AmateurRadio.com

This year Workington and District are joining up with Barrow in Furness club to extend the amount of stations we activate. We are operating from Silloth GB1LBC, Workington GB2LBC, St Bess GB4LBC and Barrow GB5LBC lifeboat stations from the 21st to the 29th January in a relaxed style. hopefully making htis years SOS radio week a bigger event locally.

The purpose of our time on the air as special event stations is to promote the RNLI  as a charity, something that costs £300,000 a day to run!

St Bees will only be running at the weekends and We are looking to be on mainly 40m and 80m but the Cobwebb is coming with me so there is a possibility of something on the higher bands but it really depends on the weather as high winds will certainly destroy it.

I hope to work as many as possible in between cups of tea and choccy biccies and if you would like to make a donation then it would be really appreciated. Keep an eye out on the status monitors to see when we’re up and running.

The Raspberry Pi, which is a 700 Mhz ARM-based single board computer targeted at providing computing hardware to poor countries is going to be going into production soon.  Two models called “A” and “B” are being offered, at approximately $25 and $35 (US).  Options to purchase boards and donate money to provide units to needy folks around the world will be available.  

The concept of single board computers isn’t new, but the horsepower and price point of these units are.  At this price range it puts the boards squarely in Arduino territory, but unlike the Arduino and other microcontrollers it will run a full blown OS.  Several Linux distributions will be supported immediately and presumably BSD variants won’t be far behind.  It will not run Windows or Windows emulation, like WINE.  (Yes, I know WINE is not an emulator).

The board is equipped with a USB port that obviously can be used to interface with a multitude of devices, however it also includes a General Purpose I/O port or GPIO that supports, PWM, Serial UART and I2C capability.  This will open the board up to hardware hackers like us.  Sweet!

I’m pondering what amateur radio applications this could run.  It has enough horsepower to do DSP.  It would make a nice logging and contest appliance, with  some well-designed software.  How about an EchoLink or digimode appliance?  Considering the low price it’s almost disposable and could make a powerful hot air balloon radio payload system controller.  I may port my keyer code over to it for giggles.  It will be interesting to see what uses radio artisans come up with.

Monument, Colorado
Saturday April 21 and Saturday April 28 (8 AM to 5 PM) 2012
Location: Tri-Lakes Monument Fire Station 1
Sponsored by the Tri-Lakes Monument Fire Radio Association

 The Technician license is your gateway to the world-wide excitement of Amateur Radio…

• Earn your ham radio Technician class radio privileges
• Pass your FCC amateur radio license exam right in class on the second day
• Multiple-choice exam, No Morse Code Required
• Live equipment demonstrations
• Learn to operate on the ham bands, 10 Meters and higher
• Learn to use the many VHF/UHF FM repeaters in Colorado
• Find out how to participate in emergency communications

There is no cost for the class (donations accepted)
However, students must have the required study guide:
Gordon West Technician Class guide, 7^th Edition $20.95
And pay the FCC Exam Fee: $15.00

Advance registration is required (no later than April 15^th, earlier is better!)

To register for the class, contact: Bob Witte KØNR
Email: [email protected]  or Phone: 719 659-3727

For more information on amateur (ham) radio visit www.arrl.org or www.wedothat-radio.org

Through Eldon, WA0UWH I have discovered another blog to add to the blogroll: that of Jeff, KO7M. Jeff is interested in a lot of the same things I have been (including light aviation: an ambition of mine when I was in my 20s but which I could never afford to take up.) But what really piqued my interest was that he has just got a Parallax Propeller to generate a WSPR signal.

This is one of the things I was interested in trying. But I never got further than wondering how to implement the fractional frequency shifts of the WSPR signal, which uses 4 tones shifted by just under 1.5Hz from each other. Jeff has apparently found that a 2Hz shift is good enough to be decoded, allowing WSPR to be sent using the integer frequencies the Propeller chip can easily generate.

Once I have finished the Tiny Keyer project and can get back to the Propeller I will be trying this myself. My ambition at the moment is to make a multi-band multi-mode (OPERA, WSPR and perhaps QRSS as well) standalone beacon with an LCD panel to enable me to choose the band and mode. We’ll see how far I get, but having two other people working on the same ideas should certainly make the task easier!

Series Five Episode Two of the ICQ Podcast has been released. News Stories include :-

• Yaesu supports 4-FSK digital radios
• Yaesu Musen
• Go back to school - DX University
• US feedback for 60m band plan
• GB80PW for the Practical Wireless 80th year
• New DV-RPTR modem board
• RSGB Commonwealth Century Club Jubilee Award 2012
• UK Propagation charts for January 2012
• New data mode crosses Atlantic on 136Khz at the first attempt
• USA HF Spread Spectrum Experiment
• 43 years of 73 Magazine online

Your feedback and Ed Durrant (VK2ARE) interviews android app author Wolfgang Philipps (W8DA).

There re just a ton of data modes you can play with and this morning was the turn of JT65-HF to be on my screen. I’d installed it quite a while ago and not used it for some months but I thought I could do with giving it a quick run through to remind myself of the protocols in case we use it on the SOS radio week operations (as GB4LBC for St Bees lifeboat station).

Time is very important with JT65 and a few other modes and I’ve never been a big fan of windows time setting utility. It never seems to be right and there is always a problem with either this or that. I use Dimension 4 on XP machines and it works very well. Under Windows 7 you have to remember to run it as an administrator so I suspect the same will be true for Vista. there seemed to be a bit of a conflict going on on my puny little computer so I had to reinstall JT65-HF and only then did it start to decode the received signals.

I took the opportunity to use my stealth antenna (A Watson 80 plus 2 dipole – which is really only good for 20m here) and immediately got a contact with DG8RW & W3PV with 15 watts. I had a bit of trouble with the first contact as he couldn’t copy my signal report for a while and I had to resend it quite a few times before he got it. Eventually we got a QSO together and that was pretty pleasing.

So I’ve got my hands dirty again with JT65 and whilst its not the most interactive of modes it reinforces the fact that SSB is inefficient in comparison as I doubt I’d have got where I did with 15 watts and a loft mounted antenna. Still, it was a nice distraction from what I should have been doing. That was to be revising for an exam on Tuesday. Nothing exciting, a professional exam and much less enjoyable that playing with radios.

I’ve setup an independent blog site to somewhat showcase my past and future SOTA or Summits On The Air activities.  In addition to posting alerts to future SOTA activations and detailed trip reports after, I also plan to post some “How To” or instructional related topics all about SOTA.

These special instructional SOTA topics can all be found under the category of “How To”.  In addition, I’ve setup links to all the various SOTA related websites and even documented some of the gear I carry along with me.  The gear page explains what I use and also details into why and how. 

You can access The SOTA Activities of KD0BIK by clicking the SOTA Activities link at the top of the page. 

Thank you to all who continue to read my blog sites and listen to the podcast. 

Until next time…

73 de KD0BIK