I kept the radio tuned to 20 Meters for the evening and had a variety of QSOs.

The first was with CO6RD, Reynaldo in Cuba.  This wasn’t a long QSO as Reynaldo was working “contest style” racking up the QSOs. But I did get him on the first shot, even though a lot of stations were calling.

Next up was a busted QSO with Mike AA6WQ, who was operating from TN.  We got through the QSO basics, only to have the band pull the rug out from under us.  One minute we were going at it, next minute we couldn’t hear each other anymore. I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes.

With two short QSOs under my belt, I was thinking that might be how the evening was going to go. But my fears turned to be for nothing as the next QSO was an almost hour long rag chew with Paul W4KLY in Stone Moutnain, GA.  This was an Elecraft to Elecraft QSO.  Paul was using his K1 and (of course) I was on the KX3.  QSB had a role to play; but in all honesty, when the band was not in fade mode,  our signals were 599 both ways.  We talked about rigs, portable ops and antennas and summer vacation plans.  It was very enjoyable and it is truly amazing to see how fast an hour can go by on you when you’re having fun.

The last QSO for the night was with Rumi LZ2RS in Bulgaria.  He was calling “CQ QRP” and I was lucky enough to be heard on my first call.  Rumi was at 5 Watts; but what really made the QSO was his Yagi at 12 meters up, pointed my way.  I was on the 88′ EDZ pumping out 5 Watts from my end also.  Signals were a legitimate 559.

The bands have been so good lately!  Not the best I’ve ever witnessed; but after the past few pitiful years, this is like Heaven (comparatively).  I sure hope it stays this way for a while and doesn’t take a fast dive off a cliff into oblivion.

On another note, this new 9 cell battery that I got for the Acer is fantastic!  I got it Monday and attached it to the netbook for charging.  I’ve used it Tuesday, Wednesday, and tonight – about two to three hours per night.  The indicator says it still has about another two hours left in it.  Of course, I have Windows set for “Max Battery Life” through the control panel, but even so, this is way outlasting the old battery.  That one gave me about two hours computer time, tops.  This battery should be able to get me through a four hour sprint (outdoors) without breaking a sweat.

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].

This past week a very interesting question was posed, one I had not really thought about but now has got me thinking. Paul PC4T asked the question " Are more and more radio amateurs are using social media such as Twitter and Facebook"  Paul had checked the stats on his blog traffic and it was down....due to what, was the question?? I will be the first to admit I am really not up on the social media scene at all. I do have a Face-book page and Twitter account but I really don't understand them or use them all that often.  Here is my question to the bloggers out there....


Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

I’ve seen several times in various forums, when people ask about setting up cross-band repeaters, some Hams mention that they cannot think of a use for that feature.  Here is your example.

With a second car coming sometime in the next few weeks, the YL and I have been keeping our eyes open for a second dual-band mobile.  We had 2 vehicles up until about a month ago, when my old minivan got to the point where my investment in repairs exceeded my nostalgic affection for it.  I had a chance to get rid of it quickly when my mechanic said he had someone interested in taking it, as-is, for more than scrap value (steel is high out here, so don’t laugh).

I have a Radio Shack HTX-242.  My first mobile rig.  A great eBay find last year, but it was not holding up to everyday use.  It’s also a little numb in the receiving department, so it’s currently sitting on my elmer’s workbench.  The goal there is to get it receiving well enough to use a my doppler receiver.  The main radio is an Icom IC-207H dual-band with the option for remote mounting.  Jill gets to use that one during the week, as I’m in the car for less than 10 minutes while she drives me to the train.  The 207H will probably go into the new car when it comes, because of the remote mounting.  I want to keep the install as clean as possible.  That leaves the Buick as my daily driver, and without a decent rig.  I decided to look for something that can do cross-band repeat for my next rig, and finally picked up a used IC-2350H the other day.  It needs a little TLC, but nothing too complicated.  As-is, it transmits OK on the 440 side, but it will not let you hear anything received, even though it IS receiving.  The 2 Meter side is functioning great.  Some quick troubleshooting shows that the volume/squelch pot for the 440 side is damaged, but fixable.

I tried the cross-band repeat function last night, which works great, even with the problem.  I now have solved an issue that I was having in my home.  We live in a bit of an RF hole, about halfway between my club’s Eastern, and Western Long Island repeaters.  I can hit the Western repeater fine from the living room, with a rig attached to my homebrew wire antenna.  Anywhere else in the house, though, I cannot.  Sometimes during a few of the nets that I like to participate in, I need to be in the kitchen, or at my desk, or outside at the grill.  With the cross-band repeater, I can use my little Baofeng UV-3R to transmit through to the Western repeater’s input, and still be able to hear the output directly on the Baofeng.

