AmateurRadio.com

The Youkits' demonstration shelter

I attended the first Maplecon last weekend, which was a gathering of Canadian QRPers. The venue was Emily Provincial Park campground. Gerry, VA3GLT, and myself headed down on Saturday morning, despite the convention’s start on the Friday, as both of us had commitments in the afternoon and evening of Friday 20th Aug. We had an early start and drove down the 401 highway to Port Hope then turned off and travelled North to the park. By noon we arrived and had put up the tent and an antenna.

The campsite. Notice that vertical antennas on poles were popular

The antenna for this event was a freshly homebrewed doublet made from some TV twin-feed I bought a few years ago and now decided to use.  It was split 16′ 7″ down to form two arms of the doublet, and the remaining 23′ or so of twin feed was the feedline.  At the end of the twin feed we installed a homebrew 4:1 current balun, which I had built a few years ago.  The antenna was raised between two trees high enough that the feedline dropped vertically down and just reached into the tent.  A short run of coax was used from the balun to my Elecraft K2.  It tuned on 40m, 20m, 17m, 15m and surprisingly 80m (given the length of the antenna is would be a pretty inefficient).  I could not get a tune on 10m. Possibly if I took out the 4:1 balun I may have made it.

There was a just short of thirty attendees at the convention and we chatted with quite a few.  There were three tables set out as stalls, one with QRP rigs, one with QRP-ARCI information and one with Youkits radios.  I would have like to have spent more time looking at the QRP equipment table, but things felt a little rushed as we had arrived late.  We had a lovely barbecue lunch prepared by Jeff, VE3JFF, and his family after which I had a chat with Yimin and Fred, VE3FAL from Youkits about their new line of QRP radios. That will be covered in a future post as I made a recording of that conversation.

Youkits' HB1A

There was an antenna competition on so I spent a little time in the tent in the afternoon trying to make contacts on PSK31.  Beside the antenna and the K2 I was using a little Asus notebook, a homebrew interface for digimodes and a large battery pack.  It is so large that Martin, VA3SIE accused me of being a secret QRO operator!  (That hurt Martin).

I had little success with contacting stations on 20m PSK until finally just before dinner when we made a contact with a weak station that was calling CQ.  I replied and was acknowledged by Mirek, SP9ONC in Kozy, Poland.  He was running QRP from a TS-2000 and and we exchanged details. I was really pleased that my first contact was DX and a QRP-QRP contact too. Soon after came my second contact Fred, KD8AQ in Mt Pleasant, TX and we had a nice chat.  As the call for the chilli dinner had gone up earlier I had to break off that conversation.

Dinner was provided by the Ottawa Valley QRP Club and that was the second good meal.  The chilli was tasty and Martin, VA3SIE,  had brought some British delicacies for dessert, including Battenberg cake, which I had not eaten in many years as  it does not often appear on shelves in Canadian stores.

After dinner there was the antenna competition, door prizes and a raffle for a ‘shack in a box’.  For the antenna competition Michael, VE3WMB, won the prize for the best technical design with a folded over vertical antenna, and I won for the best performing antenna with the DX contact with SP9ONC.  I was extremely pleased to find my prize was a Norcal BLT tuner which will very likely become the tuner for that doublet in future.

There were plenty of door prizes including several transceivers.  Gerry, VA3GLT, was lucky to get the first of two HB1A transceivers that had been generously donated by Youkits.  There were so many door prizes that I think all attendees went away with something.  I won a set of pliers and a year’s subscription to QRP Quarterly, the QRP ARCI’s excellent magazine.  So when my current subscription is up I can use that.

The 'shack in the box' prize is presented. The prize was a transceiver, battery pack and case.

After all the prizes had been given out there was chatting into the evening and then Gerry, Martin and myself went back to the tent and made two more contacts on 20m. These were Tom, KJ4QDZ , in Lillian, AL and Virgil, WA5TLP, in Willston, ND. Not too many contacts but enough to make me happy with the performance of the antenna.

Yimin of Youkits chatting with Gerry, VA3GLT after the prizes were awarded

Over Saturday night and Sunday morning there was a lot of rain.  So after breakfast next morning there were a lot of people leaving.  Gerry and I thought it was prudent to take the tent down during a brief lull in the rain so there was no making contacts, just collapsing and packing a wet tent.  We thanked Jeff, VE3JFF, for all his hard work that had resulted in a successful first Maplecon 2010, said goodbye to those that remained and we headed home before noon on Sunday.

Will there be another Maplecon next year?  Well after the prize giving it was discussed by all and it was unanimous to have another.  So here is looking forward to Maplecon 2011.

Why do some people find it necessary to put some irrelevant quote after their signature in forum and mailing list postings? When you see posts from these people several times a day it becomes incredibly irritating.

One person whose posts I seem to encounter frequently has two quotes after his signature: “Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door!” and “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”

I can’t say I ever found the first one very funny but it has got very old after the 100th viewing. And I didn’t join a ham radio mailing list to learn about people’s political opinions, whether or not I agree with them. So please, just stop doing it.

