AmateurRadio.com

I walked on bare ground for the first time in four months today. It was glorious. I worked Iceland, Ukraine, Belgium and a bunch of stations in the Missouri QSO Party and a few in the QRPARCI Spring Contest.

The river is swollen with spring run-off. A couple of kayakers have just left for the three mile run through the rapids to Franklin. I hiked along the old rail trail that runs alongside the river. Parts of the trail are snowy still. It’s still squishy in many places. But it’s 52F and a perfect day for the first real spring outing.

I hiked about a mile and whistled back and forth with a chickadee as I went. I turned through a gate toward a farmer’s field. I tramped through eight inches of snow on the way to a warm spot I knew would be free of snow. The sun had melted all the snow in a warm corner of the field, and I sat down under a large pine tree. The rest of the field was still covered with six inches of white.

I had tossed a line over a pine branch and was using the KX3. I tuned a 33 foot wire with the earchi.org 9:1 unun and the internal tuner on the KX3. Rather than detailing each QSO, I’ve attached my log below:

6 Apr-14 1921 21.037 N0M CW 599 599 MO
6 Apr-14 1922 21.039 N0O CW 599 599 MO
6 Apr-14 1924 21.042 W0E CW 599 599 MO
6 Apr-14 1927 21.060 N4BP CW 599 599 FL
6 Apr-14 1932 14.006 TF3JB CW 599 599 Iceland
6 Apr-14 1940 14.025 UR9IDX CW 599 599 Ukraine
6 Apr-14 1942 14.062 AB8FJ CW 599 599 OH
6 Apr-14 1945 21.018 ON4IA CW 579 599 Belgium

I operated for about 25 minutes and had a fantastic time in the warm sun. The little thermometer attached to my backpack read 65 degrees in the sun!

As I made contacts around the world, I could see the last remnants of the long winter melting before me. Most of the snow in the open areas will be gone in 10 days or so. It will linger for several weeks in the woods. I will get out every chance I have.

Series Seven Episode Seven of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast has been released. The latest news, Martin (M1MRB) and Colin (M6BOY) extenstion to the bands and Edmund Spicer (M0MNG) discusses Rallies and Martin (M1MRB) is joined by Chris Howard (M0TCH) and Martin Rothwell (M0SGL) take part in a roundtable.

• New world 24 GHz EME record
• Australian medium wave beacon heard nationwide
• UK and Irish Repeaters
• Eire's youngest radio ham receives award
• 146 MHz band extension for Thai radio hams
• VIARC welcomes new prefixes
• OZ7IGY - 23 cm beacon now on Next Generation Beacons platform

Enigma (Photo: R. Holm)

Bletchley Park, northwest of London (between Oxford and Cambridge), is one of the best known British sites from WW2. Its fame goes back to the breaking of the legendary Enigma cipher machine and its successor, the Lorenz cipher machine.

In order to perform this work a large effort in the development of early computers took place here. They include the mechanical Bombe for breaking the Enigma, and the valve-based Colossus for breaking the Lorenz.

The Bombe was reconstructed through a 13 year effort that resulted in an Engineering Heritage Award in 2009.

The Bombe machine (Photo: R. Holm)

Colossus was the world’s first electronic digital computer that was at all programmable. It was also finally reconstructed in 2007 despite most of the hardware and blueprints being destroyed after WW2.

I visited it with my oldest son who lives in Cambridge, and it was a fascinating place that made me want to learn more about the work done at Bletchley Park and in particular one of the founders of computation, the brilliant Alan Turing, who was treated so badly after the war.

From left: Henry Ehm (M0ZAE), Peter Davies (M0PJD), and Alan Goold (2E0GLD) on duty 5. April 2014

I was also impressed by the National Radio Centre run by the RSGB, callsign GB3RS, with its informative and well laid out exhibition and demonstrations.

They are able to keep it staffed for four days a week based on volunteers, and I really appreciated the hospitality and friendliness of the radio amateurs I met there.

If you ever come to London you should really try to visit this place. It is only a 36 minute train ride from London Euston station.

Mellish Reef in the Coral Sea

This week I was happy to add to my logbook three contacts with VK9MT.  The well-planned and excellently managed dxpedition was operating from a tiny sliver of coral and sand about 500 miles northeast of the Australian coast, a barely-there island called Mellish Reef.  It was a new one for me (number 306!), and when they had to suddenly cut their time out there short because of threatening weather, I was especially happy I had been able to log them.  Now, as I write this, the exhausted team faces several days of rough sailing, trying to steer clear of the tropical storm that chased them off the reef in the first place.  We wish them godspeed and offer our thanks for their time, effort, and considerable personal investment in placing Mellish on the air for us.

