AmateurRadio.com

Last week’s map of what I’d heard from the mobile seemed to cause a little interest (thank you!), so I thought I’d keep a mental note of what I heard over the week and put a map together. It gives an idea of what conditions have been like, which I hope you find of interest

View Heard this week 12/11/10 in a larger map

A couple of ‘spots’ that I didn’t hear last week. GB3LW in Central London came through on 433.150 (same as GB3DI near Didcot) a couple of times, with good signals. GB3SN on 145.725 was weak but audible this morning and GB3WR was consistent through the week, but a little louder than usual this morning.

Something as yet unidentified is coming through weakly on 145.750. I will keep an eye on this one and see what it turns out to be.

Most active repeater in the morning when I’m listening seems to be the GB3FN Farnham box with a good number on their commuter net. Rob, G4XUT and I do our best on GB3TD!

Not had a chance to write things up since the weekend. But I had quite a varied and interesting time on the air at the weekend. Didn’t spend too much time, as is often the case, but it was proof that a few quick visits to the radio can be interesting.

First interesting contact was from the mobile, as I was driving to get some catfood on Saturday morning. I had the FT8900 scanning and as it went through GB3RD, it stopped and I heard ‘Golf Eight Delta Delta’ in a very distinctive voice and then the rig resumed scanning. I recognised the voice and went back to GB3RD. As I’d thought it was Peter, G8DDY from the Isle of Wight, who was mobile on one of the highspots of the island. I remembered Peter as being my first QSO from the Isle of Wight on both 144 and 432MHz way back in the early 1980s.

By the time I’d got the rig back on GB3RD, Peter was already in QSO, but I listened and waited for the QSO to end. It did and I called in. It was fun to speak to Peter and compare notes of operating from the island. He knew the apartments where we have stayed and how good a radio spot it is! A lovely QSO and nice to catch up again after all this time.

The first weekend of November is always the Marconi Memorial CW contest on 144MHz. Though I don’t treat it as a contest, I always tune around as it’s interesting to see what can be heard. This year was no exception and there were some nice contacts to be made. Conditions weren’t brilliant, but I was pleased to make some reasonable contacts – mostly from Continental Europe. The best DX was F8DGY in JN18. The two gotaways, at greater distance were DK0BN (JN39) heard for a reasonable period on Saturday afternoon, just above the noise and TM0W (JN36) again, heard for a good period on Saturday evening, but not QUITE strong enough to work! I did hear TM0W again briefly on Sunday, but conditions were poorer and tropo was very weak by this time (there were some good MS bursts though!).

The other experiment was to listen for the AO-51 satellite (repeater in the sky). I was inspired to do this, after seeing a tweet from Paul, 2E0BHA. I’d hoped to try and work him. However, the experiment was only partially successful in that I heard signals on the IC-E92 handheld. But despite the overhead pass, signals were weak. After the event, I discovered that the satellite had not been operating at full strength, so I shall have to try again on a more auspicious occasion.

Over the last few days, I’ve been using the scan feature on the FT8900 a bit more from the car. I’m scanning particular channels, rather than the whole of the band, but it’s interesting to see what coverage I’m getting. I’ll probably add more channels to scan when I identify likely targets of semi-distant stations to listen for.

I thought it might be fun to try and put together a Google Map of what I heard this morning – I’ve colour coded the different bands.

View Heard by G4VXE this morning in a larger map

As you can see, GB3CF up in Leicestershire is probably the most distant station heard this morning. It fights it out on 145.600 with GB3WR. But I didn’t hear WR this morning and GB3CF was clearly audible just around Abingdon for a few hundred yards.

About a week or so, I got an e-mail from Matty, MD0MAN drawing my attention to some propagation forecasting websites. One that I hadn’t come across before, though somewhere at the back of my mind, I think I’ve heard it mentioned, is William Hepburn’s Tropospheric Ducting Forecast site.

The site allows you to select the area of the globe that you’re in – so in my case, I selected the North West Europe page but if you’re in North America, this is your map

But how well does it work? After Matty’s e-mail, I looked at the maps for the UK and NW Europe last weekend and could see that there would be a chance of some tropo to the South West towards the end of this week, from Thursday onwards.

Driving to the station this morning, with one VFO going on 145.650, there was another repeater just breaking the squelch – something not normally audible. Purely a guess, but I’ll bet it was the GB3TR repeater, to the South West of me, in Torbay.

An interesting site – I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on it. Thanks to William for some fascinating data and to Matty, MD0MAN for the tip-off.

