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Today Geoff GM4WHA became the first Wainwrights On The Air (WOTA) chaser to claim a certificate. He worked me on Longlands Fell (LDW-179) thereby completing Wainwright’s Northern Fells having made contacts with stations operating from each of the fells in that book.

Noticing that a few chasers were just a few fells short of completing a book, I suggested in the WOTA forum that chasers should post the fells they need, which might motivate some activators to go out and activate them. Geoff duly posted, and Longlands Fell was one of the ones he needed. As it is only about 20 minutes drive from here and an easy walk, I thought it would be a good idea to blow away the cobwebs of more than two months of slothful inactivity by activating it. So I did.

Despite an early start (for me) I was lucky to find a place to park at Longlands near the Uldale Common track. The ascent is quite easy up a grass path, but due to the long period of inactivity (and having put on a couple of kilos since Christmas) I had to stop for a breather rather a lot. The photo shows the view from the top with the summit cairn in the foreground, Over Water in the middle distance and the often visited summit of Binsey (LDW-190) in the background. What it doesn’t show was the bitingly cold strong wind which numbed my fingers and made it too difficult to use the 5/8 telescopic antenna.

Despite using a 7in. helical antenna (which tests have shown to perform comparably to a 19in. quarter wave whip and much better than the dummy load supplied with the handheld rig) I made 9 contacts from the summit including the all-important one with Geoff, which is good going from such a summit which is well screened to the south.

I have probably said this too often, but WOTA keeps on getting more and more popular. I’m hearing new chasers all the time – the latest recruit is Steve, M6CDX – and even people who originally said they were getting too decrepit to climb the fells have been heard operating from some of the lower ones. So far this year I have worked 50 different summits and made 72 WOTA contacts from home, not far short of my total for the whole of 2010, and we’re only a bit over half way through the second month. I’m sure others have also noticed the greatly increased activity.

There is great camaraderie among all the participants, too, many of whom feel like old friends even though most of us have never met. I think it is fair to say that the success of WOTA has exceeded my wildest expectations. Combining two of my favourite activities – walking in our wonderful mountains and making contacts on the radio – it doesn’t get much better than this!

What no blog posts this week? It’s been a busy week with one thing and another and I don’t seem to have got around to it.

Last Sunday I enjoyed going to the Didcot rally. It was well attended – better, I think, than for some years. As far as I was concerned it was a mostly social event and it was good to see a number of friends face to face and have a quick chat. I didn’t spend too much money, but grabbed a 70MHz quarterwave mobile antenna for the car from the Garex stand and an audio lead to help Julie with her presentation about ‘Earthwatch, Cheetah’s and Me (her!)’ which she did for the local WI this week.

Coming back from the rally, I felt my foot go! Just an attack of tendonitis, but it’s been painful through the week and I’ve been avoiding walking which is unlike me!

What else has been happening? I noticed a conversation on Twitter about Digi-interfaces and noted that someone recommended Alan, M0AQC as being a good source of reasonably priced interfaces. His web page has the details. I also noticed that Alan makes hands-free kits. I’d hoped to see one at the Didcot rally but didn’t. I was conscious that if you are operating mobile these days, a hands-free kit is considered essential. I checked with Alan that one of his would work with the FT8900R – he said yes – so one has arrived and been installed.

The unit is a clip on microphone which could go on the sunvisor, although I just clipped it onto my collar to get a better audio level and a switch box with LED which I’ve attached to the dashboard. Reports so far have been good. The only downside is that I’ve lost the ability to scan or change power levels from the program keys on the microphone. No big deal, it’s something I can manage in different ways.

I’ve got a MyDel-5189 70MHz FM mobile rig in to review for Practical Wireless magazine. I’ve got it set up in the shack and it’s been working well. I’ll save the details for the review, BUT – something I immediately enjoyed was the ability to scan various channels on 70MHz. That was something that I’d never done with my Philips FM1000 converted rig.

I wondered if it was possible and after a quick look at the manual for the PA4DEN conversion I was able to store frequencies and scan them. Result!

I was a little surprised when I was looking for something just now, to find this blog listed in Satellite Dish’s ’40 top blogs about ham radio’

Just a bit of fun – and it was nice to discover some new and interesting radio blogs by going through the list – equally, there are a couple of my favourite radio blogs which aren’t on the list, so I think I’d better suggest a recount!

