AmateurRadio.com

It has been yet another fabulous summer day here in Cumbria. I’m in good spirits and physically feeling fitter by the day. I think the balance issues and “jelly legs” are more an effect of the brain operation than a lack of fitness. Perhaps the same reason my hands often shake badly and cause frustration when trying to attempt soldering.

We decided to go for a walk over the fields to the north of Cockermouth and have a picnic lunch. I took the Taiwanese twins in the hope of making a few radio contacts whilst we were out.

The walk involved some gentle climbing up from the valley. On the way I heard Alan M1EYO/P call on 2m to activate the SOTA summit of Watch Hill G/LD-054 which is almost literally in my back yard. You can see it on the far left of the picture behind me. When I was fit I could walk to Watch Hill though I never did as there was not much attraction in walking for an hour and a half to reach the summit when I could park the car within 15 minutes walk of the top. With no car unfortunately even Watch Hill is out of bounds.

After I worked Alan we carried on walking until we almost reached the Carlisle road, where we found a grassy south facing slope to have lunch. This is probably the only portable site that I can reach on foot from here, though it isn’t a very good site as it is still within the Derwent valley or “Cockermouth black hole” as I call it.

Checking 2m from time to time with a 5/8 telescopic whip on the 2m radio I heard Richard G1JTD/P activating Illgill Head G/LD-029. With a bit of help from Tony G1OAE Richard heard me and we made a contact. I had to use the monitor button to disable the fixed squelch on the H112PLUS which is set far too high. The receiver on the 5/8 telescopic seemed quite poor possibly due to intermodulation or overload. These really are terrible radios!

Alan was going to activate Binsey G/LD-041 a favourite of mine which was in fact the last summit I activated so we waited until he called on 2m and I had another contact. Alan told me he had discovered Rob G4RQJ on the other side of Binsey summit working 40m and setting up to try 4m. I pricked up my ears at the mention of four metres and about a minute later I heard Rob calling on the other H112PLUS so I was able to make my second-ever contact on 70MHz. Binsey is also line of sight from where I was so it was not a DX contact but it was still nice to make a contact on the 4m band.

After that we packed up and walked home. It was a pretty tiring day’s outing for me, definitely the furthest I have walked and the highest I have climbed since my operation. But it was quite a morale booster to get out on such a nice day and do some portable operation. There are even some trees there I could try to get some wire over for some HF operation with the FT-817 in the future, so that’s something to look forward to.

As I mentioned previously, the receive capability in my 50-MHz transverter seemed to be a little bit anemic.  So, I decided to add a little bit of gain.  Looking at the block diagram for the transverter (shown below in updated form—jumper across the SGA-4586Z to understand what the circuit looked like initially—by the way, full-sized PDF versions of all of my notes and schematics will eventually be available here), I reasoned that I had the following losses and gains:  +10 dB for the LNA (this might be as much as +15 dB, but 10 seems more realistic, if not generous), -3 dB for the bandpass filter, -7 dB for the mixer conversion loss, and -3 dB in the diplexer, leaving me with -3 dB overall conversion gain.

So, I endeavored to find some more gain in the form of a MMIC (which is really what all gain blocks in this transverter would be if I were to do it again).  I have a nice (but dwindling) supply of SGA-4586Z’s that produce about 20 dB gain with a 1-dB compression point around 16 dBm, which is probably a good part for this location.  The idea is to overcome the losses in following stages with robust gain in earlier stages (in order to keep system NF low).  So, I ripped out the existing two-pole BPF and replaced it with this:

I was relatively satisfied that I had everything working with the cover of the transverter off to peak the BPF on the W3APL beacon.  So, I replaced the cover and surprise!  To borrow a poetic description of RF circuit doom from N3UM, the MMIC “amplifier burst into song.”  Bursting into song is a bit of a charitable description for something that sounded more  like S9 power line noise in the IF receiver.  I did not actually know that it was the MMIC oscillating at first, but I started wiggling cables and finally found that if I touched the 12RX (+13.8 volts on RX) line, the problem disappeared.  So, I added the 0.01-uF bypass capacitor to ground on the supply side of 180-ohm bias resistor and the problem was solved.

