AmateurRadio.com

Welcome to Handiham World!

The move, part 2

Pat Tice, WA0TDA, is the manager of HANDI-HAM and a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

I recently returned from a vacation in Mexico. We stayed at a beautiful resort in Nuevo Vallarta, just north of better-known Puerto Vallarta, and although there was plenty to do there (including doing nothing but lying around the pool sipping a cold drink), one thing that I was unable to do was to bring along my ham radio gear and operate. Although weight restrictions and the cost for additional bags are a concern, that wasn’t the issue. As with my trip to Grand Cayman a couple of years ago, I can fit most everything into either a backpack (to be used as a carry-on) or in between the bathing suits and t-shirts. The issue was that while there is a “bilateral reciprocal operating agreement” with Mexico, in this case the rules for Mexican amateurs operating within the US are very different than the rules for American amateurs operating in Mexico.

Here’s what the ARRL says (in part) about foreign amateurs operating in the US:

…if your country of citizenship and amateur license share a bilateral Reciprocal Operating Agreement with the US, the FCC allows foreign amateurs to operate with no permit. Simply carry your foreign amateur license and proof of your citizenship in that country. Identify using “W” and the number of the FCC call letter district in which you are operating followed by a slash and your non-US call sign, e.g. W3/G1ABC).

So this means that if XE9ZZ comes to the US and wishes to operate from my home state of New Jersey, he could get on the air and simply identify as W2/XE9ZZ. There are no forms to fill out, no visits to the FCC, no copies of passport pages or visas, and assuming that you are a Class I licensee in Mexico, you’ll have all the operating privileges of a US Amateur Extra license. I think that this is how things should work.

Unfortunately, for a US amateur to operate in Mexico a lot more paperwork, time, and money are involved. The detailed process has been explained very nicely on a page on DL6KAC’s web site and there is a lot of additional information available on WD9EWK’s site as well. To try to summarize the process briefly (and I’m glossing over a lot of the details), you need to fill out some forms, send in a bunch of documentation, including the application itself, a copy of your passport, a copy of your visa (which is issued when you enter the country as a tourist, which means you can’t really apply before you get there), a copy of your ham radio license, and information that proves that you have paid for the license. (You do this through a bank in Mexico). The current fee is 1025 pesos, which at the present time is about US$75. Of course, all the forms are in Spanish and translated copies are not acceptable, except if the particular official decides otherwise. (To be fair, this is reasonable, since Spanish is the official language in Mexico). Fortunately, US hams do not have to get a letter of invitation from a Mexican ham (non-US hams do), although I think that would be a relatively easy thing to get.

After you get all of that together, you either mail it or hand deliver it to the proper address (which is especially challenging if you don’t happen to be located in Mexico City), and then you wait.

As best I can tell, it can then take around 60 days to get your license, which is mailed to you at your address in Mexico. All of this makes it rather difficult for a casual tourist such as myself to operate from Mexico. To even have a chance of getting a license I’d have to find someone located within Mexico who’d be willing to handle some of these details for me, and I still can’t quite figure out how I’d get a visa in advance of actually being in the country. I suppose that if you spend a signficant amount of time there (a lot of Americans and Canadians have homes in and around Puerto Vallarta, and I’m sure elsewhere), then it would probably be worth the effort to do this.

By the way, once you get your license, you have the privileges of a Mexican Class I license (their highest-level license), but there are some restrictions: Unless you specifically ask for permission, you can’t operate from any Mexican Island, you cannot operate in a contest, nor can you be part of a DXpedition. (I’m not quite sure how simply visiting is different from a DXpedition.) Also, you must use your callsign as provided on that permit with an additional suffix if you travel outside of the callsign area for which it was issued. For instance, if I was issued XE2/K2DBK it would be fine to operate from Puerto Vallerta, but if I decided to visit Cancun, I’d have to identify as XE2/K2DBK/XE3. (Good thing you can’t operate in contests, that’s quite a mouthful!)

