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One of my plans for this year had been to try other bands when out activating on the fells. I was going to try 4 metres. Many SOTA activators use 4m FM already and the introduction of new hand-held 4m radios from Wouxun seemed likely to cause a surge of interest in the band. Moreover, 70MHz offered the prospect of chance long distance Sporadic-E contacts during the summer months which has always been one of my main interests.

I decided not to get one of the new Wouxun radios, however. Whilst the new 4m/2m dual bander looked tempting, I didn’t need another hand-held with 2m capability and any dual band antenna would be an undesirable compromise. The single band 4m Wouxun was almost the same price as the dual bander, so was not a good deal. Instead, I had a look to see if I could find something like a low band version of the Motorola GP300. I couldn’t, but eBay turned up a professional radio called the H112PLUS made by Cybercom Electronic Corporation Limited in Taiwan, available in VHF low band, high band and UHF versions for just over £50 shipped. A particular attraction was that the radio claimed to conform to IP54 weatherproofing specifications – useful when operating from rainy fell-tops.

Unlike stuff from Hong Kong or China, the “expedited shipping” method used to send the radio attracted the attention of UK Customs so delivery was delayed by over a week and I had to pay an additional £25 tax and ParcelForce collection fee to receive it.

On opening the box I was extremely impressed with the very high quality of the product. This was one of the most beautifully made hand-held radios I had seen. As far as build quality is concerned this is the opposite end of the spectrum from the little Baofeng. However the little Chinese radio is miles ahead when it comes to usability and performance. The H112PLUS is about the same size and weight as the Kenwood TH-D72 so it is one of the chunkier hand-helds. Programming software, cable and a desk charger are included in the price.

So to the shortcomings. The knob on the top is a rotary control marked Vol/Ch but in fact it only controls the volume in discrete steps. Most of the time when you turn it, nothing happens. It is as if the CPU in the radio is asleep and doesn’t notice you operating the controls for a while. The buttons on the front panel, which are used to change channel and access menu functions, are also a bit laggy in operation. If you try to hurry the radio, the firmware locks up and you have to pull the battery pack. The programming software is also a bit flaky and locks the radio after writing to it, requiring another battery pull.

By the time I received the low band radio I was awaiting an appointment for a scan for my as yet undiagnosed brain tumour and was a bit anxious. I was wondering if I would ever make a 4m contact and so, rather stupidly but with the aim of having something to look forward to I ordered a second, high band version to use on 2m. This arrived after I was out of hospital and attracted a £30 tax and collection fee despite being exactly the same price.

The high band version suffers exactly the same shortcomings as the low band one but as it covers the 2m band I was able to try it out. The main problem I noticed is that it has probably the worst receive audio of any hand-held I have used. There is a compression option which appears to clip the audio and make it sound like those police radios but even with this off the audio is still quite distorted and the actual volume from the speaker is not all that loud. The little UV-3R is much louder and sounds much better!

The programming software allows you to set power level (high/low power) frequency and CTCSS/DCS tone so you can access repeaters. There is no 1750Hz tone burst, of course, and no option I can find for setting the squelch threshold. There are scrambler options that are no use on the ham bands. I then discovered a bug. If you program separate transmit and receive frequencies (as for a repeater) and then save the results as a file, when you load the saved file the frequency splits are lost. The developer has acknowledged the bug and has promised a new version of the programming software.

The output power is about 5W on the low band radio and 6W from the high band one. The battery pack is NiMH and rated at 1500mAh. Someone has told me it is identical to one made by Kenwood. Battery endurance, even on standby, is not great.

When ordering the low band model you are given the option of specifying one of two frequencies for the helical antenna. I chose 69MHz. On the antenna analyzer the best SWR coincided exactly with 70.45MHz, which was rather nice. However the ERP from the helical is about 5dB down on a telescopic whip. The high band radio comes with a short helical that is resonant on 150MHz, but you can pop the cap off and add a few turns to the spring to get it down to 145MHz. The antenna socket is TNC so you need an adapter to use most other ham radio antennas. The speaker/mic two pin jack uses the Icom/Maxon standard.