There’s another reason I was so pleased to get a few brief contacts with this particular group and QTH, though.  Mellish Reef is located in the Coral Sea.  In May, 1942, a key naval battle was fought in the immediate vicinity.  The Battle of the Coral Sea actually changed the course of warfare since throughout the battle neither fleet ever laid eyes on the other.  All fighting occurred between airplanes flying off the decks of carriers, something that had never happened before.  The battle also was a tactical victory for the Allies.  It not only stopped the Japanese march to the south toward Australia but it also left the Imperial Navy two carriers short.  They were damaged at the Coral Sea conflict and unavailable for the historic Battle of Midway, a key factor in the first clear-cut Allied victory of WWII.

The Allied tanker USS Neosho ablaze after coming under attack in May 1942 in the Coral Sea, near Mellish Reef

I am now writing a book about a little known side story to the Coral Sea battle.  It is the tale of the sinking of two ships, a destroyer and a tanker, which were mistaken by the Japanese as an aircraft carrier and escort, an error that helped the Allies prevail in the battle the next day.  Just over 100 men were left clinging to the listing deck of the hulk of the tanker, awaiting rescue that would not come for four days.  Another nearly 200 men abandoned the ships and ended up adrift on life rafts without food, water or shelter.  By the time the rafts were found nine days later, only four of the men were still alive and two of them soon died.  It is an amazing story of human perseverance and bravery, but also one about how what happens in war is so often determined by error, coincidence, and sheer luck.  How many of those men might have survived if they had somehow found their way to Mellish Reef?

As an author, I look for human stories everywhere.  For certain, when I work a fellow ham anywhere–around the corner or on the other side of the globe, engaging in a rag chew or in a quick “59 TU” contact–I am always interested in what Paul Harvey called “the rest of the story.”  What is it like there?  What else happened there?  What does the OM do for a living?  What stories is he willing to share?

Remember when brave and resourceful ops put South Sudan on the air before most in the USA even knew a country with that name had been hatched?  I was recently thrilled to work the dxpedition FT5ZM on Amsterdam Island.  Now that part of the world is at the top of the headlines with the Malaysian passenger jet search.

Tonight, as the guys who worked so hard to give us a QSO from remote Mellish Reef continue their rough ride to what we all hope will be a safe return home, I can’t help but think of the other stories that have played out down there in that roiling, dun-colored sea.

73,

Don Keith N4KC

www.n4kc.com

www.donkeith.com

Much to my surprise, I made my most distant contact ever with the Island of Guam (KH2L) yesterday. I’ve often compared chasing DX, or even regular contacts, with fishing because you never know what you’re going to catch when you throw the line in the water. Obviously, ten meters was very long. I was hearing very few contacts, but after a few brief attempts I was able to predict his listening frequency. This was a fine fish to catch at 7,775 miles.

I was barely 20 years old when I first set foot on this Island in 1968. My “sailing ship” was the USS Corry (DD-817) and we had begun that journey from Norfolk Virginia. We sailed South past Puerto Rico, transited the Panama Canal, stopped at Mazatlan Mexico, and then North to the port of San Diego California where we spent several days.

I was only a “kid” then and very prone to “peer pressure”.

No serious sailor, worth his salt, could be “tattoo free” after leaving San Diego. I was no exception and had my right shoulder etched with a colorful “US Navy Anchor” just before we left for Hawaii. We then set sail for Midway Island, where we re-fueled, and then westward again to Guam.

Guam was a very important strategic Island during the second world war. Only hours, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this island was invaded by the Japanese. The islanders were brutally beaten into submission and remained under their control for several years before American forces re-took the island.

Not to “harp” much about war, but in my reading about this island, I found an article about a Japanese soldier who lived in an underground cave there  for 28 years after the war. He was finally discovered by a couple of fishermen, captured, and returned to civilization on January 24th, 1972.

It is also with much embarrassment, the Navy “tattoo” on my right shoulder still glares at me every day. One thing I’ve learned over the years is “there’s NO glory, and NO romance in war”. Perhaps one day, we can all learn to just “get along” and accept our differences with each other. Adolescence is a horrible time of life for everyone. I’m extremely grateful for my maturity these days.

ARRL published an article, ARRL Calls for Timely, Visible, FCC Amateur Radio Enforcement , on April Fool’s Day.  Initially I was expecting it to be an April Fool’s joke, but it’s not.  I think ARRL is spot on.  Despite two recent cases that I can recall where amateurs relinquished their licenses or had significant fines imposed, FCC enforcement has been rather quiet since Riley Hollingsworth retired in 2009.  Remember who took his place?  I had to Google it to remember.  That’s not good.

After I mentioned running a PSK program on my iPhone the other day, my friend Simon asked which one it was and whether it was PSKer. That was a program that I hadn’t heard of, so when I had a moment yesterday, I decided to investigate.

PSKer looks a very nice program and I decided to give it a go. When I got back to the car yesterday evening, I ran it up and set the receiver running on 28.120. There was plenty happening.

PSKer seems to decode a little easier than the Multimode program I was using the other day. I haven’t yet tried it on transmit. However, I did discover that it can be set to send tones through the speaker, rather than the earphone socket, which is what you want when you are too lazy to make up a lead!