Julian G4ILO has an interesting post about using W6CQZ’s JT65-HF software.

“One of the features of JT65-HF is that it automatically links in to the PSK Reporter network so you can see all the stations you heard on a map and, even more interestingly, all those that heard you.”

In 20 minutes on 20m at 5W he managed to be heard twice on the west coast of N America under S9 noise condx. Julian says he can understand “why the mode is so popular, even addictive”.

More info on JT65 from HFLINK. “JT65A is a weak signal digital QSO mode.
JT65A is normally used on HF and 6 meter bands.” Also not to be missed are The Complete Bozo’s Guide to HF JT65A (a work in progress) by Andy K3UK and the ‘smart person’s guide’ to the mother mode WSJT.

Interesting update on IK1ZYW Labs on project to achieve remote control of the FT817. Also a pointer to an interesting page on FT817 Accessories, the external keypad project (circuit, manual & firmware available as well as various configurations of components including reprogrammed and tested chip ATtiny2313-20PU, xtal and 4×4 keypad) and the remote display project (pages under construction).

From the external keyboard info:

“…are you tired of hunting needed functions through F+Sel+A/B/C combinations? Do you want to improve your on-the-air proficiency? You can’t help but always press more keys at a time? Or always retouch the frequency when pushing the F button? An external keypad will let you re-discover the joy of QRPing with the FT-817(ND).

The IK1ZYW Keypad for FT-817(ND) is a wired partial remote control for the little Yaesu transceiver. It was conceived during a 6-hour field session at 2700 m.a.s.l. for a VHF contest in August 2008…”

Several of my blogging compadres have written recently about using the JT65-HF software by W6CQZ so I thought I would give it another try to see if I could understand what all the fuss is about. This is not the first time I have tried the program. I tried it at the beginning of the year. In fact, it was the main reason for upgrading my shack computer because the old one could not decode the received signals quickly enough to give me time to reply to calls. But having got the new PC I found the mode rather uninvolving as contacts are made just by clicking buttons to send computer-determined reports and you can’t even tell which of the signals you can hear is the one you are replying to.

I decided to run the K3 at 5W into the dipole because the K2 was doing 30m APRS gateway duty on the magnetic loop and the two antennas are only a few feet apart. But there was no interference. I’m not sure how much power people normally use on this mode but I might try more next time. My new shack computer coped easily, decoding the received JT65A signals in a second or so despite the fact that it was simultaneously running two APRS gateways one of which was using TrueTTY and a USB sound card to decode the packet data.

I found a free spot on the waterfall, sent a CQ and two people immediately came back to me at the same time. I didn’t decode anything! I called again and this time three people replied! I sent CQ once more and this time the first two must have decided I was either deaf or an idiot which left just one signal on my frequency: OE1LIC, for my first contact of the day. My second CQ raised RZ6AUJ, Alex for another contact and that was all I had time for before dinner.

One of the features of JT65-HF is that it automatically links in to the PSK Reporter network so you can see all the stations you heard on a map and, even more interestingly, all those that heard you. I remembered this and popped up to the shack after dinner to grab a screen shot. As you can see, my 5W to an attic dipole was heard by two stations on the west coast of the USA, and I was only on the air for about 20 minutes! The small blob on the west coast is VE7IRA who was heard by me despite the appalling S9 interference I get on this band, which was reduced to about an S3 by the MFJ-1026 noise canceller using a PA0RDT mini-whip for a noise antenna.

I still find using JT65A on HF feels a bit odd but I can understand why it has become so popular, even addictive. It takes up little band space and doesn’t interfere with other band users unlike a certain R** digital mode. I said this before and didn’t end up doing it but I think I will spend a bit more time using JT65-HF to see what I can work and whether I can join the crowd of enthusiasts for this unusual digital mode.

POLL RESULTS SO FAR:  West Virginia is in the lead for best Ham Radio QTH in the USA… One more week of voting… Have you voted yet? Here’s the link to vote!

Last weekend I played in the QRP Afield event and had fun with fellow Polar Bear QRP Club members on the air. It was a great time. Once again, the antenna tweak won out and under the influence of a great blog post by Polar Bear #20 VA3SIE, Martin in Ontario about the 88ft Doublet, I caved in and put one together the night before the event. Oops, I did it again! But this time I had excellent results and the antenna worked as advertised.  LESSON: Sometimes it pays to follow your heart and not your head.

Civil Defense Logo

I also remembered how I learned a lot as a young teen aged ham via the Civil Defense program. Remember that time?

Watching a weather report about tornadoes reminded me of a great learning experience. The Palm Sunday Tornadoes of 1965 hit the counties north and east of my home in Elwood, IN. At only 15 yrs old, I was the assistant emergency coordinator and ran the 6 meter emergency communications net on Sundays.  Our county and city Civil Defense teams had setup equipment and were ready for disasters and those tornadoes reeked havoc on our area.

