, I’ll try to get on the air on that band. However, unless there’s some indication of a band opening I probably won’t spend much time just CQing since the lower bands should be more productive overall.

I had intended to post several updates this week, but as luck would have it this was an extremely busy week at work and I got home significantly later than usual and just haven’t had the time to update. I may post a few updates from Costa Rica when I’m there at which point I may have a better idea of when I’ll actually be on the air.

Until then, I’ve got to get back to packing.

The possible operation to Costa Rica that I mentioned a few weeks ago is now on. I’ll be operating from the north-west part of the country near the city of Liberia from the 10th to the 17th of July 2011. You can see the approximate location in this map although the aerial photos were taken before the house were built. (No, we’re not sleeping on a golf course.) We’re going as guests of our good friends Barry and Stephanie who took us along to Grand Cayman in 2007 when I operated as ZF2DK.  (For those of you who haven’t been reading this blog that long, that link goes to a whole pile of blog posts about my trip there.) This time, I’ll be operating as TI7/K2DBK, with the TI7 indicating that I’ll be operating from the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica.

As I mentioned previously, the location is wonderful, overlooking the water from a house that’s basically built onto the side of a cliff. The location where I plan to mount the antenna is a 2nd story balcony (which is actually more like 3 stories high) and the ground falls away very rapidly so the antenna height will effectively be more than high enough to get into the free-space radiation zone. (I hope.)

Although I initially planned to bring my Buddistick antenna, which is a muti-band vertical, I decided to upgrade to it’s “big brother” the Buddipole, which is a multi-band dipole that’s easier to tune and has some directivity and more gain. (I actually decided to go with the mini-Buddipole, which is the same size antenna but breaks down smaller for traveling.) I also picked up an 8′ shock-corded mast which collapses down to just 11″. I’ll secure that to the balcony railing with some bungee cords and I’ll be all set.

I did a little testing of the antenna this past Sunday during Field Day and made contacts on 10m, 15m, and 20m just to do a “smoke test” of the setup. Unfortunately, at the time I started testing the band conditions weren’t very good for DX so all my contacts were domestic, but I had no trouble working a few west coast stations. I think that with the added height plus the fact that I’ll be DX I should do just fine from Costa Rica. What’s that expression? Being DX adds how many dB to your signal strength? (For anyone who doesn’t get that joke, drop me a note and I’ll explain.)

I haven’t had as much time to prepare for this trip as I did for my trip to Cayman, but fortunately since then I’ve made a few more trips to Florida and pretty much have the gear situation down, though obviously I can’t run to Radio Shack if I discover that I’ve forgotten an adapter when I’m in Costa Rica. I did send out a note to some of the DX publicity contacts that I collected when I went to Cayman and I’ve started to see my operation show up in a few of the DX bulletins. The next thing I’ll be doing is to start going through the checklist I developed previously to make sure that I have all the equipment that I need before the trip. I’ll be doing that during this week and will probably do a bit more antenna testing over the upcoming July 4 holiday weekend.

One other thing that I did over the weekend was to test the software that I found for the iPad to see how suitable it was for use. I found a program called HamLog and while it’s not nearly as full featured as my regular DX logger (DX4Win) I think it will work out well enough. There were a couple of issues when logging Field Day contacts, since it’s not really set up too well when there is a piece of info (other than time, date, and callsign) that changes each contact, but as DX I expect (or at least hope) that I’ll be able to just sit on a single frequency and only have to change the callsign for each contact I log. (The program logs the time of each QSO and can be set up so that all other fields, such as the frequency, signal report, and mode stay the same for each QSO). I’m pretty confident that this will work, but I know that I can always fall back to paper logging if necessary.

I’ll be posting more updates over the coming days, stay tuned.

When I came home today, I found a large envelope from the ARRL waiting for me in the mail, and opened it up to find this:

It turns out that I won the 6m category for the 2010 ARRL June VHF contest and I didn’t even know it! It may be a little difficult to read, but the fine print towards the center left says “Winner 50 MHz”. That was definitely a nice surprise.

