AmateurRadio.com

A few years ago, when children,  pets and work didn’t need so much attention I took part in a bike race (commonly called a sportive) which took in 6 passes in the lake district (kirkstone, honister, Newlands, Whinlatter, Hardknott and Wrynose) in a 112 mile day out on 2 wheels. This time I shall not be cycling but helping out with the local Raynet group.

Saturday had us checking the local communication paths for the various areas. It’s the first time I’ve been involved in any of this kind of thing so Paul, 2E0EET took me through the basics and now I’m looking forward to being a spectator and watching those who’ve trained for months on end to attempt this formidable ride.

It took me over 7:30 hrs when I did it do giving up the same amount of time with the rig at cockley beck (not too far from the Hardknott summit) seems a small price for my earlier enjoyment.

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

The new setup

Old setup

 On Friday my new P3 SVGA card came in this cool add on allows me to move the band scope that is on the P3 up to a large monitor. This has been an add on I had been looking forward to for sometime. The SVGA card from Elecraft fits into the P3 and took about 20 minutes to complete the installation. It was then

New P3 SVGA

time to give it a whirl. As a side note I kept a monitor that I was not using but knew I would use it some day. Well the day came when I needed a monitor for the SVGA it's great when I can reuse! The P3 was hooked back into K3 I then powered up the K3 and P3.......BUT the monitor was blank!!! Well lets reboot and try again.....NOTHING..........It them came to me go to the Elecraft site and update the P3's software. I did that and low and behold the monitor came to life with a great looking band scope! It sure is nice to have a scope up close and personal. Now Elecraft has plans to add mouse control, RTTY and CW decoding and more suggestions are piling in. When I added the new monitor I had to do some moving of equipment on the desk. The LP-100A, MFJ 1026 and the LDG switches all found a new home. The monitor was mounted on
moveable arm so when not in use I can move it out of the way.  When the final position for all the equipment

P3 apart and ready for SVGA

 was found it was better than the old setup. All my ham equipment is on the same level and easier too view and adjust. Also it was due time to label all the cables and wires at the back of the ham gear. There has been many a time when I have removed cables to only have to re-connect them later that day and sure as shootin somehow I messed it up  with some very strange results. I pulled out the P-Touch label machine and tagged all the cables. It was a job that was long overdue and had to be done.  Now that I plan on making the Elecraft K2 portable I will be removing it from the desk along with all the hookup cables. Once I am done my portable op's the K2 can be hooked back into the desk position via the

SVGA installed

labeled cables. My next project is to investigate logging software, radio control software and propagation software. I have been using a hodge-podge  of software and I want to clean up the software end of my ham hobby so now it is time to look at some of the free ham software out there....any suggestions would be great!

View on the monitor

Monitor out of the way

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

But even in a joke there’s truth to be found.

“It’s a dot and a dash. To have a conversation with the entire world. It’s great.”

Yes, yes it is.

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].

It figures: I just get done blogging about the history of electronic communications and Google takes the topic to the next level. Recognizing the inherent problem of cramming a QWERTY keyboard onto a Smart Phone, Google has gone back to the future by adopting a simple binary input device that uses DOTS and DASHES. That’s right, the new Gmail Tap uses Morse Code.

Google has apparently rediscovered what CW operators knew all along: Morse Code is extremely efficient for text communication.

Go to the Gmail Tap web page to get the full story.

73, Bob K0NR

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

On the heels of the first KX3 shipping last week, Elecraft announced that it will begin taking orders for a new transceiver, the K10.  The rig is intended to continue the Elecraft radio lineage, known for its high quality and performance.  Specifications are not yet available for the rig, nor is a feature list as the rig has yet to be prototyped or designed.  Several amateurs speculated that the rig will have both CW and phone capabilities and will cover all HF bands and 6 meters.  More daring prognosticators predicted the rig would be 12 volt powered and have a built in antenna tuner option.  Elecraft fans appear to be equally split on whether the K10 would be a kit, a real kit, or pre-assembled.

Immediately upon the announcement, eHam created a reviews area for the new transceiver and several reviews of it were posted shortly thereafter.  Harold, KA3KXS, gave a glowing review noting that the rig will “probably look nicer and perform better than the overrated Yaesu FT DX 5000 or the marginal Icom IC-7800″, though he admitted to never operating either rig.

Asian markets reacted positively to the Elecraft announcement with the Nikkei index up nearly 21%.  Europeans were equally enthusiastic with rallies in nearly all European markets.  EU officials who have been suffering for a long time for the first time in months had a rosy economic outlook for Europe.  Here in the US, both the NASDAQ and New York stock exchanges experienced furious trading, with both markets up over 37% at the closing bell.  NASA recorded slight anomalies in the orbits of the moon, Venus, and Mars.

