AmateurRadio.com

Want to see a KX3 build from start to finish?  TJ, W0EA treated us to live video on USTREAM while he built his:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23127348

If you have a kit on order and have the time, I would really advise watching this (Hint: Start viewing at about the 8:00 minute mark).  Looking at stills (like I’ve posted) is one thing.  Watching the build being done before your very eyes (in real time) is just priceless.

Even though mine is built, I also learned a thing or two.  TJ mentioned that there was a Builder Advisory note that I hadn’t seen anywhere. It concerns the speaker grill and the distortion that can occur if it is installed.  I was experiencing that distortion; so as a result of listening to TJ, I took it out. The unit sounds much better now.

I still haven’t done the roofing filter alignment. maybe tomorrow night as I have been way busy.  But I have found some time to get in a QSO every day for the past few days.  I worked EM2012UA tonight, which is a special event station for the 2012 European Football Championships. Five watts to the Butternut vertical is still getting my signal heard worldwide.

By the way, conditions on 20 Meters were superb tonight.  The noise floor was about S1 and I heard so many European and Caribbean stations up and down the band – it was amazing (especially the fact that it was around 02:30 UTC – recently the band has been dead by then).  The fact that the sun spot number is 154 is a good thing.  Maybe Venus imparted some magic as she crossed the face of the sun yesterday?  Who knows?  If conditions like these keep up for a while, I think we’ll all be happy.

I am becoming more and more familiar with the radio and quite honestly, it isn’t as complicated as I initially thought it would be.  The controls are well labeled and are pretty intuitive and easy to get the hang of.

The bait’s been taken; but the hook hasn’t quite set yet, but this fishy really wants a K3 now.

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments over the past week or so.  Been averaging about 20 a day since I took the Captcha code thingy off.  I apologize for keeping the comments on moderation; but if I didn’t I’d be overrun by spam.  So if you make a comment and don’t see it for a while, it’s nothing personal – just haven’t gotten to allowing them through.

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

More than fifty Members of the Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club (BVARC) in Houston, descended on Seawolf Park in Galveston Texas this past weekend to activate the radio rooms on two historic ships there; Submarine USS Cavalla and Destroyer Escort USS Stewart. This is part of the annual Museum Ships Weekend event sponsored by the Battleship New Jersey Amateur Radio Station. And the fifth year of BVARC participation.

This year, in addition to conventional SSB and CW communications, club members made more than forty QSO’s with other participants via satellite. In one instance, to the USS Nautilus, N1S, in Groton Connecticut; the world’s first nuclear powered submarine, whose first captain sent the historic message, “Underway on nuclear power.”

This year, ninety nine museum ships worldwide participated using mainly voice and CW. The Seawolf Park operation is unique as it is only one of two locations in the annual event that has two ships on the air from the same location.

Much of the radio equipment on these old ships no longer works due to age and lack of parts. So we have to bring our own radio gear on board.

We logged over 1,000 contacts this weekend with amateur radio operators throughout the US and Canada and as far away as Australia from Seawolf Park. The Park is an almost perfect venue for radio operations due to its proximity to salt water and lack of obstructions.

As the park is a public facility, all club activities this weekend were performed in full view of park visitors who were free to observe and ask questions. Brazos Valley volunteers also acted as guides inside the ship to explain the sights and sounds of radio communication.

This year the club decided to sponsor its own Texas Navy Certificate for confirmed contacts with all five Texas based museum ships. In addition to the Brazos Valley club, KK5W operating from the Cavalla and Stewart, the ships included Sailing Barque Elissa operated by the Tidelands Amateur Radio Society, N5E, the Battleship Texas Amateur Radio Station,NA5DV on the USS Texas in Laporte, Texas, and W5LEX, the South Texas Amateur Radio Club operating the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi. The club will verify the eligibility and award the certificate by comparing the log entries of the other participating ships.

The club also operated two VHF nets on Saturday and Sunday for local amateurs on 146.94 Mhz. The WA5CYI repeater has wide coverage and allowed us to include, NA5DV, Battleship Texas and N5E, Tall Ship Elissa, in addition to KK5W, representing the USS Cavalla and USS Stewart. More than 50 local amateurs checked in to the net over the two day period and logged contact with four of the five Texas based Museum Ships; the unofficial Texas Navy.

