AmateurRadio.com

Just before the 4th of July, several sunspot regions rotated into view. Today, they are significant players in elevating the solar output of Extreme Ultraviolet energy — the energy helpful in ionizing the F-region of our Earth’s ionosphere. That, in turn, means better propagation conditions, even on higher shortwave frequencies.

As seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Sun is sporting quite a few sunspots, today. These are helping elevate the 10.7-cm flux, which is a proxy for solar output that strengthens the ionospheric propagation of higher frequencies in the shortwave spectrum. Expect good conditions on HF, this weekend.

73 and best DX!

Some months ago I was planning an afternoon at our local Fab Lab, partly to help raise their profile and partly to introduce some club members to the easy to use laser cutting services they have. We designed an profiled a case for the QRP Labs Ultimate 3 WSPR transmitter.

It occurred to me that I haven’t really shared the experience having been enjoying myself at the 24 du Mans race, celebrating my parents 50th wedding anniversary and having a birthday. None the less, its time for a catch up.

The U3 is a fairly simple build, in its basic form takes about and hour and a half to build and test. Start adding the various extras like a switchable band pass filter (for 5 bands!) and a gps unit and the time to build, well builds up. The kit isn’t complex and doesn’t use smd’s (although I’ve never understood the fear of them – whilst my eyes are still ok) and there’s only 4 coils to wind for the basic version.

The biggest issue was how to box it up. After trying various configurations we settled on a very simple front and back panel design, Others, like the desktop version or ones with castellated fixings either looked a bit cheesy or were hard to put together and prone to breaking. A simple 2d CAD sketch is loaded onto the machine, plonk in the materials and you’re away. It couldn’t be simpler. Anyway here’s the semi finished product. I need to do something about the spacers as they look awful but its nearly there.

To be able to go out to a park somewhere and literally throw a length of wire into a tree and sit down and talk with somebody in, say, Italy, is endlessly thrilling to me. – Sean Kutzko, KX9X

A recent NPR story with a visit to W1AW. Check it out here.

I’m a little envious of Sean Kutzko’s visit to W1AW.

I think this is a great characterization of the hobby that always inspires the imagination (well, at least mine)

…he’s contacted others all across the globe – coral atolls in the South Pacific, even a research station in Antarctica.

Makes me want to spark up the rig and see what I can find.

Why would an amateur radio operator be interested in space weather?  Is it worth the time and resources to forecast propagation, in the daily operation of a typical ham radio station?

Gary, host of the popular ‘Ham Radio Now’ video podcast, talks with Tomas Hood (NW7US), propagation and space weather columnist for CQ Amateur Radio Magazine (and in the late ‘Popular Communications Magazine’ as well as ‘CQ VHF Quarterly Magazine’) and The Spectrum Monitor Magazine. Gary discusses with Tomas how scientists forecast space weather, and how the average ham radio operator can also make predictions, and what propagation forecasting can bring to the daily operations of an amateur radio enthusiast.

Watch on YouTube: ‘Ham Radio Now’ Episode 156: Propagation…

Tomas, NW7US, talks about radio propagation on shortwave (HF) as well as space weather.

Atlas 210X

After living here in the new house since January, I haven’t had a lot of chances to use the radios, even though I now have a room for my hobby (shared, of course with KD2CHE’s sewing).  The shack has been piled with things to sort through, requiring some digging and re-arranging to get to the Atlas 210X.  A few days ago, I finally went through the pile and did some major organizing.  I now have a nice work surface, and all of the radios set up and working (including a recent flea-market find, a snazzy FRG-7).  Tonight after tuning around on 20 meters I answered a couple of calls.  The second call was from 9K2UU in Kuwait.  This contact is now my second-best distance since I got my license (about 6800 miles), and the best from home (the no 1 was Namibia from my 10 meter mobile here at the beach).  Barrak gave me a 5-7, and he got a 5-9 from me.  All of this with an old Atlas 210X, and a 35 foot end-fed sloper into a 9:1 UnUn.  I’m happy with that.

73 to AD7MI and welcome to NI0L…

…. and a no frills QSL card.

My retirement from the Army is both official and complete as of May 1st. The XYL and I have decided the land of &#216 is where we are putting down our roots. Therefore it was high time that my callsign reflect my geographic location.

We welcomed our second child, a daughter, into the family last week.  Since she is our second, the time in the hospital was more about making sure she was healthy than us learning all the ropes.  So, I had some undisturbed time to read on the Internet with a sleeping baby on my chest…and wish I could remote control my station.

Having been party to the discussion surrounding remoting a local contest station (K4VV), I had seen enough traffic about different VOIP options to start with Mumble for the audio stream.  I set up a Mumble server on my Linux server at the house, and then setup the Mumble client on my hamshack computer.  I ran a 1/8-inch TRS cable from the rear-apron line-out port of the K3 into the line input of one of my sound cards on the computer.  I put a free Mumble client on my iPhone and viola!  It worked out of the box.

I have been using Pignology’s HamLog on my phone for quick logging of one-off QSOs and goofing off with its vast array of tools.  HamLog also has the ability to remote control a rig using Pignology’s hardware.  Since, I’m really not in a good position to drop $300 on a box I’ll use a couple of times per year, I reasoned that there might be an alternative.  Enter the socat utility:

root@tula:~# socat /dev/ttyUSB1,raw,echo=0 tcp-listen:7373,fork

Freakin magic.  I used HamLog to connect to a “Remote PigTail” and it mostly works.  The frequency display does not seem to work and HamLog loses the connection if the phone falls asleep.  But, it is functional.  Another interesting wrinkle is that when my shack PC screensaver comes on, it mutes the audio stream piped into Mumble.  But, those are all minor irritations at this point considering the trivial amount of effort that went into getting a remote control going…