AmateurRadio.com

Teaching Evan the basics of radar signal processing with this baby-block 7-bit Barker code and its matched filter.

The horizontal loop has been repaired. I lost 3 glasfiber mast parts, they are broken and cannot be repaired. I can probabely use them to make a tripod or so, I’ve seen that somewhere on the web. The loop is now at 7m and I got a better feeling about the mechanical strength this time. I decided not to repair the beam, it is too heavy for a aluminium mast and although I didn’t test it I don’t think it gives me an advantage in for example working DX in any direction at low height compared to my vertical. I really need to get my versa tower up again so I can install a beam for 10m like it should be. Well, in January it’s time to have my agenda and that of my XYL filled with the upcoming contests I really want to take part in. This is my list:

• 11/12-Feb:PACC contest
• 24/25-Mar: CQWW WPX SSB contest
• 1/2-Sept: Fieldday contest
• 29/30-Sept: CQWW RTTY contest
• 27/28-Okt: CQWW SSB contest
• 11-Nov: PA-beker contest
• 18-Nov: Friese 11 steden contest
• 24/25-Nov: CQWW CW contest
• 4-Dec: 10m RTTY contest
• 10/11-Dec: ARRL 10m contest

A few days ago I was putting together a piece of training for our local A.R.E.S. Group and it dawned on me that I should share it with everybody. So after I finished the net I took a little time to flesh out that training and what I ended up with was this article. You are welcome to use this as a basis for training in your group or as a reference for your own self training. Don’t forget to let everybody know where you got it.

Speak slowly and clearly

When we say speak slowly and clearly what we mean is sometimes at normal conversational speed  words run together when you are talking on the radio. Most radio equipment doesn’t reproduce all the audio frequencies of human speech or hearing. This can make it difficult to understand what someone is saying on the air. When you have some hearing loss it is even worse. I have some low end hearing loss so most of the time I have to add a speaker to my rig that produces more low frequencies to make the speech ineligible to me in noisy environments.

Annunciate. Some people don’t consider that when they speak they are trying to convey information. I know several people that just engage there mouth and let the words fall out without giving a second thought as to if the person on the other end of the conversation is having to decipher the noises emanating from their mouth. It is sometimes difficult to understand a conversation when you are in the same room with someone if the are slurring and mumbling their words. It is even more difficult when you are on a noisy frequency or using a narrow band width mode like SSB, or D*STAR. When you add the stress of a net situation people tend to speak faster than they normally would. They also tend not to speak clearly. This makes the problem even worse.

Use Standard ITU Phonetics

Another consideration is the use of phonetics. In most cases phonetics can greatly increase your ability to understand and be understood when conditions a frequency are not optimal. Ham radio operators are as a rule a playful bunch so we do things to make talking on the radio more fun like making up funny phonetics for our call sign. Unfortunately during emergency and disaster communications play time falls by the wayside and these home brew phonetics become more of a problem than an asset. Most of the time these home brew phonetics in no way resemble any of the standardized phonetic systems. When These operators find themselves in a situation where they need to be understood their home brew phonetics really don’t help. That is why the ITU Phonetic alphabet is the agreed upon standard for amateur radio emcomm communications. Every radio operator should be able to at least spell their call sign with these phonetics. Memorization of these phonetics is not difficult. Some operators can jump to phonetics without even thinking about it. Since so many letters in the English language like E,B,V,C and others sound so much alike it is very important to know the standard ITU phonetic alphabet.

Do not yell, Don’t whisper

Yelling at a microphone is a problem that has propagated down through the hobby. Many of us have come into the hobby by way of the citizens band service. Operating AM on cheaply made and badly maintained equipment in that service. Many others use sideband radios on a regular bases. On AM and Sideband speaking louder into the microphone can give you a small increase in the output power of your radio. Since we are using primarily FM radio equipment this is not the case. Without going off into an explanation of how FM works lets just say that yelling at your microphone causes distortion making it difficult to understand the information you are trying to convey. Since the equipment that we use on VHF and UHF is Frequency Modulated the Amplitude of your voice can cause more problems than you would think.

Whispering into the microphone also has problems. There are some operators out there that speak very quietly into there microphone. This results in a full quieting signal and barely understandable audio. Some times the microphone gain or deviation on your radio may not be adjusted properly. if you do not speak up while transmitting this can make the problem worse. In the case of a Net Control located in a noisy environment it makes your transmissions unusable. It also waste valuable time while the Net Control attempts to take your traffic. We don’t always have the luxury of calling a net from the comfort of our home.

Don’t eat the microphone.

