AmateurRadio.com

Greetings AmateurRadio.com readers!  I have not written in quite awhile, so I feel the need to catch up a bit.  I’ve had so much going on lately that I just had to prioritize what time I have left at the end of the day.  I hope to be posting again on a more regular basis.

First of all, I want to mention that KD2CHE and I tied the knot back in October, on a cliff overlooking Lake Tahoe, on a beautiful (and warm thankfully) day in Incline Village, NV.  We were quite literally a stones throw from California.  The rest of our trip out west was great, including visits to two Silicon Valley surplus shops: Weird Stuff Warehouse, and Halted Supply Company (HSC), as well as HRO in Sunnyvale.  We even had a special tour of LucasFilms/Arts/ILG courtesy of some great friends with connections.  On the plane, on the way back, while leafing through a copy of Monitoring Times I purchased at HRO, I noticed that in an article about Ham Radio Kit Building, Kirk Kleinschmidt mentioned my Amateur Radio Kit Roundup as the source for info on kit building.  While it was a nice surprise, it also got me thinking that I needed to make the guide more accessible.  I will still post the changes here, but as a link to the guide’s new URL: RadioKitGuide.com.  For now it’s just a link to the page at my blog, but will evolve into a full wiki-style site in the near future.

My trusty HTX-10 has been busy these couple of months, logging calls to Alaska, Namibia, Croatia, New Mexico, Colorado, and California to name a few.  Mostly from the Crab Meadow Beach here on Long Island, but the Alaska contact was mobile!   A new addition to the collection is an Atlas 210X HF rig.  This was a holiday present from my better half.  After a couple of months of just listening, I finally put up a 35 foot random wire, and picked up an MFJ 941-D VersaTuner so that I could try and transmit.  It’s very close quarters where we live, so I’m limited in antenna choices, and have to worry about disturbing the neighbors (well, any more than they are already disturbed/disturbing).  I found out earlier in the week, that the setup seems to be very functional on 20 meters, and have talked to Mexico, and Florida so far.  I’m hoping for some good 10 and 15 conditions this weekend so that I can try it out up there.  I’m going to add a counterpoise to the setup and see if it helps me tune up on 40.  80 is out of the question for now, as I seem to obliterate my TV speakers and KD2CHE’s computer monitor when I even try to tune up.  My 5-cent 2 meter dipole has also been working well.  I’ll cover that in a later post.

Transmitter hunting has been pretty good, with the XYL and I usually finding the transmitter quickly, and rarely last.  What’s interesting about that is we are the only team in our hunting club that operates without a doppler.  I also will write a future post on our technique, which in our last hunt, guided us to the bunny way ahead of our technologically superior friends.  Unfortunately, as we arrived at the site, I assumed that we might have been wrong, due to the fact that there were no other cars from the hunters present.  Next time I won’t put my assumptions before my instincts.  In the end, KD2CHE was the one that actually found the box, by using her eyes, while a bunch of us wandered around the woods with our equipment.

That’s all for now.  Maybe I’ll catch one of you on HF this weekend.  73’s !

–Neil, W2NDG

 

 

Neil Goldstein, W2NDG, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New York, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Instead of chasing 80 Meter Foxes, I decided to make an effort in the NAQCC 160 Meter Sprint that was held tonight.  Boy, am I glad I did!

Up until now, I really haven’t had anything that loaded up well on 160 Meters.  When I had my G5RV, it would load on 160 Meters; but barely and you could sure tell the radio wasn’t happy about it.

The 88′ EDZ is about the same. It will load up on 160 Meters; but the autotuner in the K3 takes a painfully long time to achieve a match. And then, if you decide to change frequency – even just a hair, the autotuner begs to be re-tuned.

The W3EDP, however?  I hit the autotune button and within what seems to be about a second and a half, I get a tiny little “BRRRRP” and a 1.1:1 match.  And I can tune around quite a bit without the radio complaining.  I know it’s not the ideal solution for 160 Meters; but it has allowed me to make more 160 Meter contacts in one night than I have in all my 34 years of operating combined.  Seriously, before tonight, I think my total QSO count on 160 Meters was maybe 3 …. 4 – maybe 5 at most?

I made 17 contacts tonight, my best DX being North Carolina, Illinois, Indiana and Ontario.  Not bad for 5 Watts to a compromise antenna, eh? OK, so the W3EDP won’t earn me WAS or DXCC on 160 Meters, but at least now I have another band I can go to when other bands seem dead.

And my good friend Charles W2SH sent me an e-mail the other day, informing me about a book soon to come out from the ARRL on 160 Meter antennas, specifically for those of us who are real estate challenged.  That is a must buy for me once the NJ Hamfest season starts back up again in March.

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].

I just started up Google Chrome and my eye was caught by the minimize, maximize and close buttons in the title bar, which are bright red.

