AmateurRadio.com

Single Operator All Band.

• J88DR (G3TBK) | 3423 Qs | 261 Mults | 34hrs13mins | 2,677,860 Points [Chiltern DX Club].
• LU5FF | 2115 Qs | 233 Mults | 29hrs | 1,477,686 Points [LU Contest Group].
• P40LE (K2LE) | 1267 Qs | 224 Mults | 15hrs | 851,428 Points [OBONY].

n = 21 scores submitted in this category.

Multi-Single.

• C6AWL | 4199 Qs | 309 Mults | 48hrs | 3,892,473 Points.
• 5W0OU | 2339 Qs | 250 Mults | 48hrs | 1,754,250 Points [WVDXC].

n = 2 scores submitted in this category.

A thank you to each international low power operator who populated North American logs this weekend. This was a stoked event especially when 100-watt stations were logged inside shackadelic. How about 10 meters? One can accomplish the RadioSport impossible within this spectrum space.

Congratulations Dave Cree, G3TBK who operated J88DR to a 3830 Top Score and for providing a new DXCC counter as well.

73 from the shackadelic on the beach.

US | VE Single Operator All Band.

• N4YDU | 1942 Qs | 330 Mults | 41hrs | 1,922,580 Points [PVRC].
• N9CK | 1768 Qs | 335 Mults | 34hrs | 1,772,820 [SMC].
• VE9DX | 1580 Qs | 317 Mults | 1,502,580 Points.

n = 97 scores submitted in this category.

US | VE Multi-Single.

• N7DS (@NE7D) | 466 Qs | 164 Mults | 25hrs38mins | 228,780 Points [WVDXC].

n = 1 scored submitted in this category.

Cycle 24 provided an activity stimulus package this weekend surprising some and pleasing many. It’s not the peak for sure however the long sunspot recession is finally over. Event numbers suggest phenomenal effort and stellar returns within all categories.

Nathan Moreschi, N4YDU leads the low power pack before log adjudication and he is one to watch as an emergent RadioSport athlete. His station configuration is definitely low power Box potential. Congratulations Nathan on a job well done while leading the Potomac Valley Radio Club, to yet, another banner week.

Low power multi-single remains as a category waiting for a few innovators. I would venture to say it is under capitalized with lots of great opportunity for the future of RadioSport.

Believe in your signal!

Late this afternoon I noticed that the ROS website had been updated with a new frequency suggestion for 20m 1 baud operation of 14.105, so I decided to have one more try.

For a while I seemed to have the frequency to myself. However I posted that I was calling there on the K3UK digital sked page. Shortly after, WB2YDS posted that he copied my CQ. I didn’t copy anything from him, but I called again and the second time I got his report, though not perfect copy as the meter in the ROS program showed he was 30db down in the noise.

I sent a report, which I know via the sked page he received, but unfortunately a few seconds after he started KB1PVH started calling CQ and the program started decoding his CQ call instead. With two stations on the frequency it was hopeless, and soon after that Olga called me for dinner and that was that.

Normally an almost-QSO wouldn’t rate a mention, except that I was using 5W from the FT-817 to a dipole, and WB2YDS was also running 5W to a long wire. I don’t think I have ever worked across the Atlantic QRP to QRP before, and indeed I still haven’t, but I nearly did, which shows what the ROS 1 baud mode is capable of if you are lucky enough to have a clear frequency for the duration of the contact.

Unfortunately the software has a number of issues that need to be addressed before it can be considered suitable for general use, one of which is the ability to lock on to the replies to you and ignore anyone else who comes up on the frequency.

Another problem is that ROS is still a mode without a home, and at 2.2KHz wide it needs quite a big home and no-one seems to want to make it welcome. There have already been complaints that by settling on 14.101MHz it is disrupting a long established packet network, and while I’m typing this someone seems to be jamming the 40m frequency 7.053MHz with some sort of digital idle signal.

As I said in an earlier post, the issues involved in releasing something like this to the ham populace at large haven’t been thought through. Perhaps there needs to be an overseeing body like the IARU that decrees what modes can be used and where, so there can be no arguments. It’s a pity that the use of a mode with such promise is being thwarted by so many difficulties, but practical reality often stops you doing what you want to do and ham radio is not immune to this.

I got fed up rather quickly with the new digital mode ROS. On 20m it is a zoo, with everyone calling on top of everyone else and very little being worked. I tried it on the advertised frequency on 10m and got nothing, despite the fact that DX is being heard via WSPR on that band.

What this proves, I think, is that it isn’t enough to be clever enough to come up with a new super duper digital mode. That might be fine if you keep it between you and your fellow experimenters. But if you release it to the masses you need to have a plan for how it will be used given the expected number of users and how you will educate people on how to use it.

