AmateurRadio.com

My bureau-workshop

I have sometimes seen comments to this blog that are disparaging towards the idea of stealth operation. I don’t for a moment accept that stealth antennas are worse than the modest wire antennas many hams in the UK who don’t have deep pockets, large gardens and amazingly tolerant neighbours use. RF doesn’t care whether an antenna is visible or not, it’s what you do to make the antenna invisible that might compromise performance and with the small gardens without trees that so many of us in the UK have, most of us have to live with compromise.

But the real test of a ham radio station is whether it allows you to pursue enough activities to maintain interest in the hobby. And based on that criterion I think G4ILO does very well. One of the best additions to the shack was to make a dedicated work area for construction in a bureau unit whose door drops down to make a work surface and which can be closed when I have done enough without having to put everything away. I have a greater interest in building stuff now that I have somewhere to do it.

In fact there are more things I would like to do, radio-wise, than I have time to do. Last weekend, for example, I would like to have tried making some contacts in the worldwide RTTY contest but of all the radio things I did that weekend, giving away some contest points was something I didn’t get around to.

Today I was trying to finish up my homebrew SignaLink USB clone, but I made the mistake of turning the K3 on and leaving JT65-HF running and I kept on being distracted by seeing CQ calls from DX stations. In between work on the interface I made contacts with YV6BFE, N8ABY, AA1CZ and KD0AGX plus a couple of Europeans, all using 25W to the attic dipole. My signals were spotted in Japan and far eastern Russia, though I didn’t hear anyone that far east. DU1GM, whom I worked a few days ago, was calling for most of the afternoon with no takers.

The SignaLink USB clone is just about finished and does work. After I made up an interface cable between it and the FT-817ND I made one solid PSK31 contact with F5TTI on 30m with it on the test bench. So now it just has to be put into its case and it will be completed.

Recent posts on this blog mentioning the Chinese DIY scene and the explosion of offerings have prompted a very interesting exchange of views and reflections on how best to nurture this business and make it accessible to the global ham market.

Most recently Sivan Toledo has posted thoughtful comments drawing possible inspiration for the emergent Chinese DIY industry from successful amateur kit operations like Tony Parks’ Softrock. And the secret appears to be finding the right balance between the great product and crowdsourcing the support and handholding that is as much part of the product and building experience as the device itself.

Elecraft clearly enjoy the best in solid detailed step-by-step documentation (reminiscent of Heathkit) and they have the added advantage of an amazing online community dedicated to solving any problems, assisted by the designers and principals of the company. Part of the success of their online presence is a well moderated space and volunteer heroes like Don Wilhelm W3FPR who don’t appear to need sleep!

Doug Hendricks’ QRP Kits shows you can fill a niche and still keep your day job. While many of Doug’s star attractions are designed by Steve Weber KD1JV, Steve has his own website which I visit frequently to see whether a new batch of ATS-4 Miniature 5 band CW / digital mode HF transceivers are available or not, knowing they’ll probably sell out in a matter of hours. Users of this and its predecessors rave about them. Steve WG0AT took an ATS3 on his latest adventure with Rooster and Peanut.

Dave Benson, K1SWL’s Small Wonder Labs also offers quality kits at really good prices and a very efficient service. (My SW-40+ arrived in Sydney in record time.) Hunt around his site for a minute and you’ll discover how how the SWLabs fit into his lifestyle on 4+ acres near Newport “(we get a lot of winter here)” NH.

K1SWL’s approach to support includes email – “If you run into trouble during alignment and test, I’ll guide you through the troubleshoot process as far as we can get by e-mail. If that doesn’t do the trick, my repair person offers prompt and reasonably-priced service- he’ll troubleshoot and repair the unit and let you know what he found.” And you have a fair sense of what Dave means by ‘reasonable’.

It’s not unlike the successful formula for a restaurant or café – to offer the number of dishes it can do consistently well rather than attempt to cater to everyone’s tastes.

Tony Parks KB9YIG seems to have achieved production numbers of SoftRock kits that would appeal to any business backer, even if they are only made available in batches of 20 or so depending on availability of components and time. The very reasonable prices charged – including international shipping – play a part in this success by attracting a broad base of committed supporters keen to share experiences and grow the platform and everyone’s skills.

And today I noticed Julian G4ILO wrote about a range of kits from Fox Delta Amateur Radio Projects and Kits in India. They have the advantage over Chinese offerings of the English language and they accept PayPal. The range of kits on offer is impressive. Julian had ordered a APRS Tracker Module.

And of course Australia has its own GenesisRadio with its amazing line of SDR Kits such as the G59.

What an amazingly exciting time to be involved in ham radio!

Speaking of global reach, a prominent link currently on eHam.net has helped boost traffic to this site as well! (Welcome to all new visitors to the blog! I hope you find something interesting here.)

I was pleased to get my Yaesu FT8900 back from its service visit yesterday. You might remember that I’d had my suspicion that the 50MHz receiver had gone very deaf over the summer. It was odd, because the receiver was still working, but it seemed well down on gain.

It was well worth sending it away, because the receiver is now much more sensitive and it was good to be able to listen through the GB3FX, Farnham 50MHz repeater on the way to the station this morning.

Looking forward to getting back on 50MHz FM again! GB3FX works well around home and GB3ZY in Bristol works well when I travel towards the west. I noticed today, looking at the repeater maps for 50MHz, that GB3VI in the Birmingham area might be useable. I shall have to listen!

