AmateurRadio.com

As I have written in my other blog, I am currently in a period of recuperation from my brain surgery prior to beginning treatment to try to stop the cancer. I’m feeling better every day, if still rather weak and living as if in a dream – in part no doubt due to my difficulty in sleeping.

Since I can’t go anywhere much – we sold the car to a neighbour yesterday – I need things to keep me amused here, so inevitably I am once again becoming more interested in my radios. But I do have a different outlook on the hobby now. The computer gives me a headache in more than small doses so digital modes are out for the time being, as is the APRS gateway. The simple approach to ham radio now seems far more appealing. Perhaps I’ll even spend some time trying to improve my CW.

I managed to set up my Kenwood TM-D710 as a digipeater and it can be heard and gated by Mark MM1MPB’s station at Annan, Scotland. So my weather station G4ILO-5 and my Kenwood handheld TH-D72 G4ILO-7 still appear on the map and I can do limited messaging via the keypad on the handheld.

This burst of activity is only a sign of recovering from the operation (and of coming to terms with the fact of my mortality) not of beating the cancer. The treatment will not begin for a couple of weeks or so and I have been reliably informed that it may make me feel so tired that I won’t feel much like blogging or radio. So my main intention during these next couple of weeks is to try to enjoy them as much as possible.

These last few days have been surreal. I don’t feel like a man with a time bomb in my head. I’m still weak, tired and find concentration difficult (the ability to get some decent sleep would help) but every day seems to bring an improvement in many functions. I’m even typing more accurately than I’ve done in a long time. I suppose it’s possible this brain tumour was having an effect on things before I even became aware of it.

I’m far from feeling up to spending a lot of time on the hobby (or anything else in particular) but my mind still needs things to occupy it and my links and contacts with the ham radio community help lift my spirit. As I’m not using my magnetic loop antenna I thought I would connect up the 30m QRSS beacon I built last autumn. So my callsign will be going out over the airwaves as a sign that I’m down but not out and not giving in to the doctors’ pessimistic predictions.

I’d appreciate reception reports direct to my email (julian . g4ilo at gmail . com). At the moment I can’t make head nor tail of grabbers. Nor can I figure out how to change my entry on the Knights QRSS Clipboard. A long way still to go, then, but at least progress for the moment is in the right direction.

73 and thanks for all the messages of support. They really were appreciated during this awful week. If you are interested, you can follow my progress with treatment in One Foot in the Grave.

A couple of people have commented on the lack of new postings on this blog. I’m grateful that you noticed. Here are a few words of explanation.

Three weeks ago I was doing some work on the computer when I had what I thought was a bad migraine attack. My vision became blurred and I felt nauseous. I switched off the PC and lay down in a darkened room to recover.

Normally a migraine leaves you feeling a bit shaky and after a couple of days you are right as rain again. but the feeling of shakiness never really went away.

After the attack I noticed a few symptoms that were a bit scary because they were really odd. For example I had trouble telling the time. I could see the hands of the watch but couldn’t seem to make sense of it. I also had trouble finding the pointer on the computer screen, even when I knew where it should be. These symptoms did start to wear off, but I still felt that something wasn’t quite right.

For example, if I was trying to pick something (like a Wainwright summit name) from an alphabetically sorted list on a web page I couldn’t find it. If my radio was on 145.450 and someone said they were QSYing to 145.525 I had trouble finding the channel.

I also had – indeed if you could watch me typing this you would find I still have – a lot of trouble using the keyboard. It became so frustrating that I lost most of the desire to post to the blog.

I was in denial that anything was wrong. Plus, to be honest, I didn’t have much faith that the system here would do much to help me. I hoped that if I just carried on trying to do normal things one day I would find that everything was back to normal again.

Last weekend I went for a walk to the top of Binsey, one of the local Wainwright summits. I made it to the top OK but after I finished making contacts and went to leave I felt strangely disorientated and had to search for the way down. On the drive home I almost went off the edge of the road because I had trouble judging the distance on the left hand side.

Walking around town several times I knocked into lamp posts and other obstructions on the left hand side, as if I didn’t notice them.

Eventually, yesterday, I decided finally that I should see my GP. He listened carefully as I described all the symptoms I have mentioned and did a few tests on my reflexes and co-ordination. Unfortunately it seems my pessimism about the system was not misplaced. The doctor told me that the specialist he would like to refer me to, a neurologist, is not available here.

He said – these are more or less his exact words – that the NHS is very good in an emergency, such as if you have a heart attack, but in the case of ongoing problems it doesn’t work very well. His role is just to help me get the best out of it. So he has arranged for me to have an appointment at the hospital in Whitehaven for a CT scan. which given the speed things normally move here could be several days. In the meantime I have been advised not to drive, which is obviously understandable but a major hassle in an place where public transport is very limited and it is a couple of hours by bus just to reach the hospital.

So I don’t know exactly what is the matter with me. I just  have to wait for the results of the scan and hope for the best. In the meantime I can still talk to people on the radio but it is unlikely that I shall be posting to the blog or answering emails very much.