All in all this was a great event for the club. It demonstrated the power and flexibility of ham radio to the general public, it was a tune up field day and it was a public service to the community. The weather was great too!

I’d almost forgot that I had an order in for one of these. But my royal weekend was topped off nicely a royal (mail) delivery of 1 Raspberry Pi.

I had a few plans for one of these when I first heard about it but first off I’ll spend a bit of time getting to know the linux distro and I’ll assume there is a way of running something like WSPR without too much trouble as it has a native Debian (.deb) version. First off though will be trying to get a video signal out to my rather old monitor that doesn’t have a HDMI input.

In the mean time I think I’ll have a google about to see what anyone else has done. Always a good start to learn from others.

The answer is yes, and no.  Using the software utility available here you can stretch the coverage of your UV-3R Mark II.  This

UV-3R Mark II

only works on the Mark II (dual watch display) and the new Plus model.  There are two options for changing the coverage.  You can stretch up from VHF or down from UHF.  Only the UHF option seems to work.  Now, before you run off and do this, let me pass a few warnings.  First of all, the UV-3R is NOT designed to do this, so transmitting at full power on a band your radio was not designed to work on has the potential to fry something.  Second of all, most users have put the output power between 1 and 16 milliwatts (yes, milli), and my tests concur with this.  It does receive OK on 220, but not as well as it does on 2M or 440.  The procedure can be a little complicated, but there is plenty of help at the UV-3R Yahoo Group.

So, does it really work?  During my morning commute, my train passes south of my club’s main repeater site.  Now this is on a rather high building, in one of the highest points on western Long Island, and is pretty much line-of-site for a 4-5 mile stretch of my train ride.  I tested to see if I could key up our 220 machine, and it seems that the effective range was about 4 miles this morning.  Now that was just keying the repeater up.  I’ll have to check to see if I can actually be HEARD on it.  For listening to the 2 or 3 220 repeaters near my office though, it works fine.  Also, keep in mind that this was all done with the stock antenna, which is most likely far from optimal at 220 Mhz.

Once again, I can’t stress enough that if you don’t want to risk breaking your radio permanently, don’t try this.  So far, my little radio has suffered no ill-effects, but your mileage may vary.

-Neil  W2NDG

For the last few months I have been getting more and more irritated by the captcha word verification required to comment on certain blogs. The captchas Blogger used to use were perfectly adequate, in my opinion. But Blogger insists on “improving” its user interface. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it I say.

The latest two-part captchas Blogger uses seem designed to keep out the good guys and allow in the bad. The statement “Please prove you’re not a robot” seems ironic, as only a robot could decipher the letters. This morning, on a blog I won’t mention, I had to refresh the captcha three times before getting one that contained only recognizable letters.

Of course if Blogger’s captchas were annoying me they were also annoying you, my readers. So I decided to disable word verification on both G4ILO’s Blog and One Foot in the Grave. At the same time, I have enabled moderation for comments to posts more than 2 days old. Most of the valid comments are made within that time period anyway. If a comment is made later than that then a further small delay until I approve it will hardly be noticed. Hopefully this will result in an increase in valid comments and fewer spammy ones. But if I find too many spammers are taking advantage of the two day window of opportunity I’ll turn moderation on for all comments. If any internet lowlifes are reading this, don’t even think about it.

For the benefit of anyone who arrives here looking for a way to turn off word verification, here’s how. First, make sure you are using the old Blogger interface (I’d switched back to it already as I could never find anything in the new one.) Then, under Manage Blogs, click on Settings for your blog. Then click on Comments in the row of tabs along the top. The settings you need are on that page.

Today I received the following e-mail from Bill W4ZV:

“Hi Larry, FYI on the WRO live blog Richard KI6SN just confirmed that he will be doing FOBB this year and promises results within 2 weeks. Said he would be making an announcement on QRP-L next week. Great news! 73, Bill W4ZV”

End

OK – that’s all  the news I have.  I have not received any answers to my inquiries about FOBB, so I would suggest you keep your eyes peeled on QRP-L for the next couple of weeks.  I do not know if FOBB numbers will be issued; or who will be doing the issuing.

This is a great event, and I’m glad to see that it’s not going the way of the Dodo.

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