AmateurRadio.com

NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER:

Greetings! Producer Skeeter N5ASH here. Due to an extremely long and challenging work week at my full-time broadcast radio gig, Newsline Report 1966 will not be available until around mid-day Central time on Saturday 5/23/15. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thanks for understanding. ~73~ N5ASH

Since my post earlier on this blog about low cost 40m Pixie kits from the Far East, I have been told that Bangood was selling these kits today for a staggeringly low price! This information is thanks to Spence M0STO. Earlier they were for sale at an incredible £2.67. 

At this price you might just buy the crystal here in the UK!  The kit comes with ALL parts (apart from battery, key and headphones) and a very nice silk-screened PCB. Don’t forget this is with FREE shipping.  Unbelievable.

My kit from them worked first time. It was the first time I’d built anything in a LONG time because of my stroke. At this price it is an offer too good to turn down. AM breakthrough was perfectly usable (i.e. low) and RX sensitivity fine. I got over 400mW out too. Don’t forget, this is a complete 40m CW transceiver.

Sorry for the double post but the kits are here and the Customer Service is second to none. Beware the prices change daily inline with currency. http://www.banggood.com/DIY-Radio-40M-CW-Shortwave-Transmitter-Kit-Receiver-7_023-7_026MHz-p-973111.html

Roger Lapthorn, G3XBM, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cambridge, England.

My very first communications receiver weighed a ton (it took 2 people to move it!) and was a DST100. I believe it was made by Murphy during WW2. This receiver, I have since learnt, was designed for intercept listening. It was built like a tank with a huge rotary turret tuning unit. The radio cost £7 from a local garage and it was overhauled (new valves?) by (the now late) G3CHN. It covered from around 50kHz to over 30MHz and heard some impressive DX. I was always puzzled why signals were so broad on the lowest range, not realising at the time that it covered 50 to about 150 kilohertz!  This was in 1962.

At that time there was little amateur band gear available (none from Japan) and lots of us used WW2 surplus gear which was available at low cost from many suppliers. Popular receivers were the AR88 and CR100. Transmitter-receivers included the WS19, WS38 and 52 sets.

Amateur radio in the 1950s and 1960s was quite different with lots of HF AM still and most people building their own transmitters. SSB was in its infancy. In many ways it was the high point of the hobby, although today we are blessed with low cost gear, free software,  more modes and more bands. The hobby means different things to different people. Long may it continue.

See https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/hf/dst100 .

Roger Lapthorn, G3XBM, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cambridge, England.

Portable, Ground Plane for 2 Meters made with BNC antennas

that you can ‘take down’

Its a compact ground plane antenna for portable use!

This antenna is built on a 2 inch washer. Holes were drilled in the washer to accommodate 4 radials. The center hole for the BNC to BNC connector was already there, but had to be reamed out. This (male to male) connector is where the coax from the radio is attached on the bottom of the washer. It also serves to hold (the center radiator element)! 

(Note: The radiator, in the center, needs to attach to a BNC MALE connector, the cable from the radio also needs a BNC MALE connector. I used a male to male adapter for this purpose. It didn’t fit tightly so I used an old bike inner tube to cut a small spacer for taking up the slack. I’d have used a metal washer for ‘fitting’ the adapter, but I had already make 3 trips to the hardware store, so I used what I had)

 

Gizmo Portable Antenna 

without the cover

I used BNC female connectors from, Digikey, a good source for components! The center post of this connector is shorted to the ‘shell side’ to provide a ground plane with all the radials!

The 24 inch antennas from China were purchased on Ebay! CHEAP!  The 2 inch washer is from the local hardware store. Everything fits on this washer, a 2 inch space, but the center coax is tedious to attach with all the radials in place, especially if you have big fingers.

The Cap is from a spice bottle!

I live alone so it was not a problem! LOL

I love to use things for which they were never intended! This spice bottle cap is a good example of this. At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll seal it to the top BNC antenna radiator element or not? If I seal it (with hot glue, maybe) , the cap becomes permanently attached to the radiator element, and would be difficult if not impossible to remove. The whole idea here is to use this antenna as an impromptu portable antenna!