Conditions were again great on 6 metres yesterday afternoon and evening, with the Sporadic E favouring Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. After making a few contacts on SSB – it’s always gratifying when using an attic dipole to have stations come right back to your call and give you a 59 report – I was tuning up the band and heard the unmistakable sound of PSK31 activity.

I worked LA8OKA and OH2NAF using PSK31 and SM7OYP using PSK63. I thought these may have been my first PSK contacts on 6m but my log tells me I worked Spain using the digimode during June last year.

Signals were strong and steady and most people were using their regular macros and brag files and exchanging greetings rather than sending quick report and locator overs as you might expect for sporadic propagation.

Some bloggers have been advocating using the weak signal digital modes like WSPR or JT65A on 6m but when propagation is this strong I’d rather use a digital mode that allows me to have a proper QSO and exchange names and other details with the stations I’m working.

Earlier in the year I was hunting through some folders on my hard drive and discovered an unreleased version of my Morse training program MorseGen. I had no memory at all of having updated it so I had no idea whether I had finished or tested the update. The main changes from the last released version 1.4 appeared to be that there was now a batch mode for creating recordings to play on an MP3 player and a “Common words” mode. This jogged my memory as to the reason for updating the program. A couple of years ago in QST there was an article which suggested that in order to be able to copy Morse at high speed you should learn to recognize the sounds of complete words not just individual letters. So I had added the ability to play random selections from a list of some of the most common words and CW abbreviations.

Today I placed this new version of MorseGen on the G4ILO’s Shack website. The previous version is still available to be downloaded in case the new one has problems. My interest in programming has now fallen to absolute zero and I no longer even have the development tools used to compile MorseGen so this is definitely, without argument the last ever version.

This is actually a bit of a nuisance as the new version seems to have a small bug. Occasionally, in Random QSO mode the program will halt with an error message “List index out of bounds.” You have to close the error message and continue. I’m guessing that I added some QSO templates and the random number generator sometimes generates a number that is more than the number of templates. If so, this would be easy to fix if I still had the development tools. But I don’t, so I can’t, so tough luck! But no-one has any grounds for complaint because MorseGen is free!

Despite the bug, I still think MorseGen is a useful program. I often use  it whenever I get the urge to try to improve my Morse reading skills. Admittedly it hasn’t done me any good, but I think that is more due to something peculiar to my brain that is just incapable of mastering the code. Over the years since I wrote the first version of MorseGen I’ve had many emails thanking me for it so it appears that it does work for people less Morse-resistant than me!

This is an unbuilt kit for an Off-Air Frequency Standard from Spectrum Communications. It is a crystal calibrator phase locked to BBC Radio 4 on 198kHz with an output of 2V peak to peak at 10MHz.

I got this with the intention of using it to frequency lock my Elecraft K3 using the KREF3 module. Regular readers may remember that last year I purchased a surplus Efratom LPRO-101 rubidium frequency standard to calibrate my radios. But a rubidium frequency standard has a finite life which will be used up very quickly if it is turned on all day to use as a real-time frequency reference. My intention is that the off-air frequency standard will run all day and keep my K3 as accurate as I need it to be.

I ordered the full kit from Spectrum. I was disappointed to find that what looked like a die cast box in the picture is actually a plastic box with a grey metallic finish. If I had realized it was not a die cast box I would probably have opted for the cheaper PCB kit and ordered one of the nice extruded aluminium alloy Hammond cases for the project. I hope it will be RF-proof enough to work in my shack environment where up to 100W may be used into indoor antennas.

The other disappointment was the rather home made looking PCB which does not have a silk screened component overlay. There is a printed layout in the instruction sheet but relating the component positions to the holes on the PCB is easier said than done. My initial thought was that I am not going to be able to build this. What I will have to do is draw the component overlay on to the PCB itself prior to construction. But it isn’t easy with my diminishing eyesight and need to use different strength lenses which makes switching between things at different distances a real trial. Having a silk screened PCB would just have made things a bit easier. I think my days of kit building are definitely numbered.

According to Bob Bruninga WB4APR, Kenwood announced an update to the TM-D710 firmware at Dayton. The changes are:

– INTERRUPT ALWAYS: always displays information about every packet received on screen for a few seconds, not just packets from new stations.

– INFINITE: extends the above to retain the information about the last heard packet on screen.

– MY PACKET: now displays the actual digi path used when your own packet is digipeated so you don’t just see that it was digipeated you can see which digipeater.

– TOP button: LIST display inserts new entries at the top so no need to scroll down.

– HEADING/UP: you can toggle the compass rose to North-UP or Heading
UP.

– PREVIEW of PHRASES: When selecting phrases you can see a preview of
first 9 bytes.

– READ/REPLY keys come up when a message is flashed on the front panel

– OVERLAYS: You can now select overlay characters on any symbol

– TOTAL hops can be set as low as 0 instead of 1.

– Auto-Powerup-Time set (if GPS is connected and is locked)

The update also contains some bug fixes. It does not include support for item-in-message or any other previously unsupported APRS features. 🙁

At this time the update is not yet available for download from Kenwood’s website.