AmateurRadio.com

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you may have got the impression that I’ve rather lost interest in HF operation. That’s not entirely true. But I do think that DXing in general has lost its appeal on HF for me. There’s the antisocial behaviour which dogs a lot of DX operations these days. And also, once you’ve played with WSPR and JT65 on HF, there’s the nagging doubt that using CW or SSB at 100w or more is somewhat akin to fishing by lobbing a hand grenade into the water and seeing what floats to the surface. Of course, that’s completely unfair, but it’s a fun analogy! Nevertheless, it’s clear that efficiency of an ‘average’ HF DX contact is suboptimal compared to a few mW and a ‘decent’ mode.

All that having been said, I still love being able to connect up a simple HF transceiver such as my FT817 and a simple antenna like my MP1 vertical and make CW contacts over hundreds or thousands of miles. It’s particularly satisfying to do that from a portable location.

And so it was yesterday that I thoroughly enjoyed some 17 and 20m CW QSOs around Europe. It was good, too, to hear Mongolia coming in loud and clear on 30m. But I wasn’t remotely tempted to get involved with the pileup!

As the Anytone 10m rig arrived, the different band segments were fine, but I thought it might be fun to reprogram it a little. One thing I was keen to do was to be able to listen (only listen, mind you) lower down on 27MHz ssb. I guessed that activity would be higher there than on 28MHz and that it might provide some useful propagation indicators.

I ordered the programming disk and lead which arrived quickly. However, I had an enormous amount of frustration getting the lead to install on my PC (and actually I tried pretty much every PC in the house). Sometimes the PC would detect it as a COM port and sometimes it wouldn’t. I thought it must be me doing something wrong. However in the end, I talked with Paul in the sales/service department at Nevada and we agreed that I would send it back. I completely expected him to say that it worked fine for him, but happily he declared it a faulty lead. Unfortunately, though they were out of stock so I had to wait for a replacement.

The replacement duly arrived last week and the PC immediately picked up the COM port. I still had to fiddle and faff somewhat as I didn’t realise that my Anytone had v4 software in it rather than v3. Once I ot that sorted out, I was able to retask one of the band segments so that I could listen around 27.555. This works well (on receive!).

And as I hoped, it has already shown that the band is open more often than activity on 28MHz would have us believe. Sadly, I have already heard music and mildly abusive language on there! Not much difference, in case anyone’s feeling smug, to your average DX pileup on the amateur bands.

Positively though, the Anytone has been a real favourite through the summer, listening for Es on 28MHz. With the reprogrammed segment, I’m certain that it will be a great indication of when to put a CQ out on 10m.

Promo:

• Ohio LinuxFest will be held September 9-11, 2011 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, OH.
• Linux in the Ham Shack promo from the Low SWR guys. Thanks!

Announcements:

• Our best wishes for a speedy recovery to MadamMoo!
• Our regular hosts are joined by Torsten, XE2/K5TOR.

Topics:

• Firefox 4 has been out a while, and version 5 beta is available at the time of recording. Our hosts discuss. The first thing Russ noted, was the increase in speed! Look for versions 6 and 7 before the end of the year. (As I write this, version 6 has been released. -Ed.)
• Kudos to The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) and their interest in amateur radio. One of the hosts, Joel, aka “gorkon”, W3RAZ, has recorded a couple podcasts for Hacker Public Radio: Episode #738 is an introduction to amateur radio, and Episode #756 explains the basics of radio. Another TLLTS host, Allan, is N3MAW.
• Leo LaPorte of This Week in Tech has started a podcast about amateur radio. (It’s Ham Nation with Bob Heil, K9EID, and Gordon West, WB6NOA, under the TWiT banner and with Leo’s support and occasional participation. By the time you read this, Leo has his license and is now W6TWT. -Ed.)
• Russ describes the Linux from Scratch project that provides instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code. Russ plans on providing more details of his experience with Linux from Scratch on a future episode of the QSK Netcast.
• Our hosts tried Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal, and discuss it, good and bad.
• Russ also tried Fedora 15, and liked the default desktop environment.
• Richard likes PCLinuxOS, and SUSE Linux.
• Linux Mint gets a mention, too.
• In future LHS episodes, look for information about svxlink, an EchoLink client for Linux, and codec2, an Open Source and patent-free audio codec.
• Torsten has had problems installing CQRLog on a 64-bit machine. Russ recommends installing the ia32-libs package to provide the needed 32-bit libraries. In Debian-based distributions, you can install that package with the command “apt-get install ia32-libs”. More information about running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit machine with Debian-based Linux is here.

Contact Info:

• Contact Richard at [email protected], Russ at [email protected], or both at the same time at [email protected].
• Listen to the live stream every other Tuesday at 8:00pm Central time. Check the LHS web site for dates.
• Leave us a voice mail at 1-909-LHS-SHOW (1-909-547-7469), or record an introduction to the podcast.
• Sign up for the LHS mailing list.
• Sign up for the MAGNetcon mailing list.
• LHS merchandise is available at the Merch link on Web site. Check out the Badgerwear or buy one of the other LHS-branded items at PrintFection.com/lhs or Cafe Press. Thanks!
• Thanks to Dave from Gamma Leonis for the theme music.

Music:

• “Vacancy” by Assembly Line Gods, from their album Control (Volume 1).
• The music in Episode #063 is provided with kind permission by Assembly Line Gods from their recent EP release, Control (Volume 1). The track is called “Vacancy.” Follow ALG on Twitter and Facebook and buy their new tracks at iTunes. Thanks, guys!

