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IARU HF World Championship contest
10 July 2016 | by 
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].
ICQ Podcast Episode 215 – Friedrichshafen 2016
In this episode, Martin M1MRB / W9ICQ is joined by Chris Howard M0TCH, Martin Rothwell M0SGL, Dan Romanchik KB6NU and Ed Durrant DD5LP to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin M6BOY rounds up the news in brief, and this episodes feature is Friedrichshafen 2016
- New Zealand Radio Hams Request 222-223 MHz
- 'No' to Lifetime Amateur Radio Licenses
- Rockford to Scramble All Police Radio Comms
- Andorra Returns to 60m, Gains 4m band, More Power on 6m
- Radio Caroline Special Event Station
- Clarification of RF LED Light Testing
- New RSGB Microwave Manager
- RF pollution from Solar Panels
- RSGB Training and Assessment Guide
Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].
ICQ Podcast Episode 215 – Friedrichshafen 2016
In this episode, Martin M1MRB / W9ICQ is joined by Chris Howard M0TCH, Martin Rothwell M0SGL, Dan Romanchik KB6NU and Ed Durrant DD5LP to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin M6BOY rounds up the news in brief, and this episodes feature is Friedrichshafen 2016
- New Zealand Radio Hams Request 222-223 MHz
- 'No' to Lifetime Amateur Radio Licenses
- Rockford to Scramble All Police Radio Comms
- Andorra Returns to 60m, Gains 4m band, More Power on 6m
- Radio Caroline Special Event Station
- Clarification of RF LED Light Testing
- New RSGB Microwave Manager
- RF pollution from Solar Panels
- RSGB Training and Assessment Guide
Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].
Amateur Radio Weekly – Issue 119
Into the Digital age
One of the reasons for the rapid growth of DMR over D-Star and Fusion is the availability of relatively inexpensive DMR radios for amateur operators from Connect Systems and Tytera.
Digital Mobile Radio for Hams
A Radio Amateur’s guide to solar panels
Solar panels that cost over $6.00 per watt a decade ago are now available for less than $2.00 per watt. Solar is on the cusp of becoming mainstream.
Off Grid Ham
New podcast: The Workbench
Over the next several episodes, we will deep dive on information, tips, and gear needed to setup and equip your own workbench.
The Workbench
Elecraft KX2 Go Box
The project uses a water tight Pelican 1050 brand enclosure.
VA2SS
Solar Analysis Paralysis
Don’t have gear or antennas for the low-bands? Time to make an adjustment to your equipment and antenna portfolios.
KE9V
China fits final piece on world’s largest radio telescope
The 500m-wide Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, is the size of 30 football fields.
BBC News
N9EWO Review: Icom IC-7300
You can usually get a better deal with more features in a Ham transceiver and the lack of tabletop receivers these days.
N9EWO
Dear ARRL, HR1301 is Hogwash
Your homeowners association can keep you from running a simple wire antenna.
N4AE
K8BL achieves Satellite WAS after 40 years
His contacts spanned 38 years, and he submitted QSL cards to claim the award.
ARRL
Serially, are you syncing or asyncing
Synchronous communication makes the receiver’s job easier by adding a third clock line to the ground and signal lines. This is the clock the transmitter uses to shift out the bits.
Hack A Day
Video
Yaesu FT-1000MP Repair
Follow along as Paul at Mr Carlson’s Lab shows the troubleshooting and repair steps involved in making a Yaesu FT-1000MP work again.
YouTube
24 hours of JT signal reception
This video shows which stations can be received using the JT65 and JT9 digital modes throughout 24 hours on 20m/14MHz, & how propagation changes during the day.
M0CUV
Amateur Radio Weekly is curated by Cale Mooth K4HCK. Sign up free to receive ham radio's most relevant news, projects, technology and events by e-mail each week at http://www.hamweekly.com.
Is Your Miniwhip Too High?
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| The Mini-Whip at University of Twente's (Netherlands) Remote Receiver |
A recent posting to Yahoo's ndblist Group described an interesting experiment by Dirk Claessens regarding the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) versus height of his PAØRDT active whip. Dirk's tests were posted on Yahoo's Navtex DXing Group where some further interesting discussion seemed to confirm his findings.
Here is what Dirk discovered, backed-up with his graph data, clearly pointing to the 'ideal height' at his location ... and probably yours as well.
Hi all,
You may recall that to get rid of a source of QRM, my whip is now hanging from a rope-and-pulley system, about 5 .5 mtr from the house, at a height of 7 meter agl.
As the height of the whip can easily be changed, this is an ideal situation to test the behaviour of the whip wrt noise levels, optimal height etc..
I had done this test before some 4 years ago, but not very precise. Time to do it again, and documenting it.
What I also wanted to check, is if there were any noise sources of the own house possibly reaching the whip.
(how far does the "noise bubble" go in function of the height?)
The Perseus was tuned to 549 KHz Deutschlandfunk Nordkirchen, the station closest to 518.
2 markers were set, one to the signal, and a reference marker in a quiet spot nearby on 543 KHz, to get a reading for the noise floor.
The whip was then lowered in "1 meter each minute" steps, readings were taken and written to the marker file.
First the absolute values were plotted.