The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park has found a use for 30-year-old BBC Micros – teaching students how to write programs. One ICT teacher said: “The computing A-level is about how computers work, but if you ask anyone how it works they will not be able to tell you. Modern computers go too fast. You can see the instructions happening for real with these machines. They need to have that understanding for the A-level.”

I often think back wistfully to the days of programming early microcomputers where each instruction or subroutine you wrote had a direct effect on the hardware. Even the way things appeared on the screen were a direct result of my own coding. Today, Windows manages all input and output and actually prevents the programmer from directly accessing the hardware. In modern programming you never see a machine instruction. It’s all done using high-level language commands to set the properties of “objects” – software “black boxes” that simplify and speed up complex programming tasks but hide the mechanics of their operation. You couldn’t write modern software the old way, but I still miss the simplicity of early computing.

I have pretty similar reasons for being concerned at what developments like SDR and D-Star will do to the ham radio hobby. The technology is so complex that the average amateur will have no understanding of how they work, only how to use them. I miss the days when you could open a schematic and follow the path of a signal from one end to the other.

Of course, you can still buy kits to build simple radios. I hope that there will always be a place in our hobby for simple, analogue radios that the average amateur can understand, and I don’t mean just in a museum.

I think it is important when operating a ham radio station from home to ensure that none of your own domestic equipment suffers from interference. It’s a sign that everything is OK, and if a neighbour should complain then it helps to prove the point that it is not your fault if you can demonstrate that your own TV, phone, stereo etc. are not affected by your transmissions. I’ve been surprised at the amount of power I’ve been able to run using antennas in the attic without experiencing any problems.

Last night I decided to use the digital DAB band of my radio tuner to listen to the Promenade Concert on BBC Radio 3 because Olga complained of hearing some high pitched noise (inaudible to me) on the analogue FM band, when played through a stereo amplifier and a pair of large 40 year old IMF monitor speakers. For a few minutes it was fine, then there were a couple of interruptions to the broadcast which I guessed were caused by the transmission of my APRS beacons. I think that the DAB transmissions are quite close in frequency to 2m so I shut down the 2m APRS gateway and we enjoyed the rest of the concert without interruptions. I imagine that the neighbours, if they listen to radio at all, will use analogue FM just as we normally do, but it is a bit of a concern that just 10W of 2m FM can cause interference to anything.

The only other known problem caused by my radio transmissions is a neighbour’s security lights. I imagine this is a common problem. I installed an identical looking PIR controlled security light at the front of the house a few years ago after a couple of drunk youths wandered up our cul de sac one night and decided to uproot some of the plants in a neighbour’s garden. I found that I could turn the lights on with as little as 5W on 20m. The solution was to leave our lamp turned off and hope that the neighbour thought it was the wind blowing the bushes around that was triggering his ones. Fortunately it is often windy here and I didn’t used to go on the air in the evening all that often.

But my APRS gateway runs from morning to night and runs 50W output on 30m so the problem will become more evident as the nights draw in unless I adopt the simplest solution which is to shut it down (or switch to receive only) at nightfall. Breaking cover by admitting to a neighbour that I have been causing this to happen risks opening a can of worms that could put me off the air entirely, and remedying the problem would be expensive as his lights are part of a professional security installation that I would not be allowed to tamper with even if I wanted to.

QRZ.com has just come back online after another lengthy server outage. Scanning the forums I came across this lengthy personal attack on me by 2W0UZO over postings I made about the ROS digital mode several months ago in this blog.

I thought about how to respond but I decided I could not be bothered to dignify his diatribe with a reply. However it has given me cause to reflect on why I bother writing this blog when it seems that no matter how hard I try to explain the reasons why I hold a particular opinion the usual response from the other side is that I am “against innovation”, “against new licensees” or whatever stereotypical old-fart criticism they wish to label me with.

Jeff KE9V has decided to pack in ham radio blogging. I think I’ll follow his example. Just think how much more time I’ll have to actually do things with the radio.

73 from the anywhere, anytime shack.

We’re just back from a week’s holiday at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. Very nice it was too and I think we were probably pretty lucky with the weather. There was certainly some sun and we enjoyed being out and about.

I took a variety of radio gear; FT817 and HF/VHF antennas, IC-E92ED, Wouxun 70MHz and DVAP Dongle. In the end, I really only used the IC-E92ED handheld. Our apartment was located high above Shanklin on the cliffs and I discovered that I could hear all sorts of things on VHF and UHF.

On 19th and 20th August, there was a nice temperature inversion across the English Channel. I heard and worked a number of French and Belgian repeaters across the water, just using the rubber duck antenna on the IC-E92.

Still no QSOs on the Wouxun 70MHz, but having read the review in the latest Practical Wireless, I think the helical antenna is worse than I expected. It may be time to get one of the Garex Flexwhips and see how that improves performance!

Echolink made it possible to connect to my local repeater, GB3TD, using the IC-E92 to access GB3BR in Brighton (a huge signal over a fairly long sea path) and connecting the two repeaters together. Echolink using the iPhone was less successful, owing to a slow GPRS data connection.

Enjoyable mix of radio – all very simple, but plenty of interest all the same.