Over the years, I’ve developed an aversion to having anything to do with major HF SSB contests unless I’ve got at least a beam antenna. Of course, you don’t *need* a beam antenna and you *can* make contacts and good ones at that, with a dipole or vertical and perhaps 100w or less. The trouble is that each contact seems to go something like this

DX Station: QRZ Contest
Me (enthusiastically): Golf Four Victor Xray Echo
DX Station: QRZ the X-RAY
Me: Golf Four Victor Xray Echo
DX Station: Gee Four Vee Ex I you’re five nine twenty eight.
Me (starting to lose enthusiasm for this): No, it’s Golf Four Victor Xray Echo, Golf Four Victor Xray Echo, OK?
DX Station: QSL, Golf Four Victor Xray India you’re five nine twenty eight. What’s my report?
Me (thinking why did I bother….): No, the last letter is Echo, Echo Echo. Like Espana, Ecuador, Elephant (actually, I’ve never used Elephant as a phonetic, but I might now I’ve thought of it)… QSL
DX Station: QSL – Golf Four Victor Xray Echo – you’re five nine twenty eight OK?
Me: Roger roger (Thinking thank heavens for that…) you’re five nine one four. OK?

Disclaimer: I’m not singling out zone 28 stations! I was just listening to one last night. They’re super operators with great ears…

So, you can see that each contact, even with a semi decent setup is a bit of a trial of patience and I have learned it’s not good for my blood pressure. I’m quite happy to accept that I could put up a bigger antenna (but then it works ok most of the time for CW and data contacts) and that perhaps my voice isn’t that clear (well, sorry, I’m stuck with that).

It’s not that I don’t like contests – I love hearing the activity generated, and I love hearing DX coming through from all parts of the globe. I’m inclined to think, though that there is now so much interference and general aggro that anyone with a normal suburban station is unlikely to have a great time in the major SSB events (CW and data are usually better options).

Anyway, that’s a long way of telling you that I didn’t have any contest QSOs over the weekend. Still, I did have a listen on 7MHz last night about 2100z and very interesting it was too. In between the very loud Europeans there was some great DX from the Far and Middle East. JA3YGP (from memory) and 9K2HN were doing great business and good signals on the vertical and there was an Indonesian station coming through too..

Having switched the HF rig on, I listened around a little more. The 5MHz channels were quiet, though I did hear some Spanish fishermen on 5398khz! Listened on 27.555MHz too – someone told me recently that this is a CB frequency that shows activity even when the 28MHz amateur band is quiet. Not much doing there, though I heard some meteor bursts!

It was nice to listen on HF again though. I realise that I have missed playing HF recently, although not shouting Elephant at contest stations!

About a week or so ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Cheltenham Amateur Radio Association and give the Terry Russell, G3JFH Memorial Lecture.

This was a particular pleasure for two reasons – I grew up in Cheltenham and CARA was the first amateur radio club that I ever attended. I received a lot of support there as I learned the ropes and made a lot of good friends. It was simply wonderful to see many of them last week – they must be doing something right as they didn’t look any different!

Secondly, I knew Terry Russell, G3JFH pretty well. He was an influential member of the club and indeed he was my first contact on the air! He’d also been a friend of my Dad and they’d done lots of cycling together.

When I was trying to decide what to talk about, I thought it might be nice to ‘Tell Terry’ about the trends and developments in amateur radio since he’d passed away a few years ago. So that was what I did. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and I hope that people found at least something of interest.

Here are the Powerpoint slides in case anyone wants to take a look.

If you come from a DXing background like I do, then one of the lessons that will have been drummed into you is that you listen, listen some more and then listen again! The great DXer listens and makes his/her transmissions count. And that makes perfect sense if you’re combing the bands looking for new ones.

But how does that translate into our activity on the ‘day-to-day’ chat bands, like VHF/UHF or even some of the HF bands. Quite often you hear people saying, ‘I listen an awful lot but I don’t transmit very much’. And of course, I know that sometimes it isn’t convenient to transmit – it might be an RFI thing – you might not have time – you might not want to disturb the household…. these are all good momentary reasons.

But sometimes, I think we could all be a bit more active on the bands within the constraints of our day-to-day lives. It was Sunday afternoon and I was sat in the lounge entertaining the cats (if you have young cats, you’ll know how important this is to avoid curtains being swung on and bookcases scaled….). I had my iPhone with me and I dialled up a few interesting looking repeaters on Echolink and called through them. Perhaps no-one wanted to speak to me – but certainly no-one called. D-STAR was a bit more productive and I had a couple of nice chats. But even so, the systems I listened to were hardly buzzing with activity!

Perhaps we are spreading our activity too thinly across many bands/modes/repeater systems/digital modes? I think there’s some of that and I’ve certainly heard the view expressed that on D-STAR it’s easy to lose the activity with so many different reflectors (remember D-STARUSERS.ORG is your friend).

Sometimes though, I think there is a sense of wanting our leisure time activities to be laid on for us and for us just to ‘watch’. I get disheartened seeing people sitting in front of the TV apparently endlessly. They may well be watching informative programmes (or they may not). But what bugs me about it is that it’s a one way street. There’s no engagement or activity. I’ve seen a similar trend on Twitter with people who signup and look at other people’s tweets but never share what they are doing or thinking.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Social Media it’s that you must engage to make a success of it and get the best of it.

And so it is, I think, with amateur radio which was probably the world’s first social media platform. To me, just listening does not equal engagement.

So get out there. Call CQ and answer a few more calls through the repeater or on the bands. Have fun and I’ll see you on the air!