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So where have I been..........really nowhere actually I can't believe my last post on the blog was June 10 but at least I am still in the year 2015!! The blog has gone quiet for almost 3  months and really so has ham radio here at VE3WDM. I have been very busy with work, here in Toronto we hosted the Pan Am games and I was directly involved with that.......to the point of around the clock standby. Before Pan Am there was the prep time and then after the post Pan Am "stuff" To be honest there was time at home but after getting home I just just to tired to turn the rig on or post on the blog. I have been reading all your posts and really enjoyed that. Now that things are slowing down a little bit of "normal" seems to be happening I'm back in the radio saddle. I did check my blog stats and readership sure has fallen to almost nothing but that makes sense seeing it's been same old same old regarding my blog content. So what is new here? Well, most of the "new" things happen in the last few weeks as I started to slow down. First off I sold my Alexloop antenna it seemed I just was not using it  now that I moved to Toronto. I posted the sale online and it was gone within an hour! With the sale of the Alexloop I was able to purchase the P3TXMON add on to my Elecraft P3. This week I also upgraded my PC.  One of my hard drives gave up the ghost, the one with the OS on it!!. At the same time I figured it was time to move up to the next level with my PC.  So I looked at purchasing a new machine or just upgrading what I have. I decided to upgrade the PC as I have 3 fairly new hard drives in the tower, up to date video card, I just replaced the power supply and the DVD player has no issues. The decision was made to upgrade the motherboard, the processor and ram. So the new system is Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 motherboard, AMD 8320 8 core processor at 3.5 GHz, 8 Gb (2x4) of DDR3 ram at 1600 mhz. I really had not done this before so lots of reading on the internet and YouTube videos, surprisingly things went smoothly. I now have an Asus M3A76-CM motherboard, AMD Phenom IIx4 2.8GHZ fan cooled processor, 4 Gb of SDram, Zoltac GT620 64 bit graphics card, and D-Link 1GB lan card hanging around..........may put it up for sale.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

• BREAKING NEWS
• FILTERD OUT FOREVER
• A HEALTHY DOSE OF HAM RADIO
• WAITING ROOM
• FIELD DAY WITH A TWIST
• SCHOOL'S OUT - SCHOOL'S BACK IN
• HUNTSVILLE HAMFEST YHOTY
• A SHINING BEACON
• THE POLITICS OF RADIO
• DX UP FRONT
• THE WORLD OF DX
• A NATON UNTO ITSELF

SCRIPT 

AUDIO

AmateurLogic.TV Episode 81 is now available for download.

George and Tommy finally meet Peter in person at Huntsville Hamfest!

1:12:40

Download
YouTube

George Thomas, W5JDX, is co-host of AmateurLogic.TV, an original amateur radio video program hosted by George Thomas (W5JDX), Tommy Martin (N5ZNO), Peter Berrett (VK3PB), and Emile Diodene (KE5QKR). Contact him at [email protected].

I still need these two QSL cards to complete the 13 Colonies special event for 2015.



Of course, it's kind of ironic that one of the two QSL cards that I need would be from the state that I live in - and that my original QSL request was sent to a town just two over from home. I guess I will have to re-send QSL requests to both New Jersey and Delaware.  However, instead of mailing the NJ one, I might just drop it off at the manager's mail box. He lives not far off the route I take to get back and forth from work every day. That way I'd be 1000% sure that he received it.

I've been e-mailing back and forth with my good friend Bob W3BBO. At a recent hamfest, he picked up these:


Yes, this is a Heathkit DX-60 and the accompanying HG-10 VFO. Well actually, he picked up the DX-60 at the hamfest. A friend supplied the HG-10 and advised Bob that it needed some TLC, and that if he could get it working, that he could purchase it at a super reasonable price. Bob has succeeded in getting it to work and he e-mailed me this morning that he is in the process of homebrewing a cable to get the output of the VFO into the DX-60.

That reminded me of a much earlier time, when I had these in my Novice station.



My Novice transmitter was a Drake 2-NT that I had purchased through Burghardt Electronics. I had purchased the Globe V-10 VFO from John Kakstys W2FNT who lived in Linden, NJ which was not too terribly far from East Brunswick, where I was living at the time.  My receiver was the Heathkit HR-1680, which was my very first Heathkit build. That it worked without a hitch the very first time, upon firing it up, still amazes me to this day.


