AmateurRadio.com

Hey, folks. It’s time for another episode of your favorite podcast about Linux and ham radio! In this episode, your fine feathered co-hosts kind of get their act together, report on news of interest, the new version of Shackbox and a bunch of other open source-y and ham radio-y topics. Hope you’re all having a great start to 2014, and we look forward to seeing you at Hamvention this year. Don’t forget about our Indiegogo campaign and our Raspberry Pi contest, ending soon!

73 de The LHS Guys

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].

The annual Freeze Your Butt Off contest, which is sponsored by the Arizona ScQRPions is this Saturday.  QRPers are very familiar with this Wintertime outdoor QRP operating event.  The lower the temperature at your operating position, the higher your multiplier, and hence, the higher your score. Your reward for braving the outdoors during the coldness and enduring the misery.

For the last three weeks in New Jersey, I think it has gone above the freezing mark of 32F (0C), maybe once. We have been in the deep freeze for a while now. So what’s the forecast for FYBO day?  Rain and 45F (7C).  Compared to the last three weeks, it’s going to feel like Springtime!  Of course, there’s no multiplier given for enduring wet, sloppy conditions.  So if it’s pouring, I guess I’ll give it a go from indoors, and save my KX3 from making like a duck.

I guess I should keep my mouth shut and not complain, but couldn’t the thaw come the day AFTER the FYBO Sprint?  I’m just a giver of points, but it would be nice to have the bigger multiplier so I could at least halfway compete with the Big Boys!  😉

I took the plunge and ordered the Begali Simplex Mono tonight with the palladium base, and the gold contacts (30 Euros extra).  I did not get the key engraved with my callsign. I was tempted, but I wanted to keep the price down as much as I could.  I figured that going with the gold contacts was the better option for more reliable keying.  Function over form, I guess. I am really excited now and am looking forward to finally having a Begali key.  This is something I have wanted for a long time, but could never bring myself to actually purchase until now.

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].

So far this week I have learnt that aligning parts in Google Sketchup isn’t as easy as it is in something like Solidworks. Still for a freebie programme I’m not going to complain.

Progress on the rotator project is slow, mainly because of the usual lack of time. But at least the idea is cemented in my head and now its just a case of doing the mechanical design and then hooking everything up. Below is a rough draft of the proposed Az / El arrangement for the clankies amongst us. I’ll complete the design either myself in a huge amount of hours or, more likely ask one of the CAD jockeys at work to fix it in a matter of seconds.

With this arrangement it should not be complex to either fabricate, buy or 3D print parts to suit. The latter is a preference as then the model can then be used by anyone to get parts made either as laser cut solids or 3D prints.

The main parts will be 2 off nema 17 steppers, gears from actobotics (This may need to be adjusted to slow the steppers down sufficiently) and that nice radio artisan / K3NG chaps code with Anthony, M0UPU’s board.

Onwards and upwards

Alex Hill, G7KSE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, UK. Contact him at [email protected].

One fun thing about ham radio and propagation in particular is that no two days are exactly the same. One day a given path is open and signals are booming, the next day, nothing. Thus the challenge in working difficult paths. Amsterdam, FT5Z, is on the opposite side of the earth from where I live in Texas and is tough entity to work, especially when thousands of others are calling. So the challenge is on.

For those trying to work FT5ZM from the states it has been widely chronicled that the signals are coming in via multiple paths, even the indeterminate "skew" path. In other words just rotate your antenna until the signal peaks. I have heard them on such a path which is more east that the SSE short path heading from my QTH. Last evening they were spotted on 12m, 15m and 17m. I swung the beam SP and, as I would expect, nothing but noise. Skew path, same thing. Well, let me try long path and viola, there they were. A very nice signal on 15m, a fluttery signal on 17m and nothing on 12m. The better signal on 15m was also heard very well in JA as that was all the operator was working. So let me try the weaker signal on 17m. First find where he is listening....he is working a W7, good,  and I can hear both ends of the QSO, cool,.....I drop my call in figuring other west coasters will beat me out, but what do I hear? ....AD5A 599...jubilation...... and with that another band counter in the log.

