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Series Four Episode One of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast. News Stories include:

• Distracted Driving - an amateur replies
• Walkie-talkies abroad
• Brightest northern lights display for 50 years
• Gadgets Frequencies?
• iPhone Amateur Radio apps
• Chevy hidden antenna
• Work all Britian 2011
• Amateur Radio World Castles Award
• Greek radio repeater locator app
• Icelandic hams get 5.36-5.41MHz
• Russian engineers plan to extend Internet to space
• British Young Ladies Amateur Radio Association 
• New amateur radio bands for Spain

Your feedback and Martin (M1MRB) reviews the G-QRP Club.

Series Four Episode One of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast. News Stories include:

• Distracted Driving - an amateur replies
• Walkie-talkies abroad
• Brightest northern lights display for 50 years
• Gadgets Frequencies?
• iPhone Amateur Radio apps
• Chevy hidden antenna
• Work all Britian 2011
• Amateur Radio World Castles Award
• Greek radio repeater locator app
• Icelandic hams get 5.36-5.41MHz
• Russian engineers plan to extend Internet to space
• British Young Ladies Amateur Radio Association 
• New amateur radio bands for Spain

Your feedback and Martin (M1MRB) reviews the G-QRP Club.

I was just chatting to Dave, G4AQK on 70MHz and he mentioned that he’d seen a video on YouTube showing how ZS6DJM had modified an FT897 to include a Spectrum 70MHz transverter.

Interesting! The transverter is located in the battery compartment and a switch has been added to the top of the rig to switch the transverter on and off. Very neat

New Year’s Eve dawned with some fairly localised (to me) but quite intense tropo on VHF/UHF. When I first switched on the 144MHz rig around 0815z (It *WAS* a day off!) I noticed the GB3VHF beacon in Kent was well over S9 – it’s normal strength is around S6.

Didn’t get a chance to operate, but I had the FT8900 on in the car as I was driving down to see the bees and noticed that the GB3PO repeater at Ipswich and the GB3BX repeater near Wolverhampton were coming through.

From home, literally seconds before we went off to see Mum in Cheltenham, there was a flurry of activity on 70.450MHz FM. 2E0EKF, 2E0CBP and G0AUI were all coming through. Looked them up this morning and 2E0EKF is in Chigwell, Essex and G0AUI in Haywards Heath, Sussex (can’t find 2E0CBP at the moment!). Shame there wasn’t an opportunity to call them as that would have been an excellent distance on 70Mhz FM.

Happy New Year!

It is that time of the year when it seems everyone is looking back at what was important in the past year. Reflecting on the year, it has been a very good one for me in terms of amateur radio. Here are some of the highlights.

The year started out well by guiding a group of new amateurs at the Carleton University Amateur Radio Club through their exams.  The first group passed their exams in February and they were the first of two batches of students to gain their licenses.  Also in that month I gave a talk on kit building and homebrew to the Manotick Amateur Radio Group.

In April I started a D-Star net on repeater VA3ODG.  I have not reported it here on the blog (probably will be a post in the future) but if you have a D-Star radio and want to join in it starts at 8:30am local time in Ottawa (I will let you do the calculations for your time difference) on Saturdays using VA3ODG module C.  We link through to Reflector 16B, so if you are not local that is perhaps the best way to connect in.

Also in April the 160mW from my QRSS beacon was heard in Australia.

June had the Carleton University ARC (CUARC) participating in their first Field Day. The Ottawa Valley Mobile Radio Club were welcoming and we teamed up with them for the event in the grounds of the Canada’s National Science and Technology Museum.  CUARC operated on 15m and 10m using antennas built by the club members.  The antennas performed well and  we made a number of contacts on both bands.

August I attended the first Maplecon QRP convention with Gerry, VA3GLT.  I made my first podcast too, an interview with Youkits.

In Fall there was a burst of activity working on putting together the first Ottawa D-Star Symposium.  This with done with Rick, VE3CVG, members of the Ottawa Amateur Radio Digital Group and CUARC.  The event was held at Carleton University and had excellent sessions and speakers including one from Andrew, MoGRU, who presented from the UK via an internet link.

