AmateurRadio.com

Finished Warbler in box

A few weeks ago I finished the box to mount the Warbler.  The connectors are all soldered directly to the pcb board so the alignment of holes had to be done carefully.  When doing such layout and drilling I am always grateful of the ‘O’level in metalwork that I finished back in high school thirty years ago now.  (As a sidenote I am currently reading ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft’ by Matthew Crawford which covers the recent decline of school shop classes).

The box is aluminium (showing my British origin with the spelling) and made by Hammond.  To give it a nice finish I spray painted it with a couple of coats of  Rustoleum Universal hammered spray paint and it came out rather well.

The painted surface showing the 'hammered' finish.

The box size is 4.5″×3.5″ so it makes quite a nice compact unit.

I need to look at the final output power of my Warbler as I think it is a little low, but it is performing well and I have made 80m PSK31 contacts out in Wisconsin, Illinois and North Carolina. As previously reported I have also used the Warbler for an Olivia contact.  A great kit and I am looking forward to using it over the Winter when 80m conditions should be better than they are now.  Unfortunately, it looks like Small Wonder Labs have dropped it from their current product line.

The International Space Station has had its packet BBS / digipeater active for the last few days on 145.825MHz. Noel G4PEW asked me in a short APRS chat last night if I had tried listening to it. It had been a long time since I tried bouncing anything off the ISS as I got fed up with checking if the station was operational and finding that it wasn’t, so I decided to give it a go to break the monotony of nothing much happening terrestrially.

There was a good pass this afternoon and I received ten stations. I even received my own digipeated beacon and a copy of my reply to GM0ICF’s message to ALL. Unfortunately my own transmissions didn’t show up on the map and list of stations that worked through the ISS at ariss.net as it appears that I was the only station gating the signals from the space station to the internet, as the list above shows (you’ll need to click on it to enlarge it enough to be readable.)

I was using APRSIS32 to send the beacons and messages and I guess that it didn’t gate my digipeated packets as having been received via the ISS because it had already sent them to the internet direct at the time I sent them.

I’m surprised that none of the other stations sending signals up to the space station were gating them during the receive periods. We aren’t talking about important communications here, just seeing if it can be done, but it would be nice to have the proof of it afterwards. Come on, chaps, play the game and get your gateways working!

I was really pleased last night to hear from Matt Thomas, W1MST who is the Editor at AmateurRadio.com. Matt was kind enough to say that he’d been reading this blog for a while and that he would like to syndicate the posts onto his site.

Naturally, I’m delighted – thank you Matt for your kindness and confidence and I hope that readers will find my posts of interest.

Funnily enough, yesterday, I produced a word cloud based on the last six months of my posts on this site, which gives you an idea of where the emphasis lies at the moment. That’s not to say, of course, that it won’t veer off to somethng very different – as it tends to follow whatever I’m interested in amateur radio wise at the time.

A few days ago I came across a forum thread discussing ham radio applications for smartphones in which someone claimed that they were using an HTC Touch Pro (the phone I have) dual booting into Windows Mobile and Google Android. I was interested, but imagined that achieving it would require the ability to follow exactly a lengthy sequence of obscure commands with a high probability of turning the phone into a brick. However I was unable to resist looking into it further and discovered that it should be easier than that. It should be simply a matter of extracting an image of the HTC Android port on to an SD card, copying a configuration file that matches your model of phone into the root folder and then running a program (under Windows Mobile) that reboots the phone into Android. Unfortunately I don’t have an SD card of the type used by the Touch Pro so I haven’t been able to try it yet.

I originally bought a smartphone running Windows Mobile specifically because it would run Lynn KJ4ERJ’s APRSISCE, which is undoubtedly the best APRS client on any smartphone by several hundred miles. However, for me that is really about the only good reason for using that platform. I don’t need the ability to sync with Outlook or use Pocket Office as I don’t use any Microsoft applications on my PCs, and I find Windows Mobile to be too much like Windows itself – complicated to use – and not enough like a phone – easy to make phone calls and text messages. Plus, the fact that running APRSISCE all the time drains the battery in a couple of hours leaving you without a working phone has been a big disincentive to using it in the way I originally envisaged.

Whilst Windows Mobile 6.x is an undoubtedly powerful platform, as you can tell from the range of full-featured applications (not just “apps”) available for it, it is also a dead end. I was surprised to find that Windows Mobile currently has just 5% of the market. Microsoft is hoping to reclaim some of its market share with the upcoming Windows Mobile 7. Personally I think it’s too late and Microsoft has missed the boat on this one. I think Microsoft has an over-inflated opinion of the Windows “brand”. People use Windows on PCs because they don’t have much of an alternative, not because they think it’s great. Smartphone users have lots of choices. People love Google because they are always giving us stuff for free, while Microsoft always makes you pay (and then keeps checking your receipt afterwards). So I think Windows Mobile 7 is doomed even if Microsoft hadn’t decided to make it incompatible with earlier versions so that it won’t run any legacy applications – including APRSISCE.

I really wished in the end I had bought an Android phone. Now this dual boot trick will allow me to try the Google OS out and see whether it is really is as good as the hype. More when I receive the SD card I ordered and am able to try it.

(Update: Just checked the status of my order placed on Wednesday with option for first class next day delivery and it is still shown as Pending. Grr! Clearly it wasn’t a good idea to order from MyMemory.)

We are very pleased to announce the winner of a
Wouxun Dual-Band HT
from Wouxun.us!

Thanks to Ed at Wouxun.us for sponsoring this month’s drawing.
We had over 750 entries!

We’re giving away another great prize in October.
Stay tuned and get ready to enter.

OK, on to what you’ve all been waiting for!

The winner of our September 2010 prize giveaway is…

Read the rest of this post

Had a great time setting up the C Pole antenna in a tree suspended configuration. My good friend and cohort, Jim Diggs, K4AHO came by with his AIM 4170 Antenna Analyzer and we were ready to tune the antenna and get a feel for it.

LESSON: A good analyzer makes tuning an antenna fast, simple  and accurate! The AIM 4170 gave us a TON of info (most of it going over my head) and let us see how the C Pole was doing in several areas.  Take a look at this output! (Click on the image for a larger version)

K4UPG C Pole Scan Results

LESSON: I followed Niel’s directions, but did not have a small plastic coffee container so used a Quart Coke bottle instead. So I call it a Coke Choke and it seems to work well. Here’s a photo to show it off!

Coke Choke Ready for Duty

I think this one is a keeper. Goes up easily, hears well and loads nicely too. I made a few brief contacts and called it a day, but look forward to more C Pole action in the days ahead.

72,

Kelly K4UPG PB #173

p.s. Don’t forget to vote in the Ideal Ham Radio QTH poll on the blog!

It’s always good to hear when something one does or writes inspires somebody else to try it and they are pleased with the outcome. Sivan, 4X6IZ, made a version of my portable Wonder Loop and found that “it works as advertised.” He has put some information and pictures of it and another loop he made on a website. His idea of using polyethylene coated aluminium pipe to make a fixed frequency loop and tuning capacitor is particularly interesting if you always operate close to a particular frequency such as for QRP CW, PSK31 etc. If I had space in my attic for another magnetic loop I could dedicate for HF APRS use I would definitely make one of these.

I’m sure you’ll find it worth reading about Sivan’s magnetic loop antennas.