AmateurRadio.com

*This article is copied from my regular blog page – I apologise to any readers of AmateurRadio.com who may be dismayed at too many articles on this subject at the minute. Thanks for your indulgence!

Like many of us, I am still amazed by the amount of radio spectrum we have to freely play with. Shots are being fired and eyes are being gouged by companies for small slices of precious bandwidth. Multiply our many electric playgrounds by the number of games (or modes) available and the permutations are enough to overload your front end.

I’ve decided to catch up with WSPR, a mode well known to many but new to me. I’m going to give it a go – the difficult way. Julian, G4ILO has an excellent article on the system here.

WSPR stands for Weak Signal Propagation Reporting and is a computer programme that runs your VHF/HF transceiver automatically in order to receive others running the same system. Successful contacts, one or two-way, are reported automatically to a website. It’s like having a worldwide net of propagation beacons for every band available at your fingertips and the results appear quickly after automatic contact confirmation. What a great thing to leave your equipment running overnight or during the day when you’re otherwise occupied!

Screenshot of map page on WSPR.net

The best thing is that WSPR works below the noise threshold and you can use very low power. I was staggered the other day to see that Tim, G4VXE had hit Australia on 40m with just 1W! One Watt! So I’m going to give it a go with 1W and just an indoor Miracle Whip antenna. I know many QRP CW experts may cracked this one before – but I’m new and excited. I’ll try 40m and work my way up to 2m and see what happens!

I’ll use my FT-817. A CAT lead arrived this week from Hong Kong but it seems I’ll also need an audio interface between the transceiver packet port and computer sound card to make it all work. Another option is to buy an external interface that has a sound card and interfaces to the computer with a USB. It’s not quite going to be a ‘plug and play’ job, I’m afraid to report.

10m WSPR spots @ G4ILO 22 November 2012

Really excellent propagation this afternoon to the eastern USA as the WSPR spots show. An hour’s break before afternoon tea resulted in QSOs with 7 new stations.  I actually had people calling me after I signed with another station. I like the callsign of the first station…

My Motorola Milestone 2 (which I think is known in some places as a Motorola Droid) has started acting up. I’ve had it more than a year now so it is out of warranty.

A couple of days ago I picked it up one evening and it was stone cold dead. Pulling the battery made no difference so I dropped it into the multimedia base and when it came to life it showed the battery was at 0%. The phone sleeps in the multimedia base so it is always fully charged and there is normally 60% left by the evening unless I’ve been running some GPS applications, which for just this reason I don’t. How odd.

The next day after a full charge the phone appeared to be OK. A couple of hours later I scrolled to the page where the Gmail app lives and its icon had changed to a box with a gear wheel in front of it. When I tried to run it I got a message “Application not installed.” Even odder.

I tried the tech support guy’s standard fix which is to switch it off and then switch it on again. To my relief this did the trick. The Gmail icon was back again and the app seemed to be working normally. Until this morning.

When I got up I was surprised that the phone wasn’t winking its green light at me to show there was email waiting. Had no-one at all commented to my blog? After breakfast I turned on the shack PC and lo and behold there were 4 messages in my inbox. The phone still showed nothing. Eventually I checked the account settings and every one of my Google accounts had the “Synchronize Gmail” setting turned off. How very peculiar.

I turned sync on again and the phone is checking my mail as normal. But I just wonder what it’s going to do next?

Has anyone else noticed that when you open the map page at wsprnet.org in Google Chrome the sliders (the bit you drag to scroll up/down or left/right) are missing from the scroll bars? They still work if you drag on where they ought to be, but as they are invisible it’s a bit confusing.

From the website wouxun.us

If only all amateur radio dealers were this honest!