AmateurRadio.com

I wrote this short article for our club newsletter in hopes it will encourage some members to upgrade from technician class.

It is a strange privilege we have… this ham radio hobby. This morning while having a quick cup of tea, I travel around the world in under 10 minutes visiting briefly with Israel, Italy, Slovenia and Aruba.

I am transported from my radio room upstairs to places far away. Outside there is fresh snow and it’s 10F. It’s definitely not snowing in Aruba. I stop for a quick visit with Carl, P49V. He’s 2100 miles to my south… at 75F the flowers are blooming. It’s a great place to begin my journey.

I have chatted with Carl before… once in 2010, and again in 2011. We don’t linger for long… just to say a quick hello and exchange signal reports.

I turn the dial and I’m in Israel! 5500 miles away between Egypt and Iraq. Who would imagine. Udi says “Hello,” and wishes me well on my journey.

This strange breakfast navigation is made possible by some modest radio equipment and a simple wire hung from the trees outside. I am using Morse on the 15 meter band. Pure magic to many, rather a common occurrence (though magic none-the-less) for those more practiced in the radio arts.

Between sips of tea I turn north and west to central Italy. It’s somewhat closer to home at 4500 miles. Vanni, I5ECW and I have visited before a few years ago. He sends, “Ciao, Ciao,” and I am on my way to Slovenia to visit with Dan.

Dan, S59N lives south of Austria in central Slovenia. He sits in his shack using mostly homemade equipment. We have chatted nearly 20 times since 2004.

I say “Good Afternoon” to Dan (he’s in a different time zone) and reach again for my tea cup. Barely ten minutes have passed since I turned on the radio set, but already I’ve traveled to the far reaches of the world. I’m ready for some oatmeal.

Jim Cluett, W1PID, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Hampshire, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

As we go from Spring back to Winter.  Yesterday we had a high temperature in the low 50s. Today’s high was in the low 30s. There’s a chance for a light dusting of snow tonight. High temperatures for the next three or four days are not supposed to even make the freezing mark.

I started the big shack clean up this weekend and got maybe a third of the way done – well, maybe a little less.  Step one is tossing out all the junk that’s useless and has no value. Step two will involve reorganizing what I keep. Step three will be to take care of whatever odds and ends are needed.

As expected, I have found a few items that I had looked for in the past, but was never able to find. “Oh, so THAT’S where that was!” I said that a couple times.

Hopefully, if I get a little bit done each night, I should be able to finish this next weekend. Going forward, I really have to avoid the hoarder mindset where I think that I will use every scrap that I save. If it’s not of really useful value, from here on out, it gets tossed.

I had a modicum of success on last night’s Run For The Bacon. The bands were pretty dead. Not sure if that was due to bad propagation, or if everyone was tuckered out from the NFC playoffs. I managed 7 QSOs – two on 40 Meters and five on 80 Meters. As usual, that puts me solidly in the middle of the pack.

Oh, I took a closer look at that “no-name” antenna switch that I had been using, and now I know why the Butternut performed so badly when it was connected to it. It turns out the SO239 connector was not soldered well and only “partial” contact was being made. I guess there is some mighty fine junk out there that is not MFJ!

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].

Looks like the folks at American Radio Supply are giving away a Baofeng UV-5R. They’re a sponsor of our site and I’m happy to see them offering this kind of opportunity. If you’re in the market for a new HT, skip on over and check out this little radio! Looks like the contest ends January 31, 2013 at midnight (Eastern time) and is open to licensed U.S. hams.

Do you own a Baofeng UV-5R? Have you used one? If so, what do you think of it?  How does it compare to some of the other inexpensive HTs on the market?

Matt Thomas, W1MST, is the managing editor of AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

This morning we woke up to a covering of a couple of centimetres of snow. It’s fairly wet snow: The temperature is just above freezing so it is already beginning to thaw. This is about as much snow as we usually get here, but the less time it hangs around the better. When it’s cold the smow doesn’t melt and eventually gets compacted into ice which, especially as we are on a hill, is a real nuisance.

I am often asked whether snow on the roof affects the performance of attic antennas. My answer is: Not so as I’ve noticed. The SWR of my attic antennas remains exactly the same (in fact it changes more on hot days when the attic temperature reaches 40 degrees plus, due to expansion.)

My magnetic loop on 30m did not need any re-tuning this morning and the first APRS packet sent was received by a German digipeater. My 2m APRS gateway is also functioning normally. I’ve put the K3 and multiband dipole on beacon monitoring duty and the beacons are coming through just as I would expect. In other words, all is normal.

Perhaps if there was a metre or more of snow I might notice a difference. But I think the amount of frozen water the RF has to pass through on the roof is negligible compared to the clouds it must traverse on its way to and from the ionosphere.