December I helped get some external antennas set up on one of the campus buildings at Carleton University for use by CUARC. It was good to test out the HF wire antenna (one that was used at Field Day) in the RAC Winter Contest.  The operating was casual but I was pleased in the antenna performance when the first contact was a British Columbia station on 40m  SSB with just 10W from my K2.  The 1.2GHz antenna for the Icom ID-1 D-Star radio  still needs to be tested in the new year.

Throughout the year this blog has been enjoyable to write and I would like to thank all the readers and commenters. Sometimes I am busy with work or family and there are longer periods between post but I try and make posts regular. The statistics show a continued increase in post views, indeed I see that this month has the highest number of views of any month.  The blog is one of a few reposted on amateurradio.com and at least two antenna posts are listed on dxzone.com.

Click to view slideshow.

So 2010 was a busy year with a steady involvement with clubs and members of the local and not-so-local amateur radio community.

As for next year, I will continue my involvement with CUARC as well as the local D-Star group.  I have been asked to give a talk on D-Star at the Ottawa Amateur Radio Club in February and I would like to get to Dayton this year for Four Days in May.  I am sure many other opportunities and activities will arise too, just like they did last year.  I hope you too have an active year with amateur radio.  All the best for 2011.

A few days ago I got the urge to build a memory keyer into my MFJ Cub. There isn’t much of a practical reason for doing this as the noise level on 20m makes the band unusable without the MFJ Noise Canceler which is plumbed into my K3 and too much hassle to disconnect and use with anything else. But I thought it would be a fun thing to do.

I really wanted to use the SKC keyer that is in the DC20B transceiver as it has some nice features and is easy to use. It uses an Atmel ATTiny13 microcontroller. I happened to have a spare one in my parts box and I had managed to find a way to program it using a PICkit2 programmer designed for Microchip parts. Unfortunately my unorthodox programmer always fails trying to read the contents of the chip so I was unable to copy the code from the chip in the DC20B to my spare chip. Nor could I find a source or hex file for the SKC keyer or indeed any other keyer using an ATTiny13 chip. So I had to give that idea up.

I did find a couple of source files for Microchip PIC based keyers on K1EL’s website so I decided I would have to go with that. A couple of years ago I had bought a MikroElektronika EasyPIC5 development system with the intention of experimenting with microchips. Unfortunately I found PIC programming too difficult so I gave up. However I could compile the K1EL keyer code and use the EasyPIC5 to program it into a chip, which I could then build into a keyer that would go in the Cub. Perhaps I could even understand enough of the code to modify it to work the way I wanted.

My first problem was compiling the code. The compiler seemed to object to a label called CONFIG in the source code which caused a fatal error. Eventually I had a lightbulb moment that perhaps CONFIG was a reserved word in the current version of the MPLAB compiler, so I changed the label and the reference to it to CONF. That overcame that problem.

The other problem was that numerous lines in the program produced a message 306, “Crossing page boundary – ensure page bits are set.” I didn’t have a clue what that meant, and although Google turned up a few pages that mentioned the message I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do about it.

The keyer code on K1EL’s website was written for the PIC12C509A chip so I had ordered a couple from PIC Projects on eBay. They arrived in the post this morning. That was when I discovered the second problem. The EasyPIC5 development board does not support PIC12C509A chips. In fact, it doesn’t support any PICs that have C in the number, only ones that have F. It appears that the F chips have Flash memory and can be reprogrammed while the C chips can only be programmed once. So I have two 12C509A chips I can’t use.

I have now ordered some 12F509 chips which are supposed to be compatible with the 12C509 and which my programmer is supposed to be able to program. In a few days time I will discover if that is true and whether message 306 means anything important.

I came across this video by Jeri Ellsworth via the Make blog and I was so impressed with the content I thought I would repost it.  Listen to what Jeri says, there is some great advice here.