AmateurRadio.com

I’ve had several opportunities to take amateur radio along on vacation and do a little radio operating from other countries. I try not to focus too much on ham radio during such a trip, as it has a tendency to create marital discord and can suck the fun out of the vacation. Some people call this a “holiday style” DXpedition, or maybe it’s just the slacker approach.

The marine yellow Baofeng UV-5R handheld transceiver got a lot of use.

St John USVI

Joyce (K0JJW) and I were planning a vacation with three other couples that we’ve known for years. It turns out that six of the eight have their ham licenses. (We’re still working on the last two.) Our primary goal was to find an island location with great beaches and snorkeling. Someone proposed the island of St John in the US Virgin Islands  and the idea took hold.

The Buddistick antenna is mounted on the railing of the patio, overlooking the sea.

From a ham radio perspective, USVI is an interesting choice since it does count as a DXCC entity (“country”), even though it is a US possession. See my article on HamRadioSchool.com for more information on how that works. Anyone with an FCC license can operate from there without any special licensing or approval. KP2 is the prefix for USVI, so identify as KP2/<callsign> to indicate that you are operating from USVI.

Radio Gear

We were trying to pack light, so the radio equipment had to fit into our normal luggage. I took my Yaesu FT-817 and a Buddistick™ antenna. Paul (KF9EY) took along a Yaesu FT-100D, while Denny (KB9DPF) transported his FT-817 and a G5RV Junior antenna. Our primary operating mode was using the FT-100D (more power, baby) to drive the Buddistick, which was attached to the railing on the patio.

The FT-100D was the primary operating rig, carefully placed on a random table out by the pool, with the St John Guidebook nearby.

I decided that the true slacker approach required some Official Beach QRP contacts in the style of Buddies in the Caribbean (see the video). One day on the beach, I took along my FT-817 and the Buddistick and set up for some QRP action.

Some slacker beach operating (Bob K0NR).

The Buddistick was mounted on a Dolica WT-1003 camera monopod stuck into the sand, with the radial trailing off into the vegetation. My compact Heil headset was a convenient way to make some phone contacts without blasting my fellow beach bums with noisy audio.

The view looking out from the beach operating location.

How did we do on the HF bands? We managed to make a number of contacts on 20m, 15m and 10m into the Americas and Europe. I was a bit disappointed that we never really got a pileup going. I think our signal was plenty strong but KP2 is maybe just not that rare.

The innovative “plop the rig on top of a backpack” operating configuration.

We spent quite a bit of time exploring the island, driving around in two rental Jeeps. For mobile communications, we chatted back and forth on 146.58 MHz, the Golf-November-Tango frequency, using handheld transceivers. In the end, these radios probably got the most use during the trip. (Did I mention this was a slacker DXpedition?) There are a few 2m repeaters in the islands but we did not make use of them.

I brought a Yaesu FT-60 and a Baofeng UV-5R along on the trip, but mostly ended up using the Baofeng radio. If was the perfect radio to take to the beach — does the job and not that big of a loss if it landed in the ocean. Using the dual receive feature of the HT, I monitored the marine calling frequency, 156.80 MHz, listening to the boat traffic.

So if you are looking for a great place to go to enjoy the sand and water, I highly recommend St. John. Go ahead and take along some ham gear and do some slacker DXing. For more information on KP2 ham radio, see the ARRL Virgin Islands Section web site.

— 73, Bob KP2/K0NR

QSL to KP2/K0NR via Logbook of the World or to K0NR via Buro or Direct with SASE

Change is a really handy tool. I’m in the business of delivering projects which always means change. So when it came to managing some change at home I thought I knew what I was doing. When I say change I mean a little bit of landscaping that a fellow ham was going to do and at the same time put in a new cables and a post ready for my new mast and antenna. This mean a bit of planning, cost control and some stakeholder management. Or so I thought.

I had originally decided on extending the house and had some lovely plans drawn up (which included a mast and antenna), put them through planning (domestic / xyl and local council) had them approved only to find that the local builders wanted huge sums for a small job. Hence the scope was reduced to meet the budget.

For the last few weeks I have toiled int he freezing rain to drill new holes in the side of the house, removed old and corroded (poor finishing by me) cables and then set about running new ones before removing some old decking that was the cause of our problem (wooden decking and West Cumbria should be avoided). What is going to go in its place is a mast stub in the ground, ground mounted rotator, heavy duty 12.5m mast and a folding hexbeam.

The schedule is hectic but I imagine in a matter of 4 weeks I will be back on the air on hf and there will be a very tired out g7kse, ready for for some leisurely operating on hf and perhaps in time for some early Es. Until then its the UKAC VHF tuesday nights for me still.

During the Colorado 14er Event, Amateur Radio operators will be climbing many of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains and SOTA summits to set up amateur radio stations to communicate with other radio amateurs across the state and around the world. Join in on the fun on Sunday August 3 and see how many of the mountaintop stations you can contact.

The new Colorado 14er Event logo is now available on t-shirts and more.

Starting in 2012, Summits on The Air (SOTA) is part of this event. This means there are over 1700 summits that you can activate in Colorado, with a wide variety of hiking difficulty. This opens up the event to a lot more people and a lot more summits. See the new SOTA page.

Radio operators with 14er climbing experience who plan to activate a summit should log their name and intended peak at the Ham14er Yahoo group. This is also the email list for discussing the event and asking questions.

Solar Flare Alert:

Active Sunspot Region 11944 has a 75% chance of producing an M-class flare, and a 30% chance of producing an X-class flare, in the next 24 hours. Smaller flares are also possible.