I like to think APRS is a haven from the aggravation often found on the rest of the bands, but unfortunately we have our problems too. This afternoon an APRS message appeared on my screen from G1ZRN-10 that clearly had been addressed to ALL.

It obviously wasn’t intended for me personally. I don’t gate from one band to another. In fact at the weekend I leave my HF IGate receive-only because I don’t want to add to the mayhem. But there is a lot of traffic gated from VHF to HF by stations in the south of France. It serves no useful purpose for me in the UK to receive information about French repeaters or French radio club meetings nor is there any point in gating position beacons from French VHF stations on to 30m. But what can you do?

I don’t think getting your blood pressure up and acting like a band policeman will solve the problem. Unfortunately the language barrier doesn’t help here. Because of that there are no common forums where European APRS users meet, where an approach could be worked out. A direct approach to the offenders would need to be made by a native speaker who could gauge the individual’s attitude, find out why they are doing this, and tactfully dissuade them from it. Blunt emails in capitals and in English could easily have the opposite of the desired effect.

I think it is one of those things we just have to live with. Actually I’m not sure the effect is really that bad. I’m running just 10W to a magnetic loop in the attic and my beacons are reliably gated throughout most of the day by stations in Germany. When European HF mobiles are about I often gate them, so the network still works. But it would be nice to have a blacklist function in my IGate software so that I can refuse to pass traffic for the offending stations. If everyone did that, it might get them to mend their ways or get off the air.

Some folks have set up an alternative APRS network on 20 metres called Net14. I don’t think that’s the answer. Sure, you get away from the idiotic VHF to HF gateways, but you get away from all the other activity too. I tried it a couple of times and it was even more boring than VHF is here most of the time.

If anyone has any serious suggestions as to how to solve the problem of cross-band gating on 30m I’d be glad to hear them. Or even non-serious ones. Right, I’m off to bid for a GPS-guided missile on eBay!

What is it about ham radio that encourages boorish behaviour? Or is it just the internet? Whenever you post in any forum or specialist group suggesting that something about a particular radio is not a very good design and could be improved you will usually get several responses that amount to “I don’t think there is anything wrong, so there can’t be anything wrong.” If you attempt to defend your statement you will eventually end up on the receiving end of insults. Yahoo groups are aptly named it seems.

If you want a VHF radio that can be used simultaneously as an APRS gateway and for voice there aren’t a lot of choices. The Kenwood TM-D710 is really the only option given that Yaesu’s FTM-350 doesn’t have an accessible TNC. Like most radios capable of 50W output the TM-D710 has a fan. Unfortunately Kenwood’s fan logic is dumb. The fan comes on the instant the transmitter starts, no matter how long you transmit for or what the power level, and runs for about two minutes. This means that it runs for two minutes out of ten, triggered by my one second five watt APRS beacons. This is completely unnecessary as no significant heat is generated by such a short transmission. The noise is an annoyance – it’s significantly louder than the computer, or my K3’s fans – but more importantly this must also reduce the working life of the fan unnecessarily. One day the fan will fail when it is needed because of all the times it ran when it wasn’t.

When somebody complained in the Kenwood D710 group about the fan noise because he was using the D710 in his quiet living room, I agreed, saying it was just cheapskate engineering for Kenwood not to have incorporated a thermostatic fan controller. This upset the yahoos. I was told that it was better for the fan to run than for it not to run, that if there was a bad antenna mismatch the fan running in those first few seconds could save the PA transistors, that it was necessary for the fan to run all the time because some users install the radios in tight spaces in vehicles where the temperature reaches over 100 degrees F, that group members had equipment with other fans that were even noisier, and so on. None of which, if true, actually invalidated the argument that a thermostatically controlled fan would be an improvement over the present dumb logic. It was just “It isn’t a problem for me, therefore there is no problem.”

It was also suggested that a thermostatic control would add $10 to $40 to the cost of the radio. I’m not an electronics engineer but I doubt that it would add more than a couple of dollars to the manufacturing cost, which would not make a significant difference to the retail price given these aren’t cheap radios to begin with. Even my power supply, which cost a third the price of the Kenwood, has a thermostatically controlled fan. If Diamond could fit one without making the price of the product uncompetitive I’m sure Kenwood could have done.

