AmateurRadio.com

As 2010 comes down the final stretch, I’ve been reflecting on the past year and thinking about 2011.  This year I didn’t do as much operating as past years and I continue to struggle with keeping my interest going.  I don’t think I had a casual CW QSO all year and I haven’t homebrewed a thing.  I’m not sure why, but homebrewing just doesn’t hold the fascination it once did and it seems tedious.  But on the positive side, 6 meters was fun this year during the sporadic E season, despite a rather abrupt ending in August.  The Pennsylvania QSO Party was a blast as usual and I finally made a sweep of all 67 counties which was a new accomplishment.  I participated in the best Field Day I’ve been involved in for several years and was pleased to operate with some folks I hadn’t seen for awhile.  So perhaps while there may have been less quantity, 2010 was likely the year of higher quality.

Looking forward I’ve decided that a new activity and focus in 2011 is going to be activating summits in the Summits On the Air (SOTA) program.  Most areas of the world have SOTA associations that designate the official summits with an identification number.  You can both collect and activate summits and receive awards for both.  My interest is mainly in activating summits.  

SOTA appeals to me for several reasons.  I’ve always been interested in operating in remote and often desolate locations.  There’s some satisfaction in being far away from civilization and establishing communications with a minimal amount of equipment.  I love to combine hiking and amateur radio.  Operating from the trail gives me yet another reason to hike and gives me goals to pursue.

I’ve also had a desire for some time to go on a DXpedition, like somewhere around Antarctica.  I have just about all of the James Brooks 9V1YC DXpedition videos which have stirred up my desire for adventure.  Unfortunately I don’t have six or eight weeks for a vacation at this point in my life nor I do I have the requisite $30K to $40K needed for a trip like this.  But I can dream.  While SOTA summits aren’t like Heard Island or Bouvet, I can make my own little DXpedition adventure.

I haven’t activated a summit yet, but I’ve heard that activations can amass sizable pileups as many people are hunting for SOTA summits, especially in Europe where the program originated and it appears to be quite popular and growing.  It seems SOTA is just getting geared up here in the States, with four callsign area associations established just this past year and two others established in 2009.

Earlier in the week, I noticed from Alan, VA3STL’s blog that the proceedings of the Ottawa D-STAR symposium were on-line.

Alsn did a nice write up on his blog and it’s great to see that the slides from many of the presentations are online too.

I’ve not really had a chance to look at the presentations fully yet, but at a first glance they look great – I’ve learned plenty in the few slides I’ve looked at so far.

Thanks to Alan, VA3STL and also to the Ottawa Amateur Radio D-STAR group for this interesting resource.

For me, and I’m sure I’ve said this before, one of the fascinations of radio is how how signals travel from one place to another; how signals can be strong one day and almost inaudible another. I find this true at both VHF and HF.

One of the pleasures I find on HF is to listen to a band that you think should be closed and see what’s coming through. That’s what happened the other night. I’d had a quick spin around 28MHz which wasn’t doing anything at all (it was well after sunset) so I went down onto the bottom end of 14MHz.

The band was pretty quiet – but the great thing was that the only signals coming through were from several thousand miles away. First heard was a chirpy weak one, which turned out to be from Honduras, working into the USA. I listened to him for a while and tuned up and down the band a bit, only to find a Venezuelan station at good strength. He was also working into the USA.

Though I didn’t get a chance to call, I’ll bet a contact would have been possible and it’s often fun to surprise people with a call from far away.

Even when you think the band is closed – have a listen!

This is PROBABLY the only time you’ll see QSL cards mentioned on this blog. It’s really not my thing. BUT, I know it’s important to a lot of radio amateurs and, as long as you don’t force me to send bits of cardboard around the globe, then that’s ok with me….

Over at amateurRadio.com where Matt, W1MST kindly syndicates my blog, you can win 1000 QSL cards from KB3IFH QSL cards. The cards look great!

So, why not enter the competition and try and win the QSLs? If you do, and you’ve worked me, you don’t need to send me one, though. Thanks all the same. Good luck!

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but that doesn’t really make it feel any better. At the edge of my backyard there is a tree that I was pretty sure had died (given the lack of leaves through the past spring and summer), and I’d planned on having a tree service look at it next  spring. A series of rainstorms with a lot of wind passed through my part of the world yesterday (I’ll bet you can guess where this is going). One of the three small trunks from that dead tree snapped off about 8 feet in the air and fortunately fell parallel to my house so the house was OK. Unfortunately, my G5RV antenna passed through the upper branches of the tree and unsurprisingly was unable to withstand the force of the falling tree. The image you see to the right is a piece of one of the wire legs that use to be up in the air. It is, alas, no longer up in the air.