A tie wrap is used to ‘hang’ the antenna. Its hanging from a hook on my porch at the condo. I put 50 watts into it to get a repeater 10 miles away. SWR was 1:1 This is a portable antenna! Its not meant to be a permanent one. If you have ever needed a 2 meter antenna that you can pull up into a tree with a string or rope, this is it! Hauling it up 40 or 50 feet on a rope will get you better results than at ground level.

There is a joke that says, have you ever seen a golfer with only 1 club? Ham radio antennas are in the same category as golf clubs. You just can’t have too many! 

All the elements can be removed for easy storage and transport, (radials as well as the vertical element)! I’m sure some clever ham will come up with a suitable case for this entire assembly. If I had one of those nifty clear plastic shipping tubes, I’d store in that! I’ll be on the lookout for one!

 

 

Ernest Gregoire, AA1IK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Florida, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Courtesy of the ARRL:

05/22/2015

The FCC is eliminating the regulatory fee to apply for an Amateur Radio vanity call sign. The change will not go into effect, however, until required congressional notice has been given. This will take at least 90 days. As the Commission explained in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Report and Order, and Order (MD Docket 14-92 and others), released May 21, it’s a matter of simple economics.

“The Commission spends more resources on processing the regulatory fees and issuing refunds than the amount of the regulatory fee payment,” the FCC said. “As our costs now exceed the regulatory fee, we are eliminating this regulatory fee category.” The current vanity call sign regulatory fee is $21.40, the highest in several years. The FCC reported there were 11,500 “payment units” in FY 2014 and estimated that it would collect nearly $246,100.

In its 2014 Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) regarding the assessment and collection of regulatory fees for FY 2014, the FCC had sought comment on eliminating several smaller regulatory fee categories, such as those for vanity call signs and GMRS. It concluded in the subsequent Report and Order (R&O) last summer, however, that it did not have “adequate support to determine whether the cost of recovery and burden on small entities outweighed the collected revenue or whether eliminating the fee would adversely affect the licensing process.”

The FCC said it has since had an opportunity to obtain and analyze support concerning the collection of the regulatory fees for Amateur Vanity and GMRS, which the FCC said comprise, on average, more than 20,000 licenses that are newly obtained or renewed, every 10 and 5 years, respectively.

“The Commission often receives multiple applications for the same vanity call sign, but only one applicant can be issued that call sign,” the FCC explained. “In such cases, the Commission issues refunds for all the remaining applicants. In addition to staff and computer time to process payments and issue refunds, there is an additional expense to issue checks for the applicants who cannot be refunded electronically.”

The Commission said that after it provides the required congressional notification, Amateur Radio vanity program applicants “will no longer be financially burdened with such payments, and the Commission will no longer incur these administrative costs that exceed the fee payments. The revenue that the Commission would otherwise collect from these regulatory fee categories will be proportionally assessed on other wireless fee categories.”

The FCC said it would not issue refunds to licensees who paid the regulatory fee prior to its official elimination.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

So basically the FCC is saying, it costs more to process the fees and refunds of fees than it's worth.  I am going to assume (a dangerous thing), or at least hope that this also applies to the renewal as well as the initial application.

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].

This is an update to one of my most popular posts.

We have quite a few licensed radio amateurs that are members of public safety agencies, including fire departments, law enforcement agencies and search and rescue. Since they are authorized users of those public safety channels, they often ask this question:

Can I use my VHF/UHF ham radio on the fire, police or SAR channel?

It is widely known that many amateur radios can be modified to transmit outside the ham bands. The answer to this question used to be that amateur radio equipment cannot be used legally on public safety channels because it is not approved for use under Part 90 of the FCC Rules. (Part 90 covers the Private Land Mobile Radio Services.) The only option was to buy a commercial radio with Part 90 approval and a frequency range that covered the desired amateur band. Some commercial radios tune easily to the adjacent ham band but some do not. The commercial gear is usually two to three times as expensive as the amateur gear, and just as important, does not have the features and controls that ham operators expect. Usually, the commercial radios do not have a VFO and are completely channelized, typically changeable only with the required programming software.