The radios do work. I even had a 4m contact with a Scottish contest station during VHF field day. Given my health situation I have not had the opportunity to test these radios out in the field with good external antennas to see how they stand up to the high levels of signals encountered on hilltops. However, I attempted to reproduce the test I carried out in the Handheld receiver blocking shootout and the 2m H112PLUS was as bad as the poorest receiver I tested. The received repeater signal cut out when a signal at the bottom of the 2m band was keyed up, when most other radios under the same conditions showed little or no desensing.

Overall I think the H112PLUS is a radio that is of more interest to collectors than someone wanting a real hand-held workhorse. It is well made and the waterproof specification is an attraction but the poor receive audio and flaky software and firmware are a big disappointment and I have doubts about the receiver’s ability to handle high levels of out of band signals without desensing.

The weather here ever since I was diagnosed with a brain tumour has been glorious. One of the bitterest frustrations for me has been being housebound, able to do little more than walk slowly to the shops and back instead of going for walks in the hills and activating Wainwright summits as I had planned to do. On Thursday Olga and I caught a bus into Keswick for a day out. I took along the little Baofeng UV-3R handheld in the hope of catching some SOTA or WOTA activators from the surrounding fells whilst I was there. I was pleased to make contacts with Mark MM1MPB/P and Terry G0VWP/P during the day.

I love this little UV-3R radio. It’s so small and light you can take it anywhere and the range of its 2 – 3W on the slim Nagoya NA-666 antenna I have put on it is amazing. It can receive broadcast radio so I can listen to Classic FM or BBC Radio 3 and if someone puts out a call on the 2m FM calling channel the music is interrupted and I can reply to them. The Baofeng is not ham band restricted so I have also programmed in the 8 license-free PMR446 channels and can use it to talk to Olga who has a little Goodmans set that I bought for a tenner on eBay. I can even dual watch between Olga’s channel and 2m channel S20 so I don’t miss anything.

My only niggling annoyance with the Baofeng is the audio volume level, the lowest setting of which is too high so that any station using wide FM deviation – which most folk round here do – is audible to anyone within a 50m radius. There is a mod for this, which involves putting a resistor in series with the speaker, but having tried a small soldering task a few days ago and succeeded only with a lot of difficulty I think that performing the mod would be beyond me.

I know from the Yahoo group that there is not much quality control on these Baofengs and one or two people have had the misfortune to receive radios that don’t work correctly. But for me this has been the best thirty quid I ever spent on a bit of radio gear.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature has not been cooperating. I’m writing this from Costa Rica and we’ve have a lot of rain here. I was able to get on the air very briefly after arriving on Sunday, making a single contact on 20m mostly just to make sure that the gear was working. I got a little bit of RF into the radio (which I’d seen while testing at home) but the ferrites that I’d brought cleared that up.

The next time I was about to get on the air was Tuesday afternoon, also relatively briefly. I set up for 15m and the antenna behaved very well there, easily tuning the whole band. I worked a few stations in the US southeast (Georgia & Florida) and a relative local in Venezuala. But as the title of this post indicates, rainy season has started here and it’s been raining a lot since then.

Obviously a Buddipole will work in the rain, but the way things are set up here it’s not practical to leave the antenna up and run out in a near-monsoon to make an adjustment to a whip. Of course, trying to do that when there’s lightning around, which there has been, was an even worse idea.

Wednesday was pretty much a complete rainout, though my friends and I were able to go out on the water and jet ski for a couple of hours. (No, I did not attempt to operation TI7/K2DBK/MM). Did I mention that it rained constantly during that whole time?

Today (Thursday) started off looking bad again, raining for most of the early morning, but it did clear up for the majority of our day which included a sightseeing tour to the Rincon de la Vieja volcano. Right at the end of that trip it starting pouring yet again, and while there was a very brief respite after we got back to our residence here, it’s been raining steadily ever since along with a lot of lightning. Needless to say, no radio.

The weather forecast for the next couple of days calls for more of the same, although our touring plans are done and since we’ll be around more I hope that if we get a break from the rain for a few hours I’ll be able to get on the air.

I am disappointed that I haven’t been able to get on the air more, but I’m trying to stay positive and see if I can get on the air for at least a few more hours before it’s time for us to leave.