Path of the Palm Sunday Tornadoes

Our teams rolled out the emergency vans, and the adults helped this young ham handle traffic for the state police and other government emergency responders.  The old yellow CD Gonset Goonie Bird rig is still something I remember fondly. I loved running that thing!

LESSON: Give the young hams some responsibility and empower them. They will be there when the time comes and will never forget how older folks treated them as peers and gave them an opportunity to do something important. I bet that kind of opportunity will still attract young people to our great hobby. We need them! They need us!

The Yellow Goonie Bird

Mads LA1TPA recently visited Julian G4ILO’s shack and was so impressed by his approach to cutting through the QRM using an MFJ-1026 Noise canceler and a pa0rdt-Mini-Whip active broadband RX antenna, he’s replicating the solution at his own QTH.

His post links to info on both the MFJ-1026 and the pa0rdt Mini-Whip.

MFJ-1026 noise canceler

Julian G4ILO’s site has an extensive description of the MFJ-1026 explaining that it’s a noise canceler, not a noise blanker or a noise reducer – as well as a ‘look under the bonnet’. It’s most effective when the noise is coming from a single point source, not multiple sources. So the canceler can reduce noise from a neighbour’s switch mode power supply, TV or computer it may be less successful dealing with general powerline noise.

For Julian’s station it did the trick and as he concludes,

“The MFJ-1026 is expensive for what it contains and quite poorly made, so I don’t feel any pride of ownership of it. It’s also a hassle having to tweak its controls whenever I change bands. But pressing the button to take it out of circuit quickly reminds me just why I have it.

I’d probably had sold my equipment and quit the hobby if it wasn’t for the MFJ-1026.”

You can also preview the MFJ-1026 manual here.

pa0rdt mini whip

The English-Dutch-Italian pdf about the pa0rdt Mini Whip explains,

“After several fruitless attempts to make an active loop work in a city environment, it was found that the electric field from local noise sources was contained within the house. The magnetic field of local noise sources was not contained inside the house, making weak signal reception at LF impossible.

Hence an electric field antenna was called for. Tests were performed using an active whip antenna, designed by G4COL. Results were encouraging and the whip length could be reduced from 100 cm to 30 cm without loss of performance. It became clear that at LF an active whip is a capacitance coupled to the electric field.

If it is accepted that a whip is a capacitance coupled to the electric field, shape becomes irrelevant, as long as the required capacitance is available. In practice the “whip” can be e.g. a small piece of copper clad printed circuit board.”

Welcome to Handiham World!

Happy Autumn!

Now that autumn has returned and the equinox is upon us, conditions on the amateur radio bands begin to favor some of the longer wavelength parts of the HF spectrum like 160, 80, and 40 m. True, there is still a great deal of interference from thunderstorms that pop up in the warmer climates, but the interference isn’t nearly so bad as it had been during the height of summer. The longer nights also mean less ionospheric D-layer absorption on those bands, which translates into more opportunities for long-distance contacts. In short, from this point forward we will see rapidly changing conditions on some of the bands where regional HF nets typically meet on a daily basis. This, as you might expect, can lead to potential interference as skywave propagation begins to move out from a few hundred miles to over 1000!

With more and more of our Handiham members earning their General Class tickets and becoming more involved with HF operation, we now have an opportunity to learn how the HF bands change from season to season. As always, we recommend doing plenty of tuning around and listening on the various bands to learn when there are band openings and how the more experienced operators are taking advantage of them.

One of my favorite bands has always been the 75 m band, and I have made plenty of random contacts but also enjoy checking into my favorite regional net, PICONET, on 3.925 MHz Monday through Saturday. Interestingly enough, this net has long been associated with Handihams — way longer then I have been with the Handiham program. Propagation on 3.925 MHz during the 9 AM to 11 AM central time “morning net” is generally the best, because during the previous overnight hours thunderstorms have quieted down and the bands are generally less noisy. As the day wears on, D-layer absorption increases and signal levels drop. There is also an afternoon session, from 4 PM to 5 PM, in the summer. In the winter, the PICONET expands its afternoon session to 3 PM to 5 PM, since conditions for sky wave propagation are better. But this can pose a problem: Skywave is so good that a New York net on the same frequency can now be heard in the Upper Midwest. No doubt the New York stations are also hearing us. Generally this overlap of nets isn’t a problem, but sky wave can work against you when the band “goes long” and stations from over 1000 miles away begin to sound as loud as the stations a hundred miles away. This situation calls for flexibility on the parts of net participants. If it is possible to use a directional antenna, a rarity on 75 m, interference can be mitigated by turning the antenna to favor only the stations in your area. Switching between wire antennas that favor particular directions might also help, as well as using a wire antenna instead of a vertical antenna. The wire antenna will most likely have a higher angle of radiation that will favor closer stations, while the vertical will have a lower angle of radiation that will favor the stations over 1000 miles away. Flexibility on the part of the net control stations is also called for. If interference is a problem, a net control station should consider cutting the net a little short or changing frequency just a bit. Of course this is not always easy when you have a net running and if you, as the net control station, want to change frequency everyone will have to understand the plan and change with you. It can be a challenging job for a net control station to herd everyone to another nearby frequency without having some strays!