Note that: blue = noise floor, red = signal, and that the left and right axis scales have identical spans of 19dB, but are shifted, in order to get a compact graph.
We see that for a delta height of 6 meters:
-the noise floor goes up ~8dB, or 8/6 = 1.3 dB/m, almost linearly.
-the signal goes up ~14 dB, or 14/6 = 2.3 dB/m, clearly curved and showing a maximum at ~5..7 m.
The continuous lines are polynomic (2nd degree) regression lines.
The noise on the measurement values seems to increase with decreasing height. Was this caused by my body standing under the whip, and near to the whip for the lowest measurements??
What really matters of course, is the signal over noise value, this is plotted below:
-Within a narrow 1 dB band, the curve shows a clear optimum in the region of 4..7 m agl, a familiar value often given as optimal by Roelof.
-The measurement was performed during the day and thus with ground wave propagation. As the whip is truly omnidirectional, I cannot see a reason why the behaviour would be different at low angle DX signals.
- At 5.5 meter from the house, the whip seems to be outside of the "noise bubble"
and later, following discussion:
I have just checked the noise floor again at 518 (with no signal present)
Perseus set to 125 kS/s, Span/RBW 25/30.5
Shield grounded: -125 dBm
Not grounded: -110 dBm
That's a whopping 15 dB difference!
I have also buried the coax ~20cm deep from the grounding point to where it enters the house.
The ideal height was also that recommended by Roelof, PAØRDT, originally and points out that one of antenna-building's most sacred commandments ... "the higher the better", is not always true!
I have often recommended this simple antenna for those looking for a very effective yet low-footprint receiving antenna for use on the LF and MF bands.
Much more information about Roelof's popular miniwhip may be found in previous blog discussions here.
Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].
LHS Episode #172: Running on Empty
Hello, CD listeners! Sorry, channeling Tom Petty there for a moment. The latest episode of LHS is coming your way. In it, we talk about Java-based contest loggers, our Field Day experiences, lemon chicken, licensing, game emulators, Winlink, "cloud" Linux and more. Enjoy. And thanks for listening.
73 de The LHS Crew
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].
CLE 208 Results
This past weekend saw another of the monthly CLE listening challenges.
'CLE's' are 'Co-ordinated Listening Events', and NDB DXers around the world focus their listening time on one small slice of the NDB spectrum.
If you are interested in building a 630m system, doing some listening on the high end of the NDB band is a great way to evaluate your station's receiving performance.
The frequency range covered for CLE 208 was 400-419.9 KHz where a fair number of North American NDBs' can be found. Beacons at this end of the band also tend to propagate better than those at the lower end near 200KHz.
This weekend, typical summertime conditions prevailed, with extremely high levels of thunderstorm / lightning QRN ... propagation itself was not too bad for the middle of summer.
As usual, I set up my Perseus SDR for hourly two-minute captures of the allocated spectrum and spent a few hours going over the files during the day. I have yet to purchase and download the latest version of Perseus software but I understand that there are several improvements over the system I am using ... which is excellent for my present needs.
Here is my weekend CLE log:
02 10:00 400.0 QQ Comox, BC, CAN
02 06:30 400.0 FN Fort Collins, CO, USA
02 10:00 400.0 CKN Crookston, MN, USA
02 10:00 400.0 1L Fort MacKay, AB, CAN
02 08:30 401.0 YPO Peawanuck, ON, CAN
02 08:30 402.0 M3 Kindersley, SK, CAN
02 08:30 402.0 L4 Nipawin, SK, CAN
02 11:00 403.0 AZC Colorado City, AZ, USA
02 08:00 404.0 MOG Montegue, CA, USA
02 09:30 404.0 GCR Cordova, ALS
04 09:00 404.0 FNB Falls City, NE, USA
02 08:00 405.0 9G Sundre, AB, CAN
02 08:00 405.0 2K Camrose, AB, CAN
02 08:30 406.0 YLJ Meadow Lake, SK, CAN
02 10:30 407.0 ZHU St Hubert (Montreal), QC, CAN
03 10:30 407.0 CHD Chandler, AZ, USA
02 10:30 408.0 JDM Colby, KS, USA
02 08:30 408.0 Z7 Claresholm, AB, CAN
02 08:30 408.0 MW Moses Lake, WA, USA
02 08:30 410.0 GDV Glendive, MT, USA
02 10:30 411.0 ILI Iliamna Apt, ALS
02 09:00 413.0 YHD Dryden, ON, CAN
02 04:00 414.0 YZK Harper Ranch, BC, CAN
02 10:00 414.0 LYI Libby, MT, USA
02 10:30 414.0 IME Sitka, ALS
02 09:00 415.0 LO West Yellowstone, MT, USA
03 09:30 415.0 CBC Cayman Brac, CYM
04 08:30 419.0 RYS Detroit, MI, USA
Final details can be found at the NDB List Website and worldwide results, for every participant, will be posted there a few days after the event. If you are a member of the NDB list Group, results will also be e-mailed and posted there.
The very active Yahoo NDB list Group a great place to learn more about the 'Art of NDB DXing' or to meet other listeners in your region. There is a lot of good information available there and new members are always very welcome.
Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].
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