Clearly every country is going to have different rules governing their amateur radio service. It would be nicer if the processes were truly reciprocal.

David Kozinn, K2DBK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Back from Baltimore and ready for more ham radio, Linux and Linux in the HAM Shack. I had originally planned to get this episode out before I left for the Large Installation System Administration conference in Maryland, but it didn't work out that way. I even brought all the audio with me to assemble the podcast during my off time at the conference. It turned out there wasn't any off time, so I wound up having to finish up when I got home. That being said, I have to admit this is my favorite episode so far.  It seems like Richard and I are finally getting the hang of this podcast thing. We truly appreciate all our listeners. It makes the time, effort and money of putting out this program worth it.

In Episode #024, we bring you some final wrap-up from Ohio Linux Fest, including interviews with ham radio operators, Linux users, Beth Lynn Eicher from OLF, members of the Drupal project and more. We answer listener comments and questions, of which there are many, and I talk about my getting back on the air and include my new experiences with digital communication via ham radio, from PSK to IRLP. Grab a drink, sit back and enjoy this episode of Linux in the HAM Shack. And if you have a spare couple of dollars, drop them in the can so we can bring our show to the national ham radio convention in 2010: The Dayton Hamvention.

73 de Russ, K5TUX

Russ Woodman, K5TUX, co-hosts the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast which is available for download in both MP3 and OGG audio format. Contact him at [email protected].

Series Two Episode Twenty-three of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast. News Stories include:-

• London 2012 Spectrum Plan
• Sweden withdraws noisy PLT equipment
• Black Isle VHF Repeater back on air
• Getting very serious with ham radio contest
• Icom UK on the move
• Hams woos kids at HMO Science Day 
• Galway VHF Group RNLI operation
• Marconi Nobel 100 Award 
• Space satellites made in Stevenage
• New 23cm D-STAR Group
• Galway APRS Digipeater 
• Thailand's 7MHz expansion gets the go-ahead 
• Higher capacity batteries

Vintage Wireless and Television Museum and upcoming events.

Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].

Welcome to Handiham World!

Handiham Office Move – New HQ Entrance

Pat Tice, WA0TDA, is the manager of HANDI-HAM and a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

Not long ago, I added a feature to my Facebook page that automatically posted these blog updates there. While many of my friends know that amateur radio is a hobby for me, I do get asked “so exactly what does that mean?” fairly often. Although there are a number of sites that explain it, Julian, G4ILO, wrote up what I think is a terrific primer on the subject that I hope will help some of you get an answer to that question. Here’s a link to his site: http://www.g4ilo.com/ham-radio-faq.html

David Kozinn, K2DBK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Welcome to Handiham World!

The first order of business is the upcoming time change in November: Sunday, 1 November 2009, we move to standard time in the USA. The Handiham daily EchoLink net remains true to local time, so if you use local time to check in you will not notice any difference. However, if you use GMT, the net time appears to shift by 1 hour. Instead of beginning at 16:00 GMT, the net begins at 17:00 GMT. The first net affected by this change will be the Monday, 2 November EchoLink net.

For net managers, the time change means making sure that net control stations are aware of the plan to shift net times by one hour relative to Universal Time. The problem is certainly one for amateur radio nets that have worldwide participation, since different parts of the world may elect to follow a seasonal time shift. About 70 countries have at least some form of daylight saving time. Three notable exceptions are China, India, and Japan. A station checking in to the Handiham EchoLink net via the N0BVE repeater system in Minnesota would observe no difference next Monday, as the net would begin at what appears to that station to be normal local time, 11:00 in the morning. However, relative to GMT (which never shifts by the season), the net will now begin an hour later, at 17:00 hours GMT instead of 16:00 hours GMT.