With the completion of the HF SoftRock with Si570 LO, I now have a tunable IF to play with the transverter.  We had a nice opening to the Southeast and Gulf this morning and I even heard my first DX with the transverter and SoftRock combination—CO2WF.  With the appropriate software, I can configure a the SoftRock as a panadapter with the TS-930S as the transmitter.  More on this in the future.  Best of friends:

The real next step in making the transverter useful is building a 20-watt PA stage.  This should be good for driving a Mirage or TE Systems brick or even something bigger like a 3CX800 or 50-volt solid-state amp…

Got the SoftRock v9.0 Lite+USB Xtall working last night.  I’m not 100% sure what the problem was, but I think it may have been due to me programming an ATTiny85 with the latest SoftRock firmware (V15.14), rather than using the supplied ATTiny45 with V15.4.  So, I’m sticking with old version for now.  Not sure if it was cockpit error on my part programming (more likely) or an incompatibility with the new firmware which is designed to work with the Ensemble series of SoftRocks.

As shown in the screenshot from Rocky above, there appears to be a spur that repeats every 1 kHz (see left side of the waterfall).  The right side of the waterfall is with the USB cable unplugged from the computer.  I’m 99% certain this is something internal to the SoftRock because I wrapped a few turns of the USB cable around a big type-31 ferrite toroid and the spurs are still there.  So, need to play with that.

I’m listening to a Es opening to the south on 50 MHz right now using the SoftRock as the RX IF.  Yes, that means that I got the RX on the transverter souped up a little hotter.  I will post something about that later today and place a non-causal link in this post.

Sorry about the infrequency of posts this summer from me. Summers are a bad time for the amateur radio hobby for me every year and this one is particularly bad.

It’s been complicated by a storm that came through 5:15 AM CDT July 11th, with 70-90+ MPH sustained winds (for, I’m not kidding, 15 minutes) and took down *ALL* of my wire antennas. (Trees fell through their paths, so my designs were still mechanically solid, right?) So I’ve been very QRT and have spent the last several weekends cleaning up the lot and fixing storm damage to my house. At least the tower and aluminum antennas seemed to have survived the ordeal.

Because of all of this the amount of time I’ve had to dedicate to the hobby has been minimal for the last couple of months. I’ll get back to it when I can. I had a bunch of antenna work planned before winter anyway.. now I have twice as much! :O(

However, I am involved in a minor way on the committee that is handing the ARRL Midwest Division Convention and I am specifically handling Kit Building at the event.

Also I’m sort of the publicity guy too.. but I’m getting plenty of help for others for that role!

But, nonetheless.. I should still publicize… So here is a shameless plug for the event.

http://convention2011.cvarc.rf.org/

I’d like to personally invite all of my ‘blog readers to attend our convention in Cedar Rapids. If you are within a 250 mile one way drive.. it will be a no-brainer for a really fun and interesting weekend devoted to ham radio.

The convention will be held at:

Clarion Hotel and Convention Center – Cedar Rapids, Iowa
525 33rd Avenue S.W.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52404

Mention the “ARRL Midwest Convention” when booking
Reservations: 877-949-2992 Fax: 319-362-1420

If there are issues at the Clarion, since it’s getting close to the event, don’t worry..the area is “hotel row” and there are plenty of options.

On Friday August 5th, we have an educational, hands-on tutorial on getting stated with the TI OMAP processor based BeagleBoard (Rev C) and BeagleBoard XM for Amateur Radio uses. It’s the intent of a group of mostly Collins ARC guys to eventually evolve this board into a SDR but many other projects (such as D-RATS/APRS gateways, portable HF digital mode units, etc.) have also been contemplated and input on this project will be welcome. The fee is $10 for this if you are registered for the convention also, $20 if not.

On August 6th we have a plethora of interesting speakers in an “operating” and “technical” track. There is also a Youth forum (12 and under is free for the convention). In addition, Ed Hare W1RFI and Kay Craigie N3KN ARRL President will be attending. Kay will be the banquet speaker. Since this is an ARRL convention an official “Wouff Hong” ceremony will also take place. This is a grand opportunity to become a part of this “official” fraternity! The list of speakers is on the schedule page, http://convention2011.cvarc.rf.org/schedule.html

I will also personally be the master of the kit building session that includes a cute little PIC based keyer that would work wonderfully in a Rover (AA0ZZ design) and a 40m NM0S (locally designed) HamCan two transistor regenerative 1/2 to 1 W PEP output transceiver.

