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Looks like the folks at American Radio Supply are giving away a Baofeng UV-5R. They’re a sponsor of our site and I’m happy to see them offering this kind of opportunity. If you’re in the market for a new HT, skip on over and check out this little radio! Looks like the contest ends January 31, 2013 at midnight (Eastern time) and is open to licensed U.S. hams.

Do you own a Baofeng UV-5R? Have you used one? If so, what do you think of it?  How does it compare to some of the other inexpensive HTs on the market?

Hosts: Bob Heil (K9EID), Gordon West (WB6NOA), and George Thomas (W5JDX).

Preparing for CES, Gordon dunks a radio in water, and how to reduce RF interference.

Guests: Don Wilbanks (AE5DW), and Cheryl Lasek (K9BIK)

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I’ve been in Hawaii for the last two weeks. I operated QRP with a wire antenna on several occasions.

This is the cottage we stayed at during the first week. There are lots of pictures, but it’s pretty long to post here. To read it, please go to my web page at http://www.w1pid.com/hawaii/hawaii.html

Happy New Year, Jim W1PID

Today Hanz W1JSB and I went out for a hike. We wanted to make a couple of QSOs on 40 meters. We worked New York and Pennsylvania and didn’t even bring a rig with us! Huh? Hanz used his cell phone to operate his FT-817 remotely at home. It was strange and wonderful.

We hiked east from the Sanbornton dump toward Giles Pond. It was about 33F, but sunny. We hiked around the back side of this field and stopped along the trail about a half mile from the pond.

Hanz pulled out his Samsung cell phone and started pressing buttons. First he connected to his Windows box in the shack and fired up Ham Radio Deluxe. Then he established a link using Skype so we’d have audio. Then he got CWType running so he could key the rig. His FT-817 at 5 watts was hooked up to a center fed dipole through an LDG auto tuner.

Hanz had a grin on his face as keyed “KA2KDJ de W1JSB” onto the cell phone keyboard. Gary answered right away from New York. It was magic. Then Hanz told him how he was operating.

For a video of the QSOs see http://www.w1pid.com/strange/strange.html

“FB CPY,” Gary sent back. “UR 579” Gary was a 599 and clear as a bell. They chatted for about 5 minutes. Hanz’s fingers were getting cold, so he sent 73 and TNX. As we started walking back down the trail we heard another station calling Hanz! “W1JSB de AA3OI/QRP” What the heck? we thought. A pileup. So Hanz answered Joe AA3OI and they had a quick QSO.

Pretty cool… what started as a goofy experiment actually worked. Are we going to stop bringing rigs and antennas on our hikes? No way, this was just a proof of concept, and not really very practical. But it sure was a hoot and Hanz demonstrated that he could certainly do a pedestrian mobile operation without lugging radio,  batteries and antennas.

-end-

*This article is copied from my regular blog page – I apologise to any readers of AmateurRadio.com who may be dismayed at too many articles on this subject at the minute. Thanks for your indulgence!

Like many of us, I am still amazed by the amount of radio spectrum we have to freely play with. Shots are being fired and eyes are being gouged by companies for small slices of precious bandwidth. Multiply our many electric playgrounds by the number of games (or modes) available and the permutations are enough to overload your front end.

I’ve decided to catch up with WSPR, a mode well known to many but new to me. I’m going to give it a go – the difficult way. Julian, G4ILO has an excellent article on the system here.

WSPR stands for Weak Signal Propagation Reporting and is a computer programme that runs your VHF/HF transceiver automatically in order to receive others running the same system. Successful contacts, one or two-way, are reported automatically to a website. It’s like having a worldwide net of propagation beacons for every band available at your fingertips and the results appear quickly after automatic contact confirmation. What a great thing to leave your equipment running overnight or during the day when you’re otherwise occupied!