Welcome to Handiham World!

Photo: Pat, WA0TDA, holds up the the new ARRL 2010 Periodicals on CD-ROM and TravelPlus® for Repeaters CD. Both will be available for our Handiham members to try out at the Radio Camp in August.

Have you ever wondered where you saw that article about the antenna that you could build yourself and that would actually fit into your real estate? What month’s QST was it that had the review of the rig you’re thinking about buying? What’s in QEX, the “Forum for Communications Experimenters”? What about the National Contest Journal?

If you’re anything like me, you probably subscribe to several magazines and don’t really have the time to read every article. I always go through the contents and page through to see what jumps out at me, and in the process I find plenty of interesting articles that I am going to read later or save for reference. Before I know it, the next month’s magazines arrive and I am falling behind in my reading. I’ll have much more time in the winter, so the magazines go on the shelf in my ham shack, ordered by month. Sometimes the articles I wanted to read just never get read, and the reason is that they are too hard to find. It may be that I don’t even recall the title of the article or the author’s name, just the general topic. True, the periodicals search tool on the ARRL website will be helpful, but sometimes I can’t locate the article I want because my shelves are not organized as well as I would like.

I can see to read the print articles. Doing this kind of a search when you are blind can be a much more daunting task. That’s one of the reasons we will be installing the 2010 ARRL Periodicals CD-ROM on a Windows computer equipped with JAWS®, a popular screenreading software program by Freedom Scientific. The upcoming Handiham Radio Camp provides exactly the right opportunity for us to test the accessibility of the Periodicals CD using a screenreading computer operated by experienced blind amateur radio operators. The idea of having an entire year’s worth of QST, National Contest Journal, and QEX, the Forum for Communications Experimenters, available on a single CD with search capability seems a lot better than saving print publications on a shelf – or shoeboxes full of audio tapes or even the new flash memory digital NLS “books”. Most of us just don’t have the space to save more than a couple of year’s worth of old print magazines, and even if we do manage to keep them all in order, finding a particular article can be a chore, so we are looking forward to exploring this ARRL CD during Radio Camp.

One book we have never put onto tape for our blind Handiham members is the ARRL Repeater Directory. Think about it for awhile, and you’ll realize why. Not only would it be like reading the phone book, but it would also be impossibly difficult to use because you could never find anything in it, especially in audio cassette format. Imagine back in the days of books on tape what such a book would be like for a blind user. It would be a box full of cassettes, and one would have to keep them organized carefully. Even then, who wants to listen for hours to find the right spot on a tape that has just the repeater information you need? The lack of an accessible repeater directory for blind hams has been a problem, and even those of us who can see to read a print version can find the lookups of repeaters while traveling a hassle. That’s where the ARRL TravelPlus Repeater Directory on CD comes in handy. While I seldom plan to tote along a notebook computer just for repeater lookups while driving cross country, I do appreciate the pre-trip planning capabilities of the ARRL software. Once can print out a list of repeaters within a user-defined distance along a planned route. That saves the hassle of paging through a print repeater directory during your trip. I find it much more intuitive and easier to use, but what about our blind Handiham members? Would there be some features of the ARRL TravelPlus CD that could prove useful? That is what we are going to find out at Radio Camp in August when we install the software on our JAWS computer and see what we can do with it.

Handiham Radio Camp is August 8 through 13, 2011 at Camp Courage near Maple Lake, Minnesota. The camp repeater, W0EQO-R, is connected to the HANDIHAM Echolink conference and the Vancouver, BC IRLP node 9008. We also plan to have our own experimental low power IRLP node 7051 on the air. The camp station is W0ZSW, and will be operating on the HF bands.

News of Mumbai bombings arrives on Handiham net

I was surprised to hear about terrorist bombings in Mumbai, India from Vispi, VU2WLL, on today’s Handiham Echolink net. He says that he and his sister are both all right. The news media have conflicting numbers of casualties. There will no doubt be much more information later on today as this story unfolds. In the meantime, our thoughts are with the people of India as they cope with this senseless violence.