The 2011 ARRL June VHF QSO Party (link goes to the rules for the contest) is coming up this weekend, the 11th – 13th of June. I have some family coming in from out of town and some other commitments so I probably won’t be spending as much time on the air as I did last year, but I will try to get on the air and operate as much as I can.

In July, I’ll be heading to the Guanacaste area of Costa Rica along with a group of friends (some of them the same as those who I was with when I operated from Grand Cayman as ZF2DK). This is primarily a vacation, and when I initially investigated whether I would be able to operate from there I ran into a few logistical issues and pretty much gave up. However, recently, a couple of those issues were removed, and now it’s looking a lot more possible than I’ll be operating as TI7/K2DBK. I will post updates here with additional information as things progress, but this will most likely be phone-only and while I’ll pick the bands based on conditions while I’m there, most likely I’ll be on 15, 17, and 20. I plan to bring my Buddistick that I’ve used in Cayman and from IOTA NA-034 because it’s small and very easy to travel with, my trusty Icom 706MKIIG, and a fairly lightweight switcher power supply. While the place we’re staying isn’t right on the water, it’s got a pretty decent elevation above it and a nice balcony outside my room that I can use to attach the antenna. I believe my best shot for DX will be towards the northeast US, Europe, and Africa, but I think that I’ll be able to work towards Asia as well.

As with my previous trip to Grand Cayman, this will be holiday-style operation, meaning that I’ll get on when I have free time, probably a few hours a day, most likely in the late afternoon.

I’ll be posting more once the plans are a little more firm, but I wanted to give a tentative heads-up.

Incidentally, I’m planning to just take my iPad instead of a laptop for the trip, and I’d like to hear from anyone who has used any logging software (there don’t seem to be a lot of choices, but I’d still rather get a personal recommendation) for the iPad. I expect most of my contacts to be DXpedition style, so I’m not looking for any fancy integration, just ease of use. Please either leave a comment or email me if you’ve got any recommendation.

Saturday afternoon I was going through my QSO logs in preparation for a long-overdue bureau mailing. One of the things I do prior to doing a mailing is that I validate that I still need the card (sometimes I’ll get a confirmation for that band/mode from another operator, or sometimes it’ll get confirmed via Logbook of The World [LoTW] since I initially flagged it) and I also check to make sure that I’m not sending to a bureau that doesn’t exist, or sending via the bureau when I could send direct to a US manager.

In going through the log, I discovered that I had an unconfirmed QSO with Joel, V44KAI on 6m from 2009. That was my only contact with V4 on 6m so I definitely wanted to confirm it. I noticed that I had two other contacts with him (on different bands) which had been confirmed via LoTW, but not the 6m contact. Joel’s qrz.com page explain that because he sometimes encounters QRM/QRN that it’s a good idea to contact him before asking his manager, W5TFW. I emailed Joel who replied that some of his older logs were on paper and hadn’t been put into electronic form so that they could be uploaded to LoTW.

On Sunday morning I got another email from Joel who told me that he found the (valid) QSO in his logs and had emailed his manager to give him the details so that it could be uploaded to LoTW. I checked and probably within 10 minutes of my seeing that email I found that the matching QSL record was in the LoTW system, confirming V4 on 6m for me.

The reason that I wrote this is because to me this exemplifies the ham radio spirit. Joel is clearly an active ham (try a search for V44KAI on the DX-Summit search page and you’ll see what I mean) and as Joel says on his qrz.com page, his manager obviously keeps busy keeping the records up to date. The fact that both of these guys took the time to quickly respond to my question and do the work necessary to provide me with the confirmation I needed helps remind me that despite some of the less-altruistic hams floating around, there are still plenty of good guys. Thanks to both of them for that reminder.

Edit: I was asked what a “manager” is, so by way of explanation:
A manager is a person who handles someone else’s QSLing duties for them. There are all kinds of reasons to have managers, including having the manager in a country with a better mail system to reduce mail theft, or simple because the DX station handles a large volume of cards and can’t keep up with it themselves.