AmateurRadio.com

EI9KC (2nd from left) and Anthony

Very rare during the week do I have time to get on the radio once all the things around the house are done I am beat... BUT this evening was an off night were I was able to power up the K3. It was 30m were things seemed to be happening for me. I was able to "hear" lots but contact few, there was lots of South American stations calling CQ but my 5 watts just did not seem to make it down that way. I had a look at the P3 to see what stations were showing up and I came across a very weak signal. I was not able to make out the call but then as 30m does the call came in at S5 just right for me decipher the call. It was EI9KC from Ireland now for some reason I do have a very hard time with getting Ireland in the log. I took a chance and threw my 5 watts out there and EI9KC came back to me! Ark gave me a 559 report and considering the band conditions, my attic dipole and the 5 watts I was pumping out I was thrilled! The trouble at this end was he was in and out BIG TIME! It was a very short QSO but I did email him just to make sure Ark knew I did copy him and I wanted to make sure he got my call and did copy me. He emailed me right back and did confirm the contact and low and behold he is a blogger as well. You can check out EI9KC's blog here, Ireland has a special place in my heart as both my mom and dad are from there. Funny thing and small world I did a search on Google regarding EI9KC and I found out he knows a fellow blogger Anthony EI2KC   (first ham on the left of the pic above).
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

OK, by the time you read this, I guess this topic will be old news. The blogosphere and the Twitterverse have been abuzz with the news that “Heathkit is back!”

Channeling my inner Captain Picard, no one would like that “to be so”, more than I. I loved Heathkit and cut my Novice teeth on building their kits. In addition to a ton of Amateur Radio gear, I also constructed various clocks, scanners and other pieces. My stereo system was just about entirely high-end Heathkit. The only parts that weren’t were the speakers and the turntable. And yes, knowing what the age of the average Ham is, I don’t want to see “What’s a turntable?” comments in the comments box! By the time Heathkit was coming to an end, I had qualified for, and was a member of their Master Builder’s Club. All told, I probably built about 25 or 30 pieces of Heathkit equipment for myself and for others.

But let’s not get all excited, running around at 100 MPH with our hair on fire. There’s a lot more to resurrecting the company other than an announcement on a Website and a new survey. This rumor has come up before, with a lot of anticipation and drooling, only to have our hopes dashed on the rocky shores of wishful thinking.

However,  I was always of the opinion that if Heathkit could have just held on until the age of the Internet – well ………..wow! Heathkit e-mail reflectors, Heathkit user groups, Heathkit forums. I know that these Internet groups exist in various iterations today; but not for an active Heathkit.  It would have been tremendous! (Elecraft squared?) If Heathkit does indeed make like a Phoenix and truly rises from the ashes this time, it will be in large part due to the Internet.

On the other hand, if Heathkit hadn’t demised ……. Whither Elecraft, Sierra, Hendrick’s QRP Kits, Steve Weber, Small Wonder Labs and the myriad other fine kit companies and club kits that are or were out there? Would the “Maker Movement” be doing as well today? Was Heathkit’s demise part of the catalyst for the birth of these companies and the Maker Movement? I am guessing, that in the end, it will prove to be a symbiotic relationship. The aforementioned companies might not have come to see the light of day had Heathkit not gone out of business. On the other hand, Heathkit may owe its reincarnation due to exactly the success of those companies, whose efforts have revitalized the kit business. The “Circle of Life”, as it were.

Whatever happens, if Heathkit does come back as a force, don’t expect that “what was” will necessarily “be”.  Heathkit has a lot of credibility and good will in its name, but that only goes so far. Hams are a peculiar breed with outrageous expectations, at times. However Heathkit comes back (if it does at all), it will find the marketplace to be a totally different landscape from when they first left us. They will have to compete and will have to have a good business model. Relying solely on their name alone is not an option.

The good news, is that from the questions on the survey (which I completed yesterday), I think they realize that, to some degree.

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

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Pat Tice, WA0TDA, is the manager of HANDI-HAM and a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

Yesterday Olga and I set up a new weather station in the garden. It is a Nevada WH3080 SOLAR. It took a while for me to figure out how to put it together but I got there in the end with a bit of help from Olga (who took the radical step of reading the instructions!)