160 m is especially useful over the winter months. While there are not as many structured nets on that band, you can run into “regulars” — stations that often get together on the same frequency about the same time every evening. In the summer 160 m is good for propagation in a regional area during the nighttime hours. In the winter, like the 75 m band, 160 m lengthens out and long-distance contacts are possible. If you are planning to try to earn a certificate like Worked All States on 160 m, winter conditions are your friend. Most evenings at 8 PM Central Time there is an informal get-together on 1.902 MHz. Most net participants are members of the Handiham affiliated Stillwater Amateur Radio Association.

40 m is a good band summer and winter and during sunspot lows and sunspot highs. It benefits by reduced thunderstorm interference during the winter months. You can work DX on the 40 m band, and an advantage it has over 160 m and 75 m is that a wire antenna for 40 m will be able to fit into most suburban lots. Furthermore, a vertical antenna for 40 m can be quite efficient and requires less inductive reactance to make it tune, as compared to a 75 or 160 m vertical. As always, cutting ground losses through an extensive radial system will yield good results.

Of course the sunspot cycle is on the way up and we can expect more DX to appear on 14 MHz and higher frequencies, but please don’t forget about 160 through 40 m. With winter conditions approaching here in the northern hemisphere, opportunities for fun on these bands are not to be missed!

I hope to hear you on the air soon.

Looking back over some older email list posts today I came across an interesting exchange of posts on the QRPp list.

In early August Arnie Coro CO2KK announced latest progress on the ‘Super Islander Version 5 QRP transceiver project’. Key design criteria include using “as much as possible parts that could be recycled from easy to find sources of electronic components” such as toroids from PC boards salvaged from failed compact flourescent globes, and other treasures from broken VCRs, TVs and fax machines.

Via the short Wikipedia bio of Arnie Coro I discovered a link to more than seven years of transcripts of his weekly radio program ‘DXers UNnlimited’ broadcast by Radio Habana Cuba. Earlier transcripts are here. He also has a blog last updated in June. They’re practical and full of useful ideas.

One transcript is reproduced on dxzone.com and is an undated description of the project detailing what appears to be the first valve version of the project – I think designed by his friend Pedro, CO7PR. It brings home in a softly stated way the challenges and barriers facing radio enthusiasts in countries which for one reason or another don’t enjoy relatively high wages to afford factory made gear, and who have to be much more resourceful in making do with what they have available to get on the air.

A rude dismissive comment on the QRPp list prompted a firm but calm response from Arnie.

“Yes amigos, it is very easy for people having access to the money and the possibility of buying factory built radios or even well designed kits with full instructions and each and every part required… even washers , to just sign a check or complete and electronic transaction that will bring to  their homes a nice piece of equipment…

But that is not the case for many of us, that do enjoy very much the amateur radio hobby, and think not only about ourselves, but also about those that may benefit from also well designed, easy to assembly and to adjust radios that can be built using locally available parts.

Try to find even the lowest cost ceramic filter for building a single sideband rig in no less than 130 countries around the world and you will meet with the fact that they are impossible to locate, and the same goes for ferrite and powdered iron toroids, IF transformers, RF power transistors, small relays , RF connectors, resistors and capacitors, not to mention quartz crystals and integrated circuits !”

SolderSmoke named Arnie ‘Homebrew Hero’ earlier this year.

Arnie Coro CO2KK

Arnie ended one of his missives to the QRPp list with this plea:

“Maybe one day the International Amateur Radio Union could sponsor a similar project to help promote amateur radio among young persons that live in poor nations where buying a factory made transceiver may be equal to the full salary of a worker during five years or more !!!”

I remember that one of the first QRP designs I ever built (back in the late 1970s) was a simple VXO controlled 6 W 20 m transceiver that appeared in QST (Dec 1978). It was later suggested as a prototype IARU transceiver as ham aid for developing nations.

Arnie’s idea appears much more economical and self reliant, drawing on the potential of recyclable components. It’s also a design thought through from a Cuban perspective rather than a first world one.

You can even hear an interview with Arnie Coro recalling the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. [audio]