AmateurRadio.com

New monitor in place and ready for ARRL CW contest

Very dusty

This week a new monitor came in via UPS as my old standby monitor after many years of service bit the dust. I ended up ordering the AOC E235F monitor to match my other two 23 in monitors. Oh as a side note if anyone out there has an AOC monitor with a white square that shows up in the upper left hand corner shut off the picture boost bright frame option, which can be found in the monitors menu. Anyway.......With this nice new monitor up and running I did notice only one monitor seemed to be real sharp?? I then did some investigating and found out that my video care (Geforce 9400GT) had
one DVI and one VGA output port. It was the VGA port that was not allowing my new monitor to shine with all it's resolution. I ended up purchasing the Zotac Geforce GT 620 video card. This has two DVI outputs and as with the other care supports dual monitors. A small part of the day today was spend

Rear view of  PC

New on left old on right

removing the Geforce 9400 card and replacing it with the new Zotac GT 620 card. It was great to have the PC out and on the test bench I was able to give the interior a good cleaning. It's very surprising how much dust gets in there and to have the processor nice and clean and running cool will extend the life of the chip. The picture of the back of my PC shows many clip on toroid around most if not every cable as well there is a ground wire grounding the cabinet as well. I also put some snap on chokes on the DVI cable to the new monitor. This way my PC and monitors are RF free!
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

Overview photo showing the new chair.  I also shifted everything on the bench top to the left.  I picked up a used 19″ flat screen monitor for $40 from eBay.  I put that at the right end of the bench top.  The tiny screen of the Netbook was giving me a hard time due to the age/eyes thing.

Kind of a “View from the Operator’s Position” kind of shot.

Frontal view – K3 in front, KX3 right above. Elecraft Hex Key to the right, SKCC Straight Key to the left. HRD is running on the new monitor.  To the immediate right of the KX3 is a Fox Hunt “mascot” Ty stuffed animal. To the left of the KX3 is my Radio Shack amplified speaker for the K3, my OHR WM1 Watt meter. All the way to the left is a Yaesu 2 Meter radio (for those rare times that I get on 2 Meters).

Bottom line is that it’s still a basement shack in an unfinished basement.  No wall to wall carpeting, finished ceilings or fancy paneling on the walls.  But it is where I spend a lot of time, so at least it’s pretty neat and clean, now.

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].

The view at CT9/OM3RM..

I was sitting at the operating desk this evening setting up N1MM logger for the ARRL CW contest starting Friday. I was sitting with the K3 on 40m and clicking on spots on the N1MM band map, wanting to see if the radio followed and all was working well. There was a spot CT9/OM3RM and I clicked on the spot and the rig did do as it was told  and go to the spot. I could hear Madeira island calling CQ so I gave it a go and low and behold he came back to me!! Now for some this is no big deal BUT for reasons unknown my attic

C6APG setup

dipole just does not like 40m at all. It's to the point were U.S station struggle to hear me. I then saw C6APG in the Bahamas again on 40m gave him a call and he too came back to me. I am in total shock with how 40m is co-operating this evening. I hope this holds up for the contest this weekend it sure will help out the score for sure. Maybe I will spin the K3 antenna tuner and give 80m a go as well! Oh and just for the record both these contacts were done with 5 watts QRP and the faithful attic dipole.


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

Due to the health issues of the developer Joe Large W6CQZ it has been some time since there was a new version of the popular JT65-HF application. So I was interested to receive an email from Erwin, DK5EW, telling me about an enhanced version of JT65-HF made by Matthias DL3VCO called JT65-HF-Comfort.

JT65-HF as enhanced by  Matthias, DL3VCO

Matthias has not made an add-on to JT65-HF in the style of programs like JT-Alert. Instead he has made changes to the actual JT65-HF source code. I was particularly pleased to see that the enhanced version retains compatibility with the popular add-on JT-Alert by Laurie, VK5AMA. When I tried recompiling the JT65-HF source code myself the new version did not work with Laurie’s program, which I regard as an essential aid to JT65A operating. (In fact I have cheekily asked VK5AMA if he would consider making a version of JT-Alert that works with K1JT’s WSJT-X program!)

I have not spent much time with JT65-HF-Comfort as my interest at the moment is directed towards the new JT9 mode, but you can see from the screenshot that one of the improvements DL3VCO has made is to display the callsign above each trace on the waterfall. He has also added a new Statistics menu which displays the number of contacts you have made per DXCC entity per band. I couldn’t show you that as I use KComm for logging so my log is not in a format that JT65-HF-Comfort can read. You  can find a Google-translated version of the JT65-HF-Comfort information here.

If you are interested in trying JT65-HF-Comfort then you can download a setup program (a modified version of W6CQZ’s installer) to install the updated version. I shall certainly try using it the next time I do some JT65A operation.

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

AmateurLogic.TV Episode 50 is now available for download.

Peter builds the NS-40 40-Meter QRP Transmitter Kit. George and Tommy visit friends and find new toys at the 2013 Capital City Hamfest. Emile talks about Ham Radio Deluxe and Automating routine tasks. We run into someone you may remember and much more.

1:09:00 of the usual suspects.

Download

View in web browser: YouTube

This episode brought to you by:
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George Thomas, W5JDX, is co-host of AmateurLogic.TV, an original amateur radio video program hosted by George Thomas (W5JDX), Tommy Martin (N5ZNO), Peter Berrett (VK3PB), and Emile Diodene (KE5QKR). Contact him at [email protected].

