AmateurRadio.com

YYH-290 Taloyoak, NU - courtesy ve3gop.com

Another month has zoomed by and it's CLE time once again. This is a challenge for all newcomers to NDB listening and the ultimate test of your medium frequency receiving capabilities. Can you meet the challenge?

From CLE organizers comes the following info:

Hello all

Our 289^th co-ordinated listening event is this coming weekend.
It spans a 50 kHz frequency range - about three times wider than usual.

Rxx suggests that there are plenty of NDBs to hear and they are not

changed much since CLE274, the last time we used these frequencies.

 

   Days:  Friday 24 February – Monday 27 February
   Times: Start and end at midday, your LOCAL time
   Range: 270.0 - 319.9 kHz (NDB signals only)

Any first-time CLE logs will be extra welcome, as always.

Please log all the NDBs that you can identify and any UNIDs that you

may come across there.

Please don’t report the DGPS signals in part of this frequency range.

Send your final log to the List (not in an attachment, please)
with 'CLE289’ and ‘FINAL' in its title (important).

Show on each line:

   # The Date (e.g. '2023-02-24', etc., or just '24' )
   # The Time in UTC (the day changes at 00:00 UTC).
   # kHz - the nominal published frequency, if known.
   # The Call Ident.

Please show those main items FIRST.  Other optional details such as
Location and Distance go LATER in the same line.

As always, of course, tell us your own location and give brief details of
the equipment that you were using during the Event.

We will send the usual 'Any More Logs?' email at about 19:00 UTC on

Tuesday so you can check that your log has been found OK.

Do make sure that your log has arrived on the List by 08:00 UTC on
Wednesday 1^st March at the very latest.

We hope to complete making the combined results within a day or two.

You can find full details about current and past CLEs from the CLE
page  https://rxx.classaxe.com/cle   It includes access to the CLE289
seeklists for your part of the World, prepared from all the previous
loggings in Rxx.

Good listening - enjoy the CLE.
  Brian and Joachim
  (CLE coordinators)


(If you would like to listen remotely you could use any one remote
receiver for your loggings, stating its location and owner and with their
permission if required.  A remote listener may NOT also use another

receiver, local or remote, to make further loggings for the same CLE)

 

CLE's provide several purposes. They:

Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

 

 

It is being reported on the QRP Labs forum, that some have got the little smart QDX digital transceiver communicating with the FT8CN app.

The rig is noticed straight away by FT8CN using an OTG USB lead and a minimum of configuring. 

The QDX and a small phone or tablet, allow true FT8 portable operating with minimum hardware to cart around.

Pick up the thread here

Details about the QDX https://qrp-labs.com/qdx.html

   

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

Sorry I have been away the last twelve months or so, the Blog has had to take a rest from my typing fingers and Amateur Radio has been put well away on the back burner.

I lost both my parents within five months of each other early last year and I still have not really got over the ordeal yet, which had played out over five years before their demise.

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

Not often is this seen on 10m

 

 VE9KK the world of CW blog would not be complete if I did not partake in the ARRL International CW
DX contest. As always I skipped the opening session Friday evening mainly because my limit is 40m and due to the time, I would have limited operating time before the band closed down for the evening. The contest was very well attended along with great propagation numbers. Now having said that on Saturday the space weather numbers were off the charts and some in my local contest group felt it could had been an error on WWV's part as they were showing 343 and other sites such as Dominion observatory were in the 160s. In any case, the numbers were great and in most logs including mine, 10m displayed the largest contact numbers as sure sign propagation was good. 

For about 90% of the contest I ran and when it go slow I did some search and pounce. Now running in a contest like this you get HUGE pile-ups and it showed me I have to get more serious with pile-up practices using software such as Morse Runner. I have to be honest in saying at times the pile-ups were overwhelming and hard to pick out any call. 

The action on a map view

My Hustle 4BTV worked like a dream and at times my SNR numbers in Europe were great according to the Reverse Beacon Network. One of the challenges was to find an empty spot to call CQ contest. Often I would have to find a new spot as other ops would unknowingly move in. Not a big deal as it's all part of contesting. Entering these contests always helps out my CW skills to improve my skill but towards the end of the contest on Sunday evening I pulled the plug at 23:30 UTC with only a 1/2 hour to go. I was not hearing code anymore just noise and simple calls like M2T were a challenge so it was time to end things and go have a nice glass of red wine and relax.
One of the highlights was contacting fellow blogger Bas PE4BAS on 10m and 15m.

The contest runs for 48 hours and according to my contest program N1MM I was on for 16.5 hours but I take a break every hour and lunch but N1MM keeps running as I don't want to shut it down to just start it up again. So I figure I was on for about 14.5 to 15 hours in total. My best 1 hour run was 148 contacts. On average each hour netted me between 80 to 90 but then there were very slow one hour stints as well.
 

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

 10m remains very active, this is todays activity at 2 different times.

Around 10:30z:

Around 13:55z:

 

Further details about FT8CN see my Blog https://g1kqh.blogspot.com/2023/02/ft8cn-new-free-android-app.html

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

I had a few problems displaying the blog listing of previous blogs yesterday, after I had uploaded a new blog about the FT8CN app. I have found out what caused it and all should now display correctly on your phones, tablets and PC's.

