AmateurRadio.com

For those of you outside the US who might not be familiar with baseball, there’s a common saying that says “three strikes and you’re out”. This refers to the fact that you are allowed to “miss” a pitch three times before you are no longer allowed to bat. (For you purists, given that this isn’t a baseball blog, I’m going to ignore foul balls, etc.) Taken figuratively, the expression is often used to mean that you only get so many tries at something before you have to stop. In my case, I had the opposite happen over the last week.

About a week ago I wrote about how I’d contacted my first new DXCC entity of 2010, BX5AA in Taiwan. Strike one. Earlier this week, I wrote about my second new DXCC this year, VR2XMT. Strike two. Now I’m very happy to be able to write about strike three.

On Friday morning, I was again working from home, this time because I had some reports to complete that had to be done by the end of the day. It’s often easier to do these kinds of things from home since I get disturbed less often. (And yes, I actually got everything done.) P29TL, Tom had been spotted quite a bit recently on 20m, and while I’d heard him a bit earlier in the morning, he wasn’t really coming in strong enough to work. On top of that, given the location (Papua, New Guinea) the folks on the west coast had a much better path to him and were apparently working him easily. As with my contact with VR2XMT a few days earlier, I turned down the volume on the radio while I worked on my reports, until I realized that I could hear Tom more clearly and there were fewer folks calling him. In fact, the folks that were working him seemed to be mostly on the east coast, meaning that the band conditions had changed. Sure enough, I called him a few time (he was using upper sideband on 20m), and after a while he replied to my call and gave me a 5×5 signal report (I gave him 5×7). Strike three!

Fortunately, in the DXing game, I’m not limited to just three strikes, so I’m looking forward to working some more “new ones” this year. It just goes to show that even though over the last couple of weeks the conditions have taken a dip, it’s still possible to make some really good contacts. (For reference, PNG is around 9,000 miles from my location.)

Today’s bad news is that the toothache that I’d had for about a week hadn’t gone away this morning, and after my dentist took a look yesterday and tried one thing to fix it that didn’t work, this morning I made an appointment with an endodontist to see if I needed to have a root canal on that tooth. The folks in his office were nice and managed to get me a late-morning appointment, which meant that I’d work from home in the morning (the endodontist’s office is only about 10 minutes from home, so going all the way to work in Secaucus and coming back made no sense) then head to the appointment. (The other bad news is that I did indeed have the root canal procedure done. The procedure itself wasn’t so bad, but now that the anesthetic has worn off it’s pretty uncomfortable.)


As usual,  when I work from home I usually leave that packet cluster up and running, and this morning was no exception. I saw a spot for Charlie, VR2XMT in Hong Kong on 20m, which is another entity that I still needed to work. I’ve heard Charlie before and even tried working him but hadn’t had any success. While working on some emails for work on my laptop, I tuned to the spot frequency and heard Charlie’s very strong signal. I called him several times but wasn’t able to get through, so I turned down the volume a bit and kept listening while working. After a while it seemed that there weren’t as many callers, and in fact it got to the point where there seemed to be nobody calling at all, so I gave my callsign a few times in response to Charlie’s “CQ”, and he responded to “the station ending in Echo Bravo Kilo”. I figured that he might have been calling me so I called phonetically a few more times and sure enough, he was calling me. We exchanged 5×5 signal reports, I thanked him, and I had a new one in the log!


Unfortunately, Charlie doesn’t participate in Logbook of the World, but since this is an all-time new entity I would have been sending for a paper QSL card anyway, which I will get in the mail very soon. It’s always great to work a new DXCC entity, and it was especially great to have worked my 2nd new one this year within less than a week of working the previous one.

The season of Linux fests is now under way. The Texas Linux Fest took place a couple of weeks ago. By all accounts, the turnout was excellent, the educational opportunities were plentiful and fun was had by all.

Oggcamp in the UK is next on the list. Then there will be ham fests and Linux fests all over the country and the rest of the world for the rest of the spring, summer and early fall. Linux in the Ham Shack will be represented at the Dayton Hamvention in May and at the Southeast Linux Fest in June. I’m also trying to start a new Linux fest called the Mid-America Linux Fest which will be held in early November. It’s possible that could be November of 2010, but it’s more likely to be November 2011. If you want more information about the Mid-America Linux Fest or are willing to volunteer your time or services, please check out the Web site at http://midamericalinuxfest.org.

And yes, I know this episode of Linux in the Ham Shack is late. Life has been very busy of late and I think all of our listeners for your eternal patience. We hope to see you at the live recording of Episode #037 on April 27th at 8:00pm.

73

Yesterday morning, I got a nice surprise. I was working from home in the morning and chatting on the computer with Larry, N4VA. He was also at home and told me that Jimmy, BX5AA was coming in very strong on 20 meters. Jimmy is located in Taiwan, and that’s a DXCC entity that I’d never worked before, so I was anxious to try to make a contact. I tuned to the frequency and at first, I only heard a very weak station, which I assumed was Jimmy, and figured that I wasn’t going to have a chance to work him. It wasn’t surprising that he’d be louder to Larry, since he’s got a beam on his tower instead of just a G5RV (wire) up in the air.

However, it turns out that I was hearing a local station that Jimmy was working, and when it was Jimmy’s turn to transmit I heard him very well. (I had heard him and tried to work him in the past, but the signals were much weaker.) Although he had a pretty good pileup, he heard part of my callsign (the “BK” part always seems to get through), and he asked just for the “Bravo Kilo” station. It took a few tries, but he was patient and eventually he got the complete and correct callsign, and gave me a 5×5 signal report. (I gave him a 5×9). That was that, and he moved on to working other stations.

