AmateurRadio.com

Welcome to Handiham World!

Before I mention anything else, I want to thank all of you who expressed sympathy or had suggestions for me and my broken computer. Things are looking up this week, and most everything is back to normal. I did have everything properly backed up. In our radio club, this is called the “belt & suspenders theory”. You wear both to make sure that if one fails, the other will still hold your pants up! It does pay to back up your data, since you just never know when something will quit working, whether hardware or software, in a system as complex as a computer. The idea of having backups extends to other parts of your ham shack, too. Having more than one radio can be a real relief when another has to be repaired at a factory service center a thousand miles away. Having a spare HT battery during a public service event is just plain smart. Engineers call this concept “redundancy”, and there is certainly good reason for it when you need to protect a high-stakes system like the communications system in an airliner or the brakes in a car. Since you have a lot at stake with your personal computer’s many files, you have an interest in protecting it with regular backups.

Turning to Field Day, we have an email from Ken, W6KHS, who came up with the idea of holding our own version of Field Day on the HANDIHAM Echolink conference:

You probably know by now that Field Day operations using the Handiham conference server was a total success. As this entity becomes more and more popular, repeaters and radio links using it will be more likely to receive emergency or life or death messages from situations when cell service is not available. I recommend that there be a twenty second break between transmissions so that there is room for emergency traffic to enter. If this information comes from you, it will be carved in stone, rather than from me. Thanks again for just being there.

73, Ken Schwartz W6KHS

Yes, Ken, you are right about that! Occasional longer pauses are in order considering that we are using a worldwide resource. Susi, WA0DKS, who worked behind the scenes to manage the Field Day event on the HANDIHAM conference and put in considerable time as net control station during the overnight hours, commented on the event, calling it a “rousing success”. Podcast listeners will hear Susi tell them about it herself! Our thanks to Jim, WB4LBM and the other net control stations and participants who made this first-time event possible. In talking with Susi after the event, we concluded that the HANDIHAM conference really gained a lot of exposure worldwide. I just happened to tune in later in the day on Saturday and heard a YL who had been at a local Field Day station here in the eastern Twin Cities Metro area. She was driving back home and heard our net on the N0BVE repeater system. (Thanks, Don!) As I have said many times before, having Echolink or IRLP on a repeater really enhances its value to the community, and will make the difference between a dead, unused system and a vital, much-appreciated community resource.

Even though the contacts made on our system don’t count for points, the whole idea of building our operating skills, making friends, showcasing amateur radio and technology, and building a stronger community while HAVING FUN just somehow seemed more important to me. I’ll bet it did to you, too.

Linux in the Ham Shack would like to be involved in more community events and we need your help to do it. Please check out our new Ambassador Program and let us know if you’re willing to participate. Help us make the world a better place for free software and amateur radio.

73 de The LHS Guys

Less than three weeks ago I wrote of having a bit of a headache. Since then, a lot has happened. I went to hospital in Newcastle, where it was discovered that I have a brain tumour. I was going to write about all of that in a bit more detail but things didn’t turn out quite as I hoped they would.

Read the rest of this post

The possible operation to Costa Rica that I mentioned a few weeks ago is now on. I’ll be operating from the north-west part of the country near the city of Liberia from the 10th to the 17th of July 2011. You can see the approximate location in this map although the aerial photos were taken before the house were built. (No, we’re not sleeping on a golf course.) We’re going as guests of our good friends Barry and Stephanie who took us along to Grand Cayman in 2007 when I operated as ZF2DK.  (For those of you who haven’t been reading this blog that long, that link goes to a whole pile of blog posts about my trip there.) This time, I’ll be operating as TI7/K2DBK, with the TI7 indicating that I’ll be operating from the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica.

As I mentioned previously, the location is wonderful, overlooking the water from a house that’s basically built onto the side of a cliff. The location where I plan to mount the antenna is a 2nd story balcony (which is actually more like 3 stories high) and the ground falls away very rapidly so the antenna height will effectively be more than high enough to get into the free-space radiation zone. (I hope.)

Although I initially planned to bring my Buddistick antenna, which is a muti-band vertical, I decided to upgrade to it’s “big brother” the Buddipole, which is a multi-band dipole that’s easier to tune and has some directivity and more gain. (I actually decided to go with the mini-Buddipole, which is the same size antenna but breaks down smaller for traveling.) I also picked up an 8′ shock-corded mast which collapses down to just 11″. I’ll secure that to the balcony railing with some bungee cords and I’ll be all set.