Meanwhile, Ebay was flooded with listings for new in-the-box Elecraft KX3 units, with sellers indicating that yet to be received rigs were being sold to raise money to purchase K10s.  As of this writing, bids on several KX3s had exceeded list price by over 180%.

The announcement promises to make for a lively and exciting Dayton Hamvention® this year, with the ham community abuzz about the K10.  Several participants have coordinated a “K10 Room” where attendees can sit on the floor and silently meditate, imagining what the rig will be like.

In case you didn’t know about it already, check out this new map of recent WSPR spots. (Editor’s note: please be advised that we have had a report of this link freezing a computer and requiring a reboot. I do not believe that it’s a malicious link, but it may be very resource intensive to load…)

It’s much faster than the ‘official’ one, which could bring Firefox to its knees on a slow computer. And it remembers allyour preferences including zoom level. A must-bookmark, if you’re a WSPR fan.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

I’m back from my short trip to Florida where I operated from Lido Key, located just to the west of Sarasota, in west central Florida. I was very pleased with the operation this time, despite a minor glitch after the first day (which I’ll talk about later). I wound up operating from the same general area that I did on my last trip, which is from South Lido Park at the very southern tip of Lido Key. As with each trip, I learned things that I hope will help make things better for the next time, but fortunately, unlike my last trip, I didn’t run into any significant issues that had a major impact on my ability to operate. (If you’re interested, you can read the whole saga of my last trip starting with this post; there are links to the rest of the series at the end of that one.)

View K2DBK @ South Lido Park in a larger map
As with past operations from NA-034, my radio activities took place in the afternoon which allowed me time to spend some time with my wife’s family in the mornings and evenings as well as giving me some time to have lunch at my favorite restaurant in the area, The Old Salty Dog, before setting up for the afternoon.

As I mentioned during my preparations a few weeks ago, the idea was to operate using the Buddipole on top of the 8-foot shock-corded mast, using some tent stakes, line, and some small S carabiners to guy the mast. As long as the wind wasn’t too strong, I felt that the setup should work just fine, and it did. The setup here was very similar to what I’d done in the past, but I wound up having to drag the picnic table over to where it was close enough to the car so that I could run the power cables to the battery. On the first day, I wound up having a very late breakfast so I decided to skip lunch and headed right for South Lido Park. The first difference from previous years was that although it was almost the exact same days as previously, this year, there were a lot more people in the park, which meant it was a lot harder to get to my “favorite” operating position. On the map here, I’ve put a red marker on the spot, which is just off the south end of the parking lot.

There was a reason why there were more people this year: It was quite a bit warmer than in the past. In fact, the weather was absolutely beautiful, with temperatures in the mid-80s under a beautiful blue sky with just a few clouds on the horizon.That warm weather led to my first small problem: As with my trip to Costa Rica, I was using my iPad with the Hamlog logging software to log my contacts. (Just a quick side note about Hamlog, Nick, N3WG, has done some great upgrades to recently, including the ability to save your log to a cloud server. Very slick stuff.) The one big difference is that when in Costa Rica, even when it wasn’t raining, I was usually operating in the shade, not in direct sunlight. When operating from the table you see in the picture, I was in direct sunlight. After a few minutes of having the iPad set up, it shut itself down due to the heat. What I wound up doing was to use the backpack bag from my radio to shield the iPad which kept the temperature down to a point were it was no longer shutting off. Lesson learned for next time.

I initially set up to operate on 21.260Mhz and although I did make a contact with Vasily, ER4DX in Moldova who was CQing a bit above that frequency, I wasn’t getting any “takers” so I decided to switch to the main IOTA frequency of 14.260Mhz. I started calling CQ there and after a few minutes, George, KC2GLG, who had read my previous posting about the IOTA activation, heard me and answered. We had a nice chat, and I then moved on and worked about a dozen other stations that day.

I did have a bit of an issue with the antenna on 20m, though I was able to work some DX (Sweden and the UK). With the configuration I was using, it was very tough to get a good SWR and I seemed to be getting some RF back into the radio. Scott, NE1RD, wrote me and suggested that I set up for 20m in a vertical configuration, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to test that configuration before I left home. Even though I had Scott’s excellent Buddipole In The Field [PDF] book with me on my iPad which has a cookbook section to help set things like this up, by the time I decided to try this I was hot, tired, and it was getting late so I decided to call it quits for the day. So that takeaway lesson from that was “try everything before you leave”.

Click here for Part 2.