If you develop a weak signal mode you have to take account of the fact that a lot of people don’t have a QRP mentality. They can’t see the point in trying to make a contact with low power when they can simply crank the power up. And if they do that, they miss the whole point of the mode and ruin it for everyone else. If a mode cannot be used on a particular band for its intended purpose because of overcrowding or interference perhaps it would be best if it was not used at all.

Instead I decided to use my FT-817 lash-up to try the APRS Messenger APRS-over-PSK63 software instead. Whilst doing that I noticed on the waterfall a strange signal almost spot on the 10.149.70 frequency used for APRS over PSK63. It looks like an upside down three pronged fork but comes in two sizes, one wide and one narrow. It starts sounding like a single tone, and then widens to a chord of three distinct tones. But what is it, why is it on that frequency, and are my PSK63 beacons interfering with it?

Many people have blogged about their activities over the weekend during the ARRL DX CW contest. I had planned to spend some time making some Stateside contacts, to see how many different states I could work and perhaps make enough contacts to be worth submitting an entry, even though I had no intention to win anything. Alas it was not to be. After just over an hour on Saturday afternoon, during which I had made 17 contacts on 15m, Olga learned that her sister in Ukraine was in intensive care in hospital. It would have been inappropriate to carry on making contacts on the radio, even if I had still felt like it after receiving that news. So that was the end of my participation in the ARRL contest.

Olga felt she would have to go urgently to Ukraine to see her sister, which made me depressed and anxious. Kharkov isn’t the easiest place to get to from here, even without snow both here and there making the journey more difficult. However on Sunday Olga received some better news about her sister, including the advice that there was little she could do if she went now and it would be better to wait until she was out of hospital before visiting. I’m still depressed at the thought of being without my wife and soulmate for a bit, but at least I will have more time to get used to the idea before it happens.

My interest in the contest didn’t recover after this, but I did read about a couple of new pieces of digital radio software which I tried out and wrote about yesterday. Both of these programs are very interesting, and I think I shall have more to say about them in the near future.

Another new digimode has made its presence on the airwaves. Called ROS, it uses spread spectrum techniques in a bandwidth 2.2kHz wide and offers a choice of two symbol rates, 16 baud and 1 baud. The latter will be of great interest to QRP operators as it is claimed to allow communication at signal levels of 35db below noise, which is better even than WSPR. ROS is an interactive mode, so you can type what you want and have a real QSO, unlike WSPR and the other JT modes that can only send a limited number of fixed messages. What’s more it isn’t an all-or-nothing mode like the JT modes, so you can receive a message that’s part garbage and use your own intelligence to correct the errors if possible.

An interesting feature of ROS is that the software will automatically send an emailed reception report to any transmitting station that includes his email address in his transmission. Quite how it achieves this I don’t know, since I don’t have an email client set up on my shack computer (I do all my email through Gmail.) So I was quite surprised after receiving my first ROS signal from G3ZJO running 1 watt on 40m to see him send “HI” to me on his next over (as you can see in the screengrab.)

This is yet another program that only recognizes the “default” sound card so I am once again receiving using the HB-1A transceiver and am unable to transmit using the mode.

The weak signal capabilities will no doubt make this mode of interest to the QRP fraternity as well as VHF operators working EME and troposcatter. I think the ability to receive an emailed reception report is also rather cool, and a bit more personal than seeing your signal spotted on a website.

However I do wonder what will happen once the massed hordes start using it on HF and begin cranking the power up to try to work further afield. There isn’t enough space on the HF digital mode bands for many simultaneous contacts to take place using a 2.2kHz wide mode.

I’m now listening on 14.101.0 MHz USB so if you try this new program and put your email address in your message you might get a report from me.

Chris, G4HYG, has just released a new Windows program called APRS Messenger which supports APRS messaging using the PSK63 mode. Various experiments made in the past suggest that this could give better reliability at low power levels than 300 baud packet which is normally used on HF. APRS Messenger also functions as an Internet gateway so any error-free packets received over HF are sent to the APRS-IS network.

An unfortunate limitation of the program at the moment is that it will only talk to the “default sound card” which on most Windows computers is the one used to play system noises, listen to Internet audio and video and so on. So I am unable to use it with my K3 at the moment. For test purposes I have connected my HB-1A QRP transceiver to my 30m antenna and fed the headphone output into the mic socket on the front of my PC.

I have decoded a few packets already, though many seem to contain some corruption. I am wondering why the little-used QPSK63 mode was not used for this application? As I understand it (and I could be wrong) QPSK63 takes up the same amount of bandwidth but incorporates some forward error correction that improves the likelihood of good copy compared with plain PSK63.

Chris has apparently agreed to talk with Lynn, KD4ERJ, about the possibility of making APRS Messenger work with APRSIS32. The possibility of using Lynn’s full-featured APRS client to send and receive APRS over HF using PSK is quite exciting.

By the way, if you are wondering why the screenshot shows a Mac program the reason is that I’m using an OS X theme under Windows XP!