PLT debated in parliament

The issue of interference to short wave from power line networking devices was debated in Parliament yesterday. You can view the televised debate here. It’s quite long, but worth watching if you can spare the time.

If you don’t, here’s a summary: The only complaints are from a few hobby radio amateurs and the number of complaints has been too few to justify banning a technology that brings potential benefits to millions of homes.

Other points: “Hobby radio amateurs are not legally entitled to a completely clean radio spectrum”, and “no specific limits on interference levels have been set so that radio users can adapt as the use of PLT technology evolves.” It is also projected that the number of installed PLT devices will quadruple by the year 2020. So this spectrum-destroying interference will be coming soon to an antenna near you!

I’m afraid that the writing is on the wall for amateur radio. In today’s world, the only things that count are money and big business vested interests. There are too few radio hobbyists to count at the ballot box and they don’t contribute anything to the country that can be measured in financial terms. So we are just going to have to “adapt” to increasing interference levels by giving up hope of receiving weak signals, confining our activities to quiet portable locations, or using modes like D-Star which are interference-free once the signal level rises above the noise threshold.

I think we just saw a death sentence passed on our hobby!

PLT a threat to British intelligence gathering?

A report produced for the British intelligence gathering organization GCHQ claims that noise from power line networking devices is causing a detectable increase in interference at its monitoring stations and could adversely affect its operations. The report, which can be found on the website Ban PLT, was originally released by GCHQ’s Director of Engineering and Technology but has since been disowned by GCHQ which now claims it contained “inaccuracies.” The government organization also forced the online tech news journal The Register, which published an article containing details of the report, to remove the author’s identity from the article using measures designed, ironically, to suppress information that could be considered a threat to national security. So much for freedom of speech.

Ofcom meanwhile continues to deny that PLT devices cause a problem, stating that there have been “only” 272 complaints of interference (all from radio amateurs) and that of 233 cases referred to BT all but one have been resolved so there is nothing to worry about. Has pressure been brought from on high to force GCHQ to disown the report which is embarrassing to BT which has a couple of million of the Comtrend PLT devices installed nationwide? It is blatantly obvious that Ofcom couldn’t give a damn about the possible effects on a few hobbyists who don’t even pay a license for the spectrum they use. But a threat to the country’s ability to monitor the short waves to gather intelligence about potential security threats is something they would have had to take seriously.

Inside the UV-3R

Many people have been buying the cheap little dual band Baofeng UV-3R handheld radios from China. Some people have been pulling them apart, such as Fabrice, F4AVI, who has discovered that it is really quite a state of the art radio.

Fabrice found that the VHF/UHF transceiver functionality is provided by an RDA Microelectronics RDA1846 chip. This is a single chip fully DSP based transceiver capable of covering 134-174, 200-250 and 400-500MHz and supports CTCSS, CDCSS and DTMF with an 8dBm on-board PA. The Band 2 broadcast FM receiver uses an RDA5802E chip, also from RDA Microelectronics, which is a single chip broadcast FM stereo tuner. The UV-3R doesn’t cover the US 220MHz band, of course, nor is the FM broadcast audio in stereo. But future models might well do.

Some buyers of the Boafeng have experienced minor issues with their radios that suggest the quality control is not all it could be. Still, it is interesting to see innovative designs coming out of China. One can only wonder what next?

A birthday to forget

As you may have noticed, I have been experimenting with making software instruction videos. APRSISCE/32 has been the beneficiary of my attempts, but my real intention has been to make videos that would bring traffic back to the website that for the last few years has provided us with a living. For the core of the videos – and for APRSISCE/32 videos – the screen capture software I have been using (BB Flashback Express) is good enough. But I wanted to make the videos more professional by including shots of me talking to camera – which meant that I needed to buy a camcorder and get to grips with video editing software.

I ordered by post an AgfaPhoto camcorder which captured good quality video, though the sound level was low. I struggled with the supplied Arcsoft Total Media Extreme software. Eventually, and quite by accident, I found that my work laptop which is running 64-bit Windows 7 had on it a program called Windows Live Movie Maker. This is a brilliantly designed piece of software and easy enough even for me to use. Unfortunately I found that the audio level on the video made with the camcorder was much lower than that recorded by the screen capture software. I tried reducing the level in BB Flashback to match that of the clips filmed using the camcorder, but once the video was uploaded to YouTube the audio was much quieter than other videos and even with the PC speakers turned up to the max you could hardly hear it.