Screenshot of map page on WSPR.net

The best thing is that WSPR works below the noise threshold and you can use very low power. I was staggered the other day to see that Tim, G4VXE had hit Australia on 40m with just 1W! One Watt! So I’m going to give it a go with 1W and just an indoor Miracle Whip antenna. I know many QRP CW experts may cracked this one before – but I’m new and excited. I’ll try 40m and work my way up to 2m and see what happens!

I’ll use my FT-817. A CAT lead arrived this week from Hong Kong but it seems I’ll also need an audio interface between the transceiver packet port and computer sound card to make it all work. Another option is to buy an external interface that has a sound card and interfaces to the computer with a USB. It’s not quite going to be a ‘plug and play’ job, I’m afraid to report.

As you’ve read this blog throughout 2012, it’s been kind of a tough year for W2LJ and family. There have been many trials and tribulations:

My Mom passed away in May, Marianne’s Mom passed away in October. My Mom’s best friend’s husband passed away this September – and even though he wasn’t a blood relative, he was “family” nonetheless. Our cat Sadie passed away this February and we found out this summer, that our dog Jesse has cancer. We’re dealing with Jesse on a day by day basis, trying to keep our 13 year old friend as comfortable as we can. And then we had Hurricane Sandy and the aftermath to deal with. And to top all of that off, I was notified by the company that I work for, that we lost the contract for my department where I work; so I will probably be facing unemployment sometime in December or early next year.

But I’m not the only one with troubles, some have less …. some have more. And I know that even with all that we have been through and continue to endure, my family has been and continues to be richly blessed.

Thanks be to God, I still have a job, if even for a little while. Marianne, Joey and Cara and I all are all in good health. We have a safe, warm house to live in and have plenty of food. Marianne is in no danger of losing her job, so even if I have to collect unemployment insurance for a time while I look for a new job, we won’t starve. We still have my big sister Ann Marie and her family; and we still have Marianne’s brother Tim and his wife, as well as extended family. I have my friends and I have Amateur Radio (the world’s greatest hobby) and I have all of you – whom I consider to be good friends as well.

So I am thankful, for all of that and more. God has been so good to us and continues to be – He truly deserves my thanks, this coming Thursday and always. So when we gather around the table tomorrow, I am hoping to be able to say Grace and give thanks in a steady, strong and unwavering voice. It will be an emotional moment for me and may be difficult to do without faltering, but my thanks to God will be completely from the bottom of my heart.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

Today my main rig has spent even more time on other things than WSPR. Besides trying to work some PSK31 DX I have also been testing a beta release of K3 firmware. This new version has an improved CW decoder that is a bit less finicky about settings. It works very well but is still beaten by the Windows program MRP40 which I regard as the gold standard for CW decoders. As Wayne N6KR says, the MRP40 algorithm is probably ten times more sophisticated and the K3 MCU doesn’t have enough code space for it.

I’ve been interested in Morse decoders since the first home computers and can remember keying in a program listing in BASIC from a QST article in the late 70s. Later I wrote a decoder in Hisoft Pascal which ran on my ZX Spectrum. It actually decoded strong, perfectly sent Morse but it was not reliable enough to be useful. More recently I tried implementing a Morse decoder in KComm but it was a total failure.

I didn’t have a lot of success with PSK31 DXing on 10m either. I only made two contacts but I heard what would have been two new South American countries: HC7AE in Ecuador and CE4BRO in Chile. I didn’t need to look up HC in a book as I remember from my teenage SWLing days hearing HCJB Quito, the Voice of the Andes!

I think band conditions were better today but they supported more propagation from Europe so there were higher QRM levels (and lower operating standards 😉 ) I moved up the band to try and get away from all the IMD products but hardly anyone was listening up there so it was a bit futile.

Someone who did hear my CQ calls was Vito IZ7DMT. He was a whopping signal but was signing IZ7DMT/QRP. He told me he was running 5 watts from an FT-817 and was rather indignant that I wouldn’t use the illegal /QRP suffix during handovers. Nice QSL though!

Here is the result of today’s WSPRing:

10m WSPR spots @ G4ILO 20 November 2012