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Rest In Peace, Steve

6 October 2011 | by Anthony K3NG | Leave a Comment (0)

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Handiham World for 05 October 2011

5 October 2011 | by Patrick WA0TDA | Leave a Comment (1)

Welcome to Handiham World.

A broken water pipe gets me thinking…

What sort of things might cause a disaster in my ham radio shack? I started thinking about this recently after dealing with a minor disaster caused by a leaking water pipe in the ceiling of the basement. As usual, I was sitting in my home office, which also serves as my ham shack, when I heard a faint drip, drip, drip. Since I spend an awful lot of time in my office, I know and recognize all of the usual sounds of the house around me. In fact, I don’t really notice if the compressor in the freezer comes on and my brain rarely even registers sound of the washing machine or dryer in the adjacent laundry room. The furnace or air conditioner can come on and go off without interrupting me. Jasper, my dog, wanders the house and occasionally growls at a squirrel that he sees through the window. None of this stuff bothers me or particularly gets my attention. But the brain is a marvelous thing; it can ignore the common and expected while immediately picking up on something unusual.

The sound of dripping water, even though barely audible, got my attention!

Sure enough, an inspection of the recreation room around the corner from my office revealed a drip from the ceiling. Several of the tiles in the suspended ceiling had gotten waterlogged and collapsed onto the floor, and I hadn’t heard that sound because I had only just a few minutes before come into the office to sit down and do some more work. The leak must have occurred in the afternoon shortly after I had finished my usual office day and had taken the dog out for a walk. When I returned to the office after dinner, that’s when I heard the dripping sound that was so out of place. It turns out that a 90° copper connecting joint in the cold water pipe going to the outdoor irrigation system developed a tiny pinhole leak on the inside of the bend. The tiny, almost invisible spray was enough to create quite a mess given a few hours. The soaked ceiling tiles collapsed onto an easy chair, soaking it and ruining the cushion. The carpet on the floor was soaked in an area of about a yard square. A few other items stored in the room got wet on the outside, but were not ruined because I heard the drip and responded in time to shut off the water. Fortunately, we have a carpet cleaning machine that vacuums up water and we had a spare cushion for the chair. I haven’t replaced the ceiling tiles yet, but they are standard 2′ x 2′ squares that are commonly available at any big box building store. As we are so fond of saying in Minnesota, “it could’ve been worse!”

Of course I called the plumber, and he was able to fix the problem the next day. Fortunately, we have a shut off valve for that particular leg of the water system in our house, so there was no need to keep the main valve turned off. It’s heck to be without water when you need to wash, cook, and flush! But what got me to thinking about the ham shack in relation to this broken pipe was that the shutoff valve is located directly above the ceiling in my office. In fact, several water pipes converge in the ceiling above the ham shack and it is sobering to think that the copper pipe carrying all of that water is exactly the same age as the pipe fitting that failed in the next room, which is about 20 years old. So, as I sit here talking into the microphone and enjoying a nice session on my radio, will I one day feel a drip, drip, drip on my head? I guess it could happen, and I have to admit that when I finished the basement and built the ham shack I never gave a second thought to the water pipes running through the ceiling joists overhead. I had grown up with copper water pipe in my parents’ house, and I cannot remember a single time that there had ever been a leak. I guess I would not have been too surprised if a leak had occurred where pipes were joined in the soldered connection, but to have a piece of copper simply spring a leak in the body of the pipe? It did seem pretty unlikely, but like all such things it is not something to worry about unless it happens to you – and it happened to me!

So I am forced to assess the probability of another leak, perhaps occurring over the critical electronic and computing equipment I have in the ham shack. Some of this equipment runs for hours or days at a time without being turned off. One can only imagine the damage that would be caused by water pouring onto the energized equipment. When I wired the ham shack, everything was put on ground fault interrupters. Given a good soaking, the equipment would probably short and trip the interrupters, but by then of course the station and computers would be ruined. This is not something I care to think about, but it is nonetheless a possibility. I had considered the possibility of a leak like the one we had to be extremely remote, and perhaps I was right. Nonetheless, had the leak occurred over the ham shack it would’ve meant many thousands of dollars of damage instead of a soaked chair cushion and a few feet of wet carpet.

What to do? Well, moving the ham shack and home office would be a major undertaking and a huge disruption in my work schedule. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be expensive and difficult. For now, the best I can do is to turn the main water valve for the entire house to the “off” position whenever we leave on vacation or for any kind of extended multi-day trip. This is something I have always done anyway, and while it is not a perfect solution, it does prevent damage from leaks that might occur when no one is home and when damage can be severe due to the fact that no one is around to discover the leak. Long ago, when I worked in an appliance store, we recommended that our customers who were leaving on vacation turn off the water supply to their washing machines because the hoses that fed the washing machine might burst and cause flooding in the basement. Turning off the whole house valve takes care of that problem. Keeping equipment off the floor is another good idea.

We are used to thinking about protecting our amateur radio equipment and its associated computer equipment from lightning damage, but we cannot ignore the threat posed by water!

