AmateurRadio.com

Someone – ‘G7 in Northampton’ – just posted a comment to an old post asking where I got my DVAP. I can’t see where your comment has gone! Anyway…

I got my DVAP through HRO in Atlanta in the US. However, they are now available in the UK and I have heard that Waters and Stanton, Martin Lynch and RadioWorld have all had stocks – quite likely other stockists too.

Hope that helps…

The hills are alive with the sound of “CQ SOTA” and “CQ WOTA”. These two adventure radio programmes are becoming so popular that anyone trying to make contacts from a hilltop this last weekend on 2m FM had trouble finding a clear frequency. The sight of radio amateurs on mountain summits is becoming so commonplace that soon it will be the ones without radios getting the funny looks.

On Sunday morning Olga said to me “You should go for a walk”. Needing no further encouragement, I tossed the VX-8GR and a few bits and pieces into my rucksack and off I went. I parked at Thornthwaite near the old Swan Hotel and made my way up through the forestry roads to the minor summit of Barf. I didn’t go up by the direct path from opposite the Swan as it is very steep and slippery – I came down that way once a few years ago and it was enough for me.

On the way up I had a contact with top Wainwrights activator Phil, G4OBK/P on the summit of Brandreth. Phil is well on his way to completing the challenge of activating all 214 Wainwright summits in the English Lake District within two years and reached the half way mark this weekend. Visit Phil’s Wainwrights blog if you get a chance.

Shortly after contacting Phil I saw two ospreys circling over Bassenthwaite Lake and calling to each other with their high-pitched cry. I stopped and took the picture shown above of the view towards Keswick. About ten minutes later a small red deer came out of the forest about 100m ahead of me and trotted into the distance. Perfect!

It was cool but humid, but the misty weather creates a special atmosphere in the forest that is very pleasant. However once on the top of Barf a drying breeze was experienced. I made another contact with Phil, who was now en route for Great Gable, so he could tick Barf off on his “worked” list, and made another contact with Geoff GM4WHA. I also received an APRS message from Colin 2E0XSD, who unfortunately couldn’t hear me direct due to the amount of rock between us.

I then set off for the higher summit of Lords Seat, which I reached in about half an hour, where I stopped and had my lunch. By then Phil had reached Great Gable so we had a summit-to-summit contact. I made numerous other contacts, including Geoff and Colin and a couple people on SOTA summits outside the Lake District. I received a lot of comments about wind noise in the microphone, despite trying to shield the radio with both hands. The VX-8GR is the only one of my 2m hand-helds not to have a speaker mic, due to the fact that the only option is the expensive original Yaesu version. I should probably carry the VX-8GR just for the APRS and take the Motorola GP300 for voice contacts.

Simon, M3IWN/P called CQ from the top of Scafell Pike in the Lake District, which is England’s highest mountain. He was doing a SOTA activation and had a beam antenna with him. On a clear day I could probably see his summit from where I was, but he had so many callers that after 10 minutes of trying he still hadn’t heard me. I decided to move to another frequency and make some contacts of my own, checking back on Simon’s frequency now and again until eventually he got my call and we had a contact. At the time I worked him Simon had filled two and a half log pages with contacts including several summit to summits.

The QRM up there had to be heard to be believed. I was only using a 2m helical. The VX-8GR receiver tends to die in the presence of strong signals and I have heard strange things when using anything better than the stock antenna. Another reason for taking the Motorola, which has a better receiver. First, though, I will need to reprogram it to cover 145.300MHz, the frequency Phil likes to use on his activations.

Over the weekend I think something like 20 Wainwright summits were activated by around half a dozen different operators. Scafell Pike was actually activated twice on Sunday! Later in the afternoon after Simon had left I saw a spot had been posted for another station on the same summit.

I returned to the car via the forestry roads for a very pleasant walk with a lot of radio fun as well. If you want to join in, come to the English Lake District on a summer weekend – you won’t regret it!

My weekend is wrapping itself up and NAQP CW delivered a lot of ham
radio fun. I’m also grateful for the friendships that follow our
hobby. Whatever one’s passion there is another who shares the same
albeit RadioSport or chasing DX or logging grid squares on 2 meters
when the ‘e’ goes plasmic on very high frequency.

I had fun this weekend sitting in front of a high frequency
transceiver pumping radio frequency toward destinations unknown. A
local ham opened his station for guest operation and my cans jumped to
the next level when monoband antennas surfed some serious radio waves.
It felt tubular and hang ten like while Q after Q went into N1MM
Logger.

Sometimes I wonder if ham radio forgets to emphasize friendship from
across the miles. I enjoyed making new friends this weekend especially
when a QRP operator in Texas mentions in his e-QSL, “Good ears. I
enjoy reading your blog.”

I want to say you are welcome and it is my pleasure sharing a personal
journal about ham radio. Our hobby is not for everyone that is okay. I
would like one Texan QRP operator committed to their passion instead
of ten Paris Hilton types committed to nothing other than nothing.
What will those new numbers translate into over the next five years?

It was great to meet with Dave, G4BUO last night. Though we have pretty regular QSOs in various contests, it was ages since we had met up for a beer and a chat, and very enjoyable it was.