The force of the stress on the wire not only snapped one of the wire legs but also pulled hard enough to break the solder joints at the insulator where the bare wire connects to the ladder line, as you can see in the next photo.  Both ends of the soldered joint were broken, but the non-broken wire leg appears to be OK otherwise and is still attached to the “near end” tree where it was originally attached. The remaining few feet of the other leg appear to have snapped back after breaking and look to be up in the branches of the other supporting tree at probably around 50 feet in the air. I’m hoping that I can get a line over that and pull it down, since that way I can use the existing rope (which is still over a nice high branch) to support the replacement.

For at least the short-term, I am going to try to salvage what’s there. Although this has been up in the air for over 10 years (I didn’t think it was that long, but I realized that every HF QSO that I’ve made from my home station starting in August 2000 has been on that antenna) the other parts of the antenna seem to be in fine shape. (And it was certainly working very well until it came down.) The G5RV is, without question, a compromise antenna, but in the 10 years that I’ve been using it  I’ve managed to work all states, all zones, and gotten DXCC on all bands from 10m to 80m (I still need a few more confirmations for 30m) and on all three modes, and have worked 300+ DXCC entities using this compromise. Would I like a tower with a nice Steppir on it? Sure, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so I’ll stick to what I know works. I have another G5RV that a friend gave me before he moved out of the country, and while I need to verify that the wire is the correct length, it’s been sitting in my garage out of the elements and the wire legs look like perfect candidates for a “transplant”.  The big advantage of repairing what’s there is that it will be zero cost and with a little luck, I should be able to get it done over the weekend.

If I can’t repair it for whatever reason, then most likely I’ll run over to KJI Electronics and pick up a new one and put it up in the same place. I have discussed with some friends the possibility of replacing this with something like an Alpha-Delta DX-CC or possibly even an Alpha-Delta DX-LB Plus (I have the horizontal room, the question is whether I can get it high up enough to function properly), but for now I think I’m going to stick with what I know works.

I hope to have an update with good news soon, stay tuned.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but that doesn’t really make it feel any better. At the edge of my backyard there is a tree that I was pretty sure had died (given the lack of leaves through the past spring and summer), and I’d planned on having a tree service look at it next  spring. A series of rainstorms with a lot of wind passed through my part of the world yesterday (I’ll bet you can guess where this is going). One of the three small trunks from that dead tree snapped off about 8 feet in the air and fortunately fell parallel to my house so the house was OK. Unfortunately, my G5RV antenna passed through the upper branches of the tree and unsurprisingly was unable to withstand the force of the falling tree. The image you see to the right is a piece of one of the wire legs that use to be up in the air. It is, alas, no longer up in the air.

The force of the stress on the wire not only snapped one of the wire legs but also pulled hard enough to break the solder joints at the insulator where the bare wire connects to the ladder line, as you can see in the next photo.  Both ends of the soldered joint were broken, but the non-broken wire leg appears to be OK otherwise and is still attached to the “near end” tree where it was originally attached. The remaining few feet of the other leg appear to have snapped back after breaking and look to be up in the branches of the other supporting tree at probably around 50 feet in the air. I’m hoping that I can get a line over that and pull it down, since that way I can use the existing rope (which is still over a nice high branch) to support the replacement.

For at least the short-term, I am going to try to salvage what’s there. Although this has been up in the air for over 10 years (I didn’t think it was that long, but I realized that every HF QSO that I’ve made from my home station starting in August 2000 has been on that antenna) the other parts of the antenna seem to be in fine shape. (And it was certainly working very well until it came down.) The G5RV is, without question, a compromise antenna, but in the 10 years that I’ve been using it  I’ve managed to work all states, all zones, and gotten DXCC on all bands from 10m to 80m (I still need a few more confirmations for 30m) and on all three modes, and have worked 300+ DXCC entities using this compromise. Would I like a tower with a nice Steppir on it? Sure, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so I’ll stick to what I know works. I have another G5RV that a friend gave me before he moved out of the country, and while I need to verify that the wire is the correct length, it’s been sitting in my garage out of the elements and the wire legs look like perfect candidates for a “transplant”.  The big advantage of repairing what’s there is that it will be zero cost and with a little luck, I should be able to get it done over the weekend.

