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AmateurLogic.TV is celebrating our 16th Anniversary and you could win a complete Icom IC-705 prize package along with accessories from MFJ.
Get all the detail at www.amateurlogic.tv/contest

In this episode, Colin Butler (M6BOY) is joined by Leslie Butterfield G0CIB, Edmund Spicer M0MNG and Martin Butler (M1MRB) to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and in the episode, we feature Questions, Answers and Tips.

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We would like to thank David Reid (W6KL), David Strachan (2M0WHX), and our monthly and annual subscription donors for keeping the podcast advert free. To donate, please visit - http://www.icqpodcast.com/donate

• Ofcom Inquiry About PMR 446 Prosecutions
• Hyderabad Hams Develop Low Cost Transverter for QO-100 Satellite
• ARRL Make Online RF Exposure Calculator Available
• Revised Prediction for Solarcycle 25
• Radio Frequency Interference from Water
• UK Broadband Rollout Trial to Target Hard-to-Reach Homes Through Water Pipes
• Steel Schooner Gedania SP2J/mm Operation
• RSGB 2021 Online Convention
• EI2WRC to Activate Hook Lighthouse for ILLW

AmateurLogic.TV Episode 159 is now available for download.

Mike 3D prints a custom Solder Fumes Extractor. Emile reviews SDR Console software. Tommy sets up his Icom AH-705 auto tuner. George does some AA exploring.
Announcement of AmateurLogic’s 16th Anniversary Contest. Someone is going to win a great Icom IC-705 transceiver package. Details at amateurlogic.tv/contest .

1:18:50

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It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.

73 de The LHS Crew

Single LOG / Dual LOG - courtesy: va7st.ca

As man-made noise levels become ever more problematic for radio amateurs, particularly those that are serious about weak-signal DX on the lower bands (160 / 80m), the ‘Loop On Ground’ or ‘LOG’ is proving to be a worthwhile improvement for some.

Bud, VA7ST, near Kelowna, has done some recent experimenting with a LOG as an alternative to listening with his 160 / 80m transmitting antennas and has written a great blog on his findings.

Bud has included some ‘A-B’ tests comparing the LOG to his normally-used vertical or inverted-L and the results are quite interesting.

If you’ve ever considered building a separate quieter low-band antenna, you can find everything you might need to get motivated as well as a nice listing of LOG-related links in Bud’s very helpful blog:

https://va7st.ca/2021/02/matching-transformer-for-loop-on-ground-and-beverage-antennas/

and

https://va7st.ca/2021/01/hearing-through-the-noise-on-the-low-bands/

We hams often resort to the common claim to choke the “life” out of RFI on feed-lines or other wire carrying electrical current in our shack environment (and nearby) by using ferrite materials in various forms. So it’s just a reflex action to buy those ferrites to install or to make chokes. Wind-em tight. A lot. Pour on the ferrite beads. If one is good, five should be better, especially if they’re cheap. And we like cheap. Right?

Hardly! That jig can be terribly misleading, expensive or, heaven-forbid, make noise worse! That’s a jig that needs to be up.

We do it without knowing because of the genuflection to the folklore of the hobby. Without putting a meter to it to more fully understand just what the ferrite(s) we install are doing. And what we want them to do. But that is the dominant behavioral pattern of many ham operators. Add K4FMH to the list of guilty parties.

It is much easier with that handy-dandy NanoVNA that you got for not much money. IF you know how. Yes, you could read Dunsmore, Witte or Bonaguide & Jarvis. And you should. Or, have someone give you a more practical tutorial. That may well lead you to study the Masters of the VNA as shown below. As Lord Kelvin once said something like: it ain’t science if you ain’t measuring it. Sort of.

Definition of the jig is up: —used to say that a dishonest plan or activity has been discovered and will not be allowed to continue.

Merriam-Webster

It was an honor to get to do a sneak-peek at one of this weekend’s QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo talks on this very subject. Mark Smith N6MTS is giving a talk entitled, Measuring Common Mode Chokes Using a NanoVNA, at 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM: 1500 UTC, 15.08.2021. This talk is worth the price of admission alone if you work HF!

I found it highly engaging, practical, informative, and he’s got the plans to build a test jig (get my title now?) to measure your own chokes before just “hoping” they will do the trick. Mark plans to post those on the Ham Radio Workbench podcast website soon. There are a lot of what look to be great talks scheduled for this weekend. But I know this is one of them because I got the chance to see it already and to share comments with N6MTS.

After you watch Mark’s talk, take a look at one or more of the online NanoVNA groups I am a member of which are listed below. Very helpful and (most always) nice members. Then take a look at Bob Witte’s book if you’re not familiar with it. It’s the preferred gateway drug to the ones by Bonaguide & Jarvis then Dunsmore. Measurement is addictive. And there’s no Twelve Instrument path for withdrawal.

Cited Books:

The VNA Applications Handbook by Gregory Bonaguide and Neil Jarvis.

Handbook of Microwave Component Measurements: with Advanced VNA Techniques 2nd Edition by Joel P. Dunsmore.

Spectrum and Network Measurements, 2nd Edition by Robert Witte.

Online groups on NanoVNAs:

https://groups.io/g/nanovna-users

https://groups.io/g/NanoVNAV2

https://groups.io/g/nanovna-f

https://groups.io/g/nanovna-f-v2

While he may have been channeling his inner Nashville self, those are the exact words KJ4VU used to describe his tool to facilitate use of the Elgato Streak Deck in your ham shack. Telling attendees at last Saturday’s Cycle 25 Tribe Zoom meeting about his macro.exe software tool, George KJ4VU aptly described the engineering design of his latest tool for the Stream Deck. The reference was to sending a command out of the serial port, in case you were wondering.

“macro.exe allows the user to send serial control commands to radios and other station accessories in
multiple data formats, baud rates, destination addresses and com ports. Commands are triggered by
invoking the program and sending a set of parameters on the command line. A command can be simple
individual command like set my radio to CW mode or it can trigger a sequence of commands called
macros.“

OK. So how’s this different than the famous Hello, World! thing in most programming languages? Actually, it may be a big deal.

One of the steps along the way to organizing the Stream Deck’s built-in functions to automate amateur radio software is to engage the existing software that controls rig devices on the PC. He’s building out some of the CAT commands for Icom and Yaesu radios initially as shown on his blog page.

The structure of the macro.exe program is to take conventionally stated options to the program as illustrated below, as taken from the PDF guide by George.

When the mac program is invoked, the parameters on the command line are parsed and executed.

Command line options include:
-t Define data format type
-p Com port number
-b Baud rate
-d Device address
-m Macro name
-c Command string to be sent
-w Wait for x seconds

In most cases, not all parameters are used. Some parameters have default values if they are left off and
default values are loaded from the macro.env configuration file.

Most experienced computer users will follow this flow and control lingo easily. There’s a lot more here for stacking multiple commands to, say, set up a given rig for CW operation with one button and so forth.

Those who like turning knobs, winnowing down through stacked menus (Yaesu lovers: I’m talking to you, lol!), and generally playing Mr. Fixit while operating their radios won’t be interested in automating mundane tasks so they can focus on direct operation fun. That’s ok. There is a big tent in amateur radio. But for those who do want to automate things (like making sure your amp is on the right band when that DX entity pops up on your monitor and you’re too excited to notice), you might follow George’s blog at the Ham Radio Workbench website.

From there, you too can just take this command and shove it...out of the serial port!