Shortwave radio has been a source for great sci-fi plots, spy intrigue novels, movies, and so on, since radio first became a “thing.” But, what is the big deal, really? What is it that amateur radio operators listen to?

In this video, I share some of the types of signals one might hear on the high frequencies (also known as shortwave or HF bands). This is the first video in an on-going series introducing amateur radio to the interested hobbyist, prepper, and informed citizen.

I often am asked by preppers, makers, and other hobbyists, who’ve not yet been introduced to the world of amateur radio and shortwave radio: “Just what do you amateur radio operators hear, on the amateur radio shortwave bands?”

To begin answering that question, I’ve taken a few moments on video, to share from my perspective, a bit about this shortwave radio thing:

Link to video: https://youtu.be/pIVesUzNP2U — please share with your non-ham friends.

From my shortwave website:

Shortwave Radio Listening — listen to the World on a radio, wherever you might be. Shortwave Radio is similar to the local AM Broadcast Band on Mediumwave (MW) that you can hear on a regular “AM Radio” receiver, except that shortwave signals travel globally, depending on the time of day, time of year, and space weather conditions.

The International Shortwave Broadcasters transmit their signals in various bands of shortwave radio spectrum, found in the 2.3 MHz to 30.0 MHz range. You might think that you need expensive equipment to receive these international broadcasts, but you don’t! Unlike new Satellite services, Shortwave Radio (which has been around since the beginning of the radio era) can work anywhere with very affordable radio equipment. All that you need to hear these signals from around the World is a radio which can receive frequencies in the shortwave bands. Such radios can be very affordable. Of course, you get what you pay for; if you find that this hobby sparks your interest, you might consider more advanced radio equipment. But you would be surprised by how much you can hear with entry-level shortwave receivers. (You’ll see some of these radios on this page).

You do not need a special antenna, though the better the antenna used, the better you can hear weaker stations. You can use the telescopic antenna found on many of the portable shortwave radios now available. However, for reception of more exotic international broadcasts, you should attach a length of wire to your radio’s antenna or antenna jack.

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It’s unseasonally warm this fall. Still wearing a summer outfit, running the AC at night and temperatures up to 30 degrees Celsius during the day. Makes for good portable operation weather and yesterday I had another one. It was the first time that I hooked up a laptop to my KX3 because I wanted to have some digital fun. I really miss my Olivia chat sessions, exspecially with Ken, JA1RZD. My KX3 comes with the stock heat sink, so I turned the power down to 3 Watts and even with long transmissions the KX3 only warmed up a little. Ken had no problem copying me, but that is also due to the power of Olivia and the beautiful view to the north. My school is situated on top of a low mountain range and the elevation of 290 meter ASL really helps in propagating my puny signal.

The wonderful view from our parking lot towards Japan.

The KX3 and Fldigi happily working together.

Been missing HamRadioNow, my podcast/YouTube show?

No? I’m hurt, but I’ll carry on. The show’s been ‘off the air’ since late September, except for one episode from the ARRL/TAPR DCC on FlexRadio.

I’ve been AWOL because I’ve been editing the DVD video of the K1N Navassa DXpedition from last January/February. Semi-apologies for the overwrought narration in the trailer. That’s not what the DVD sounds like, if you were worried.

If you’re into DXing at even a very casual level, you’ll recognize K1N, and likely you made (or tried for) a contact. Maybe you saw HamRadioNow Episode 205 – the K1N talk at the Dayton Hamvention’s DX Forum. Episode 206 was a spin-off conversation with one of the hams who was part of a 1972 Navassa DXpedition (and is the K1N webmaster). There’s a lot of interesting background in those episodes.

So, the DVD.

Last summer, Bob Allphin K4UEE, called me and asked if I’d consider editing the footage he shot of the DXpedition. Bob’s produced 9 other DXpedition DVDs, including the 2005 K5K operation on Kingman Reef, 3Y0X on Peter I Island, and FT5ZM on Amsterdam Island. He needed an editor for this one.

If you’ve watched many HamRadioNow episodes, you’ve probably heard me whine about how much I don’t like editing. I’ve been doing it all my career, and I’m kind of tired of it. It’s tedious and very time consuming. I can easily spend an hour or two completing just one minute of the finished product. The K1N program runs about 45 minutes, and I estimate I spent over 100 hours on it. You watch it in real time – 45 minutes – and you say ‘that was interesting. Next…‘

I’ll mitigate my rant by adding that I also find the process of editing very engaging and satisfying, especially once it’s over and I watch the finished product. The pain and time is sort of forgotten, and I wonder what I was doing for the past two months. Ladies, if that sounds a little like childbirth, I’ll acknowledge a weak resemblance. Very weak.

