AmateurRadio.com

We had two very good QRP ops serving Fox duty tonight. Dave N1IX in New Hampshire and another Dave, AB9CA in Alabama. Double barrel Daves!

As the hunt began, my gut instinct was to listen for N1IX first. I mean, go figure, right? New Jersey to New Hampshire — 80 Meters — in the Winter and at night. No brainer, right?

Right!  But even though Dave N1IX was a relatively easy catch, he wasn’t as loud as I thought he would be. I was expecting 599 or better. He ended up being 569/579 at best. But I did get his pelt in my bag, so it was off to hunt for Alabama Dave.

I found him, rather easily, also. However, his signal swung wildly. He was either 559 at best, or was completely in the mud. I ended up having to turn the K3’s AGC off so I could hear him decently. The static crashes did wonders for my bleeding ears!

Even though I was able to hear Dave AB9CA throughout, it seemed he just wasn’t hearing me.  I kept switching between the HF9V, the W3EDP and the EDZ, but no matter which antenna, nothing seemed to be working. I was considering lighting a signal flare, but that would not have been Kosher.

And Dave must have been having receiving problems also. He went back to several stations, only to have them fade away on him, and forcing him to send them a “nil”. And he was also changing his listening frequency often, probably to get away from local QRM and QRN on his end. In all, it made for an interesting time.

But luck was on my side, and with about 15 minutes left in the hunt, Dave finally picked me out of the muck. Conditions were bad enough that I had to repeat my half of the exchange for him once. But in the end, I got a “TU”, so all’s well that ends well.

QRP – patience and perseverance DO pay off!

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].

Well, not really!

But as a reminder that this Saturday is Freeze Your Buns Off, he treats us to a flashback of the Flight of the Bumblebees from 2012.

Hey Rem …… how about a video of the Skeeter Hunt for 2013? (Hint, hint, hint, HINT!!!!!)

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].

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.

Compared to what it was before, the W2LJ basement shack is now pretty organized.  About a dozen large green garbage bags went out to the trash.  Some was mine; but a lot was some ceramic pieces that I had been storing for my Mom for the last nine years after she moved out of our house and into her apartment.  This shelf was totally filled with boxes of paints and ceramics – now it has radio and electronic items on it.

Those empty firelog boxes come in handy.  One is holding various empty enclosures that I have collected over the years.  The other has my collection of unfinished kits.  I have to sort through those and see if there’s any that I want to sell.  But parts tins, egg crates, rolls of wire and cable, cable ties, various parts and pieces all have a neat home now.

I have a relatively uncluttered operating space now; and my little tray table that I use for building is now uncluttered and very usable.  The World Map is new (and slightly smaller than the ARRL one that I had) as is the MFJ LED clock hanging on the wall.  My old Radio Shack one, which was about 20 years old was starting to lose some segments.

Down on the leg of the table is where I placed the new antenna switch.  The old one was on the wall; and I always had to lean forward to make an antenna selection change.  This is much better location now.

I would say that I am about 90% complete.  I need to go to Harbor Freight this weekend and purchase another 40 drawer storage cabinet like you can see in the lower left of the very top picture.  I have a lot of resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc that I have to sort, label and store.  That will take a while; but at least I have a functional uncluttered shack in which to do it now.

Before I left the shack for the evening, I disconnected the antennas from the switch. It reached 65F here today; but tonight we are expecting thunderstorms, 2 inches of rain and very gusty winds (maybe up to 60 MPH).  I don’t want to take the chance of either radio getting damaged.

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].

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

My first Android app

I thought that some of you might be interested to look at the first app I have completed using Basic4Android (B4A) called WhereAmI. It’s no great shakes as an app, and I think there is at least one other in the Android Market that does a similar job. My app’s unique feature is that besides the locator it shows the national grid reference (NGR) as well as the Worked All Britain (WAB) square. WAB is a popular activity on the low HF bands over here.

Because NGR and WAB only cover the UK, my app will not be very useful if you are outside of Great Britain. Indeed the app will probably blow up if you try it outside the UK as I haven’t included any test that the user is within these sceptred isles.

I’d rather not say how long the app took me to complete, but it was far longer than expected given that I had already written code to convert from lat/long to grid locator in VOAProp. That code was in Pascal, and the trouble was caused by the fact that Basic4Android does not have equivalent functions to those in Pascal, or even Visual Basic, so I could not just do a copy and paste. In the end I found a conversion routine written in C++ and converted that to B4A’s dialect of Basic. From there on it was easy, as there is a user-written library in B4A to handle conversions to/from National Grid references, upon which the WAB programme is based.

If I don’t try something else I might have a go at displaying a Google Map centred on my location, as one of the examples that come with B4A does just that.

I don’t plan on publishing any of the apps I create in Google Market (or Google Play as I think they now call it). I am doing this just for fun. Think of this as the programming equivalent of those radio projects knocked together on a breadboard or built Manhattan style, with no expectation that they will get put into a nice box.

If there is any interest I will make available the B4A project files as a zip file so that folks can play with them, hack them about or use them as a starting point for something better.

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

I posted yesterday I had contacted F8EI and in the heat of the moment I had thought I contacted  him with between 20 and 14mW's of power!! I was thrilled when the contact ended and my calculations done it showed the distance at (I used the higher wattage of 20mWs) 181,958 miles per watt. I was thrilled and it was off to another contact to see what I could do for more miles per watt. On my Hendricks attenuator there is a bypass switch and I use it as the audio also is attenuated. I found another contact and switched in the Hendricks attenuator as I was transmitting I noticed the power output was around 150Mw's!!!! Did I read the meter wrong in my excitement.....I already sent an email to F9EI with the news of a 20mW contact. I was very discouraged not knowing what I was reading during the contact. Well 140mW's in nothing to laugh at and the miles per watt is still impressive.
Today I was looking through some recent photos on my PC of my shack setup as I wanted to change the wall paper on my PC at work. I was looking at pic's from yesterdays contact being the most recent pics of my shack. In one of the pic's was a shot of the rig and Hendricks attenuator, as I zoomed in on the attenuator the slider switches used to attenuate were not in the same position as they are right now! I had never repositioned the switches so I got to thinking Hmmmmm when I hit the bypass switch did I move the one attenuate switch that is out of position according the the picture?????. I turned on the K3 and moved the switch back to the position in the picture and took a reading on the meter and it was bouncing between 20 and 14mWs of power as the key sent out dits and dah's.
HOLY COW I did contact F9EI with (lets use the higher output) with 20mW's and I was not reading the meter wrong after all. It was me who inadvertently moved an attenuate switch to off along with the bypass switch. Just to test I checked the output with this attenuate switch in the off position (opposite of the pic I took just after the contact) and low and behold I was getting around 150mW's. Bottom line I really did make a 181,958 miles per watt contact!!!!
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

I took the test for my Novice license in November of 1978.  I received my ticket in the mail at the very end of December 1978.  I remember that I was sitting, taking a break from my job at the camera store where I was working.  We were having a post-Christmas sale and it had been a frantic day. My Mom had called to tell me that I had received the vaunted envelope from the FCC and that my call was KA2DOH. Between that time and my very first QSO, I was occupied with putting my station together.

For some reason, in my mind, I always remember my first QSO as having taken place on January 29th, 1979.  But a look in Logbook Number One reveals the date as January 28th, 1979 – so the 34th anniversary of my very first QSO was yesterday!

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