For Handiham World, I’m…

Patrick Tice
[email protected]
Handiham Manager

Pat Tice, WA0TDA, is the manager of HANDI-HAM and a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

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Meeting old and new radioamateurs

5 October 2011 | by Bas PE4BAS | Leave a Comment (1)

Dragonfly photographed in our garden in the evening sun

The weather was beautifull the last 2 weeks. Temperatures around 20-24 C without that much wind, a real nice autumn. Unfortenately work had to be done both at the job and at home. Not much time for radio, although… at monday I heard a few locals on 10m. They seem to have a kind of net there on 28.400 USB. I heard some known voices and decided to jump in. After a short hello I discovered a couple of them were old friends from the CB years. I did a lot of 11 Mtr DX about 20 years ago with one of them and now he got his license as PD1BM. I remember Bert very well as we did a lot of DX together, I even visited him now and then after school back then just to do some DX. Bert has a ear for special DX and also has a exceptional location between 2 large canals which apparently gives him a advantage. I welcome him on the amateurbands and hope he enjoys it a lot. Bert already made some very nice DX with his 4 element LFA yagi for 10 Mtr. Last friday we had a meeting from our radioclub VERON dep. Hunsingo, there was a pile of QSL cards waiting for me. Another pile was for a neigbour HAM PC5F which I had to deliver to another local HAM. Very complicated….end of the story he made a telephone call to me and met me at my job to get his cards. Never spoke this guy although he is living in the same street that was my QTH for 12 years. So, I decided to e-mail him for a sked. We did meet at 80m PSK31 at Tuesday evening and had a chat for a while. PC5F Ferdinand has all his antennas inside the house on the attic, and makes some very nice DX for instance to North America on 10m! And with Hawaii on 20m! That is really nice, why do we need all those big antennas??

Bas, PE4BAS, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Groningen, Netherlands. Contact him at [email protected].

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iHAB-7 Was a Sucsess!

5 October 2011 | by Rich KB2MOB | Leave a Comment (0)

Southgate Amatuer Radio has a great article about iHAB-7, which is a high altitude balloon that carried Amateur Radio as well as record HD video of the flight. It went up to a little over 85,000 feet and took some stunning images.

YouTube Screen Shot

It all carried a 40 Meter beacon and a 70cm simplex repeater up with it. The video was posted on YouTube and I am re-posting it here for you as well. Here’s the description from the YouTube video giving a little more detail on the flight:

First, we are thankful for everyone who participated in the iHAB-7 launch. What a GREAT way to spend a beautiful Iowa fall day! iHAB-7 was a picture perfect flight! The propulsion team did a fantastic job getting the balloon filled to specifications, which gave iHAB-7 a perfect 5.5m/sec ascent rate.
The balloon stayed aloft for 1 Hour – 51min, reaching a burst altitude of 85,290ft and traveling 33 miles down range. COLD temperature at altitude, lowest temperature recorded inside the payload reached -8 °C or 17.6 °F. The recovery team had the rare opportunity to get a visual on the payload at 8,000 feet on its decent, and witnessed it land in a freshly harvested cornfield SE of Morning Sun, Iowa.
Signal reports are still coming in on the 40 Meter beacon. UHF Simplex repeater worked as well as it could. Being a “Parrot” it is a little more challenging to work, but some folks were able to make QSOs.
A special thank you to the Washington Area Amateur Radio Club for their sponsorship of the iHAB-7 Launch! Also, thank you to Mark Joseph (KC9DUU) – Jesse Risley (K9JLR) – Jeremy Lamb (KC9KGJ) – and Pete Lilja (KC0GPB) for chasing with us!

Looking at a still image from the video, the view reminds me of Courasant from Star Wars. There I go being geek again. Anyways, here is your Amateur Radio moment of “Zen”.

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.

Rich Gattie, KB2MOB, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New York, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

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Seeing the big picture with PowerSDR

5 October 2011 | by Mike VE9KK | Leave a Comment (0)

PowerSDR screen

Over the last couple of weeks the sun gods have been looking down on us and smiling with record breaking sunspots and flux levels. Bands such as 10 meters normally quite has opened up world wide. Just this past weekend I was able to work Europe with just one watt. I found with these great conditions and wanting not to miss out on band openings the rig has been on lots more and the blog writing has gone down just a bit. One tool that has been in my ham radio pocket for some time now is my SDR Panadapter. What is an SDR panadapter you ask....in a nutshell it is a displays a segment of radio spectrum for
the band that your radio is on. My setup is made up of the LP Pan, EMU 0202 Creative labs external sound card and the PowerSDR software. The pan-adapter gives my QRP station some nice advantages the main one is the ability to see the entire CW segment at one time. I can see a strong station or week station then point and click and I'm there. Before I would be spinning the VFO from on end of the band to the other. I may just miss a station calling CQ and is now waiting for a response but to me its static with no one there and I move on missing this station for his

