AmateurRadio.com

Wow! Great way to bring together a lot of ham radio ops on a Saturday using all sorts of technology!  Way to go! QRPSPOTS.COM is normally used by QRP ops to spot each other when we are out operating portable or to alert others of band openings. It was ALIVE with reports and updates from all over the USA and even a few DX ops adding input too! In addition, several QRP reflectors were buzzing with updates and info. What a great community effort this turned out! Congrats to all and thanks to QRP ARCI for helping get the word out.

Iowa High Altitude Balloon Project

One of the 4 States QRP bunch, Terry WA0ITP, provided the 20m beacon again and has some great info on his informative website.

But for me, the coolest thing was listening in on the streaming webcast of  VE3EN and his wonderful IC-7700. Sure wish I had thought of recording a bit or doing a screenshot to share here. But what a treat to listen in and hear the beacon’s signal right up until touchdown. Thanks Kevin for a fun way to eavesdrop on this event since the lawn mowing crew took over my condo’s yard and didn’t allow me to put an antenna out today. There is a ton of info and creative website construction on Kevin’s website and it is worth spending some time looking at the solar cycle data.

Congrats to the team for a successful event today and for bringing so many hams together for a good learning experience and something out of the ordinary. Well done W0OTM, well done indeed!

Today sees the publication of a new RSGB book by Steve Nichols, “Stealth Antennas.” I haven’t seen the book myself, but I was asked by Steve to contribute a description of my own stealth antenna farm as one of the practical examples. It remains to be seen whether this entitles me to receive a free copy. 😉 It isn’t even in the RSGB Bookshop yet, but hopefully it soon will be.

I think this is an important book which addresses an issue that I believe many new radio amateurs (and many not so new, such as myself) find themselves faced with, that of what to do when circumstances prevent the erection of the kind of antennas so many experts say you need. I hope the book helps to dispel the impression created by many that in order to enjoy the hobby one needs a beam mounted on a huge tower, or at least a full size dipole up high and in the clear. It would be nice if you could have one of these, but it certainly isn’t the end of the world if you can’t.

Here’s my dilemma:

I am a rookie homebrewer. My kit experience is good, but I have struggled to build direct from schematics. Part of it is my lack of ability to conceptualize the physical layout and part of my challenge is lack of building experience and mentoring.

What should I use?

Several of my antenna tuner projects seem to have a TON of hand capacitance effect. They are built in plastic cases, some from the Shack and some from the local surplus shops and hamfests. Most commercial tuners are built in metal cases and I wonder if that would eliminate the sensitivity to the tuning hand?

I have a couple metal enclosures I can use and a great ham friend sent me some thin copper with adhesive tape on the back.  I am thinking of slapping some copper tape inside the plastic cases and see how it works.

So, I am putting it to the vote:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

And for the record, the vote in the poll  for best ham radio QTH in the US was won by West Virgina. Here is the top 5:

• West Virginia (17%, 11 Votes)
• Kansas (14%, 9 Votes)
• Texas (8%, 5 Votes)
• Hawaii (6%, 4 Votes)
• New Hampshire (5%, 3 Votes)

Thanks and 72,

Kelly K4UPG

Great news for owners of Apple portable devices who want to access Fabian Kurz DJ1YFK’s brilliant lcwo.net site on the move. LCWO stands for “Learning CW Online”. If you don’t know the site and you want to learn morse code or improve your code skills, this is one of the best destinations available – and it’s totally free.

Since May Fabian has been working on alternative ways to deliver the material, using HTML5 as an alternative to Flash.

As of Tuesday this week, Fabian has enabled the HTML5 player option to work with Apple Safari so it can handle mp3 files. And now at last iPhone and iPad owners can use the site as it was intended. Now I have no excuse for not getting my CW into shape.

Another cause for celebration is that today the lcwo.net site welcomed its 20,000th visitor. As Fabian says on the site “The reports of CW’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

If you know a bit about programming and have been thinking of writing a ham radio application, here’s a word of advice. Don’t. If you do, it will take over your hobby, your spare time will never be the same again and you’ll be lucky to receive much thanks for it.

First, you’ll have to spend countless hours answering emails that ask the same basic questions. You’ll have to do this no matter how much time you put into writing documentation or creating an FAQ or a wiki, because no-one will read it. And believe me, starting the day with an inbox full of the same old questions gets tiresome very quickly.

Second, you’ll be expected to know why your program won’t run on a user’s computer, without being given any idea what kind of computer it is or what version of operating system it uses. If the user has done anything that might affect your program’s ability to run, you won’t be told that either. And beware if you should choose not to spend too much time looking into someone’s obscure problem. One user of VOAProp who had a problem several years ago that I was unwilling to solve threatened to write to the RSGB accusing me of lacking in ham spirit. That bruising encounter is one reason I gave up developing programs for the hobby completely and now make it as clear as I possibly can that the programs I wrote continue to be available on the sole condition that I provide absolutely no support for them whatsoever.