Dave had been part of the UK team, with Andy, G4PIQ who’d achieved a brilliant 9th place in the recent World Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC) held in Moscow. It was interesting to hear how they’d achieved such a high QSO total in the contest, by using two radios on one aerial, with some fancy switchgear, allowing them to ‘interleave’ QSOs, ie one person transmitting whilst the other one was listening. Clever stuff.

As always, propagation varies from the different part of the world and the Great Circle paths took a bit of getting used to; UK is west, France and Germany is southwest and so on.

Temperature at their field day site was extremely hot, rising to around 38C at time, but the winds got high as well, with the tent almost blowing overnight; it being held down by the support team and referee whilst Dave and Andy kept on operating.

I was surfing around looking at information about robust digital modes, as you do, and stumbled across something called the WINMOR Sound Card TNC. WINMOR is a free, open and documented protocol intended for reliable HF data communications. Originally developed as a low cost alternative to Pactor for emergency communications systems such as Winlink, it has been made available as a virtual TNC for other developers to incorporate in their products. I started to wonder if this is the solution people are looking for to make APRS over HF more reliable, rather than trying to use digital modes such as PSK63 or GMSK that weren’t designed for this type of application, as is being tried by G4HYG in APRS Messenger.

The documentation for the software is somewhat over my head, but from what I can deduce the Sound Card TNC (shown above) does not provide an interface like a regular packet TNC. However there is a module called BPQ32 that appears (from the description) to implement a TNC-like interface. I’ve probably misunderstood something – in which case hopefully someone will point this out to me – but it doesn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility to connect an APRS client like APRSISCE to this TNC and then you would be able to send APRS using the reliable WINMOR protocol with forward error correction (FEC).

The only problem would be finding a place to operate, since SCS’s proprietary Robust Packet protocol seems to have already established itself below the FSK300 APRS channel on 30m.

I haven’t had time since I got back from holiday to read every post of every blog that I follow, but I was glad that I caught the post about HFDL in Adam, M6RDP’s blog.

 HFDL stands for High Frequency Data Link. It is also known as HF ACARS, which gives the game away as to what it is about, for ACARS stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. In other words, it’s like APRS but for aircraft.

HFDL uses a proprietary protocol. Transmissions use USB with a symbol speed of 1800 baud. The modulation is 2-PSK, 4-PSK or 8-PSK with effective bit rates of 300, 600, 1200 or 1800 bits/sec. Aircraft log on to a ground station, of which there are currently 17 located around the world, each of which receives on several different and unique frequencies. The ground station assigns the aircraft a sequence ID number which is used in subsequent communications with it. HFDL is used by over 1200 aircraft operated by more than 60 airlines and allows pilots to always be able to communicate with the ground, no matter where they are located.

I downloaded the PC-HFDL software from the author G4GUO’s web page which unfortunately contains no information about the program itself. I also downloaded and installed Google Earth which is used to display the positions of the aircraft. I tuned my receiver to the frequency 6532kHz mentioned by Adam, which is one of the frequencies used by the ground station at Shannon. After a minute or so I received a loud signal that was obviously a burst of quite rapidly modulated data.

After a few minutes of head scratching when the program did not decode anything I found that it apparently sets the input level from the sound card to zero at start-up. PC-HFDL is “shareware” and this is presumably one of the annoyances authors of such programs put in to encourage users to pay up. It is more likely to encourage me to uninstall the software, but that’s another subject.

Once the program is receiving the audio from the radio, each burst results in a decoded message being displayed by the PC-HFDL program, while the aircraft position is plotted on Google Earth. You can see the results of about 10 minutes of listening on the 6532kHz frequency in the screen grab.

After 10 minutes or so of receiving the program shuts down, another limitation of using it without purchasing a registration. But 10 minutes is probably enough for most people to realize that, whilst the technology is interesting, as a pastime it would quickly get boring. Perhaps it would be possible to receive signals from more distant aircraft, but that’s about it. There’s a lot more happening on HF APRS, plus as a licensed amateur you can actively participate.

It doesn’t appear to be possible to submit position reports from PC-HFDL to a site like flightradar24.com (which I discovered from a comment to Adam’s post) which aggregates aircraft positions received by amateur enthusiasts to display a real-time radar map of all the commercial aircraft in Europe. Those position reports are sent using ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast) which uses a frequency of 978MHz and requires a dedicated receiver costing around £500.

The heart of ham radio beats strong and the next level awaits. The
North American QSO Party CW is less than 24 hours away when operators
will compete for Box positions. Our high frequency spectrum will
ignite with signals juiced by the awesome power of solar Cycle Twenty
Four. The competive spirit of RadioSport underpinned by good
sportsmanship will certainly drive the beginning of our fall and
winter season.

There is something to be said about being in the right place at the right time.

I logged a station in Mexico this afternoon on 10m and it is a first
since my re-entry into ham radio. The numbers are steadily improving
with glimpses of epic high frequency conditions. I’d like at least one
of those memorable events worthy of three cups of Starbucks and better
than the best fish story. Perhaps?

Strategy is straightforward that is be in the right place at the right
time. I’m looking forward to moving to the next level and having a lot
of ham radio fun through Saturday evening. Also, the biggest secret in
RadioSport that does not require a non-disclosure statement is, call
CQ a lot.

73 from the anywhere, anytime shack.