AmateurRadio.com

I mentioned in a post over the weekend that a couple of channels on the Anytone 10m rig were showing a slight discrepancy between transmit and receive when no clarifier was switched in.

I thought perhaps a factory reset might do the trick.

This morning, as I had a few moments before the train arrived, I performed the reset after I had parked up in the station car park.

With a loud beep the display changed to 25.615MHz! Quite a reset then, and the segments that had been programmed were lost! Just the lower bit of 28MHz was accessible!

Happily, you may recall that some months ago, I purchased the programming lead for the AT-5555. And even more surprisingly, I had backed up the configuration of the rig onto my laptop.

So, this evening saw me out on the drive with the laptop, the rig open and the programming lead. It’s all back as it should be (I think). Though I didn’t check yet whether those two channels were fixed.

For a change, it was quite interesting to listen to the activity on 27.555 as I drove home.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Dayton Hamvention this year.  It was on my list of things to try to accomplish for 2012, but since I’m heading out west to Pacificon in October, I needed to save my pennies for that adventure.  The Dayton Hamvention will be moved to my “things to accomplish list” for 2013.

As you may know from my recent blogging, I do own the brand new Elecraft KX3.  I described this little rig in a recent podcast as “ultra-lite, ultra-portable, ultra-awesome” and the KX3 certainly lives up to all of these fine attributes.  While I’ve owned my Yaesu FT-817 for about 4 years, I really love the larger display of the KX3 and of course all the updated features certainly don’t hurt either.

The Yaesu FT-817 was first released in 2001 and an updated FT-817ND model was made available in 2004.  The 817 is based on the main circuit board design of its bigger and more powerful brothers, the FT-857 and FT-897. 

As I stated, I purchased my 817 back in the 2008 timeframe and used it for portable operations and carried it along with me on hiking and backpacking trips.  I became hooked on SOTA or Summits On The Air in the fall of 2011 and this became my main radio for that purpose.

While I’m perfectly happy with my KX3 and have already used it on one SOTA adventure, I was (like many) thinking, hoping, expecting, anticipating Yaesu to unveil it’s new QRP portable offering at the 2012 Dayton Hamvention.  However, the Dayton Hamvention is over and there was no announcement or news of any kind from Yaesu regarding their future QRP/Portable offering.  I’m wondering if the boat has sailed and left Yaesu high and dry? 

With Elecraft announcing the KX3 at the 2011 Dayton Hamvention and opening the KX3 up for orders in late December 2011 and beginning to ship orders in the Spring of 2012, the 2012 Dayton Hamvention would be the perfect place to announce a new QRP offering from Yaesu.  Well…that is if a new offering was planned.

Of course, Yaesu is big enough and perhaps powerful enough not to necessarily need to leverage an event like the Dayton Hamvention to announce a new QRP rig.  Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the FT-817.  While it may be over 10 years old, the old dinosaur is still kicking and screaming and loved in the QRP community.  As I stated I do own one and I plan to keep it….for now!  

So why do I even bring this up?  Well I do have an interest in QRP operations and an updated offering from Yaesu would be great news for the hobby.  However, I don’t view this as doom and gloom.  I figure Yaesu will update their aging line of 817’s, 857’s and 897’s when they feel the time is right.  However, I just wonder if that time is NOW!

Until next time…

73 de KDØBIK   

I have the company of 3 rigs in my shack. The XYL IC-7000 friendly rig that offers quite a decent amount of features for its pygmy size. Not to mention its requirements for very adaptable fingers to enable these features and a good memory. The handheld VX8-GR which give me a fell friendly access to 2m and 70cms and the always useful APRS. Finally the FT-817  for holidays and occasional summit activations.

Lately the FT-817 has been lagging behind in the ‘access to all parts of the band’ feature which is pretty useful at worst and a necessity when the bands are crowded or as in the case of this weekend. A special event station run by our club, GB1WSL was transmitting outside of the window of opportunity for the unmodified rig. GB1WSL was on 7.133Mhz and mine stopped in its tracks at 7.099.9Mhz.

Until this evening, when soldering iron in hand I removed solder from 1 jumper and added some (not the same stuff i might add) to another jumper and hey presto the Full TX on FT-817 as mods.dk calls it was complete. Its a bit more fiddly than that but even an inexperienced soldering iron toting danger managed it in about 15 minutes. Why had I not done this before?

Now the rig has the full 40m band, which is the primary reason why I did the modification,  it becomes even more indispensable when I go portable. Next stop is a suitable capacity LiPo battery that I can add on to give it the full output away from a power outlet and an ATU for portable means. I wonder if there is a design out for a homebrew ATU about.

