AmateurRadio.com

Today was a good day to be indoors. We had some snow today, but not nearly as much as was originally forecast. The weathermen were calling for 3 to 6 inches of the white stuff, but we ended getting around maybe an inch. Just slightly more than a dusting.

I did get on the radio for a bit after handling some house chores. But my radio efforts ended up not being fruitful at all. I called CQ for quite a while on 15, 17, 20 and 30 Meters. The Reverse Beacon Network told me that my signal was getting out just fine, but there were no answers to my calls.  Perhaps every body was busy with the RAC contest.

So I entertained myself by investigating logging programs. The new version of Ham Radio Deluxe is out, but the program went from free to $80. I suppose that given the sophistication of the software that it’s worth it, but I can’t imagine spending that right now. I did sell my K2 and PFR3A recently, but those funds are earmarked for something else. So I will maintain the last free version on my computer. I also noticed that Version 6 is recommended to be run on a Windows 7 machine with dual core processors. Hardly what my netbook is set up for.

Now that computers are becoming such a fixture in our shacks, it almost seems like we are replacing them at faster rates than our radios. There are many Hams out there using boatanchors, but I would venture to guess that most everyone’s computers are not as old. Can’t get away with antiques when it comes to computing power in the shack!

Tomorrow should be less busy as far as chores go. Maybe I’ll bet to spend more time twiddling the dial.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

Since I seem to have engaged in nostalgia a bit, with the IC-740 post here’s another one! As I was driving back to Cheltenham with Mum this afternoon, talking about her father, Harold Iles, my Grandpa (who incidentally features in Laurie Lee’s novel, ‘Cider With Rosie’) . Harold was a great experimenter and really should have been a radio amateur. He was building radio sets when this was very cool stuff. Mum was telling me that he’d helped her build her own valve receiver. Certainly in the 1970s, he helped me build my own crystal set, which I still have! When he died in 1979, he was kind enough to leave me a little money.

By 1979, I was already very interested in amateur radio and had been shortwave listening for sometime, using a Nordmende Globetrotter broadcast bands radio which I had acquired when a dear, if distant, uncle had passed on. The Globetrotter was excellent, although the tuning was not so precise and it was hard to know exactly where you were listening – which could be tricky when sending off SWL reports!

I think I really wanted to buy myself a Trio (not Kenwood in those days) R1000, but could not really afford it and I was not working at the time, so the affordable option, which would bring me SSB reception for the amateur bands was the Sony ICF-2001D.

I’ve a feeling that the ICF-2001 was £199, but I’m not sure. I remember buying it from a shop on the High Street in Cheltenham, ‘Ray Electrical’ (Robber Ray, as my Dad, perhaps unkindly, referred to him!), using Grandpa’s gift.

Having digital readout and SSB was amazing! Being 1979/1980, solar conditions were good and I was able to hear lots of DX, particularly on 28MHz. With the receiver in my bedroom using the whip antenna, I listened to the USA working into the Indian Ocean (VQ9) and much more DX! I was captivated and knew that this was the hobby for me.

The ICF-2001 served as a great introduction to amateur radio for me, and I entered the SWL ladder in ‘Short Wave Magazine’ for a couple of  years. By early 1983, I had taken and passed the Radio Amateurs Examination (then a City and Guilds exam) and obtained my first callsign, G6TTU. The ICF2001 formed part of my first station, being used on the Mode A satellites (145MHz up and 29MHz down) enabling me to work such DX, to a VHF only call, at least, as OX3WS in Greenland and TU2IT in the Ivory Coast.

Of course, not long after, I aimed for my Class A licence, passing the 12 wpm morse test, and by then was working, and had purchased the IC-740 so the need for the ICF2001 was lessened.

However, my Dad was always interested in short wave and I made the rig available to him. When I was off on a DXpedition somewhere, such as D68C in the Comoros, or ZF1VX in the Caymans, he would listen out for me, which was a nice feeling.

Wind the clock forward to this afternoon. I wondered if the ICF2001, which was still in Dad’s old study, would still work (not having been used since Dad’s death almost 3 years ago), so I grabbed it and brought it home.

I popped a couple of AA batteries into the ‘computer’ battery box, connected a power supply and fired it up! IT WORKS!

Fun to listen around, just on the internal antenna – just for old times’ sake, but it’s nice to know it still works, and I’m sure I can still coax some DX out of it!