I’ll also admit that I’m not a speedy editor. It never mattered if I was being paid by the project or by the hour. I’m slow, methodical and detail-oriented. I screen and catalog all the footage before I start (why aren’t you editing yet?).  I fuss over each new scene, trying various combinations of shots, pacing and transitions. After I’ve moved on and edited the next few minutes, I’ll retrace my steps and trim up some already completed scenes. And then I’ll do it again. And you watch and say ‘that was interesting.’ Most of the movies and documentaries you’ve watched were done that way. Most of the TV news stories and prime-time programs were not – they got the hurry-up treatment. The commercials, though – which is where I spent most of my career – were also hashed and rehashed to within an inch of their lives. Maybe not the local car dealer spots.

So I knew I should have turned Bob down. HamRadioNow and a little freelance keeps me as busy as I want to be. I knew what he was going to ask when I saw his caller-ID on my phone, before I even answered. And I knew I was going to say yes, I’d do it.

The DVDs will sell for $25, and I’ll get a pretty good piece of the action – several $k if the initial run of 1000 discs sells well (well over 100 have already been ordered). That’s really nice, but it wasn’t my driving interest. I just wanted to tackle this project. I’m not a DXer. I’ll work a DX station if I come across one. In my 50 years as a ham I may have worked 100 countries, but I stopped logging and QSLing a long time ago, so there are no operating achievements adorning my walls. But I was attracted to this event. I didn’t work’em. I only tried a little. Maybe it was the Dayton talk that caught my attention.

Only a few people have seen the finished product so far, and the reviews aren’t in from ‘the media’ yet. A few of the hams who have seen it say it’s the ‘best DXpedition DVD they’ve seen,’ but I’m always wary of the usual grade-inflation we give each other. I’m pretty happy with it. It’s polished without being slick. More professional than most other ham-oriented media. But I’ve always considered the DXpedition DVDs to be the best-produced, most professional ham radio media out there. Maybe getting an entry in that category is what pulled me in.

It is Bob’s project, of course. He shot it, amid all his other duties as co-leader of the K1N project. He got to review it often while it was in progress, and he made a few requests for additions, deletions and changes. But I think he may have been a little overwhelmed with what I was putting in there. If you’ve watched HamRadioNow, you’ll recognize my fingerprints.

And my voice. Most of Bob’s previous videos don’t have much narration. He talks to the camera some while shooting, and he’s recorded a little post-production narration. But mostly his previous videos strike me as really good home movies. I gave it more of the documentary approach. As I got into editing a segment, I’d pull the footage together, figure out what the story was (Bob gave me basic notes on every shot), and decide what narration it needed, if any. I’d write that into a script, and record myself reading what we call a ‘scratch track’ – a temporary version that gave me the timing I needed for editing. The plan was for Bob to record the script once it was finished. But he liked what I’d done for the temporary version, and we decided to keep me as the disembodied voice. There’s still plenty of him talking from behind the camera (also a disembodied voice) as he was shooting.

I had to re-record my part, since I had recorded the ‘scratch’ version in a fairly noisy room. I did the finished recording at the SoundTrax recording studio in Raleigh, NC (where I freelance a lot). It’s got the quietest couple of hundred cubic feet of studio space in the southeast (a room ‘floating’ on all sides, with an air-gap isolating it from surrounding noise. Yep, even the floor is suspended above the building’s floor), and a $3000 microphone (Neumann U-87).

And I couldn’t use it.

I had recorded the scratch track slowly and deliberately, fairly laid-back and laconic. Alone in the studio, with no producer to give me feedback, I sped through the script like the paper was on fire. It was terrible. I didn’t have time to go back to SoundTrax and record again, so I draped some blankets over the exercise contraption in our home gym and read it again into my Heil PR-40. I still like parts of the original scratch track better, and I used one or two of them (or three or four) where music or location-sound covers up the room noise. That’s what you’ll hear on the DVD.