 

Exposed PCB

 http://www.cwtouchkeyer.com/

Model P6 CWtouchkeyer

Model P6 CWtouchkeyer http://www.cwtouchkeyer.com/P6.htm

“The PC card is exposed to reduce assembly cost and material cost to provide a low cost touch paddle. The model P1PAD would be the next option.  It’s twice the size and offers a weight in it. The P6 is designed to be low cost, light weight yet hold the touch standard as with all my products.” Summer, from CWtouchkeyer.com says, “I’ve had a few comments about the exposed PC card but less than 1%.”

I wanted to protect the PCB from potential short circuits that might damage the Touch Paddles.  I ordered the P6 because every radio I have already has a keyer onboard. A quick scan of the CWtouchkeyer.com web site will show you various models with better and better features.

I like to tinker and one of my favorite things to do is to use something for ham radio for which it was not intended. The Old Bay spice can was just the right size for this job. The can was almost empty anyway. I was going to mount the entire keyer inside the Old Bay box but eventually decided that was overkill. Modifying the cover was pretty easy. I used a Dremel tool to rout out the cover lip so it would fit better on the PCB. I used ‘Whiteout’ to drip a mark onto the Old Bay Cover through the screw holes of the PCB for its rubber feet and main cover screws.

The hardest part of this job was getting all the wire back in the box, and whole thing put back together without pinching the wire. It took longer to write this blog and get the photos properly displayed than doing the actual work.

Using these paddles is not exactly the same as using mechanical paddles. You cannot ‘rest’ your fingers on the metal tabs. Touching the metal strips sends a stream of code out. I learned to keep my wrist steady to avoid sending extra dits. The learning curve is not as steep as I first suspected it would be. My fist improved after using the touch paddled for just a short time. Using them if fun. I plan to try various CW speeds on my radio keyer just to test myself and make sure I don’t embarrass myself when I go on the air.

I tested the paddles with very low power into a dummy load. So far so good. Now I’m looking forward to using them on the air.

The P6 is a very light weight model and can be held in your hand to steady it. I like these paddles so much that I am thinking about getting a second set and boxing them up in a different kind of enclosure and weighing it down to keep it from moving around. That will be fun to play with indoors with my 100 watt radio.

73

de AA1IK

Ernest Gregoire

Geezer on the porch

Elecraft KX3

KX3 Transceiver (Preliminary)
Note: This is advance information. Specifications and option/accessory availability are subject to change without notice.
KX3 Ordering and Shipping dates will be Fall-Winter 2011

• 160-6 meters, SSB/CW/DATA/AM/FM modes
• 0 W PEP (100 W with KXPA100 amp)
• Only 1.5 pounds (0.7 kg)
• Current drain as low as 150 mA

I have been following the story about this rig ever since I found out about it. I am very excited about it, especially since the QRP community lost a source of rigs from Icom

The Icom 703 is no longer made. I have two of them. One has a SSB filter and the other a CW filter. If one breaks I’ll still have a back up. Although the 703’s are fine rigs and I have used them for years without the need for repair, Its nice to see a new rig coming to the QRP market.

I am eager to get my hands on this new Elecraft KX3. I have a Kx1 that I like very much but this new one has a lot of promise.

http://www.elecraft.com/
You can put your name on a waiting list at Elecraft at the web site listing above. I hate to wait when I have money for a new rig burning a hole in my pocket. As luck would have it, by the time my number comes up here. I’ll have spent it on something else.

Even worse, there is no price on this radio yet. We can only guess what it might be!
I am very satisfied with the KX1 and I look forward to the same quality from Elecraft on this new KX3 radio.

I’m curious!

How many readers of Amateur Radio.com are seriously interested in buying one of these babies! I think it would be fun to know how much interest this new offering from Elecraft has generated.

In your reply, tell us about how you plan to use this rig. Also include how many and what kind of QRP rigs you use and which modes you operate these rigs in. Is this the rig you have been waiting for?

I’m always interested in what other QRP’ers are doing and what they are thinking and planning. I’ll bet others would like to hear from you too.

Its been a long time since the FT 817 was introduced and likewise the Icom IC 703 in its various iterations.

73

de AA1IK

Ernest Gregoire