WA0ITP of 4SQRP fame and K0NEB the “kit building” columnist for CW magazine are scheduled to attend and have stated their intention on assisting me if needed. The kits are suitable for beginners and I will NOT let you fail building one.

Then if you are smart enough to stay the night at the Clarion, you can attend one of the region’s best hamfests on Sunday August 7th (which is an annual event even on non-convention years)… Cedar Valley ARC “Summerfest” near the hotel at:

Teamster’s Hall
5000 J Street SW
Cedar Rapids, IA 52404

Which is about 1 mile from the convention.

Hopefully I will see some of the regular viewers of the ‘blog at the event.

The day of the event is getting close. If you want to come it would be highly appreciated if you mail your registration (from the website .PDF) as soon as possible.

My search for a way to generate more young hams has taken a strange turn. My original goals were to (a) provide a solid excuse for our hobby to be kept alive, despite the pressures for our valuable spectrum by rapidly expanding commercial interests and (b) help provide the high-tech work force our country is going to need to compete against the other industrial countries.

If we’re going to do this we have to get kids interested in hamming. This brought me head-to-head with the mess our schools are in. And that, in turn, got me to reading about our educational system. I’ve found that I’m not alone in criticizing our schools.

Now, before I get really started on how lousy our schools are, let’s just consider what you might do if you were interested in having the very best child or grandchild you could. First, let’s talk about what can go wrong, and then we can discuss how to fix the situation. I’m presuming, of course, that you might have a shred of interest in giving your children the best start in life that you can. Maybe you don’t give a damn. Many parents obviously don’t.

By the time your kids are seven the largest part of their characters will have already been formed. The child at seven won’t be very different fundamentally from the teenager at 15, or the grown-up at 30. Maybe you’ve seen the movie they made about that. If not, rent it.

Your child starts with the sperm and the ova. Anything you do to screw up your DNA before conception is going to affect your kid, and not positively. If you mess your sperm up enough, there’ll be a miscarriage. But a lesser disturbance of the DNA message will just burden your child with problems. There may be health, behavioral, or even cosmetic birth defects.

So what can we do to give our kids the best possible start? Well, research has shown that there are a lot of things that affect our sperm. There are drugs such as caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. There are magnetic fields such as we find with electric blankets or living near power lines or power sub-stations. There are poisons such as mercury, silver, and nickel, which we can get from amalgam fillings in our teeth and inoculations, such as for flu. Most of us already know about crack babies, and terrible problems from cocaine, pot, and the hard stuff.

So let’s say that you and your wife go out of your way to give your kid the best start you can. Then comes birth. I’ve got to get you to read The Continuum Concept by Liedloff. That’ll keep you from letting the hospital put your baby in their nursery. This is a wonderful guidebook for the first year of life.

Next comes the pre-school era from one to five. This is a time of incredibly rapid learning. It’s a wonderful time to teach babies several languages, if you have a way to continue and develop their use later on. Use it of lose it.

Unfortunately, even if we’ve done everything the best we can until we send them to public school, this is when we can permanently screw up the rest of their lives. I hope I can get you to get the book by John Gatto, the New York State Teacher Of The Year, Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. It’s inexpensive and a humdinger. Of course, since you are an alumni of this school system, the chances are great that you do not have any interest in reading books. Do you know that the average American schoolteacher only reads one book a year. And then, even if you do read Gatto’s book and get all upset when you find out what’s been going on in schools, you have been so conditioned by your own school experience so the odds are that you have been made into a gutless wimp and won’t have the initiative to even try and do anything about it.
Heck, I’ve discussed the major problems facing our society and proposed inexpensive, creative solutions to them in my Declare War book. Several thousand people have bought it, yet I’ve seen no movement to try and implement any of my proposals. “It can’t be done. It’s hopeless.” Until I read Gatto’s book I hadn’t realized why I was getting verbal and written support, but not seeing any sign of people actually doing anything.