I feel a sense of ownership of this video. I should – it’s got a little piece of my life in there, along with some style and quirkiness that you don’t usually find in documentaries (although the kids these days are also breaking all the old rules). I’m proud of it. But I need to give most of the credit to the 15 guys who went to the island for two weeks and pulled this off, and the dozens more who worked from behind the scenes before, during and after the operation itself. They’re the ones you’ll see on the screen or in the credits at the end. I wasn’t there, although I kind of feel like I was. Bob shot about 5 hours of video, and I crawled through it all, whittling it down to the 45 minutes you’ll see in the show. But I didn’t spend two weeks in the 100+° heat, eating MRE’s, sleeping on a cot with an inch of water on the floor, battling pileups and propagation. I know, I make it sound romantic.

And that ‘before’ part is more important than it seems. Any DXpedition to a difficult or dangerous part of the world takes lots of planning. There have been very few serious incidents in any of the many DX adventurers that appear to us as just a signal on the band (and a huge pileup a few kHz up the dial), either as a result of careful preparation, dumb luck, or both . But this one took something extra. Bob, Glenn Johnson W0GJ and several others spent 13 years working with (and sometimes against) the US Fish & Wildlife Service to obtain permission for the first DXpedition to Navassa since 1993. That story is told in HamRadioNow Episode 205 in their talk at the Hamvention®.

I think the DVD will make a nice stocking-stuffer present for a ham this Christmas/holiday. It’ll make a good club meeting presentation (and I know one single copy will make the rounds of every club in your town and the surrounding six counties, and that one will probably be a pirated copy of one that somebody actually bought or received as a gift. You’ll spend more on gas shuttling it around than you would buying another copy or two). You can order it at NavassaDX.com. Follow the links from there.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.

73, Gary KN4AQ

http://www.cqxiegu.com

Xiegu has come through once again with their latest firmware update to take care of a few small problems that were on the latest version of the X108G OLED outdoor version.

The first fix about a month ago was to address the issue with the Iambic keyer adding extra characters in while trying to send code. That was fixed and all is good now when using a paddle.

This newest firmware update takes care of a few things:
1) Fixed the A=B issue
2) Split mode-You can now work cw on on one VFO and voice on another for working nets when no microphone is available.
3) Split band is also working now so you can operate cross band if required
4) SQL adjustable levels also added to menu

One can now send code using the microphone PTT button while in CW mode in the event a key is not present, there is however no sidetone heard when doing this.
From what I read or what I think I read it looks like maybe one could send code while in USB mode, the rig does key up but there is very little RF going out, you can hear a carrier on another radio but no power deflection is visible.

This is a direct copy from the Xiegu Firmware Folder:

1. I. Update description

[A=B]

A=B functions are available

[Split screen] mode

Update the transceiver switching logic, both two VFO in any mode, split screen mode are effective.

1. The PTT switch is no longer disabled in CW mode. Ignoring automatically key settings when PTT is pressed (by pressing the manual key logic), enter the sending State and CW tone generated (microphone effective at this time), release the PTT to produce a state of setting CW the delay time of switching and quit sending.
2. When not in CW mode, no longer disable keying. Keying action and the VFO key were setup consistent (hand keys left / right automatic key). At this point, the carrier is related to the current VFO mode( Into the launch logic will open the carrier switch).

Key behavior in CW mode is not affected.

PTT behavior is not affected when there is not in CW mode.

3. [SQL]

Updated SQL code

1. SQL=0, invalid squelch;
2. SQL=1~10, the squelch invalid when S signal is greater than the SQL value, otherwise, squelch effectively.
3. [SQL]

When the user upset the X108G data, you can press the RST key, so that the X108G to restore the calibration data.

1. II. Firmware update tutorial:
2. Press the frequency knob (keep the action), turn on, connect the USB cable to the computer.
3. Open “ My computer”, there is a Update X108 (*:) mobile storage device.
4. Open Update X108 (*), delete the file, this time on the radio will show delete progress (waiting for progress to complete 100%).
5. Copy the latest firmware to the Update X108 (*:) to wait for replication to complete, and then disconnect the USB and the computer.
6. Restart X108G, firmware update is completed!

Xiegu Tech

WRC-15 has ratified the first new HF amateur allocation since 1979. Although only 15kHz wide it was agreed internationally. I hope that CEPT allows a wider contiguous allocation. I am sure I cannot be alone in finding all these non-contiguous 5MHz allocations very confusing.

From the RSGB report on WRC-15:
“Z8 has now officially been agreed as the prefix for South Sudan and will be formally entered into the Radio Regulations. Meanwhile the revised Radio Regulations from WRC-15 will officially come into effect from the 1st January 2017. “

They say that in order to know where you are going, you must first know from where you came. I really believe that and have applied it in my genealogy hobby. I think maybe the time has come to apply it to my ham radio hobby, as well.