I spent couple of hours last night playing in the NAQCC Sprint.  It was the 100th Sprint held since the founding of the club back in 2004. It was good to hear familiar friends and new calls come back to me last night.

My score?

Pitiful.

19 QSOs with 13 S/P/Cs worked – my total score didn’t even break the 1,000 point mark, only 988 total points at the end.

Not sure why I didn’t do better, but if I could blame one thing, I’d have to say probably a lack of practice.  A few years back, I used to get into every QRP Sprint I could.  NAQCC, ARS Spartan Sprint, RFTB every blessed month as well as all the miscellaneous QRP-ARCI and FISTS events.  I would routinely make 30 – 40 contacts in the same amount of time.  Nothing has gotten worse, equipment wise, in fact it’s gotten better.  I still have the Butternut, the G5RV got switched out for the 88′ EDZ and I even added the W3EDP.  The antenna and rig quality have definitely increased.

What hasn’t gotten better has been the time spent behind the rig.  I am doing much better getting behind the key this year compared to last year (heck, the past two years!), but I don’t get on nearly as much as I did when I was heavily involved in the sprints a few years ago.  My rustiness shows.

No one to blame, but myself.  I just have to get back on the horse and back in practice.

73 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].

As I was clearing out my childhood home I came across an old radio that my father had tucked away in the basement. It was a German Blaupunkt radio, and what a historic dial it had!

It turned out that my father had himself found it as he was clearing out his childhood home many years before and that it had belonged to my grandfather who died in 1959.

It covers longwave, medium wave and three shortwave bands from 5.5 to 21 MHz. I had never before seen a radio with a dial given in meters rather than kHz or MHz, but I have later understood that that was not uncommon for pre world war II radios.

Since the back was missing, I had no information about age or type. The tubes which were all in the 11-series suggested the end of the thirties, but here it turned out that the dial had valuable information.

The medium wave part of the dial had a separate side on the left hand for German stations and here one can find cities that are no longer in Germany such as Königsberg on 223 m and 291 m (1348 and 1031 kHz). Today this is Kaliningrad in Russia. The dial also showed Danzig on 230 m (1303 kHz), ”Schles. G. W.” (Schlesische Gleichwelle – a single frequency net with stations in Gleiwitz and Reichenbach/Oberlausitz) on 244 m (1231 kHz), and Breslau (315 m – 950 kHz). Today these are the cities of Gdansk, Gliwice and Wroclaw in Western Poland, an area which was in Germany until the end of the war. At least the radio must have been from before the end of WW2.

But there were a couple of more names with a lot of history in them. Troppau can be found on a wavelength of 249 m (1204 kHz), a frequency which it had until September 1939. Today Troppau is called Opava and lies in the Czech Republic. Troppau lies in the Sudetenland which Germany annexed on 30. September 1938. Finally one can find Memel on 531 m (565 kHz). This city is today called Klaipeda and lies in Lithuania. It was occupied on 22. March 1939 as the last German annexation before the outbreak of the war on 1. September 1939.

Thus the conclusion of this historic search across the dial is that the radio dates from some time between March and September 1939.

With some cleaning the exterior turned out to be quite nice. I thought to myself that I cannot give up now, so on inspection I could see that a couple of electrolytic capacitor had been replaced, probably by my father. It had the following tubes: ECH11 as mixer/oscillator, EBF11 and EF11 for the intermediate frequency stages, and EFM11 for the magic eye and the first low frequency amplifier.

The output tube and the rectifier were missing, and it was natural to look for tubes in the same 11-series. I was not able to find this particular radio in the large archives of the Norwegian Radio History Society, but there was documentation for a few other Blaupunkts there. From their descriptions I could guess EL11 for the output tube. Measuring the filament voltage for the rectifier gave 4 Volts, so then AZ11 was a good choice.

With some excitement I turned on the voltage for the first time, and to be on the safe side I connected it in series with a 60 W light bulb to reduce the voltage. No explosion! As incredible as it sounds, with full voltage it actually produced sound. But unfortunately after a few seconds everything disappeared. One evening with diagnosis of the radio and I could isolate the problem to the beginning of the audio section and two rotten shielded cables connecting audio in and out of the pentode in the magic eye. Not everything is as new after 60 years! After having replaced the cables the radio was perfect, and even the magic eye and the dial lamps functioned. In my experience the magic eye is often weak and in the Oslo region the dial lamps for the longwave band may have burnt out as the local station used to be on 218 kHz.

Some weeks later as I was about to clean the dial for dust I disassembled the glass in the front and found an inscription saying Blaupunkt 7W79 and the date 28.3.39. So the result of my detective search wasn’t too bad! In fact the dial was produced with an updated name just 6 days after the occupation of Memel/Klaipeda. 

This radio cannot have been more than a couple years old when all radios were confiscated in Norway in 1941. Imagine how sad it must have been to give up such a nice and costly radio at that time! This must also have been one of the few radios that actually were returned to their rightful owners in 1945.

Now the radio has a prominent place in my house and every time it is turned on it is a reminder of both the history of my family and of a turbulent era in the history of Central Europe.

---

First published as “Min farfars Blaupunkt radio” in Hallo Hallo of the Norwegian Radio History Society, September 2001, updated in 2013. © Sverre Holm

Sverre Holm, LA3ZA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Norway. Contact him at [email protected].