To work correctly this requires the use of the programming software on the Baofeng to set up a split channel (receive on 2M, and transmit on 440).  I’m running the 2350H at 10 Watts, which is enough.  It is passing the PL tone from the Baofeng so no need to encode again.  The only feature I’m missing is tone-squelch on the Icom, so that un-authorized people don’t get in.  Even if they do though, the chances of them using the correct tone to pass through to the repeater I’m targeting are slim.  This weekend I’m going to test the receiving range of this setup with the mobile.  I think this will even cure some of the dead spots that I have issues with in the neighborhood.

I intend to use this elsewhere too.  We go on excursions up to the Adirondacks to my friend’s farm.  Cell phones are marginal there, at best, and my Sprint phone just laughs at me when I try to use it.  This would be a great way to communicate on his property.  I can turn it on in the car, before we go hiking.  I expect my son to also have his license soon, as well as Jill’s oldest, so we’ll have 4 licensed Hams when we go up there.  Definitely a good investment.

–Neil W2NDG

 

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

When I’m mobile with the FT8900, I generally have one of the VFOs on one of the local repeaters and the second one scanning about 40 channels for activity. This morning, the scanning stopped on 145.500 and I heard G4APL/M call CQ.

It’s fairly rare for me to hear a simplex CQ on 145.500, so after a quick bit of button pressing, I called Paul G4APL/M. It turned out that he was on the A40 between Witney and Burford, some 15 miles away from me. We had a good QSO, with signals getting weaker as I approached Abingdon.

I signed with Paul and was pleased to be called by Alan, G3SLI in Wootton near Abingdon. I occasionally work Alan on 70MHz FM and it had been quite a while since we spoke. I got the impression speaking to Alan that he hadn’t made too many QSOs recently – so a bit of simplex activity was welcome. We could also hear that Paul, G4APL/M was working a portable station closer to him in Burford on another frequency. I told Alan that I’d come across his callsign in connection with his activities frrom Gibraltar on 70MHz in the early 1960s when I was looking at Mike, G3JVL’s QRZ page the other day. A really nice QSO with Alan, talking about aerials and VHF propagation.

It struck me that unless Paul had made his CQ on 145.500 – those great QSOs wouldn’t have happened. A great reminder that activity really does breed activity and that I should call CQ on simplex myself more often!

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Got QSOs on four different bands tonight – they all seemed to be in decent shape.

CN8KD in Morocco on 20 Meters
UA3TCJ in European Russia on 17 Meters
UT6UD in the Ukraine on 30 Meters
EW7LO in Belarus on 40 Meters

No rag chews tonight – just quickie kind of DX contacts.  The QSOs on 17 and 20 Meters were completed through the Butternut HF9V and the QSOs on 30 and 40 Meters were made through the 88′ EDZ antenna. As per the little NA5N propagation box, conditions on all the bands I used were pretty good.

Just for the heck of it, I hooked both antennas up to my coax switch and then to the KX3.  You could actually hear the signals being attenuated by the switch.  The difference between direct hookup to the rig and going through this crummy switch was like night and day.  I’ll have to try and see if I can find a good quality coax switch at the hamfest this weekend to replace this piece of junk.

It would be nice to be able to switch real quickly.  Take the QSO with CN8KD for example.  When I first heard him, I was on the wire.  I called and called and called with no result.  I switched over to the vertical and bingo – first try resulted in a QSO.  Maybe it was coincidence, but in my mind, in this case the vertical made all the difference in the world.  The wire is a much better performer on 80 and 40 Meters.  It sure would be nice to be able to switch at the flick of a button.

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].

Dr. Bob Heil, K9EID, is the founder of Heil Sound and host of TWiT.tv's Ham Nation which streams live each Tuesday at 6:00pm PT (9:00pm ET) at http://live.twit.tv. Contact him at [email protected].

Welcome to Handiham World.

We are back after a week at Radio Camp. There are lessons to be learned.
But first, I want to take you back to the early 1990’s, when interest in public service communications saw a real growth following the 9/11 attacks. Ham radio operators dusted off their VHF/UHF handheld radios and headed to training sessions. It was at one such event that many of us in my own local radio club found out how little we actually knew about operating our radios. In an embarrassing exercise that really only called for some very simple operations to be performed on the handheld radios, we discovered that many – maybe most – of us didn’t know how to enter frequencies, set offsets, and enter subaudible tones. In a real public communications emergency all of these things might leap to the fore as necessary skills. After all, plans change, interference happens, and repeaters can fail. We have to be ready to deal with all of these things – and more.