The situation has changed dramatically in the past few years. Several wireless manufacturers in China (Wouxun, Baofeng, Anytone, etc.) have introduced low cost handheld transceivers into the US amateur market that are approved for Part 90 use. These radios offer keypad frequency entry and all of the usual features of a ham radio. It seems that these radios are a viable option for dual use: public safety and amateur radio, with some caveats.

New radios are being introduced frequently, so I won’t try to list them here. However, you might want to do a search on Wouxun, Baofeng and Anytone for the latest models. I will highlight the Anytone NSTIG-8R radio which I have been using. It seems to be a well-designed but still affordable (<$75) handheld radio. See the review by PD0AC.

Some Things to Consider When Buying These Radios

• The manufacturers offer several different radios under the same model number. Also, they are improving the radios every few months with firmware changes and feature updates. This causes confusion in the marketplace, so buy carefully.
• Make sure the vendor selling the radio indicates that the radio is approved for Part 90 use. I have seen some radios show up in the US without an FCC Part 90 label.
• Make sure the radio is specified to tune to the channels that you need.
• The 2.5-kHz tuning step is required for some public safety channels. For example, a 5-kHz frequency step can be used to select frequencies such as 155.1600 MHz and 154.2650 MHz. However, a 2.5 kHz step size is needed to select frequencies such as 155.7525 MHz. There are a number of Public Safety Interoperability Channels that require the 2.5-kHz step (e.g., VCALL10 155.7525 MHz, VCALL11 151.1375 MHz, VFIRE24 154.2725). The best thing to do for public safety use is to get a radio that tunes the 2.5-kHz steps.
• Many of these radios have two frequencies in the display, but only have one receiver, which scans back and forth between the two selected frequencies. This can be confusing when the radio locks onto a signal on one of the frequencies and ignores the other. Read the radio specifications carefully.

Recommendation

There are a number of reasonably good radios out there from various manufacturers. My favorite right now is the Anytone NSTIG-8R but I also like the Wouxun KG-UV6D. The Baofeng UV-5R continues to be popular in the amateur community as the low cost leader. However if you show up at an incident with the Baofeng, your fellow first responders will think it is a toy. Which leads to a really important point: the established commercial radio manufacturers such as Motorola, Vertex, etc. build very rugged radios. They are made for frequent, heavy use by people whose main job is putting out fires, rescuing people in trouble and dealing with criminals. These low cost radios from China are not in the same league. However, they can still serve in a less demanding physical environment while covering the Amateur Radio Service (FCC Part 97) and the Private Land Mobile Radio Services (FCC Part 90).

73, Bob K0NR

The post Can I Use My Ham Radio on Public Safety Frequencies? Updated appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

These listening events serve several purposes. They:

• determine, worldwide, which beacons are actually in service and on-the-air so the online database can be kept up-to-date

• determine, worldwide, which beacons are out-of-service or have gone silent since the last CLE covering this range

• will indicate the state of propagation conditions at the various participant locations

• will give you an indication of how well your LF/MF receiving system is working

• give participants a fun yet challenging activity to keep their listening skills honed

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 ndblist Group, results will also be e-mailed and posted there.

The very active Yahoo ndblist Group is 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.

If you are contemplating getting started on 630m, listening for NDBs  is an excellent way to test out your receive capabilities as there are several NDBs located near this part of the spectrum.

You need not be an ndblist member to participate in the CLEs and all reports, no matter how small, are of much value to the organizers. 'First-time' logs are always VERY welcome!

Reports may be sent to the ndblist or e-mailed to either myself or CLE co- ordinator, Brian Keyte (G3SIA), whose address appears above.

Please...do give the CLE a try....then let us know what NDB's can be heard from your location! Your report can then be added to the worldwide database to help keep it up-to-date.
Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].