AmateurRadio.com

The November 2011 issue of QST contains an Op-Ed that really left me shaking my head more than normal.  The author bemoans the complexity and feature sets of newer handheld radios and pines for the days of his IC-02AT.  He goes on at length about the “unnecessary” receive capabilities (NOAA weather broadcasts, AM/FM radio, etc) and how he has to search for the manual every time he wants to program a repeater offset.

Well, as someone who recently upgraded from a radio just slightly newer than the IC-02AT to a “modern” HT, he’s wrong on nearly every account (except the micro-/mini-USB port, which I would wholeheartedly support for charging purposes).

• Eliminate extraneous features.  Too bad we all have different definitions of this.  I think scanning is a worthless feature, but like NOAA/NWS weather broadcasts.  In fact, my wife is delighted that we now have a battery-powered AM/FM+NOAA/NWS radio again that I will always be able to find and will guarantee that it works.  Did you hear that, guys?  My non-ham wife actually likes my HT and uses it to listen to FM radio!
• Eliminate multilevel menu trees.   I’m just dying to replace my cell-phone-sized VX-3r with a knob-covered brick.  I’m sure you are too.  It’ll look great in my shirt pocket.
• Eliminate the proprietary programming cables.  Maybe I’m not a typical ham, but I only have about ten memory channels programmed into my VHF/UHF FM radios and they took about 10 minutes to program through the front panel (my bad, menus).  The mini-/micro-USB port is a good idea for charging, though.
• Allow for a battery pack that uses disposable batteries.  Last time I checked, most radios have this option.  Did I miss something?
• Create an inter-vendor standard for user interface.  What if they standardize on Icom?!?!  The last Icom VHF/UHF FM radio I used received a “grade of S, for ‘stupid’” from its owner.  That was in 1993.  All of the Japanese manufacturers will be put out of business by the factory owned by the Chinese military that produces their products before this happens.

He should buy another IC-02AT if he liked them so much.  I bet for a Jackson or two, you could have a nice one…complete with the 6x AA battery holder.  Heck, buy two or three for spare parts.  I think I have the Service Manual around here somewhere if I didn’t already sell it.

On a more serious note, there are lots of no-frills radios available out there, even brand new ones with factory warranties.  Until recently, at least, the money in VHF FM radios was in two-way, government, and public safety, not amateur.  There are a lot of amateur rigs at the “low end” of the market that share a lot in common with their commercial counterparts.  And, of course, you can always buy used Motorola gear on eBay if you desire ultimate performance and ruggedness.

Despite the fact that I live pretty close to some power transmission lines as well as the regular above-ground residential service, I’ve been pretty lucky in that I’ve never had much of an issue with powerline noise. Unfortunately, that changed just about a week ago. It might be coincidence, but there there were about 4 or 5 houses around a block away from here that lost power due to the October snowstorm that didn’t get it back until last Friday, which is when I started getting S7-S9 powerline noise on all the HF bands, 2m, and, to a lesser extent, 70cm. Given that there were still others in the area without any power (we were very fortunate in that we never lost power at our house), I figured I’d wait until the local power company indicated that they’d finished restoring power to everyone before calling to report it. (Powerline QRN is bad, but it doesn’t come close to not having lights or heat.)  In the meantime, I put my main HF rig (Icom 756 Pro II) on a battery and turned off the main breaker to the house to eliminate any possibility that it was something in the house, but with that done, there was no change to the noise signature.

On Wednesday, the QRN was gone for a few hours in the middle of the day, and I figured that maybe they’d found and fixed the problem on their own, but it was back by the afternoon. Yesterday, the power company officially announced that all customers were back in service, so I figured that I’d give them a call today to see what they’d say.

The automated voice response system had no way to understand “RFI” so it thought I was reporting an outage, and because that’s not the case, I finally got through to a human … who seemed equally baffled. I explained that I was an amateur radio operator and that I was hearing electrical noise that I hadn’t heard until about a week ago. He put me on hold for about 10 minutes and when he came out he said they’d be dispatching a crew.

While the recommendations for a situation like this are to try to narrow it down to a small area or even a single pole, in additional to not really having the right kind of DFing equipment for this, I’m home tending to one of my kids who is recovering from minor surgery, so I didn’t want to spend the time walking or driving around. I am crossing my fingers that PSE&G (my power company) will take this seriously enough to send out a properly equipped crew and find the problem. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Here’s a short video that I took showing what the powerline noise looks like:

An awesome story over on Southgate’s website shares that Ham Radio operators in Thailand, have helped to save almost 1,000 lives during the course of the floods that have been going on in this unusually heavy monsoon season. RAST, which is Thailand’s Amateur Radio society, held a gathering making this announcement.

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia/Navy Visual News Service/Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer Villalovos

RAST Secretary Wacharaphol, HS4DDQ, and his team working with the Public Health Ministry, setup station HS0AC and helped to coordinate rescue communications for medical emergencies. This action made it possible to save those lives. Like here in the US, many of the government agencies have been able to take advantage of the services Amateur Radio operators can offer when their communications networks failed either to overload or from interference from other agencies also trying to help during the emergency.

From the Southgate Story:

The NBTC (National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission) has praised the role that radio amateurs have been playing to help people cope with the disaster by providing communications support and this have been especially helpful in flooded areas where several mobile phone cell sites have failed.

During the meeting, Pranee Netrattana, E21DKD, who is a CQWW VHF Contest winner, was praised for her efforts in the disaster, as a net control operator. This is just another example of how Amateur Radio is still relevant in the 21st century. Even in the information age, there is still room for century old technology.

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, Albany’s #1 Rock Station website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday on AmiZed Studios and hosts a podcast called The Kim & Rich Show with his fiance’ Kim Dunne

Welcome to Handiham World.