Photo: Matt, KA0PQW, talks on an HT while Phil, K9HI, leads a critique of the emergency communications exercise.
Now fast forward to Handiham Radio Camp 2012. Our scripted emergency exercise, written and led by volunteer Phil Temples, K9HI, called for a post-tornado communications response. Handheld radios and one mobile rig (for the net control station) were programmed and ready to go. Unbeknownst to the participants, a scheduled “repeater failure” took the camp repeater off the air mid-exercise. There was a good deal of scrambling to figure out a workaround during that part of the exercise. As a result, the mobile rig at the net control position was so out of whack from random button-pushing that it required a hard reset to return it to the original factory settings. Some participants had not programmed their handheld radios at all prior to the exercise and were left scratching their heads or borrowing radios from someone else.
This happens at virtually every camp, so we came up with an idea to test for HT skills. (Thanks, AB8WF.) We will be letting you know what is going to be involved in this skills test, more about which will be featured in the August Worldradio Online. In addition, we also are mulling over an operating skills exam in written format and an HF skills exam. This would give our Handiham members some new goals to work toward. We would provide an actual certificate for each “element” of our new skills testing. It would be fun to earn each certificate, but it would also help operators to focus on really learning their equipment.
We also had a VE session at camp, so here’s a photo of Rachel, KC0VBV, receiving her certificate of successful completion of examination from Dr. Dave Justis, KN0S. Congrats, Rachel! Our thanks to the Stillwater Amateur Radio Association (SARA) for fielding the VE team, and to VE Team Leader Shel Mann, N0DRX, and all the VEs. Following the VE session Shel and XYL Mary, N0DXH, stuck around to help us take down the wire antennas.

Photo: Rachel, KC0VBV, receives her certificate of successful completion of examination from Dr. Dave Justis, KN0S. 

Photo: Bill, K9BV, teaches the General Class. Here he points out a sine wave. “What goes up must come down.” 

Photo: Lucinda, AB8WF, taught one on one computer lessons and brought computers up to date, which included installing Microsoft Security Essentials. She also taught remote base operation with JAWS. Lucinda also suggested the operating skills certification and will continue to work with us on the lessons and testing. 
Of course old man Murphy is not ever far from any antenna project, so the center insulator and 450 ohm feedline got REALLY stuck in the tree we used as the dipole antenna’s center support. We did have some wind during the week, so we will blame it on that rather than any of our expert antenna wranglers! Here is a photo of Dr. Dave attaching the remnants of the 450 ohm line to the back of my Honda CRV so that I can drag the feedline out of the clutches of the greedy tree with some serious horsepower. This proved successful, and although the feedline was somewhat the worse for wear Dr. Dave did collect the pieces for use back at his home QTH. He isn’t afraid of splicing the somewhat ragged pieces together!

Photo: No, we are not going to run 450 ohm open-wire ladder line to a mobile W0OXB Special antenna!
Although we foiled Murphy’s antenna tangle, he wasn’t through with his mischief. On Thursday evening I discovered that the Drupal-powered Handiham.org website had gone down and that problem persisted through Friday and the weekend. Here’s the story:
Handiham.org returns to service following SQL failure
The database failure at Handiham.org has been resolved. Our thanks to the kind technical support people at Network Solutions for their assistance.

The SQL database required by Drupal failed due to a problem with the table structure. This proved to be a bit beyond the pay grade and capabilities of your humble Handiham Manager to figure out, so I had to ask the folks at Network Solutions, our hosting service, for assistance.

The problem surfaced on Thursday, June 7, while we were at Handiham Radio Camp and as a result of being very busy at camp I didn’t notice that anything was wrong until very late Thursday night. Friday was travel day, so everyone was getting their travel back home underway and there was really no time to think about the website until later on Friday afternoon when I myself got back home. By that time it was quite late in the week and when I called Network Solutions I knew it would probably mean a weekend wait for a regular business day crew to be back on board – unless the staff could help me with a relatively simple problem. I spoke to my tech support guy, another ham who of course knew all about us, and we scheduled the service for this week. I am happy to report that the site has been restored to service as of this Tuesday morning, right on schedule. Good work, Netsol!

Of course we apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this outage may have caused. I guess one good thing about it happening in the summer was that everyone seems to be so preoccupied with summer outdoor activities that not too many people noticed!
*HANDIHAM* Echolink node guy visits camp!

Photo: Left to right – Matt, KA0PQW; Susan Tice; Pat, WA0TDA, and Handiham volunteer Mike, N0VZC, who hosts the excellent *HANDIHAM* conference which makes the worldwide Handiham net run smoothly on a single high-capacity node. Mike and Don, N0BVE (not pictured) visited to help the camp with some networking. I think he’s the guy who took this photo. 
Post-camp cute puppy alert!

Photo: Jasper takes a well-deserved snooze after a week at Handiham Radio Camp. He was an enormous hit among the campers and staff, probably due to his overwhelming super- cuteness. Thankfully he only uses his amazing powers for good. 
Email me at [email protected] with your questions & comments.   
Patrick Tice, WA0TDA
Handiham Manager

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