My LP-Pan unit below, new TS-990s

next CQ call. Also I can flip to 10 meters and look at the pan-adapter to see if there is any action on the band or not....seeing if the band is open in a shorter time as opposed to spinning the VFO over the entire band. If you want to go down the Pan-adapter road at this time there are about 3 ways to do it. You can go all out and purchase a Flex radio system this is by far the most expensive way of going about it. Having said that it comes complete with all that is needed including a rig, processor for software and software all in one package. Or as I did you can order a pan-adapter, sound card and download the free software. Finally there is the stand alone Pan-adapter the only one at this time on the market I know of is the Elecraft P3. This unit is plug and play there is not need for software or a computer...the only catch is you need an Elecraft K3. To be fair some of Icom's rigs come with a band scope. I am not sure how interactive they are. Also Yaesu has their DMU-2000 option that gives you more than just a band scope. There is also some rumors of Kenwood coming out with a new rig. I have seen some pictures and along side is an
Elecraft type stand along plug and play Pan-adapter. Next question that most ham's ask is "how much for this toy" The option I chose I believe is the cheapest...the LP-Pan comes either as a kit or factory built unit. I chose the kit at 200.00. The EMU-0202 ran me 125.00 and the software is well what all hams want to hear....FREE!!! So for about 325.00 you can be in the Pan-adapter world. Oh and one last consideration is the speed of your PC. It is recommended on the LP Pan site the following be used for your PC:

2.8 GHz processor (the more the merrier), preferably Core Duo or Quad.
1 GB RAM (the more the merrier, limited to 3GB on 32-bit systems, which are recommended)
16-bit sound card, preferably not integrated into motherboard. 24-bit preferred (lower noise floor)
48 kHz sound card... 96 or 192 KHz preferred (display width is roughly equal to sampling rate)
Separate video card, or integrated video with sufficient dedicated memory. Most of the SDR applications are video intensive.
So there you have it a pan-adapter setup...Christmas is coming and maybe it might be something you would like under the tree??

JUST WANTED TO ADD A NEW ADDITION TO THE POST I WAS EMAILED BY JOHN AE5X. HE REMINDED ME OF ANOTHER OPTION I NEGLECTED TO INCLUDE IN THE POSTING. THE SOFTROCK AND IT'S A 20.00 KIT!!!! HERE IS A LINK TO GM0ELP'S BLOG DETAILING THE SOFTROCK.

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

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Central Florida QRP Meetup 8 October 2011

4 October 2011 | by Kelly K4UPG | Leave a Comment (0)

This coming Saturday at the Melbourne Hamfest and ARRL FL State Convention QRP ops from around the state will gather for a time of eyeball QSO’s, bragging, show ‘n tell and maybe even some operating from the picnic tables in the park next door!

Looking for Something?

Get there early and do your tailgating and swapping so you can gather at noon near the front entrance. Look for K4UPG’s gawdy yellow hat and come up and say HI! Some of us want to go to lunch together and depending on the number we have a couple places in mind that are nearby the event site.

So come one and all (even the curious) and join the fun.

GATHERING: Front entrance to Auditorium

DATE: Saturday, 8 October 2011

TIME: 12:00-12:15 EDT

Bring some gear if you want to play radio in the park or on the beach later in the day!

Kelly McClelland, K4UPG, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Florida, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

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Pumpkin Patrol is Coming!

3 October 2011 | by Rich KB2MOB | Leave a Comment (1)

I haven’t heard about this too much in the last few years, but back when I first got my license, I helped out with this. So I figured I would mention the Pumpkin Patrol since it’s now October and Halloween will be here before we know it!

Screen Shot of YNN Video

When I was helping out, I was stationed on one of 2 bridges near where I lived. One was in the village of Fultonville, just off Exit 28 on the NY Thruway, and the other was in Amsterdam off of Exit 27 of the Thruway. Both bridges, went over the Thruway and were accessible because they were State routes that went over the bridges. Now I had heard on the news about kids throwing stuff off of the bridges down on to roads and cars. And after a particularity bad incident, the NY State Police decided to stop the problem right off. That’s where volunteer Ham Radio operators like myself came in.

I had heard on the local repeater they were looking for a few people to help cover bridges and that they needed someone to cover one of those 2 bridges by me. So I called the man in charge at the time, Jack, WA2YBM, and ask if I could help. Long story short, I got all the info and a plaque for the car so the police knew who I was, and went out and sat on the bridge till midnight and did my check ins. I did it a few more times. Then I didn’t hear anything about it for a while, so I never really did it again.

Although, given the chance, I might be willing to still do it, if the need arose. It was fun, but to be honest, it was also a little boring. But I kept myself occupied and still enjoyed the experience overall. If there is a Pumpkin Patrol in your area, I would encourage you to sign up and be a part of it. Especially if you’re looking for something for the first time out. This would be a good way to break the ice.

Here’s a link to a quick story from a couple years ago. Just a blurb on the news…

73.

Rich Gattie, KB2MOB, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New York, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

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