They stick out like a sore thumb. I can’t believe I wouldn’t have noticed it before. Is it just me, or my computer? If the buttons have changed colour, why? My eye is constantly drawn to these bright red buttons. It is a real eyesore.

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

The runaway success of the Elecraft KX3 has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of users of KComm. Even those who use a full-featured logging program in the shack find the simplicity of KComm and the compactness of its user interface (which was designed to fit a netbook) better suited to portable operating.

I received an email from a KComm user in Vienna, Wolfgang OE1MWW who wrote that he found the option to “Use PSK modem” (which uses AE4JY’s PSK Core DLL to operate PSK31 using the sound card) was disabled on his laptop running Windows XP SP3 though it was enabled on his desktop running Windows 7 64-bit. Wolfgang eventually found that replacing the file PSKCore.dll that was installed by KComm with one dowloaded from AE4JY’s website cured the problem.

I am surprised and a bit mystified as to why this occurred. My shack PC also runs Windows XP SP3 (I prefer to stay as far from the bleeding edge as possible) and it uses the same version of PSKCore.dll as is installed with KComm.

KComm’s version is much smaller so I’m hazarding a guess (since I can no longer remember) that it may have been compressed using UPX, an executable file compressor. I used to have a bit of a mania for compressing executable files so I could claim how small they were compared to certain other ham radio bloatware, but in these days of 100GB hard drives it’s probably rather fatuous. Possibly the compression caused an issue with some security software?

Whatever the reason, I’m grateful to Wolfgang for discovering a solution. I have added a note to KComm’s Troubleshooting page and updated the installer package to include AE4JY’s copy of the PSKCore.dll so hopefully new users will not encounter this problem.

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

It was time for me to go over the blog and do something that is never very easy to do.....I have had to preform this function in past and never looked forward to it. The time came to look through the blogs on my blog list and remove the ones that have been dormant for some time. As I went through the blogs I had noticed that some were without any activity for more than a year. I felt these ones for one reason or another were no longer functioning. It ended up I only had to drop about 3 blogs but it gives me more room to add active blogs. I can understand how workloads, family and sometime health problems can lead to a blog going stagnate. One thing I am guilty of is not changing my blog layout now and then to give it a new and fresh look. I think in the 3 years the blog has been up and running it has had....maybe 2 makeovers!! I should pay more attention to this as well as adding and or refreshing up the pages as well.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. 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].

Up until I got an Android smartphone, there has not been a single programmable device that I’ve owned and not tried to write my own programs for it. However, programming for Android devices seemed to be fiendishly difficult, requiring a good knowledge of Java (which I haven’t got) so I didn’t attempt it. The other week I saw an article in a computer magazine that went through describing how to create programs using a tool called Basic4Android. It seemed similar enough to other development tools I have used such as Visual Basic, Delphi and Lazarus. So I thought I would download the trial version and have a play.

The Basic4Android development environment,

I soon discovered that the trial version is pretty limiting. It’s enough to get a feel for the environment and the development process by creating “hello world” apps and suchlike, but in order to do anything interesting you need to use libraries and these are only accessible using the full paid-for version.

There are two full versions of Basic4Android you can buy: the Standard version which costs $49 and includes support and free upgrades for two months, and the Enterprise version which costs $99 and includes support and free upgrades for two years. As I’m not an Enterprise, only a dabbler (and a cheapskate one at that) I bought the Standard version. With hindsight that was not such a good idea, as I discovered after purchasing that only current paid-up users get access to the download links for additional libraries, even user-written ones, and access to the support forum. So after two months I’m on my own. A false economy, I think.

Sophisticated GPS apps can be developed

Basic4Android is a very powerful development tool and I don’t think there is much you couldn’t do with it if you’re clever  enough. The language is object oriented like any modern Basic, and objects exist to let you access the internet, draw charts, access SQL databases and much more. You can access the Android device’s GPS via a fully featured GPS library. There is even code to work with Google Maps. I have no intention of developing an Android version of APRSISCE (as if I could!) but Basic4Android looks powerful enough to make that possible.

So far I haven’t learned much about Basic4Android programming that’s worth sharing with people, but here are a few things I wish I had known prior to buying.

There is no need to pay the full prices I mentioned earlier. Once Google finds out you are interested in Basic4Android, ads to buy Basic4Android with 30% off will follow you around the web. To get the deal, click on one of them.

There are two options you can use to pay for Basic4Android, PayPal and Plimus. If you are in Europe then be sure to use the PayPal purchase buttons. If you use Plimus then you’ll get stung for VAT which will bump up the price 20%.

Better still you can get Basic4Android Enterprise version with two years’ updates and support at half price by using the coupon code dnxyif. Unfortunately this is only valid if you use the Plimus payment option so there is no avoiding VAT if you are in Europe. But even with VAT it’s still the best deal I think. I hope that helps someone.

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