We are expecting a glancing blow from a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) sometime in the next 24 hours.

The Earth’s polar regions are under a proton event (Polar Cap Absorption, or PCA, event). This is degrading HF communications over polar regions.

(Live data and more info at https://Facebook.com/spacewx.hfradio or http://SunSpotWatch.com/ )

In the past two weeks, the results of several ham radio contests from last summer were posted. The typical contest takes months for the official results to be finalized and I have usually forgotten about the contest by then. The more serious contesters share their results via the 3830 web site so they can get an early read on how they did relative to their peers. But you need to be patient for the official results.

In the ARRL June VHF Contest, I placed in the top ten for the new Single Operator 3 Band category. This category is restricted to 50, 144 and 432 MHz, which is a good match to my radio interests. We had good 50 MHz conditions in Colorado (relative to other parts of the country), so CO stations seemed to score well.

Speaking of Colorado, in the Colorado QSO Party I finished first in the Phone – Low Power – Single-Op category. I was actually not that pleased with my score this year (45,500), which was considerably less than my score from last year (76,464). Oh well, I will invoke the Universal Purpose of Amateur Radio and say I had a great time in the contest, regardless of the score. Thanks to the Pikes Peak Radio Amateur Association for sponsoring this event.

The ARRL Field Day results are also posted. Joyce K0JJW and I did a one transmitter (1B) operation from the cabin using the club call KVØCO, resulting in a modest score (454). We mostly made phone contacts on 20m, 15m and 6m. We had some nice sporadic-e on 50 MHz, which is always a treat. Remember, the key to a fun Field Day is: Season To Taste.

73, Bob K0NR

“Radio Hams” do more than play with their machines. They are also invaluable in relaying vital information during times of tragedy and disaster.

Here is a mildly entertaining look at radio hams, those amateurs sending and receiving coded messages during the late thirties when films first dealt with the subject of “radio hams.” In this case, the ham operators manage to be helpful during situations of stress, using their abilities with code to help someone in distress and to seek aid for pilots flying a missing plane.

The humorous ending has the family gathered around the radio listening to someone speaking Chinese while the narrator tells us how impressed the family was to be hearing someone across the world on their radio set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZi7LiPNMt8

This little vintage film, a rather more serious film than many of Pete Smith’s other presentations, takes a look at how ham radios can become priceless aids during emergencies. The two stories shown, one dealing with sickness, the other with a missing plane, are bookended by a humorous look at a typical three-generation family’s fascination with their ham radio.

Of course, amateur radio, or “ham radio”, is alive and doing very well, in our modern times. Using satellites, moon-bounce communications, repeater networks, as well as shortwave, mediumwave, and longwave telecommunications technology, amateur radio continues to provide emergency services in times of need, from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and even during such times as the infamous 9/11 atrocity. But, amateur radio also breeds invention and experimentation, always at the cutting edge of science. It is a hobby worth investigating, having room for a wide-range of interests. Preppers, science lovers, experimenters, and those with a passion to meet people from all over the world by way of radio waves, all together make up the radio hobby of amateur radio.

Clayton Moore, later famous as the Lone Ranger, appears uncredited as a ship radio operator.

Directed by Felix E. Feist

Writing Credits Buddy Adler (screenplay) (as E. Maurice Adler)

Cast (in alphabetical order)

Barbara Bedford – Mrs. Crane (uncredited)
Eleanor Counts – Miss Mulligan, Jimmy’s Sister (uncredited)
Jack Daley – Pa Mulligan (uncredited)
Robert Homans – Lighthouse Keeper (uncredited)
Clayton Moore – Ship Radio Operator (uncredited)
Alonzo Price – Clyde DeVinna (uncredited)
Jason Robards Sr. – Pilot in Distress (uncredited)
Pete Smith – Narrator (voice) (uncredited)
Harry Strang – Man in Montage (uncredited)
Phillip Terry – Co-Pilot (uncredited)
Dorothy Vaughan – Ma Mulligan (uncredited)

Produced by Pete Smith – producer (uncredited)
Music by David Snell (uncredited)
Cinematography by Robert Pittack
Film Editing by Philip W. Anderson (as Philip Anderson)
Music Department Jack Virgil – orchestrator (uncredited)
Other crew Douglas Smith – technical advisor

According to https://archive.org/details/wwIIarchive this film is in the Public Domain.
Creative Commons copyright.

The Sun currently is active, with powerful, complex magnetic structures that have formed a healthy number of sunspots. We are seeing a fair number of x-ray flares, which push the 10.7-cm flux higher than we’ve seen in a while.

Sunspots and flares means better propagation in general, especially on the higher frequencies of the shortwave spectrum.  While a flare can cause a short period of “blackout” conditions (especially on the lower frequencies) on the sunlit side of the Earth, such activity is part of the positive activity that ionizes the F-region, providing for DX.

Here’s a movie of one such flare and the release of solar plasma, a release known as a coronal mass ejection (CME): At about midnight, UTC, on 6 November 2013, a moderately-strong M-class flare erupted, with a “beautiful” CME: http://g.nw7us.us/18a0QvI

(Source: SOHO/SDO/NASA)

We will see continued flare activity over the weekend, so expect great conditions on the HF bands, with momentary blackouts.  Keep up to the minute on space weather at http://SunSpotWatch.com

73 – de NW7US
Propagation Columnist, CQ Communications Magazine, Popular Communications Magazine
http://NW7US.us