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

The Dayton Hamvention® has been around for a long time. Hard as it may be to believe, the event has been around longer than most of the radio hams who now attend it year after year. It hasn’t always been conducted at Hara Arena though it has been there since 1964. In earlier days the event took place at a time of the year when the weather is not stable in this part of the country and attendees had to prepare for any contingency.

Moving the event into May certainly has helped.

And that was evident this year – the weather was spectacular. Some might complain that it was a little on the “warm” side as the weekend wore on, but I suspect those would also complain about finding a four-leaf clover!

By now the cat’s out of the bag and you’ve no doubt heard all the big announcements – the new Flex-Radio, the Yaesu FTdx3000, the Kenwood TS990S. Of course many other new items were shown and discussed and all of these will undoubtedly be dissected in painstaking detail in ham radio blogs and magazines over the coming weeks and months.

But the most important story is that another Hamvention® has come and gone and it provided us with yet another opportunity to meet new friends and reconnect with a few old one’s. Most of all, it imprinted a few new memories on the gray matter – memories conjured over one magical weekend.

A stroll through the flea-market is like a trip back in time…

On a more practical level, Hamvention® always provides opportunity. Local news outlets reported that this year’s event was expected to generate $6 million dollars in revenue for local businesses. It’s where enterprising hams share their ideas and new wares and as a result many will go on to market success. Having a great product debut at Dayton often guarantees financial success for these entrepreneurs while a big flop can mean disaster.

But Dayton is about so much more than just the bottom line.

Much of the talk about Dayton over the coming months will focus on the new product offerings, the attendance, speculation on the number of inside exhibits and outside booths, and the inevitable endless debates about why the event should be moved to a more modern facility in an entirely different location.

It would be nice if during these conversations that we not forget that Hamvention® has been around since 1952 and has become yet another in a long line of traditions in our century-old hobby. Like the Wouff-Hong and the Rettysnitch, Morse code, the ARRL and DXing.

Dayton is a permanent marker in the sands of ham radio time and its place in radio history is forever secure.

We did end up making that trip down to the Camden waterfront yesterday.  There was so much to see at the aquarium, that we didn’t make it to the USS New Jersey.

But after seeing it from the outside, all of us decided that we really want to go back to take the tour. That we didn’t make it there yesterday may have been serendipitous, anyway.  As yesterday was Armed Forces Day, the New Jersey might have been a busier place than normal.  We WILL get back there this summer – somehow, someway.

Congratulations are in order to the two newest members of the QRP Hall of Fame, Terry Fletcher WA0ITP and Jay Bromley W5JAY. They both richly deserve the honor and it’s good to see them inducted.

Not much news on the e-mail reflectors about new QRP items at Dayton.  With the proliferation of e-mail capability via cell phones, iPads and other tablets, I was expecting more.  Either there wasn’t much in the way of news, or perhaps we’ll start hearing more once folks get home and settled in.

I am hoping that with the Dayton dust settling that there will be good news headed my way from Aptos, CA this week,  My buddy sent me an e-mail letting me know that he’s closing on his house on May 31st.  Looks like this horse race is going to be a photo finish.

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

I’ve often wondered if I were to go on a long distance Appalachian Trail hike, where would I get the power to charge some lightweight batteries so I could operate a QRP rig and a cell phone each night.  Of course, I’ve wondered more where I would get the vacation time or money to do such a long trip, but that’s another story.  A company called BioLite is offering CampStove, a lightweight hiking stove that burns twigs and anything else you can gather and turns them into heat and electrical energy.  The stove has a USB port for plugging in devices. 

BioLite manufactures a larger model called the HomeStove that is intended for third world countries and purchases of the smaller CampStove help fund providing HomeStove to needy families.  The stove is more efficient at burning wood due to a built in fan which feeds more oxygen to the fire, and the stove produces less pollution than convention wood fires.

The USB port on the CampStove delivers 5 volts at a nominal 2 watts of power, with up to 4 watts power peak.  That’s not a whole lot of power especially when talking about 12 volt powered QRP rigs, but it’s definitely up to the task of topping off your phone battery each meal.  Undoubtedly for a long hike one would want a small solar panel to charge rig batteries.  Perhaps a high efficiency 5 volt to 12 volt converter would allow charging of rig batteries with CampStove during meals or long periods of overcast, solar panel unfriendly skies.

The CampStove is $129 US and can be purchased on the website, though new orders currently aren’t shipping until July.  I may get one just to try it out and have another hiking stove option and support BioLite’s efforts in poor countries.