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

KX3 on the new Nifty stand viewed at same angle as below pic

Last week I ordered a stand for my KX3 radio I had seen it on the Nifty ham radio site. I was there looking at their new KX3 radio guide. I have one of their guides for each of my radios and they are great. If you want to find a "how to" with your radio instead of searching through your manual these Nifty manuals have it all set out at your finger tips. So back to the KX3 stand.....I was surprised to see they were

KX3 on it's own legs

 offering a stand for the KX3. I have found here in the shack that when the radio is supported by it's own legs for me it sits on a funny angle still. The Nifty stand uprights the radio to a very easy to operate position......for me anyway. I have read some postings about this stand with some saying they didn't notice any real difference between the rigs legs and the new stand from Nifty.
  Also a week or so ago my KXPD3 keyer and KXBC3 NiMH battery charger came in. I have not yet had the time to install the KXBC3 charger. I have mounted the Key and it worked great right great out of the box. The key does come with other springs to change
the tension of the key. Up to this point I have not changed the key spring tension it works fine as it is.
My Begali key that I have was (I thought) giving me problems with extra dit's and dah's at times. It became very frustrating and even after adjusting the key as well as cleaning the contacts I would still have the same

New KX3 key

 problem. The Elecraft key was great and no extra code was being sent at all........it did not take me long to figure it out and for you CW buff's out there you may know what I mean when I say.......The Eleraft key was "loose", that is the best way I can describe it and the Begali is more "tight" The contact spacing on the KXPD3 is wider and in the past I would had seen this as sloppy spacing. BUT..it seems this works best for me and my joy with the code has come back. I then took my Begali key and opened up the contact spacing, now it too works fine for me. For some reason it never occured to me to open up the contact spacing on the key. I thought the tighter the contact spacing the better the keying ability....don't ask me where I got that idea!!
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

A few of my blogging colleagues have written about having surprising success WSPRing with modest antennas on the 474kHz VLF band. I thought I would try to see what if anything I could spot using my attic dipole as an antenna.

Receiving WSPR-15 on the 630m band

I downloaded the WSPR-X software which supports the new WSPR-15 mode. (The standard WSPR for HF and VHF is now called WSPR-2, the number indicating the duration in minutes of the transmit cycle.)

First problem was to find a receiver that would tune to 474kHz. My K3 would not tune below 490kHz nor the KX3. My K2 doesn’t have general coverage at all. My SDR-4 receiver would not go anywhere near the frequency. My FT-817 came to the rescue. I took it out of the drawer, blew the dust off it, found a power lead, switched it on and it tuned to 474.2kHz quite nicely.

The next problem was to find a sound card to receive the audio. I have three USB sound devices currently connected to the shack PC and I could only identify which driver was for which sound card by trial and error. After I realized that WSPR-X can be used for HF WSPR as well I tried it out first on 30m. For about an hour I had confusion as I did not seem to be receiving any WSPR signals at all. Eventually I tried WSPR-X on the sound card used by my K3. Once I verified that the program worked and was decoding spots I then tried receiving 30m WSPR on the ‘817. Once that was successful I tuned the receiver to 474.20kHz, set the mode to WSPR-15 and left it for a few hours to see what would happen.

I was doubtful whether I would receive anything on my 80 – 6m multiband dipole which is too short and totally unmatched on the 630m band, but when I came up to the shack later this evening I saw there were three spots of PA0A in JO33 at 30 minute intervals! These spots were not reported to WSPRnet as I had been so pessimistic of my chances of decoding anything that I hadn’t bothered to tick the “Upload spots” check box.

So the experiment was a success. I doubt that I will receive anyone else on this antenna so it is probably not worth leaving the radio set up for it but it was fun to see what can be received here on this new amateur band.

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

My children know what kind of gifts that please their father, so they gave me a Supermechanical Twine for Christmas. It is described in this way:

Want to monitor things and environments remotely without a nerd degree? Maybe you want to get a tweet when your laundry’s done, an email when the basement floods, or a text message when you left the garage door open.

I am presently using it to monitor the temperature in the outer part of the basement, where there is a chance of freezing when the outside temperature drops below about -15 C (5 F). I can continuously read the status such as the temperature on any web browser on my computer or mobile phone. I can also set threshold values that trigger an email message.

The Twine is easy as a breeze to program, by using simple rules as shown below.

The only catch is that right now the conversion to centigrades is not fully debugged, so I had to enter the strange world, to me, of Fahrenheit degrees close to freezing temperatures to get the rules to work.

I just couldn’t let go of my curiosity as to what’s inside, so here’s a picure. Links to the datasheet for the processor and the Wifi-module can be found on the Supermechanical Community site.

The Twine comes with a temperature sensor and an orientation sensor built in. As options one can connect an external humidity sensor or a magnetic switch. Alternatively one may use a breakout board for inputs from one’s own binary sensor.

Other interesting applications are:

• Garage door monitoring and alarm when it has been open for a certain time period
• Monitoring the temperature of a turkey thawing
• Use of the magnetic switch in a pet door to track when your pet comes and goes.
• Christmas tree water level monitoring
• Temperature logging

There is a Supermechanical Community forum with discussions and lots of ideas as well as a Supermechanical Support page for users who need assistance. I think we will soon see many more similar devices – we are at the threshold of the era of the Internet of Things.

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Update 29. Jan 2013: Yesterday, the Twine got software upgrade 1.2 and now it does Celcius properly, I have just tested it. So what I wrote about having to use Fahrenheit is no longer needed – and now that I was about to get familiar with Fahrenheit! In addition some new functionality was added such as vibration sensing, I’m looking forward to testing that too.

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