If I can’t repair it for whatever reason, then most likely I’ll run over to KJI Electronics and pick up a new one and put it up in the same place. I have discussed with some friends the possibility of replacing this with something like an Alpha-Delta DX-CC or possibly even an Alpha-Delta DX-LB Plus (I have the horizontal room, the question is whether I can get it high up enough to function properly), but for now I think I’m going to stick with what I know works.

I hope to have an update with good news soon, stay tuned.

I have never understood why Microsoft has become the most successful software company in the world. When compared to similar products the underlying design of their software, to me, seems unnecessarily complex. And the company couldn’t care less about backward compatibility and breaking something when bringing out a new version. Microsoft software development tools, compared to third party products like Delphi or Lazarus, are far more difficult to use in my opinion. Visual Basic long ago ceased to be a “basic” programming language for amateurs like myself.

I had an idea for a program to run on my HTC Touch Pro smartphone that needed to access the phone’s internal GPS. A couple of months ago I actually got a good way towards implementing it for the Android platform (even though I’d never programmed in Java before) just by downloading the source code of someone else’s GPS application and modifying it using the free development tools. But because my phone was running an unofficial port of Android on which not all features worked I could only run it in an emulator, not transfer the app to the phone. In any case, the XD Android port was unstable and ate battery power even worse than Windows Mobile did, so I had to go back using WM 6.1 despite the fact that under Android it was a much nicer phone.

So I thought I’d have a go at writing my program for Windows Mobile. I had a copy of Visual Studio 2005 sitting on the shelf. So as before, I started Googling for example programs for accessing a GPS.

If I am writing a program for Windows desktop using Lazarus / Free Pascal I can Google for what I am trying to do and nearly always find code I can use. Even if it was written for Borland Delphi in 1996 it usually still works. The problem with the Windows smartphone / PDA platform is that it has been through many incompatible incarnations in less time than that. There is Windows CE, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile versions 4, 5, 6 and 6.1, Windows Smartphone, Windows Phone 7, Compact Net Framework 1.0, Compact Net Framework 2.0 and Compact Net Framework 3.5. If you do manage to find a relevant example there is no guarantee that it is actually compatible with the development tools and SDKs you have installed on your PC, or with your mobile device.

The first program I tried that actually did anything came with two DLLs, one for serial port access and one to decode the GPS data. That would print out a few NMEA strings and then fail with an exception. None of the other examples I tried would do anything at all. The problem with the first program appeared to be in the serial port DLL, so I tried to upgrade it to version 2.0 of the .Net Compact Framework which had built-in serial port support. I copied examples of serial port access code but although the program didn’t crash it never received anything from the GPS at all, even though I knew it was working (e.g. by running APRSISCE.) Unfortunately when run from Visual Studio the Net CF 2.0 programs would display an error on the phone that “this device has a newer version of the Compact Framework installed that must be uninstalled first.” I wasn’t about to do that since who knows what it would break. So much for backward compatibility.

One of the reasons implementing my idea was so easy on the Android platform is that Google had provided a GPS object that gave you ready to use data. On Windows Mobile you have to listen to the GPS via a serial port and then parse the NMEA data that comes out. So, having failed to find a GPS example that would run for more than a couple of seconds I decided to look for serial port examples. None of those would receive any data from the GPS either. I even found a free GPS test application. That would receive several lines of data from the GPS then disappear without trace.

At this point I started to wonder if there was a problem with the internal GPS of my HTC Touch Pro. I did some more Googling and found that users of some GPS apps on HTC smartphones with internal GPS had found these apps did not recognize the internal GPS or timed out while waiting to get data from it. Presumably these apps had been written based on the same code examples I had been trying. One user had found the only way to get the GPS data into the program was to use a program called GPSGate. But this was a commercial program, costing money, which I had no wish to spend just to see if this worked when everything else hadn’t.

After a couple of days of fruitless effort my interest in continuing with this project had evaporated completely so I gave up. At least, unlike with abortive hardware projects, no components were wasted. I restored the PC back to a couple of days earlier to remove all the hundreds of megabytes of APIs, SDKs and examples I’d installed. And I have gained a new respect for people who actually manage to develop software using Microsoft tools.