Eating the microphone or holding it to close to your mouth is another bad habit that has trickled down through the hobby from the days of carbon microphones and the poor quality microphones of the past. Today the microphone supplied with a standard piece of amateur radio equipment is very good. Eating the microphone presents its own set of problems. Holding the microphone to close to your mouth can overdrive the diaphragm in the microphone and audio stage of the radio causing distortion which most often results in muffled audio. You may also experience Flat Topping of your audio signal that is very similar to clipping in other audio equipment. Over deviation of your signal is also a problem you may experience. Over deviation is a problem because most repeaters are equipped with a band pass filter to eliminate unwanted noise on nearby frequencies. This means that in some cases you could be sitting under the repeater running a hundred watts and not be able to key the machine because your signal exceeds the width of the passband. Another problem that may occur from eating the microphone is known as P-pops or Clicks. These are most common when the microphone is held directly in front of the mouth. These are not only annoying but can also make it difficult for net control to understand the information you are trying to convey. It is always best to hold the microphone off to one side of the mouth. I also like to use what I call the “Thumb Rule”. If I am holding the microphone to transmit I should be able to extend my thumb and lightly touch my chin or lower jaw. This seems to be just about the right distance and works well with most radios including hand held transceivers.

Lastly a word on hand held transceivers. Most HT’s come from the factory with the microphone gain turned up higher that mobile radios. So the built in microphones are “Hotter” than one might expect. They are designed to be held a foot to eighteen inches away from your mouth. Eating the microphone on these will cause many of the problems listed above to be much worse. External microphones will depend on the design of the microphone.

Q signals, codes and jargon

Since from time to time we will be transmitting information for use by non-hams such as our served agencies we need to keep Q-Signals, Codes, and Jargon to a minimum. Our served agencies have there own language or jargon and in most cases it doesn’t even remotely resemble the jargon that we use as amateur radio operators. The National Weather Service has its own language for describing weather and that is the only possible jargon that we may need to use. That information will be covered at Skywarn School where it will be covered by the folks that know what they are talking about.

Codes and Ciphers are prohibited by part 97 so they are not appropriate for any reason.

Q-Signals are a problem in amateur radio today because everybody wants to sound like a professional radio operator and they think that Q-Signals help achieve that goal. Q-Signals were designed to make cw operation easier and have no place on a phone (Voice) frequency especially during an emcomm net where the transmission and reception of clear and concise information is critical. Lastly, There is a place for Over, Out and Roger in emcomm communications. Most amateur radio operators tend not to use them correctly. My personal opinion is that if you want to acknowledge a transmission the word “Received” works just fine.

These are just a few of the things that can help all of us improve our communications skills. Clarity in communications is always important. It is even more important when we start to deal with Emergency and Disaster communications. Remember we are not transmitting for ourselves. We are transmitting for everybody.

First of all, Happy New Year, loyal readers.  I have been exhorted by several enthusiasts of the blog to write more.  The months of November and December are busy around the Miller household with the CQ WWs, ARRL Sweepstakes, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and an annual professional conference on the West Coast between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  So, this is a drought time of year for writing.  A number of projects around the station have been started or completed and those will be written up as time allows.  Travel and potential DX operation is on the horizon, etc, etc.  However, today’s topic is WordPress comment spam.

I hadn’t checked the moderation queue on the blog comments for about six weeks until recently.  There were some 1500 comments pending.  Exactly two of them were from real commenters.  (Thanks, by the way!)  I could subscribe to a service (like Akismet) to stem the flow of spam, but I’m a cheapskate and skimming the spam is a bit like reading the police blotter in your local newspaper—a guilty pleasure.

The Internet democratizes the sale of nearly everything, legal or not, by providing a low-cost storefront for a business that can be based anywhere in the world, plus  (semi-)anonymous payment.  This is great for obtaining otherwise unobtanium surplus electronics and parts.  But, it’s also great for anyone selling anything else that is high-risk (for vendor or purchaser) or low-volume in a standard retail setting.  The difficulty for everyone is getting your business noticed.  Enter search-engine optimization (SEO):  techniques that game search engine algorithms to increase your visibility in a search.  Google’s PageRank, for example considers the number of links to a site as a measure of its popularity.  So, blasting every blog’s comment boxes with links to your site is a brute-force way to game that system (except the smart engineers at Google have weighted PageRank with the “quality” of the linking page and a whole host of other trade-secrets).  Some SEO schemes appear also to develop trees of “link farms” to improve “quality.”  But, this is just an arm-chair assessment.