I noticed on his website that he uses Logbook of The World, so that night I uploaded my contact with him, and to my surprise I found that he’d already uploaded his contacts and there was a confirmed QSL record generated. The time from contact to confirmation was probably under 12 hours. Not bad for a station from Taiwan!

I’ll be sending for a paper card anyway, as while I think LoTW is fantastic, there’s nothing like having an old-fashioned QSL card to look at.

The Beaconworld website will be closing down in May. If you’ve never heard of it before, neither had I until I read about it in M0XPD’s blog. But having visited the site, it seems to be an excellent and comprehensive resource for anyone interested in beacon DXing. It’s a shame that it will disappear even though it is being closed for reasons that I can understand.

Have a look while it’s still here. Perhaps someone will step in and offer to take over the site and carry it on, or at least to preserve the pages as they are.

I recently returned from a vacation in Mexico. We stayed at a beautiful resort in Nuevo Vallarta, just north of better-known Puerto Vallarta, and although there was plenty to do there (including doing nothing but lying around the pool sipping a cold drink), one thing that I was unable to do was to bring along my ham radio gear and operate. Although weight restrictions and the cost for additional bags are a concern, that wasn’t the issue. As with my trip to Grand Cayman a couple of years ago, I can fit most everything into either a backpack (to be used as a carry-on) or in between the bathing suits and t-shirts. The issue was that while there is a “bilateral reciprocal operating agreement” with Mexico, in this case the rules for Mexican amateurs operating within the US are very different than the rules for American amateurs operating in Mexico.

Here’s what the ARRL says (in part) about foreign amateurs operating in the US:

…if your country of citizenship and amateur license share a bilateral Reciprocal Operating Agreement with the US, the FCC allows foreign amateurs to operate with no permit. Simply carry your foreign amateur license and proof of your citizenship in that country. Identify using “W” and the number of the FCC call letter district in which you are operating followed by a slash and your non-US call sign, e.g. W3/G1ABC).

So this means that if XE9ZZ comes to the US and wishes to operate from my home state of New Jersey, he could get on the air and simply identify as W2/XE9ZZ. There are no forms to fill out, no visits to the FCC, no copies of passport pages or visas, and assuming that you are a Class I licensee in Mexico, you’ll have all the operating privileges of a US Amateur Extra license. I think that this is how things should work.

Unfortunately, for a US amateur to operate in Mexico a lot more paperwork, time, and money are involved. The detailed process has been explained very nicely on a page on DL6KAC’s web site and there is a lot of additional information available on WD9EWK’s site as well. To try to summarize the process briefly (and I’m glossing over a lot of the details), you need to fill out some forms, send in a bunch of documentation, including the application itself, a copy of your passport, a copy of your visa (which is issued when you enter the country as a tourist, which means you can’t really apply before you get there), a copy of your ham radio license, and information that proves that you have paid for the license. (You do this through a bank in Mexico). The current fee is 1025 pesos, which at the present time is about US$75. Of course, all the forms are in Spanish and translated copies are not acceptable, except if the particular official decides otherwise. (To be fair, this is reasonable, since Spanish is the official language in Mexico). Fortunately, US hams do not have to get a letter of invitation from a Mexican ham (non-US hams do), although I think that would be a relatively easy thing to get.

After you get all of that together, you either mail it or hand deliver it to the proper address (which is especially challenging if you don’t happen to be located in Mexico City), and then you wait.

As best I can tell, it can then take around 60 days to get your license, which is mailed to you at your address in Mexico. All of this makes it rather difficult for a casual tourist such as myself to operate from Mexico. To even have a chance of getting a license I’d have to find someone located within Mexico who’d be willing to handle some of these details for me, and I still can’t quite figure out how I’d get a visa in advance of actually being in the country. I suppose that if you spend a signficant amount of time there (a lot of Americans and Canadians have homes in and around Puerto Vallarta, and I’m sure elsewhere), then it would probably be worth the effort to do this.

By the way, once you get your license, you have the privileges of a Mexican Class I license (their highest-level license), but there are some restrictions: Unless you specifically ask for permission, you can’t operate from any Mexican Island, you cannot operate in a contest, nor can you be part of a DXpedition. (I’m not quite sure how simply visiting is different from a DXpedition.) Also, you must use your callsign as provided on that permit with an additional suffix if you travel outside of the callsign area for which it was issued. For instance, if I was issued XE2/K2DBK it would be fine to operate from Puerto Vallerta, but if I decided to visit Cancun, I’d have to identify as XE2/K2DBK/XE3. (Good thing you can’t operate in contests, that’s quite a mouthful!)

Clearly every country is going to have different rules governing their amateur radio service. It would be nicer if the processes were truly reciprocal.

In case you haven’t already heard, four of the operators of the C6APR station were tragically killed this week in a plane crash on their way to the station. Ward Silver, N0AX posted the following message to the CQ-CONTEST reflector, which I’m going to reprint here.

There have been several suggestions for on-the-air actions to remember the four ops lost on their way to C6APR yesterday. Perhaps a moment of radio silence – at the beginning of the contest or perhaps around the time of their flight. Or look back in your log to find the time of your most recent contact with them and take that moment out then. Maybe call C6APR at some appropriate time and wait for their signal. Putting a C6APR QSO in your log with a zone of 00 is another idea – I know that K7RA used show up in logs from the Pac NW for years after Homer’s untimely demise. Whatever seems appropriate to you, take some time out during the contest to not only remember the team, but to appreciate the other competitors. Let’s try to treat each other with a little extra respect this coming weekend as we’ve all just been reminded of how quickly a log can close.

73, Ward N0AX