The Practical Amateur Radio Podcast (PARP) is an amateur radio or ham radio podcast I created in 2008.  Like many, I discovered podcasts when I purchased my first iPod and was introduced to the world of iTunes.  I subscribed to many podcasts in those early days but it wasn’t until after I got my ham ticket in 2007 that I discovered amateur radio related podcasts.  I decided to launch PARP as a mechanism for giving back to the hobby I love so much.  The Practical Amateur Radio Podcast is a podcast about all things ham radio.  While geared towards the brand new ham or someone interested in getting into the hobby, I do cover a wide range of topics which have even inspired individuals who have been in the hobby for many years, to try out and find they truly enjoy some of the newer modes.

If I remember correctly, I created this blog several months before the podcast was born.  While both have suffered over the years due to my sometimes hectic work and life schedule, I’ve tried to keep both going and never allow either to duplicate each other.  I really think of this blog as more of an extension of my radio hobby and the podcast more of the educational mechanism for Elmering new and prospective hams alike. 

In any event, I just released my 45th episode and you can download it via iTunes (just search for the practical amateur radio podcast) or you can stream it direct from my podcast website.  A site designed for smart phone users is also available.  The topic for episode 45 of the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast is, So you have your technician class license, now what?  I encourage the newly licensed ham to join a local club in his/her area and get involved.  In addition, I’m a strong supporter of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and encourage all to join and support this organization.  I also share many of the exciting things a new tech class license holder can get involved with. 

As it is with every episode, I encourage all listeners to share the knowledge learned through my podcast episodes with others.  The Practical Amateur Radio Podcast, creating Elmers one podcast at a time. 

73,

Jerry
KD0BIK

I’ve been seeing on the googles and the twitters, that HeathKit is going to start selling kits again, but not for Ham Radio. They are going to start selling “Do It Yourself Kits” for around the house. While this is great, It’s kind of useless for me.

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia/Louis F. Sander

The first two kits they are offering is a garage parking assistant and a wireless swimming pool monitor. I’m sure these will be great kits and lots of fun to build for many people out there, but not for me. You see, I live in an apartment. Curses, foiled again! But in seriousness, with Heathkit’s come back, it kind of makes me wonder why now? I’m guessing the economy is not what it used to be and money is getting a little tighter. So they are just firing up an old revenue stream that has been dormant a long time and getting back to what worked?

I have never built from a kit, but I have owned kit made electronics before, buying them after the person who made them, then got tired of them. I used to own a nice Heathkit AM/SSB HF transceiver back in the early days of my license. I think it was around the time I upgraded to General Class.  While they haven’t started offering anything Ham Radio related yet, they are looking for suggestions for new projects. A couple that come to mind for me would be, an APRS kit and maybe a small CW or SSB transceiver for backpacking or mobile use. That would have to be pretty rugged though, so not sure how that would play out.

But with Radio Shack also getting back into the DIY arena too, things are starting to come full circle and we’ll have a new generation of kids able to build some pretty cool things on the weekends, keeping them off the interwebs thingy and the facebook doo-dads. Maybe even a return to the catalogs we would get every now and again, and would eagerly await in the mail, like I used to wait for the Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs for Christmas to see all the toys. But being the 21st century, the catalogs would be in PDF format, and delivered by email.

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, The Rock of Albany’s website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday here on AmiZed Studios.

Don’t you hate it when you build a project, it works, then you put it into a case and find that it is no longer working as well as it was?

I built the VCXO-AXE 30m WSPR tramsmitter and it worked perfectly. I then put it in a nice case and began testing it with various portable antennas. At the start I received several spots of my transmissions but after a while the spots became few and far between until hours would pass without any report of my signal.

At first I thought this was due to poor conditions or the fact that the antennas I was testing were inefficient. Eventually I investigated by putting the TX on a dummy load and listening for it with my K3. I found that although I had initially set the VCXO-AXE up to transmit 40Hz above the bottom of the 200Hz wide WSPR band, the frequency had drifted low so that my transmission was now right on the bottom edge and possibly below it on many receivers since I couldn’t guarantee my K3 readout was dead accurate.

It was easy enough to set the transmit frequency back to what I wanted it to be. But I still didn’t receive any spots of my signals.

I looked a bit closer and noticed that although my signal started off as a horizontal line for about the first two-thirds of the transmit cycle, the last third curved down a little. The WSPR software was reporting a drift of -3Hz, which was typically what I had been receiving from those stations that had spotted me. There is a thread in the forum section of the WSPR website which suggests that few signals which drift more than 3Hz are reported. So it seemed probable that drift of my signal was preventing it from being spotted.

Before I put the transmitter into a box the frequency had been perfectly stable after the initial warm-up period. So it was obvious what the trouble was. I drilled a small grid of ventilation holes in the back of the case just above the PA FET and attempted to increase the thermal inertia of the VCXO chip by placing a blob of Blu-Tack over the top of it. This made not the slightest difference. I was still getting -3Hz drift reported on the decodes of my transmissions.

After further investigation I found that the worst heat generating component was in fact the 5V voltage regulator, which also happens to be fairly close to the VCXO chip. So I drilled a further set of holes above that. I also fabricated a heat shield from a piece of cardboard sandwiched between the PCB and the back of the case with Blu-Tack to try to induce most of the heat to go out through the holes instead of heading in the direction of the oscillator. This did make an improvement. I’m now mostly seeing reports of -1Hz drift or even none at all. And I’m getting a lot more spots of my WSPR transmissions!