The sky is always blue in Cumbria!

We had a bit of trouble mounting the weather station in the garden. The manufacturer supplies two large hose clips (you can see them in the picture) which are not the ideal hardware for attaching a pole to another pole. But they did the job, if not very elegantly.

There were no problems receiving the weather station on the control panel sitting on the shack PC 10m away. This Nevada weather station transmits on 868MHz so no interference from or to 70cm amateur transmissions. No problems with the software either, not with EasyWeather nor with Cumulus which is what I will be using.

The software setup went so easily that I couldn’t see how it was working. When I plugged the display console into a USB port the PC went “ding dong” to acknowledge a new USB device had been connected but I couldn’t find the new device anywhere. I expected it would appear as a serial port in Device Manager but no new ports were added. I didn’t have to specify a COM port in either program either. How the console talks to the weather software is a mystery. I’m not planning to write my own software to process the weather data but I’m still curious as to how the software gets the data.

Using the example web pages provided with Cumulus I set up a Cockermouth Weather page very easily. Cumulus creates a wxnow.txt file which APRSIS32 uses to generate an APRS weather object. However I have just noticed that Cumulus can send updates to the APRS network directly. That would be a simpler way of doing it, but that way the weather object would not get transmitted to the local APRS network. I’ve since discovered an issue when using APRSIS32 to generate a weather object via a converse mode TNC, but hopefully Lynn KJ4ERJ the author of APRSIS32 will come up with a fix for it.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

I made it to the Dayton Hamvention this year, after a multi-year absence. Due to that four-letter word known as work, I was not able to arrive until really late Friday night. That left all day Saturday and the half day on Sunday to partake of the event.

I’ll start with the obligatory dig at Hara Arena, repeating my tweet:

Hara Arena continues to be everything that I wish it wasn’t.

Check out the posts by Jeff KE9V and Steve K9ZW about their impressions of Hamvention.

I spent some time helping out at the HamRadioSchool.com booth in the north hall. Wow, what a positive response we got from that effort. Stu W0STU’s Technician and General Class books have really hit their mark, finding a good balance between covering the material to pass the FCC exams while also helping students to really get it. We heard quite a few instructors stop by and say “This is what I have been looking for!” If you are teaching a ham radio licensing class, you need to check out the HamRadioSchool.com books….and the companion web site and iOS apps.

One of the high points of the weekend was discovering the poster-size front cover of Spring 2013 CQ VHF with my mountaintop photo on it.  Joyce K0JJW took a great shot of me operating from Mt Sneffels last August (Colorado 14er Event and SOTA), so it was an excellent complement to my article: “A Little Mountaintop Operation”.

So I leave Dayton, thinking about the highs and lows for the weekend. There was not much new that really caught my attention. (Disclaimer: I am sure I didn’t see everything there.) I am still looking for an FT-950 with 2 Meters, an Android HT and a D-STAR radio from Kenwood, Yaesu or even Alinco. Also, there is a real trend of vaporware instead of products. I’ve gotten really jaded about this. If a company can’t quote price and delivery, then it doesn’t exist in my world.

As K9ZW pointed out, much of the fun of Dayton is being with great people: some old friends (like my bud Denny KB9DPF) and some new ones, too.

How was your Hamvention?

73, Bob K0NR

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

A new batch of QSLs arrived from the bureau today. This is a selection of the most colourful ones.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

For one reason or another, I’m a bit late starting my bicycle portable trips this year. For one thing, the weather hasn’t been great. I went to get my bike out a couple of days ago and found that it had a (not so slow) puncture. Amazon came to the rescue with a new inner tube!

So it was today that I set out with a rucksack on my back containing the FT817 and a 50MHz whip (thanks again Ian, MW0IAN). I had a great ride along the banks of the Thames, around 13 miles in total. I stopped a couple of times to get the rig out and have a listen. Typically, the band was flat – just the GB3RAL and GB3BAA beacons audible – which I guess wasn’t bad going with a whip, down at river level.

And even if there was no propagation, I love being by the river….

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].