AmateurRadio.com

if you’re a seller!

Just for the heck of it, I’ve been keeping a watch on the auction for an ATS-3B that ended tonight.  I was watching a bidding war right before my very eyes.

The final winning bid was $317.00 – not bad for a kit that originally sold for $160.00.  Admittedly, it is assembled and comes with a carrying case.  But that is almost double the original price.

I mentioned before that I think that eBay is a very good thing for sellers.  You have to wonder how many items end up garnering a bigger selling price than they ever would in a classified ad situation.  The “macho” of not allowing yourself to be outbid? A feeding frenzy – like sharks drawn to prey? Or is it just consumer ignorance?

An ATS-3B for over $300, that NorCal Doublet the other week for $60. Admittedly, I’m not in the market for either item, so maybe if I was, those prices would not seem so inflated.

It will be interesting to see what that Palm Mini Paddle and Code Cube end up going for.  Right now, they’re at $90.00 with about 40 minutes to go.

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].

The K3 is ready to go at 100mW's

Well as many posts have mentioned the CQ WPX CW contest is now history for 2012. There is no total score, multiplier count or a prefix total to brag about here. This contest I was hunting DXCC's. When the hunt slowed down ( and it did for long periods of time) I then worked stations with as little power that my Elecraft K3 could muster to see if I could make contact. I was able to add 6 more DXCC's to my count (at 5 watts QRP) but I must admit at the start of the contest I was hoping to score around 15 or so. Oh well it seems that I have at this point most of the popular entities. I found conditions to Europe to be great but the South Pacific areas were dead up this way. There was more of Africa this year but the pile ups were huge at times.
To make things interesting as I was not "contesting" in the true sense I started to drop my power as I gave out contest points. I started at 1.5 watts to CR1X in Finland that worked out to 2755 miles per watt. Update....Thanks to PE4BAS my distance to CR1X who is in the Azores not Finland is 2417 miles per watt, thanks Bas for the info!  He had no  problem copying me so down went the power. I leveled out at 100mW's just for the reason this is as low as the K3 will venture.

Proof 100mW's is on it's way...no SWR showing

1.  HA8JV            45,868  miles per watt
2.  IR9Y               44,558   "                        "
3.  9A1A              44,187   "                        "
4.  OL7C             42,496   "                        "

Until this contest my personal best Miles per watt 16,737 miles per watt when making contact with ZS4TS at 500mW's. Even at 100mW's being copied was easy and I was very surprised. I did not want to drop my power to the point were the contest station was spending his valuable time trying to make contact with me, but that never happened. I am now in the market for an attenuator do get my power output to below 100mW's and see what happens. I was looking at the Hendricks 41db attenuator. It's a kits and looks like a very nice unit.


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

I finally managed to record some video, with my Canon SX-230, of the Hi-Per Mite Active Audio CW Filter. I had to delay filming by a week due to sinusitis, but this turned out for the best since the WPX yielded enough signals to show what this filter can do. I am more than happy with it and it is going to be a permanent part of my set up. Thanks to Larry (W2LJ) for mentioning this great filter here on this site. The only thing left is to find a case to build it in. This coming Saturday we are going up north to Taipei, so ample opportunity to get one. Enjoy the video.

Hans "Fong" van den Boogert, BX2ABT, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Taiwan. Contact him at [email protected].

 

 

I’ve had a mechanically completed SatNOGS ground station sitting in my garage in need of some care and attention for a while. Its just one of the projects that that I have filed under ‘ working but not very robust’. Essentially after I killed off the first driver board we have not managed to get it to drive properly (that is without smoke pouring out of motor driver’s).

Fortunately the SatNOGS gang have made it much easier to load up the client software on a RPi and run a rotator free ground station on the development site. So over the weekend I have produced a standalone set up in between going to the 2nd harmonics rugby festival under the moniker Ground Station 170

The set up is very simple get yourself a RPi 3, an rtl-sdr dongle and a simple antenna (I used this one which took all of 10 minutes to make) and have scheduled a few passes to see if it works. There is some info here if you’d like to have a go

If you have a few moments you can look at the other SatNOGS stuff such as the recently presented video.

 

Alex Hill, G7KSE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, UK. Contact him at [email protected].

Dave, WW2R/5 reports that the WX9XRU 70MHz beacon in Virginia was activated on Saturday afternoon, 26th May. The beacon is beamed across the Atlantic, so hopefully there will be many reports from Europe this summer.

Dave heard the beacon, by Es off the back of its’ beam on Sunday on his 70MHz dipole over a distance of 1626km.

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

I don’t normally operate the WPX contests, but several friends (e.g., KB9UWU and SM2WMV/SJ2W) were planning efforts and I thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time working them.  The high bands have been in good shape lately.  And, WPX CW was the first CW contest I ever operated (in 1997…my call was AA8UP then if you want to look up my stellar performance).  Why not have a little fun?!

The 30-meter open-wire fed dipole at 40 feet worked great as two half-waves in-phase on 15 meters into Europe (and the Pacific).  Now, I can move the lackluster 15-meter dipole high into the back tree for N/S operation.  In fact, it might actually be smart to just put a second 30-meter open-wire fed dipole there.  Interesting thought.  Probably have the parts to build another tuner in the junkbox(es).

I paid basically no attention to strategy and just did whatever I pleased working interesting stuff and running a little bit later on.  I didn’t spend much time on 40 and I didn’t work the 2nd radio very hard until the last 1.5 hours between 2114 and 2249 on Sunday when I made 124 QSOs…not big rates, but a nice pace for using the second radio to fill in dead space.  Here is the damage:

Call: K8GU
Operator(s): K8GU
Station: K8GU

Class: SOAB LP
QTH: MD
Operating Time (hrs): 6
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
  160:    0
   80:    0
   40:   52
   20:  206
   15:   97
   10:   12
------------
Total:  367  Prefixes = 256  Total Score = 266,496

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

 

“Sleep when the baby sleeps,” new parents are told.  All six hours of operating were with Evan asleep and about four were with Sarah asleep.  So, guess who’s behind now!

Ethan Miller, K8GU, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Maryland, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

I’m exhausted, so I’m going to make this quick. It’s been a full day! Today our dear friend Rachel got married to Wayne, a fine fellow, in the chapel of Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. That of course was the highlight of the day, but what is of most interest on this blog is how ham radio played a small part.

Our good friends, the Marshalls, are staying at the same hotel as we are. Since roaming charges are so high up here in Canada, we all have our cell phones turned off. But two of the Marshalls are hams, and they also brought along an HT. Here is a picture of Brent Marshall, K4EMC, and his son John Marshall, KI4JQB, standing with me at the end of the day’s festivities.

Before splitting up this morning, we agreed upon a simplex frequency and a repeater: the one at the top of the CN tower, VE3TWR. My wife and I went on to Wycliffe College while the Marshalls took in the town for a couple of hours. Thanks to our HT’s we stayed connected, and it’s good that we did. I radioed a subway route to them and, more importantly, passed a couple of messages back and forth between the mother of the bride and Mrs. Marshall, upon whom the harried mother was relying for help. When we were too far apart to use simplex, we used the tower repeater.

Nowadays we rely upon our cellphones so much that we forget sometimes how useful these radios can be. I brought my HT along on this trip for entertainment, but today it came in mighty handy.

Todd Mitchell, NØIP, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Minnesota, USA. He can be contacted at [email protected].