Anyhow, the upshot is that there are a lot of keywords and links embedded in SEO spam.  The keywords generally reflect what’s offered for sale and they seem to reflect typical black and gray market goods—counterfeit designer clothing (Ugg boots are the informal favorite in my spam tin, with sports jerseys a distant second), pornography, and dubious medical products and home remedies (“tattoo removal creams” was a recent example).   Today, the bit bucket found a dozen or so messages such as these:

All point to the same site and contain keywords about amateur radio topics (except the SEO one at top).  So, I can infer that one of several things happened:  1. The site owner’s site got hacked and the SEO scumbags wove their material into it to make the SEO look somehow more “legitimate.”   2. The site owner acted (paid…*shudder*) on one of those spam e-mails every domain owner receives that offer to “increase traffic to your site.”  3.  The site owner is an SEO scumbag himself.

I’m leaning toward explanation #2, since the site itself makes him sound like the Homer Simpson line, “Oh, they have the Internet on computers now?!”  Whatever the case, this is inappropriate behavior and I refuse to mention the site owner by name, callsign, or link, lest the action be successful.  It’s the equivalent of splattering up and down the band on SSB when running high power to a good antenna.  You’re a lid.

Ok, I feel better now.

Often I complain about what we’re doing wrong or what we should be doing.  This time is one of those exceptions where I have to pass kudos along.  CQ Magazine has announced a “Maker” column which will be edited by Matt Stultz, KB3TAN, and will appear in several issues this year.  The so-called maker movement has always been around, it’s just recently become more “hip” with the “maker” moniker and like with amateur radio the Internet provides a means for tinkerers to network, exchange ideas and information, and come together as a more organized movement.  In my opinion amateur radio missed two prime opportunities with techie movements in the past, that of the open source world / Linux, and the wifi boom in the late 90s, early 2000s that led to wireless ISPs and got a lot of geeks interested in wireless but without amateur radio.

It’s great that CQ recognizes the opportunity and is taking advantage of it to bridge the maker and amateur radio worlds, and it just makes sense from a technical standpoint to introduce amateur radio to makers.  Maker projects often have an element of mobility or remote control — projects that need wireless for control or data telemetry.  Rather than just purchasing a mystery “black box” radio unit off-the-shelf and incorporating it into a project, makers have the opportunity with amateur radio to understand what’s going on inside the box, or bettet yet build that black box themselves.  Introducing amateurs to the maker world will be beneficial as well, hopefully encouraging more amateurs to build and perhaps build projects outside of the normal QRP rig projects we tend to do.  Overall this is a win-win situation for radio amateurs and makers.

A new version of the Opera software has just been released which can output the bit code of a beacon signal so it can be programmed into a microcontroller such as a PIC or a Parallax Propeller chip. (You can find the download via the Links page of the Opera Yahoo group.)

I modified Eldon Brown WA0UWH’s QRSS program code to send the bit code generated by the Opera software and it was received by my K3 on 30m and successfully decoded. Not bad for 5 minutes’ work! You can download the code here.

Just as Eldon did I will have to build an amplifier to raise the output of the Propeller from a couple of milliwatts to something with a better chance of being received. Before it is worth doing that people will have to start using the Opera mode on the HF bands because with my antenna restrictions I have no hope of receiving or radiating a signal on LF or VLF. But I am quite excited at the possibility of building simple standalone beacon transmitters for this new weak signal mode which is much easier to generate than WSPR or QRSS.

Stop press: Just decoded G0NBD on 10.135MHz +1500Hz for my first real over-the-air Opera spot. And it appears my first transmission (using the PC software and my K3 at 5W) has been received by OM5NA at -21dB. This is fun!

After getting the Sirio 10m antenna on the car last autumn, I’ve been switching the FT8900 over from the VHF/UHF aerial to use 10m, particularly at weekends as I’ve been driving around. On the FT8900 I’m restricted to FM of course, so I’d been thinking about getting the Anytone AT-5555 in the car to give me SSB capability.

It was just a case of getting the bits together to do it, which in reality was just sorting out the power. I assumed that fixing would be easy, but actually as ever, there’s less room in small cars than you think. And the Anytone is actually quite a big rig! In the end, I managed to fix it securely to the left hand side of the centre console. It seems quite easy to operate and doesn’t impede driving.

On a test drive across to the next village, I listened and heard some activity; UA9XL and an EA8 on SSB as well as a UN9 down on CW. SWR of the antenna seems fine in the lower portion of the band.

Hopefully I shall be able to make some contacts in the coming weeks. 12W or so is quite low power for SSB but I am sure something will be possible and in any case, it’s always interesting to listen.

One thing I have already tried – whilst parked – is tuning the rig to 28.120 to receive PSK and decoding it on my iPhone with the ‘Multimode’ application. In theory, a QSO may be possible by ‘miking’ the output of the iPhone to the rig.

I’m looking forward to seeing what can be done