I was around eleven when it finally dawned on me that kids had no more rights than slaves. By law I had to go to school. The only rights I had in school were those the authorities let me have, and they have been backed up by the Supreme Court in this. I was forced to comply by the use of embarrassment and humiliation. You do nothing unless the teacher tells you to—which stifles thinking and makes you dependent on the teacher. I see this pattern in most of the youngsters I’ve hired, who are unable to think for themselves. They sit and wait until they’re told what to do. They are unable to plan work. They’ve always been stopped before finishing something by the bell, so they’re not familiar with the concept of completing work.

Gatto says, “It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves.”

Gatto points out that it only takes about one hundred hours for a person to learn to read, write and do arithmetic, as long as they’re willing to learn. From then on they can teach themselves. “Schooling, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified teacher. Nobody survives the curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it—don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education.”

He points out that before television children had enough time to themselves to learn about self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love. Now kids, on the average, spend 55 hours a week in front of the TV. That’s one-third of their time. Add to that the stresses of a two-income or single-parent family, and our kids have too little time to learn to become human.

Is it any wonder that our engineering universities are running out of potential students, and are having to continuously lower their admission standards? Only 7% of the high school graduates in America have enough math and science background to be accepted by an engineering college. The colleges have responded by turning to foreign students. That’s great for other countries, but it sure leaves ours in a fix. Here we are heading into a high-tech future and we’re turning out fewer and fewer American engineers, technicians and scientists.

The time was, 60 years ago, that youngsters wanted to be hams so badly that they’d put up with learning the code as a barrier. I did, even though I hated being forced to do something which did not make sense to me, even then. Very few of the kids these days have the passion to surmount obstacles, so we’ve instituted the no-code license. Well, we’ve been lowering the standards for school grades in order to get our kids through school, which is the same thing. They’ve even had to lower the SATs because our kid’s scores have dropped so much. Now I see some hams pleading that we lower the technical exam standards so kids won’t have to memorize so much to get a ham license.

There may be some American schools that are pretty good. I’ve read about a few. But most of the better educated children today are being schooled at home by their parents. Maybe you’ve read about it in Newsweek.

Home schooling will be a lot simpler once we have a good video educational series parents can use. These would use top-notch performers, plenty of graphics, and be fun to watch. PBS has been producing some superb educational videos. Now we need to have them to cover everything being taught in the K-12 years, plus everything that should be being taught. And also plus everything kids might want to learn, but which aren’t being taught. We need thousands of these videos.

We’ll still need schools to provide the hardware and facilities to teach skills. You can teach a lot about driving with a simulator, but then you need a car. Ditto flight simulators, etc. You can’t learn to juggle with a simulator, or to throw a boomerang. Or do glass blowing.

College? There may be some that are okay, but if you read the books on education you’ll find that most aren’t much good. Most of the “teaching” is done by student instructors. Get a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education, 2003, Free Press, $25.

If you learn much about nutrition you won’t let your kids near a McDonalds. Granted, it’s difficult to get the facts on nutrition. The field is overgrown with fads and scams. But if you want to raise healthy, happy, intelligent children, you’d better learn.

Though it’s far from perfect, the best school I’ve found so far is the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Mass. Here’s a school that accepts children from 4 through 20. It has no curriculum! No classrooms. No tests. No grades. The kids learn what they want, when they want, and if they want. The results are spectacular. I’ve read eight books about the school and visited it personally. It turns out that kids, if give the opportunity, love to learn and run circles around those forced to take courses. My Secret Guide to Wisdom reviews the books about the school and explains where to get them. I wonder what I might have been like and accomplished in life if I’d been able to go to a school like that.

It’s been a very busy week for me both at work and at home following my vacation, so it’s taken me a while to find the time to start writing this. I’d hoped to provide a few more updates while I was in Costa Rica but I never found the time so I’ll do my best to try to remember what happened. I’m going to try write a number of shorter postings so hopefully I can get them all out over the next couple of days.

In my last posting, I’d talked about how it had been rainy all week. That weather continued, but I finally did figure out a way to get on the air for more than 10 minutes at a time.