Tokyo Hackerspace has recently released these videos of a tour of Akihabara in Tokyo and they have done a viral tour of some of the major hacker blogs like Make and Hackaday.  If you have not already seen them then they are worth the time watching as Akiba of Freaklabs gives a great tour of this part of Tokyo which is brimming with stores that sell tools, electronic components and everything else for the hobbyist, maker, hacker and engineer.

The full collection of 24 videos are on the Tokyo Hackerspace website.  The video recording was made in HD so if you have a good bandwidth connection try the 1080 HD version on full screen. Here are a couple of the videos that I found particularly interesting.  First an amateur radio store called ‘Rocket Radio’

This next video shows a collection of indoor stalls that sell a wide variety of hobbyist items.  The location reminded me of a British indoor market, but instead of clothes and food here you can buy radios and enclosures. A collection of ‘candy stores’ for hobbyists.

I had heard of Akihabara but was stunned watching these videos how many stores there are.  I am sure it is unique in the density of electronics and construction retailers.  I would be interested to hear from anyone if they know of a collection of electronic component stores similar to this elsewhere, particularly in North America.  No doubt there were smaller collections of shops like this after World War II when the surplus gear hit the high street.  I know in London, UK, Tottenham Court Road had a concentration of such stores and I remember my father taking the family there when we visited London in the 70′s when I was a kid.  I believe that Shudehill in Manchester, UK, also had electronic component stores around that time  (again I recall a visit with my father) but they had all gone except for a TV and Radio store in the 80′s when I was a student there.

Thanks to Akira of FreakLabs, Patrick of Work in Progress and Tokyo Hackerspace for bringing us these videos.

This morning a small package arrived from India. It is a FoxTrak-M APRS Tracker Module kit from Fox Delta.

Fox Delta has an interesting range of kits for anyone interested in APRS, packet radio, digital modes or EchoLink. They are all extremely good value – the website suggests that they are sold on a non-profit basis. A couple of weeks ago I asked about one of these kits in a forum somewhere and an American ham complained that the parts were of poor quality, the instructions were poor and it took a long time to come from India. I think that is just the biased nonsense one sometimes hears from US hams about anything from India or China. The PCB is screen printed and looks fine, all the components are standard components and have been packed into individual small polythene bags for each value, and it took a week to arrive which is a lot faster than anything coming from the US via the postal service. It’s true you don’t get Elecraft style step by step building instructions, but it really isn’t rocket science to work out which part goes where on the circuit board.

Hopefully this module will form a stand-alone GPS tracker that I can use with my other VHF radios. However, before I get started on it I have to finish my DIY SignaLink USB project.

After installing the four port serial card in the shack PC which allowed me to have computer control of my Elecraft K2 I decided to borrow the USB sound card that was being used by my EchoLink hotspot and get my HF APRS gateway up and running again on transmit as well as receive. It is running very well and, although I suppose it may just be conditions, it seems to be receiving more stations than when I was using the K3. I am also surprised at how well my 10W output gets out. The experts are always saying how poor a mode FSK300 packet is, but I transmitted several test messages (into my stealth attic magnetic loop) and they were all received by other gateways.

However, something went very wrong on Sunday. Replies to a couple of messages I sent kept being received over and over again. I also kept receiving the same messages over and over again from a couple of stations. It was like the film Groundhog Day, except it was more like Groundhog Five Minutes. And it was very annoying as these damn messages kept generating pop-up balloons from APRSISCE’s new messaging system.

Eventually I became convinced there must be a problem with APRSISCE and I sent a bunch of logs over to Lynn, KJ4ERJ, the program’s developer. However I now think the problem is down to the configuration of some stations in Europe that are unnecessarily digipeating or gating traffic from the internet to RF and somehow managed to create an endless loop. Aprs.fi shows that some of the messages continued to circulate for more than 10 minutes after I had shut down all the computers and radios and gone downstairs in frustration. But even Lynn hasn’t manage to figure out who the culprit was.

The trouble with the APRS HF network in Europe is that there is no co-ordination at all. Anyone can connect some software or a TNC to a radio, configure it however they see fit (perhaps basing their settings on out-of-date books, obsolete web pages or nonsense thinking like “WIDE5-5 must be more than twice as good as than WIDE2-2”) and start digipeating or gating traffic regardless of whether there is a need for it. There are stations in France who are gatewaying information from VHF to HF that serves no useful purpose there. What use is it to me in the north of England to know the meeting date of a club in the south of France or the details of a repeater in the Pyrenees?

These days it is far too easy for people to get on the air without first having to properly understand what it is they are doing. And many hams seem to think it is their duty to radiate RF even if the most useful thing they could do in this particular case is simply to receive.

You can’t have a network without co-ordination of the stations that participate in it. But, no doubt in part because we all speak different languages, there is no online forum that everyone doing APRS on HF in Europe can join to discuss the issues and resolve the problems.

Now that I have my K2 connected again for computer control I have found that a few things in KComm that worked with the K3 don’t work with the K2 because the control commands, though they may look the same, don’t all work the same way on both radios. So I spent yesterday evening fixing the problems.

One of the things that didn’t work was the auto-repeat option for CQ calling. I was testing it by sending a CQ on 30m with just 1W output into the magnetic loop in the attic. I didn’t expect anyone to come back to me, and no-one did, but I was surprised that my signal was spotted in Northern Spain by EA1GFY. The effectiveness of that magnetic loop antenna never fails to amaze me.

I don’t think many people use as little as 1W on PSK31 but it would be interesting to see what you could work with such low power. It seems to me that 1000 miles per watt should be perfectly achievable. I’ve made a few contacts using the K2 and 4 or 5 watts over similar distances to what I’d expect using the K3 and 40 watts. I think conditions, more than power, determine how far you can work. More power just makes it easier.