Olga made a test clip using the video feature of her digital camera and the audio on that was much louder. So yesterday we decided the camcorder must have a fault and emailed to the supplier saying we wanted to return it. Not wanting to waste time we then went to Argos and bought a different camcorder, this time one from Hitachi, which had received good reviews. You can imagine the sinking feeling when, after waiting for the battery to charge up, we tried it only to find that the recorded audio level was no louder than on the Agfa.

I felt out of my depth, clueless with no idea what to do. Other people managed to upload videos to YouTube with speech you could hear – why was I finding it so difficult? I asked in a couple of familiar ham radio forums if anyone had experience of this and could offer some advice. One person explained how to change the audio level in Windows Live Movie Maker, but as I had already found, the volume slider was at maximum in the video clips and the only direction I could adjust the audio level was down. Few people seemed to have experience of using camcorders, most using smartphones or other pocket devices to make their YouTube submissions, which would not give the HD quality I was hoping for.

Olga, trying to be helpful because I was getting stressed, found what she thought was a Hitachi support forum. Twelve Hitachi technicians were online waiting to answer my questions, the site claimed. I wrote my question and immediately received the response that this had been passed to someone who was an expert in this particular field and I should pay £12 for an answer by email or £18 for a consultation by phone. Ready to try anything at this point, I handed over my credit card details, only to find that this was not Hitachi support at all, but some generic advice service claiming to answer all kinds of questions. More than 12 hours later we have not received any answer for our £12.

Eventually I stumbled upon a workaround. The Hitachi camcorder creates AVI files (unlike the Agfa whose video files are MOV.) Google found several answers to how to increase the audio in an AVI file, which suggests this is a common problem. Many of the answers were couched in gobbledygook I didn’t understand, using terms like “demux” that mean nothing to me. But eventually I found a “how to” procedure I could follow. It involved using a free utility called VirtualDub to rewrite the AVI file after processing and increasing the level of the audio track by 12dB. Even that didn’t work until I had visited a dodgy looking site and downloaded an iffy looking unofficial codec for the H.264 video encoding used by the Hitachi.

So I have a solution to the problem, though it’s a bit of a cumbersome one involving processing every video clip before I can start to assemble them in Movie Maker. To arrive at this point I have ended up buying two camcorders the first of which is probably not faulty as we first thought (it being unlikely they both are.) and been suckered into paying £12 to an internet scam site. This is not to mention the hours spent in front of the computer feeling frustrated and helpless on what was actually my birthday. Certainly not a birthday I particularly want to remember.

I think I’m getting too old for this tech stuff. I wish I could retire somewhere and keep chickens or something that did not require the use of computers at all. You would think that making home videos was something lots of people would want to do. Why is it so difficult?

Home-build D-Star radio

Years ago, after I built my Elecraft K2 I had the idea that I would only use home-built radio equipment. However I found that it was no longer possible to buy a kit to build a 2m FM radio. This afternoon I visited a site mentioned by Tim, G4VXE in his latest blog posting and was intrigued to find that a Dutch group is working on a design for a VHF/UHF transceiver kit. Not only that, it is apparently being developed in consultation with Elecraft and is built into an Elecraft EC-1 (K2) enclosure!

The basic kit will be for an analogue FM transceiver with modules for 2m, 70cm and 23cm (it isn’t clear to me whether you must choose one of these bands or whether you can fit all of the modules.) But with the addition of another module it can also become a D-Star transceiver!

Now I have never made any secret of my dislike of D-Star, mainly due to the fact that one manufacturer has a monopoly on the provision of radios. But a home-brew D-Star transceiver that doesn’t require you to buy anything from Icom and would sit neatly alongside my K2 in a matching enclosure could just be the thing that makes me swallow my objections. Yes, it will still have an AMBE chip containing the proprietary codec. But most of my radios contain chips with proprietary firmware so I don’t think that’s a good enough reason for continuing to avoid D-Star.

New video: Interfacing APRSISCE/32 to a radio

I have just uploaded a new video to G4ILO’s YouTube channel showing how to set up the APRSISCE/32 software to connect with a GPS and a TNC or radio. In the video I actually set up a connection between the software and a Kenwood TH-D72 and you can see and hear packets being received by the radio.

I also cover how to set up a connection with a GPS and how to use the AGW Packet Engine which allows you to use a soundcard as a packet modem.

Another eBay dud

It’s the same on 433MHz as well.
In fact I couldn’t find any frequency at which this so-called antenna is resonant!


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  • Matt W1MST, Managing Editor