Sadly, online groups have ceased to be a place where you can intelligently discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various products due to the activities of the yahoos who will brook no criticism of the thing they have purchased. I could regale you with another recent encounter, this time on the Elecraft reflector, over the stupidity of having the K3 change mode to the one last used on a band when a program sends a change frequency command, overriding the mode set by the program so you may end up in USB in the CW part of the band or vice versa. Needless to say, the Elecraft Way is The One True Way and it is the developers who won’t modify their programs that are wrong, even though by making this one change Elecraft could enable the K3 to work properly with N3FJP and several other programs whose developers won’t change them just to suit Elecraft. In fairness I should point out that Elecraft didn’t refuse to make the suggested change (they didn’t respond to the thread) it was the fanboys who defended the status quo as usual.

Frankly I’m getting tired of engaging with hams over any subject at the moment. So I have decided to unsubscribe from the majority of ham radio groups and will restrict myself to posting my thoughts here in future. I’m sure that will please many people who don’t like seeing points of view they don’t agree with. Commenters to my blog are welcome to disagree, as long as they do so intelligently and politely. Boorish comments that amount to “I don’t agree, therefore you’re wrong” without providing any supporting evidence as to why I might be wrong will be unceremoniously deleted.

The best APRS client just keeps getting better. The latest treat for beta testers of APRSISCE/32, the APRS client for Windows desktops and Windows Mobile (which also runs under wine on Linux) is configurable map tile servers. This feature allows users to switch between a variety of different map servers to use a range of different maps in addition to the default OSM mapping.

Probably the most useful for most users will be the Mapquest OSM mapping which is a high contrast map similar in appearance to a road atlas. Mapquest also has a set of satellite view tiles, shown above in a screenshot from my 30m APRS gateway. These tiles don’t unfortunately let you get closer than about 10,000 metres so you can’t zoom in on somebody’s house like you can with Google mapping.

For UK users especially those of us in hilly areas the ability to use the UK specific Freemap mapping is a massive benefit. These OSM based maps show topographical detail (contours) as well as footpaths and walkers’ routes as illustrated by the screenshot below centered on a recent SOTA activation in the Lake District.

The ability to seamlessly pan and zoom around an area as well as switch map types with a couple of mouse clicks puts APRSISCE/32 miles ahead of UI-View. This new feature is another example of the amazing dedication and support given by Lynn, KJ4ERJ, to his program. Only last weekend while Lynn was on a trip to Spain a handful of us were discovering and sharing details of alternative map sources and hand-editing them into the configuration files so use the maps with the software. On his return the suggestion was made that it would be nice to be able to switch between map sources from within the program. Four days later, we’re testing the new feature. It’s like Christmas every day when you’re an APRSISCE/32 user!

Just before the start of the OARC meeting (photo copyright of the OARC)

Last week I drove through a snowy evening to give a presentation to the Ottawa Amateur Radio Club (OARC).  The meeting was in one of the rooms in City Hall and I have to admit it was my first time attending the OARC.

I was greeted by Dave, VE3TLY, the president and others and it certainly seems to be an active club.  There was a report on the club construction project and talk about the upcoming Canadian Ski Marathon and the amateur radio support that is given.

My talk was on D-STAR in the Ottawa Area and started with some D-STAR principles, covered a little on the local repeater VA3ODG and finished off with a look at the current projects and developments.  A pdf of the slides are here:> OARC Presentation PDF.

I finished off with a demonstration and tuned the HT to module B of repeater VA3ODG and chatted with a small group that had assembled there.  There was some luck as using the repeater with Maurice-Andre, VE3VIG was Greg, VA3OMP, using his FREE STAR* repeater as well as a station connecting in from Florida. This nicely illustrated the linking to the repeater from outside the local area and use of a different (FREE STAR*) network, which I had just earlier mentioned in my talk.

After the demonstration there was some good questions and comments from the audience.  The meeting officially wound-up and over coffee I had pleasant discussions with a number of the club members.

A great evening and thanks to the OARC for inviting me and making me so welcome.