Photo: Pat, WA0TDA, poses in front of the Honda Driving Simulator at the Mazda car rental agency in Chitose, Japan.  Note the Handiham baseball cap!  In Japan one drives on the left side of the road. 

I’ve mentioned before that I wanted to try out JT65A on HF but had hit some problems with the laptop’s sound card and the software. Having got things going on WSPR yesterday; my 1W 20m signal got as far as VE6PDQ/1 in Edmonton. Having had an insight as to what I thought the sound card issue was with the JT65A-HF software was, this afternoon I connected it all up and started the software.

It worked!

First of all I tried it out on 20m and got a decode, having sorted out the levels to the sound card. It seemed that the JT65A software needed a slightly higher input level than WSPR. Having done that I was delighted to work DL1AAH on 20m running about 1W.

I wondered what 10m would be like and sure enough it was busy! I answered a few CQ calls, but a particularly nice QSO was with W7YES – I was running about 10W to the vertical.

By about 1830z the band seemed to have faded but I left the software running whilst we had supper. To my surprise, when I popped up later, the band had opened again and the software had logged some further US stations including WY7LL.

I’m pleased to have this working and suspect I shall have a lot of fun with it.

While I’ve mentioned it several times on my podcast, I don’t recall blogging much about it.  I did blog once about moving my ham shack from a 6 foot area to a larger area here.  But for what feels like a decade, I’ve been planning for and slowly working on my new basement ham shack, office and just general man-cave.  It all began sometime in early 2008 when I got the idea to turn the un-finished portion of my basement into a new ham shack. 

We had half of our basement finished soon after purchasing our house in 2004.  It’s been in this finished area where I’ve setup my ham shack, podcast recording studio and home office.  Because this basement area was finished prior to me getting my ham ticket, I have to run my coax feed line either across the ceiling or across the carpet to get it to an outside wall.  Of course we do what we have to do to get on the air.  But I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a space that didn’t have coax and power cords everywhere. 

The first step was to move everything from the unfinished area of the basement (primarily used for storage) to the finished area so I could begin construction.  The unfinished portion of the basement is concrete floor and concrete walls.  While I would have no problem working in a concrete space like this, the object was to create something that was nice and comfortable.  So up went the 2×4 stud walls. 

The framing portion of the overall project went fairly quickly.  The main room of my ham shack/home office/man cave is a room approx. 20’x20’ with a hallway measuring about 8’x16’ opening up into the area that is the laundry room which when framed in was about another 12’ or so of wall space. 

While I started the framing project in 2008, if memory serves me correctly all the framing was complete in about 3-4 months.  So what have I been doing the past three years?  Well obviously not a lot in relation to the basement project.

Part of the delay has been due to life schedule conflicts.  You know work, travel, good DX conditions etc.  In recent weeks, it has been hard to pry myself away from the radio to go work on the basement.  But I really want to get this done and the wife really wants to claim the rest of the basement for other uses. 

A few weeks ago I started working on the basement area again.  I’ve been running electrical, CATV, telephone and network cables in the new area.  With the help of my wonderful wife, we have mapped out where my desk and such will be.  I’ll admit I’m not the most tidy person on the planet.  My current shack area looks like a bomb went off.  I blame this primarily on the fact that I have no cabinet space.  Everything is either on the desk, under the desk or stacked beside the desk.  The new space will have cabinets under the desk surface and cabinets from the ceiling down with just enough space in between for the work area. 

Speaking of work areas.  I’ll have my primary operating position in one corner.  I’ve worked in a corner type setup for the past couple of years and like having the LCD in the corner with my FT-950 on the right and my FT-897 (used for digi modes) to my left.  There will be plenty of space for my VHF/UHF rigs, packet and just about anything else I want to do.  I have also factored in a large workbench area where I can build projects and restore those old AM radios which I enjoy. 

For the wall material I’m going with sheetrock.  While we had investigated other options, we kept coming back to drywall.  This will be one area which we’ll contract out and for a couple of reasons.  One, it will be difficult for just my wife and I to handle the sheetrock (especially the ceiling) the time to complete the job would take us a few weekends.  The sheetrock process is a dirty and nasty one.  I can hire a contractor and crew to come in and they’ll hang, plaster, sand and texture the walls in just a few days.  My wife and I then will paint and do all the rest.

Back to the cable planning.  I’ve factored in both what my present need is as well as looking ahead.  Because the exterior wall where I run the coax feed line for my Hustler 6BTV (ground mounted in my back yard) will be covered in sheetrock as well as the ceiling above it, I’ll need a way to access this in the future. I installed a 1 1/2” PVC pipe across the ceiling for my coax needs.  Some may argue and say I should have installed a larger pipe, but living in “HOA Hell” I’ll never have a need (nor permission) to install anything other than a vertical antenna in my back yard.   I’ll still have access from the utility closet where I’ve pulled the feed line for my 20m hamstick dipole, rotator and VHF/UHF antenna. 

The final decision to make is on the floor covering.  Everything from just the bare concrete floor to tile has come into our heads.  I do know that carpet (any style is out).  I want to be able to zoom from one side of my desk to the other in my chair without issue and carpet just doesn’t allow it.  Plus carpet in a basement is a bad idea any way you look at it.

I have just  another weekend or two of work to do before we can bring in the sheetrock guys.  I need to run speaker wire for a surround sound setup and make one more plumbing modification near where the laundry area will be.  If all goes as planned, we would like to have the sheetrock installed just prior to Christmas and use some of the time-off to do the painting. 

I’ll update everyone in a few weeks on our progress and hopefully with pictures.  I don’t see much need in adding photos to this blog article.  I think everyone knows what concrete walls with 2×4 studs in front look like. 

Until next time….

73 de KD0BIK (Jerry)