73's Steve

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

At a recent local hamfest, my ARRL Section Manager, Malcolm W5XX, held the annual ARRL Forum. As Division Director David Norris K5UZ was giving his update on the recent Board of Directors meeting. W5XX commented that a club in North Georgia had begun reaching out to licensees of the General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS). Why? There are some 8,000 of them in surrounding counties! Give a statistician a number like that and it’s catnip to a cat.

I had heard of GMRS and the lighter-weight Family Radio Service (FRS) as additional radio frequencies to the famous Citizen’s Band (CB) that I used as a teen. But I didn’t really know much about it. So, I spent parts of a week doing some searching, reading, and, inevitably, database building. I saw the wisdom of the club in question reaching out to this audience. Let’s do a thought experiment to flesh this out.

GMRS licensees use radios up to 50 watts on mobile stations and 15 watts in fixed stations in the mid-400 mhz region. There are limitations on the type of one-way communications (no whistling which would rule out most anyone in amateur radio tuning up an amplifier, lol). But in general, there are parallels to GMRS operators to those holding a Technician license in the Amateur Radio Service with the latter having much greater frequency access, power usage, and other aspects of the radio arts.

After doing some reading, I checked the FCC ULS GMRS license data. There’s an interesting comparison: the ARRL February 2023 numbers show 386,122 Technicians while individual GMRS licenses total 336, 513 after APO addresses and one Canadian are removed. Organizations and some other groups can obtain GMRS licenses. Roughly, there are about as many individual GMRS licensees as there are Technicians, give or take 50,000. Ok, I thought, this is surprising but how do they operate? Are they communicating amongst themselves as ham operators do? How many GMRS repeaters are there? The surprises just kept on coming!

The popular site, RepeaterBook.com, does list some GMRS repeaters. But the mother ship is the myGMRS.com website. One has to have a GMRS license to register but there ‘s enough information available to the public to show just how organized parts of the GMRS community already is. I’ve taken a screenshot of the map display, nicely done with clustering repeaters until a certain zoom level is reached, showing the GMRS repeaters in the U.S. Note those in Puerto Rico: I had recommended that the ARRL assist in getting a permanent repeater on the westernmost mountains near Mayaguez after a devastating hurricane. Perhaps even an HF ALE type station directed at Florida or North Carolina. Looks like the GMRS community has done some work here, too.

The map below illustrates the set of repeater hubs and their links around the U.S. There are national and regional Nets held regularly. An audio stream can be monitored using the website for each hub, not unlike Hoseline for the Brandmeister DMR Network. Hmm. If ham radio were only this organized, so quickly.

After downloading the February 2023 GMRS data from the FCC ULS ftp site, I processed it and filtered out the overseas military licenses. These records were then georeferenced to street addresses, with some that did not have street addresses geocoded to zip codes and a few to city centroids. The map below illustrates this: the GMRS individual license IS a compelling market for amateur radio recruitment.

It’s easy to see that the North Georgia region is part of the Appalachian Mountain range that is covered with GMRS licensees But so is most of the region east of the Mississippi River, the West Coast and the mountainous areas of the Southwest. Here’s another view zoomed in to the ARRL Delta Division where I live. Licensees in GMRS tend to follow population centers but note the areas, like Nashville, where the topography gives more height-above-ground than others. Northwest Arkansas is another such location. Interesting patterns!

We know little to nothing about the age distribution of GMRS licensees as year of birth is not contained in the ULS database released to the public (only 18 or over). But it stands to reason that GMRS licensees are likely to have a broader age range of adoption. From perusing the names on the licenses — license holders can authorize other family members to use additional radios in this Service — there are gendered-naming patterns. More women in GMRS than ham radio? Possibly.

Some interactive maps of these data are now available over at FoxMikeHotel.com under the Maps tab.

An important note is that an unknown number of those holding GMRS licenses today also hold licenses in the Amateur Radio Service. The FRN is not contained in the GMRS data so it would take “fuzzy matching” with less than perfect results to examine this idea.

The ARRL has taken an interest in my proposed initiative to treat public libraries in the U.S. as “new served agencies” for recruitment strategies, according to Division Director David Norris K5UZ. See my two blog posts here and here. Should the GMRS licensees be viewed as another direct marketing opportunity by the ARRL?

I’ve taken the GMRS data and spatially joined the ARRL Division and Section fields to the license record using GIS. These files were then split into separate spreadsheets by Division with the Section as a separate field. I’ve put them on my public folder in Dropbox for all to retrieve should they desire. This would make it easy for a direct-mailing to GMRS licensees. In a cover letter identifying the contact info for their ARRL Section Manager, a brochure should be inserted describing the much greater options available by adding the Technician license through a VE exam. It works for some yield rates for other membership services. (Check today’s mail if you doubt this isn’t used frequently.)

It would not be inexpensive with USPS rates. But it would be directed at a market that is already known to have some interested in operating radios for communication. Perhaps it should begin with GMRS licensees in areas where there are existing repeater operations. This would be a good test case to see the yield from such a direct mailing.

What won’t work is to simply send the information “down stream,” expecting SMs to do all the heavy lifting. It simply won’t happen. The League already conducts a commercial mailing operation which is where this activity should be situated.

This would be a third recruiting rail for the ARRL, including the Teacher Institute (getting in schools), the pending (I’m told) Plant the Seed initiative for public libraries, and the direct mailing to known radio communication licensees in the GMRS arena. Recruit the Generals, anyone?

Frank Howell, K4FMH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Mississippi, USA. Contact him at [email protected].