Anyway, I had the transmitter and I had the VFO. What do I do with them? That was the quandary for me at the time. This was 1979, after all. There was no Internet, no Google. I had no Elmer with whom I could speak, other than the instructor who taught the license class I had attended (and I never got his home telephone number). So it was either get the information I needed from a book, QST or go with my gut and improvise.

I improvised.  There was a two conductor cable coming from the output of the VFO.  The 2-NT's crystal socket had two holes for where you would plug in a crystal. I figured that the output from the VFO had to go there - it just seemed reasonable to me. So I took a junk crystal, pried the bottom part off, which left me with a base and pins. Then I soldered the two wires coming from the VFO output to the crystal base pins. I plugged it in, hoping the 2-NT wouldn't know the difference between a crystal and a VFO.  I took a deep breath, muttered a prayer and turned everything on.  I half expected it to blow up, taking me along with it, or to somehow electrocute me.

It didn't.

I connected the 2-NT to a dummy load and adjusted it for the lowest output power I could (see, QRP even way back then, I just didn't know it yet!).  Then I turned on the HR-1680 and keyed the 2-NT to see if I could hear anything.

It worked!

I had successfully hooked up my VFO to my transmitter and did not harm myself or anyone else in the process. Much to my parent's delight, I didn't burn down the house, either!  I used that setup for a lot of QSOs and enjoyed the heck out of it.  After I upgraded to General and bought some equipment capable of doing SSB (silly boy), instead of selling off my Novice station, I donated it to the Handi-Hams, who were pretty much a new organization back then. I guess they must have been desperate for equipment donations at the time, as they gratefully accepted it - homebrewed VFO cable patch job and all.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!
Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

In the September 2015 QST magazine, there is an article about FSQCALL. This is an interesting digital mode with some free software to send quick, short messages between other hams. It’s meant to be more conversational than PSK – you type a sentence, hit enter, and away it goes. It has some selective calling features that let you address stations individually.

I loaded the software on my Windows 10 desktop, turned on my KX3, and was up and running on 30M with 5 watts in about 5 minutes. The software is pretty simple, especially after watching a couple of videos on YouTube first. I ran into Jim, W1PID, and also talked with Maine, and Texas.

For me, this is a great place to just hang out and see who’s around. No expectation of making endless CQs on 14.070, or sharing signal reports on JT65.

The simplest application for FSQCall is that it provides a ‘watering hole’ for a group of friends who wish to keep in touch and chat occasionally. Experience has shown that leaving your equipment running on 7105 kHz during the day, and 3580 kHz at night, will provide fairly reliable communications over about a 500 – 1000 km range. Depending on propagation, 40m may well work day and night. Only modest power is required. You can leave a message for your friend if they aren’t available, and even use one friend to relay a message to another. The software will tell you who is currently available.

I’m going to play with the message store/forward functionality next. If you didn’t see the QST article, you can read more  from ZL1BPU. Or, take a look at this video:

Michael Brown, KG9DW, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Illinois, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

In the September 2015 QST magazine, there is an article about FSQCALL. This is an interesting digital mode with some free software to send quick, short messages between other hams. It’s meant to be more conversational than PSK – you type a sentence, hit enter, and away it goes. It has some selective calling features that let you address stations individually.

I loaded the software on my Windows 10 desktop, turned on my KX3, and was up and running on 30M with 5 watts in about 5 minutes. The software is pretty simple, especially after watching a couple of videos on YouTube first. I ran into Jim, W1PID, and also talked with Maine, and Texas.

For me, this is a great place to just hang out and see who’s around. No expectation of making endless CQs on 14.070, or sharing signal reports on JT65.

The simplest application for FSQCall is that it provides a ‘watering hole’ for a group of friends who wish to keep in touch and chat occasionally. Experience has shown that leaving your equipment running on 7105 kHz during the day, and 3580 kHz at night, will provide fairly reliable communications over about a 500 – 1000 km range. Depending on propagation, 40m may well work day and night. Only modest power is required. You can leave a message for your friend if they aren’t available, and even use one friend to relay a message to another. The software will tell you who is currently available.

I’m going to play with the message store/forward functionality next. If you didn’t see the QST article, you can read more  from ZL1BPU. Or, take a look at this video:

Michael Brown, KG9DW, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Illinois, USA. Contact him at [email protected].