An easy way to remember the difference is to know the “normal” number of hours between your local time and GMT. In Minnesota, where I live, the difference between local time and GMT is +6 hours. That means if the net is on at 11:00 hours in Minnesota, I add 6 hours to 11 hours and the total is 17:00 hours GMT. That is the same as 5:00 in the afternoon Universal Time.

In the summer, when Daylight Time is in effect, the difference between Minnesota time and GMT is only 5 hours.

So, to set forth a practical example, a station checking in from Japan will notice that the net now begins at 2:00 a.m. during the winter, when we shift to standard time. All summer, when Minnesota was on Daylight Time, that same station in Japan would see the net starting at 1:00 a.m., so you can see that it might be more difficult for Asian stations to keep the net schedule at such an inconvenient hour. We also get check ins from India, and since, like Japan, India does not shift times from Daylight to Standard, those stations will also observe that the net begins an hour later.

The Handiham Monday HF nets also remain true to local time, the only problem being whether or not we are even going to bother keeping these nets on the books, so to speak. The nets, other than the CW net, have fallen into disuse and might as well be abandoned. The relentless sunspot minimum with its poor band conditions has taken a toll on participation, and the RFI that prevented us from using our old station at Courage Center meant that we could not pick up the net if there was no other net control station available. We had a number of dedicated phone operators who stuck it out as long as they could on the 20 meter net, 14.265 MHz, but when stations just don’t show up, there really isn’t much of a net. A perennial problem with the 14.265 frequency is that the Salvation Army Net backs up against our net time and does not always change with the season.

It is time to decide what to do with these HF nets. The CW net stays in place on 40 meters, but the HF phone nets need a complete re-thinking. Let’s hear your ideas, now that the sun is again showing signs of life and solar cycle 24 will begin bringing us better HF band conditions. Oh, and let’s not assume that all the activity will be on 14 MHz and above. Maybe you would like to have a 75 meter net, or perhaps a 160 meter net, either of which would allow for fairly wide geographic coverage during the upcoming northern hemisphere winter. While nets are normally discouraged on 17 meters, we used to have an informal gathering on that band during cycle 23, when the band was open often. Alan, K2WS, started that “informal non-net get-together”. When band conditions became so bad that we just couldn’t keep the 17 meter non-net going, it simply died out. Maybe conditions will improve and we can get together informally on that band, or perhaps have a more formal net on a higher frequency band like 10 or 15 meters.

Think of the advantages of a 10 meter net:

• Novices and Technicians can operate SSB phone between 28.3 and 28.5 MHz.

• A quarter wave vertical antenna for the 10 meter band is only about eight and a quarter feet (2.5 meters) long. It is much easier to fit a 10 meter band antenna into a apartment or condo living situation than it is to fit a 20 meter antenna into that same space.

• Band conditions will soon favor 10 meters with the solar cycle producing higher sunspot numbers. That means that smaller antenna systems and lower transmitter power will become practical for working HF again.

• There is a lot of spectrum space on the 10 meter band. It is not crowded with stations as the 20 meter band is.

• Modern multiband rigs cover the 10 meter band, so many of us already have the equipment we need.

• The Handiham Remote Base station at Courage North operates on the 10 meter band, offering another way to get on the air.

Look, all I’m asking is that we mull this idea over and think about the HF nets. I hate to drop the 20 meter net altogether, but 14.265 MHz is just a very crowded frequency. We could consider running the net in a less crowded part of the band, but that would mean moving to the Advanced or Extra portions of 20 meters. Do you have any ideas about that? Perhaps it would offer even more incentive for some of our Generals to upgrade, but even if they don’t want to upgrade, there would be other nets that they could join on bands like 10 meters.

I guess we have to admit that every station is not going to be able to get on every net. The secret to building a successful on the air community is to have enough choices, alternatives that serve as many Handiham members as possible.

For Handiham World, I’m…

Patrick Tice, [email protected]
Handiham Manager

Pat Tice, WA0TDA, is the manager of HANDI-HAM and a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].