Third, you’ll receive a lot of requests from armchair programmers for changes and improvements. Some of these might be good ideas, though you still may not want to implement them. But many will be things that only that person thinks is a good idea, quite possibly because they haven’t read the instructions or understood how the program is supposed to be used. These requests will contain no acknowledgement of the amount of time you will have to spend making these suggestions happen. You’ll have the job of justifying why you shouldn’t spend several hours or days coding some function that you personally have no interest in using. And some people find it hard to take “no” for an answer. If you wanted to write programs to someone else’s spec you’d get a job as a programmer, wouldn’t you? Then at least you’d be paid for it.

Last, but by no means least, you’ll get complaints about bugs. Yes, complaints, even if your program is free. Often, these emails will be the first contact you ever have with that particular user. But don’t expect them to start with any pleasantries. If you are particularly unlucky, as I was with one email I received from someone who couldn’t get KComm to run, you’ll be blamed for wasting their time. Sometimes the “bugs” will be due to user error or failing to read the instructions, but it’s rare that you’ll receive an apology after pointing that out. And believe me, those who complain most bitterly won’t get the joke if you offer to refund what they paid for the software.

Fortunately there are users who will make you feel that your effort is worthwhile. You might even be lucky and build a team of online friends who test your program and give you useful feedback about it. But it doesn’t take many of the other sort of comments to make you wonder why you bother. If you develop your program solely for your own use you will save yourself a lot of trouble.

It’s a good job no-one takes my advice because if ham programmers didn’t release their programs for free and put up with all the brickbats I’ve described the hobby would be a lot poorer for it. But if you’ve ever seen a program mentioned in some old forum posting and been unable to find a copy of it, now you know why.

So next time you use a bit of free ham radio software ask yourself: Did I remember to say thank you for it? Before bothering the developer with a question, take the time to read the documentation and search any relevant forum for the answer. And if you think you found a bug or have a suggestion for an improvement, try not to make it sound like a criticism or a demand. A little tact goes a long way.

The Radio Society of Great Britain are conducting a survey of radio amateurs based in the UK. On their website, RSGB say, “The objective of the survey is to gather as much information as possible on 21st century amateur radio operation in the UK. The survey, which is internet based, will run for three months and the data collected will be used to determine the direction that amateur radio takes over the next 10 to 20 years”.

With my cynical hat on, I’m afraid I’ll have to take issue with the last point. Amateur Radio will take its own direction, regardless of any survey results! In my opinion, perhaps a better way of putting it would be that the survey would help shape the RSGB’s attitude to taking amateur radio into the future.

I’ve just completed the survey myself and I encourage you to do so if you are based in the UK. I was surprised at some things that it dwelt upon and surprised at some of the things that it didn’t cover, or only lightly touched. There is more I might say about this, perhaps when the survey is over, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of leading the witness!

Either way – take a few moments to respond – it can only help for as many people as possible to take part in the survey.

It will be interesting to see what use is made of the results.

The RSGB’s Amateur Radio Survey can be found here

Peter, G4NKX, uncovered a can of worms the other day after encountering some unpleasantness by CW users in what has traditionally been the PSK segment of 40m starting at 7.035MHz. It appears that the 40m band plan in IARU Region 1 (Europe) has been changed, but nobody has been told, including the IARU.org website which still has copies of the old band plan coming up top in Google searches for “IARU Region 1 Bandplan“.

Under the current European band plan for 40m, CW now has free reign up to 7.040MHz, with narrow band digimodes from 7.040 to 7.050. So the start of PSK31 operation is now presumably 7.040MHz. However the bright sparks who sit in their ivory towers and decide this sort of thing clearly forgot about the real world in which people don’t find out about something unless it is shoved under their noses. People will operate where they hear other people operating, which creates a very powerful inertia against any form of change. These band plan changes came into effect on 29th March 2009, yet people are still in ignorance of them 18 months later. Where was the letter from the national society to each licensed amateur, informing them of the changes?

But more to the point, why change? It’s just a recipe for chaos and an opportunity for the band police to cause unpleasantness, just for the sake of an extra 5KHz for CW operators. It also now means that digital mode users in Europe must use a different part of the spectrum to those in the USA, making transatlantic digital DX impossible without incurring the wrath of the policemen. Frankly, I don’t blame PSK31 users for staying where they were and refusing to be shunted around by bandplan changes that don’t give them any benefits.

I’m somewhat confused about what the 40m USA bandplan is. The document on the IARU website for Region 2 shows narrow band digital modes starting at 7.035MHz. But I thought people in the USA operated PSK31 starting at 7.070MHz and other narrow band modes like JT65A at 7.075MHz? No wonder I have never heard any Stateside DX on digital.

Radio waves don’t stop at IARU regional boundaries so what is the point in having bandplans that put digital modes in different parts of the band in different regions? It just goes to prove that the powers that be who make these decisions think the only modes that matter are SSB and CW.