The problem was that my initial setup was on part of the outdoor deck with everything exposed to the elements. I would have been happy to bring the feedline inside, but the air conditioning system in the house we were staying at has sensors such that you can’t leave the sliding doors open even a little without the system shutting down. Considering the temperature and humidity, that wasn’t a realistic option, so I had to operate outside and hope for the best. In the picture, you can see the antenna in the background and I’ve got the power supply sitting on the chair with the radio on a little table. As long as it was dry, this worked out fine. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay dry long enough for me to spend any significant time on the air.

On Friday afternoon, the weather was once again uncooperative, and I was starting to think that I’d wind up leaving Costa Rica with only about 5 QSOs. However, Sharon pointed out that the deck next to the common area of the house had a pretty big overhang, and I realized that even with some of the really torrential downpours we’d had that area had stayed dry. I moved down to that location and set up the antenna there, configured for 15m, and brought out the rest of the gear to the new location.

Sure enough, after a few minutes of respite the skies opened up again, but although the antenna was getting wet, the radio, power supply, and my iPad (used for logging) were dry. (As you can see from the photo, I did have a towel ready, just in case.) I got on 15m at just about 21:00Z and called CQ and was answered by a station in Brazil. Being in Costa Rica, that wasn’t quite the DX that I was hoping for, but very shortly after that I got spotted on the DX Clusters and started getting a lot of calls from Europe. All told, I was on the air for about 40 minutes (we had plans and I had to get ready) and worked 33 stations that day. (I’ll have some details about the countries I worked in a future posting.) Although I’ve worked from a DX location before (as ZF2DK), this was the first time that I ever had what I would consider to be a full-blow pileup. I think that I did fairly well in managing things, managing to at least get enough of a partial call so that I could respond back with “the station ending in xyz only please” on almost every call. I don’t have enough experience yet to be able to pull full callsigns out of a pileup every time, but I know that’s something that comes with experience. By the second day of running stations, I could tell that I was doing better.

Part 2 of this series continues here.

In a comment to one of my posts on my other blog, Roger G3XBM wondered whether exposure to materials used in electronic construction such as PVC, lead solder, flux etc. might have contributed to my having a malignant brain tumour. I have never worked in the electronics industry and it was mainly during my teens and in the last few years that I have melted solder to any great extent. I suspect my exposure has been quite a lot less than that of professional engineers and many other hams, so personally I doubt this is the cause, though I guess it could be one of those things like smoking and lung cancer where if you’ve done it at all you increase the risk.

The other thing Roger mentioned was exposure to RF. This was something I kept on thinking about during the days I was in the hospital bed staring at the ceiling. Could using antennas in the attic a few feet from my head have caused the tumour to develop? Or perhaps it was using hand-held VHF radios?

With the logic of the ignorant I was inclined to dismiss the fears. I have never been a particularly prolific operator and only in the last couple of years have I run more than 10 watts to my attic antennas. I suppose my liking for digital modes may have increased the strength of the RF fields I was subjected to. 40W of PSK31 is probably a more intense exposure than 100W PEP of SSB.

As a right-handed person my HTs are usually held on the right hand side of my face – the side the tumour was. Coincidence or not? On the other hand, most people on the planet use mobile phones far more than I do and they aren’t all dying of brain tumours. Would doctors use radio waves to kill cancerous tumours if exposure to RF caused them? I don’t know.

Mike G4GOC found an extract of an article “Increased mortality in amateur radio operators due to lymphatic and hematopoietic malignancies” which appears to suggest a link between RF exposure and myeloid leukemia. So I guess getting as much distance between yourself and a transmitting antenna is always going to be a good idea, hard though that is to achieve for people living on postage stamp sized plots like so many of us on this small island.

There may be no proof that anything I did in pursuit of my hobby contributed to this brain tumour, but ever since returning home and getting some of my interest in ham radio back again I have felt uneasy about being close to an RF field. Yesterday I took the K3/100 and the Kenwood 50W 2m rig off the shack desk and put them away. Perhaps I’ll have a change of heart but it’s going to be QRP for me right now. If I could go back in my life and do anything different that would have avoided getting this brain tumour I would do so. I just don’t know for sure that carrying on as I did before won’t harm my chances of beating the bugger or at least keeping it at bay for a while longer.