I did a little testing of the antenna this past Sunday during Field Day and made contacts on 10m, 15m, and 20m just to do a “smoke test” of the setup. Unfortunately, at the time I started testing the band conditions weren’t very good for DX so all my contacts were domestic, but I had no trouble working a few west coast stations. I think that with the added height plus the fact that I’ll be DX I should do just fine from Costa Rica. What’s that expression? Being DX adds how many dB to your signal strength? (For anyone who doesn’t get that joke, drop me a note and I’ll explain.)

I haven’t had as much time to prepare for this trip as I did for my trip to Cayman, but fortunately since then I’ve made a few more trips to Florida and pretty much have the gear situation down, though obviously I can’t run to Radio Shack if I discover that I’ve forgotten an adapter when I’m in Costa Rica. I did send out a note to some of the DX publicity contacts that I collected when I went to Cayman and I’ve started to see my operation show up in a few of the DX bulletins. The next thing I’ll be doing is to start going through the checklist I developed previously to make sure that I have all the equipment that I need before the trip. I’ll be doing that during this week and will probably do a bit more antenna testing over the upcoming July 4 holiday weekend.

One other thing that I did over the weekend was to test the software that I found for the iPad to see how suitable it was for use. I found a program called HamLog and while it’s not nearly as full featured as my regular DX logger (DX4Win) I think it will work out well enough. There were a couple of issues when logging Field Day contacts, since it’s not really set up too well when there is a piece of info (other than time, date, and callsign) that changes each contact, but as DX I expect (or at least hope) that I’ll be able to just sit on a single frequency and only have to change the callsign for each contact I log. (The program logs the time of each QSO and can be set up so that all other fields, such as the frequency, signal report, and mode stay the same for each QSO). I’m pretty confident that this will work, but I know that I can always fall back to paper logging if necessary.

I’ll be posting more updates over the coming days, stay tuned.

If you’ve never heard of Burt Fisher, K1OIK, then you’ve probably been living under a rock. Well, not quite. But the video above has garnered well over 90,000 views in the couple of years it has been online. In the world of Internet video, that’s fairly respectable. How does he do it? By making fun of just about every aspect of our beloved hobby, that’s how!

Many people will view the video and get upset. Or they’ll be offended. Or annoyed. Don’t worry, that’s just what Burt was hoping to accomplish! But there is something more to this video than just some jerk on the Internet with an axe to grind. More than trying to tick anyone off, I think he’s trying to get you to think. To turn a critical eye on what we do and why we do it. To self-evaluate and change the parts of Amateur Radio that don’t make sense or that are self-destructive. He makes some good points. Some may not like his condescending style, but do you know why he’s so annoying? He’s very often right.

I’ve just noticed that my first posting to this blog was on the 24 June 2006 – making the blog five years old.

What I have enjoyed about it is that I can write about anything that interests me in Amateur Radio be it a passing interest-du-jour or something more long standing.

It always fascinates me which posts get the most visits. The ones about setting up D-STAR have been popular – which I was pleased about. I was less pleased that a rare comment on RSGB politics was the best read post of all time on the blog! Why was I less pleased? Because this blog has always been about getting on and trying ‘stuff’ in Amateur Radio out – not paperwork and politics! So I guess if someone wants to write a blog on Amateur Radio politics, you’ll get great readership. But I won’t be writing it!

Thank you for reading the blog – if you’ve been reading since 2006 then my commiserations – but thank you!

For a while I’d been wanting to reroute the coax from the Butternut HF6V to the shack. Where was it going before, I hear you ask? Well, the lounge actually… it’s a long story.

Got around to the job yesterday and put a new coax run in up the garden, secured it to the fence and neatly tacked it up along the side of the house. When we put the V2000 vertical up on the house the other day, we drilled another hole into the shack to take this coax.

However, I had a very frustrating half hour or so trying to get the coax through the hole (which it turned out was not quite straight) – the coax kept missing the hole at the other side of the cavity and curling around.

Julie seeing my exasperation suggested I had lunch whilst I worked out a plan. Over a prawn mayo sandwich I noticed a number 8 knitting needle sitting on her desk….

Once replete, I marched outside with the knitting needle, a knife and some insulation tape. I stripped back the outer of the coax and the screen, leaving the inner of the coax to the same length as the knitting needle. I then taped the end of the coax as tightly as possible to the sharp end of the knitting needle. And poked!

The needle and coax went through the hole first time. From the inside, I undid the insulation tape from the tip and pulled the coax through as far as it would go. Then I went outside and gently retracted the knitting needle (I really didn’t want the coax to follow it!).

Back inside and I was then able to pull the coax through into the shack fully! And hastily, I rinsed the knitting needle to ensure it was once again fit for knitting!

So, I can now play HF should I wish. Currently the Butternut vertical is connected to the Anytone AT-5555. More on that in a separate post.

If you don’t have a knitting needle handy, a straightened metal coathanger may serve the same purpose.