While I haven’t been a ham for very many years, I worked as an electronics tech for about 18 years –much of it in the Air Force, on radar and radar guided missiles on a fighter jet, but later working Civil Service for the Army, then Air Force as well. Many times I started to get my FCC license, but I had nobody to elmer me, and some of what I was studying was for a license for career use.

While working in electronics repair in 1983, a copy of “Radio Electronics” came (as it normally did) in my mailbox as part of a monthly subscription. An article in that issue on Nikola Tesla touched me like no other before, or any other even to this day!

Who was this Nikola Tesla? After reading the article I had to question, with years of electronic education, an A.S. degree in electronics, and specialty schools galore, why had I never learned more about this guy that had almost EVERYTHING to do with my interests at the time! I was stunned that I could have gone so long without being educated on this man! Sure, I had heard of the coils named after him, but little on the man himself. Maybe in my youthfulness I didn’t pay attention to past history so much? But it shook my foundations and made me curious to know more about Mr. Tesla.

Recently, my wife and I moved back into a house we were in before I got into HF. As such, it had no HF antennas or tower. So I put in a request for help in my local club, DARA; the famous hosts of the Dayton Hamvention. The club is huge, so I hoped I might get some help. I did receive two offers of assistance.

One offer to help was a fellow vet that raised a son by himself due to a tragic loss of his wife and the son’s mother. The man and his son soon were over and helped me undo the mess I made, and started on a new plan to move forward. Another great guy also helped greatly, and before we knew it, we started over on my meager beginnings on a tower, and improved and added on.

We had several long days and late nights as well. The XYL is a GREAT cook and I suspected that the man and his son had few home cooked meals the caliber of which the wife could put together. So we had some nice late dinners and stuffed ourselves while talking all sorts of ham-related subjects.

The son of this man has a name similar to mine, and he did most of the climbing and hard work. As such he really impressed me. His father raised him well and taught him respect and service to others. It turns out he has a desire to one day purchase a radio similar to my ICOM IC 7000, which I use for a primary station radio. He had studied the manuals some and downloaded one to his cell phone and helped me use the features built in to the radio that I hadn’t yet figured out how to use!

After thinking about this tower and antenna outlasting me, I realized that one day I will take my turn to go silent key, and this young guy is one of the few that will be working to carry on this great hobby and service to our community. I have grandsons, but they are too young yet to know if they will show any interest later on in life.

When Tesla came back up to me recently, I remembered the old magazine article, and the book I later purchased by Margaret Cheney on Mr. Tesla’s biography. Did you ever have something happen to you that just said you were at the right place at the right time, and it was supposed to happen just the way it did? After a base closure in Sacramento, I found myself working at Wright-Patterson AFB just outside of Dayton, Ohio (and yeah, it’s that place that has long had a reputation of supposed aliens being brought there! In fact, the bowling alley on base makes fun of it and has special “Alien Bowl” events and signs posted at the back above the pins showing aliens in cartoon form).

The place I was assigned was the Air Force Institute of Technology. I was working in computer support as a LAN Admin, and establishing and maintaining accounts, adding new equipment, maintenance on servers and more. I had changed my career, but not lost interest in electronics. I read something somewhere that indicated that the biography on Tesla written by Margaret Cheney was a pretty good read and fairly accurate! I ordered the book and to this day is one of the few books I have actually finished. It was that interesting!

At the end of the book she claims that the Department of Defense went into Tesla’s home and lab after his death, and confiscated many of his papers and research notes. She claimed they were taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. If this is true, the most likely places for these records to go would be the Air Force Research Labs, and the Air Force Institute of Technology. They shared a common library. I was careful to not jeopardize my career, so my curiosity remained mostly in check. But still, not a day went by when I wasn’t thinking about Tesla and his work being studied and possibly carried on where I was working.

So becoming friends with this young man who helped me greatly, I feel a sense of responsibility to help him succeed. To make sure he knows about some of the roots of this hobby so that he is better “grounded” in basic facts, to help him move forward. As I write this, I am not yet sure if he is already familiar with Tesla or not. But maybe, just maybe, I can pass on some of the history, to help a young man continue on in this great hobby and service of ours.

Maybe one day I can do the same with my grandsons, but for now, I feel an obligation to “pass it forward” and make sure a new generation was aware of a man I knew little about, but had a great contribution to my career and daily life.