AmateurRadio.com

I just finished a contact with a very loud Austrian station, OE3DIA on 10 metres, who took time out while working a string of stations to give me a complimentary audio report, quite unsolicited. It’s good when that happens! The comment was “Very nice audio cutting through the QRM” I was using the K3 at 80 watts and the mike was one of those Heil mikes with the dual insert, set to “narrow”. The K3 transmit audio equalisation is factory standard, in other words flat.

As it happens I had just been doing some audio comparisons between the KX3 and the FT-817. There has been a thread going on the KX3 Yahoo group started by a disenchanted American ham who claims that the FT-817 has punchier audio than the KX3. It’s rubbish, to put it politely. The KX3 has a built-in speech compressor, while my 817 has an RF processor made by Joachim, DF4ZS (more details on my FT-817 page) built into the microphone. Without it there is just no comparison.

I recorded some audio clips so you can hear for yourself:

• FT-817 with standard microphone, no compression
• FT-817 with standard microphone and DF4ZS compressor
• KX3 with MH3 microphone, mic gain and compression both set to 30

There is a bit of distortion on those clips which was not noticeable when listening on the radio. I think I might have a problem with my sound card.

I’m not sure if the difference are that noticeable in those clips, but when you look at the needle of the power meter the KX3 certainly has the more punchy signal.

Both the FT-817 and the KX3 were running off 13.8V and set to 5 watts output. I couldn’t compare them on battery power as I don’t have the charger board for the KX3 and the external battery pack (10xAA NiMH cells) I intended to use appears to be past it and the KX3 kept cutting out on voice peaks.

So cheap you just have to buy one! According to the the listing it’s VHF or UHF not dual band. Thanks to Steve G1KQH for the tip-off.

This Saturday morning there was a big Sporadic-E opening on 6m. There were some pretty big signals, though once again I seemed to be on the edge of the opening. The Sporadic-E seemed centered over northern Europe and you can see from the map that it was pretty intense!.

6m on 18 May 2013 at 0930z. Map from DXMaps.com

I had KComm’s DX Cluster window open. I don’t use the cluster on HF and dislike it intensely, but spotting stations on the cluster (in a specific format with locators for both endpoints) is how VHF contact information gets to DXMaps.com.

I saw a couple of contacts from Ireland spotted on 2m so I switched bands.

2m on 18 May 2013 at 0940z. Map from DXMaps.com

As you can see, two lucky EI stations managed to work into northern Italy, one of them using a vertical antenna! Signals must have been strong but when I QSYed to 2m I didn’t hear anything. The Es must have been over the northern French coast and you can see that the same Es cloud must have permitted F6HTJ to spot the GB3ANG beacon and enabled DG7IG to work EA1CCM as the paths intersect at the exact same point..

I wasn’t lucky on 2m but I was a bit more successful on data and tuned to the PSK part of the 6m band just in time to catch a French station signing off with Tim, G4VXE. I managed QSOs with Gerard F4LKG and George EA4GB but I don’t think many stations were listening because my CQs went unanswered.

It seems as if the 2013 Sporadic-E season is off to a good start!

10m WSPR spots @ G4ILO 1242z 16 May 2013

By running WSPR day after day on the same band you start to get a feel for how propagation behaves that you don’t get from casual operation. It’s interesting to compare this map of WSPR spots for G4ILO around lunchtime today with the kind of results I was getting in November. Then I was getting DX spots throughout the day. Now I’m getting mostly local spots, within Europe.

In the autumn the picture changed slowly through the day. Now, in springtime, the picture changes all the time. Stations pop up for a few cycles and then disappear, never to be heard of again. The signal reports vary wildly as well, from just above the noise to +10dB or even higher in the space of a few minutes. This didn’t happen in November. It is a clear indication of Sporadic-E propagation: reflections from fast-moving clouds that are highly ionized and very reflective, creating a path with very little loss.

From time to time I pause the WSPR and tune the band to see what activity there is. I’ve also tried 6m for short periods. I’ve had a few spots on 6 (this is with 5W to my attic dipole) but the magic band is still fairly quiet at 55 degrees north. 10m is far from being wide open yet too. I’ve still to see what WSPR is like when the band is open and signals are romping in at S9+. So I will continue with my WSPR monitoring in the expectation that things will get even more interesting.

A few weeks ago one of our websites was hacked. We didn’t notice for almost a week due to browsers caching the pages. The consequence of the hack was that every page accessed returned a 404 error meaning that the page was not found. During that week Google’s spiders visited with the result that almost the entire site was lost from the search engine.

I discovered the hack just in time to be able to restore from my web host’s oldest backup. It was a real hassle as well as a stressful time and I wanted to find a way to alert me more quickly if it happened again.

My first thought was to use ChangeDetection.com, the site I use to alert me when a change occurs to the IBP Beacon Status page. That was no good as both sites contain dynamic content that changes frequently.

A couple of days ago I was visiting some ham sites and I came across one with a badge stating that the site was scanned and malware free. I clicked on the badge and it took me to evuln.com, a site containing a lot of information about how to secure a website and offering tools to detect an attack.

Tools include a malware scanner that will check your site to see if it contains something bad. You can have this check run daily for free if you display a badge on the site. This appeared to be just what I was looking for, so I registered with the site and added the badge to both G4ILO’s Shack and ham-directory.com.

Evuln.com also offers a service to clean and fix websites. This is something I might well have used a few weeks ago if my web hosts’s support hadn’t been helpful in assisting me to identify the hacked files. But the cynic in me rang an alarm bell. It would be in evuln.com’s interest to claim that my site was hacked and then offer to clean it up for a fee. What a good scam! In fact the owners of a couple of sites that had been told they had been hacked thought it was a scam and that their site had been hacked by evuln.com!

So is evuln.com good or evil? I did a lot of digging. I think that if it was a scam I would have found a lot more evidence of people who had been scammed. Evuln.com has been running for several years and contains good information. The owner replies quickly and promptly to enquiries. There is an address and contact information on the site. I believe that evuln.com is a genuine attempt to provide a useful service.

I have since found other similar services such as ScanMyServer which do not offer a site cleanup service. Come to your own conclusion.

Today is a day I thought I’d never see – my 60th birthday.

Even on such a special occasion you can’t keep me away from the radio and computer!

A few days ago my Fox Delta WX1 Micro Weather Station stopped working. As it turned out, I just had to switch off the power and switch it on and it started working again . But while I was waiting for the rain to stop so I could go out and look at the device I began thinking about getting a better weather station – one that measures wind speed and direction and rainfall as well as temperature, humidity and pressure.

When you start to look at weather stations the choice is overwhelming. My first priority was that it should work with APRSISCE and generate the file wxnow.txt that it uses to update weather objects. That requirement led to the stipulation that it should be compatible with the free weather software Cumulus, which creates the required file. There is a list of weather stations that work with this software, which narrowed the choice down a little. After reading many reviews the best choice seemed to be the Davis Vantage Vue. Unfortunately this cost about four times more than I was willing to pay, so it was back to the drawing board.

The weather stations made by the Chinese firm Fine Offset and sold under the Watson brand name seemed to meet my criteria at a more reasonable price. However, browsing through the reviews on Eham.net and elsewhere there were quite a high proportion of dissatisfied users. Complaints about anemometers that stopped rotating, poor wireless reception and so on. With weather stations as with everything else, it seems, you get what you pay for.

Despite the reviews I am tempted to get one of the Watson W6861 solar weather stations. But before I did I thought I would take the opportunity to ask my readers for their experiences. Many of you must have home weather stations. So which ones are good, which are bad and which should be avoided at all costs? I await your comments with interest.