Thanks, Grandpa, for getting me started…

(PS This is the first blog post written on my Raspberry Pi computer)

I hope all of you had a very good Christmas. I was not very well a couple of days before the holiday. Nothing to do with my cancer, I’m glad to say, but possibly a result of all the treatment for it. I’m feeling a lot better now, but have got to have more tests and may have to go into hospital for removal of gallstones or kidney stones – I’m not sure which as I’ve been told I have gallstones but I have had some sharp pain in the kidney area. As a consequence of this I haven’t felt much like getting up at a reasonable hour to start the beacon monitor or HF APRS gateway.

Creative Design New FM+DAB USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T

Before Christmas my interest was piqued by Tim G4VXE’s adventures using cheap digital TV dongles as receivers for, amongst other things, aircraft spotting. The first dongle I ordered was described as a Creative Design New FM+DAB USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T with antenna, and cost just over six quid!

EZCAP eztv645 RTL2832U / FC0013 USB DVB-T Digital TV Dongle

After a bit more reading up on the subject I began to doubt that this would be compatible with the software everyone was using so I ordered a second one, described as an EZCAP eztv645 RTL2832U / FC0013 USB DVB-T Digital TV Dongle for WIN7 LINUX SDR which was a massive £8.68 including postage from Hong Kong.

Both arrived yesterday. I tried the ezcap first, but my shack PC didn’t like the mini-disc that came with it so I was unable to test it as a TV receiver. Following the instructions for the aircraft decoders I installed the driver using zadig_xp, then downloaded and ran rtl1090 which is a decoder for the ADSB packets. This seemed to work – no error messages appeared – but nothing else happened. To display the aircraft data that I hoped to receive I downloaded ADSBScope and installed it. I then spent a lot of time trying various options to connect ADSBScope with rtl1090 but got nowhere. I also tried SDRSharp in the hope that I could use the dongle as a VHF/UHF SDR, and ADSBSharp as an alterntive to rtl1090. But neither of them received anything.

After a while I gave up, disappointed. I then installed the Creative Design dongle and its software. A scan for channels found about 55 TV channels with its quarter wave antenna hung in the window. So it was obviously working. Just not with any of the SDR or ADSB software, as I had suspected.

This morning I tried installing the ezcap software CD that my shack PC couldn’t read on another computer. The software installed perfectly on this laptop so I plugged in the dongle and hung the antenna in the window. The software scanned for channels and found precisely nothing. I think this proves conclusively that I have a duff ezcap dongle. Ah, eBay!

I recently mentioned using PZTLog which has been the work of Charlie M0PZT.  This is an extremely well done logging program and on the plus side, is free.  Don’t let the “free” part dissuade you in any way.  Charlie has put together a magnificent piece of software that will compete with any program that you would pay for.

There’s another one that I have been playing around with that is also free.  This one is called LOG4OM and has been written by Daniele Pistollato IW3HMH.

This program is also very good.  It is a little more basic than PZTLog and was written more in mind for the Ham who might be considering moving away from paper logging to computer logging.  It’s no slouch of a program, though.  It has many great features – ADIF import/export, mapping of QSOs, labeling, onboard DX Clusters, rig control, etc.

If you have been searching for a logging program and haven’t found one that quite fits your needs yet, I would highly recommend giving each of these a look.

The price is right!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

My APRS-based temperature monitor has now worked flawlessly for half a year. APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System so it can send much more than temperature data, the chief usage is really for GPS position reports.

But I just needed a temperature monitor and here are the readings for December. As one can see, there were no days with temperature above freezing. At 800 m elevation in the mountains of Telemark in Norway, this is not unexpected for this time of year and makes for good skiing!

I use a Quanzheng TG-25AT handheld with a quarter-wave whip antenna on 144.800 MHz. Its signals reach the LD3GT digipeater at 1845 m above sea level. Although I don’t have direct line of sight, the low power (1 Watt) setting is adequate as the distance is only 10 km. The APRS-beacon is an OpenTracker USB set up for transmission every 15 minutes. An external DS18S20 temperature sensor which measures the outside temperature is connected to the 1-Wire® bus of the OpenTracker USB.

Thanks to the infrastructure providers: The Tønsberg group of NRRL (LA1T) who operate the LD3GT digipeater, probably the one with the largest coverage in Southern Norway (Gaustadtoppen). Thanks also to the various operators who receive packets from LD3GT and pass them on to the internet, and thanks to aprs.fi for processing and displaying the data on their excellent web site!