They will be there for two weeks and working them should get easier, but don't give up, try some of the sneaky ways into the log, it's a lot more fun.

I must issue a disclaimer: This is not a QRP story, I was hitting on all cylinders on this one:-)
Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Last night I attempted my first contest, the RSGB 50MHz UKAC

I am a complete novice at using HF, in fact I am a complete novice at transmitting anything!

My Chinese Baofeng handhelds have pretty much collected dust since getting my licence. However with the purchase of the FT-857D I must, despite my trepidation, step up to the microphone.

I had hit a snag when testing out the new radio, my antenna was showing high VSWR on 6m, even with the ATU I was struggling to get it to 2:1, therefore I decided to construct a simple dipole and sling it up with an ugly choke 'balun' I had constructed.

Due to some unexpected delays I was running out of time but eventually did manage to get something up, it was only around 2 meters off the ground and the VSWR still wasn't ideal, but I was ready.

At the appointed time, well nearly an hour late I started turning the dial and was met with a load of static, wasn't hearing anything! This continued for a quite a time then suddenly I started hearing "CQ Contest  CQ Contest" I listened in for a while to try to get the gist of the exchanges, wandering up and down the band.

Then I decided to have a go at a QSO, giving my callsign out, I waited nothing! "QRZ CQ Contest CQ Contest" another go.. still nothing.. and so on..

Changed frequency to another stations, tried again and I was heard, but they couldn't make out my call sign despite several attempts.. another change of frequency and the same results.

Now I know I had only got it set a 5W, the lowest I can till I get some confidence in my set up and am not going to damage anything! But I was a little disappointed, but I persevered until suddenly I was in the middle of my first contest QSO and my brain turned to jelly..

Thanks to M0MDY and his patience and prompting I successfully completed the QSO, details suitably written down. I carried on with no luck and called it a night just after 10pm, and went back in the house and manually entered the details of my solitary contact on the RSGB Contest website www.rsgbcc.org

Checking this morning and there I am at the bottom of the list, but not the very bottom, with a whopping 48 points.

http://www.rsgbcc.org/cgi-bin/claim.pl?Contest=50MHz%20UKAC&year=2014

Roll on next week, it is the 144MHz UKAC and I have a proper 2m YAGI... just got to work out how to mount it up on the poll and how to rotate it..

73s
Andrew Garratt, MØNRD, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from East Midlands, England. Contact him at [email protected].

As with most of the USA, this Winter of 2013/2014 sure has been a rough one! The cold snaps have been harsh and long lasting. And this has been causing the snow that we have gotten to stick around longer than usual for this area. Pardon the pun, but this Winter has been about 180 degrees different from last year, when we had only one minor snowfall. And for the most part, last Winter was downright balmy!

The extra cold weather has been kind of keeping me out of my basement shack. Thanks to our efficient gas furnace, all the heat goes to the upper floors, while the basement remains chilly. When the outside temperatures approach the single digits, my shack thermometer registers about 55F (13C), definitely not the most comfortable.  Even with wearing a long sleeved T-shirt, a polo, AND a sweatshirt, I get to the point where my hands get cold and sending without errors becomes a chore.

Thanks to all of you who have been sending comments and emails with regard to my quest for a single lever paddle. I am still leading towards the Begali, but looking at some other manufacturers has been fun. It seems I always hesitate before making a purchase like this, as I am not used to spending money on myself. Plus the fact that I’m concerned about the cost of all the natural gas I’m burning this heating season, I have to double and triple think purchases like this.

The QRP Fox Hunt season enters the second half tonight. With the two pelts I nabbed on 40 Meters tonight, I have 16 pelts in 22 hunts for a .727 batting average. In the 80 Meter hunts, I have snared 13 out of 16 possible pelts for a .8125 batting average. Thanks to good propagation and the excellent ears of our Foxes, I am having one of the best seasons I have had in a while.

The last good news that I have for the night is that Jim W4QO posted on the North Georgia QRP Group email reflector that he has successfully worked Amsterdam Island FT5ZM with QRP, not once – but twice! Since Jim is a fellow Eastern Seaborder, that gives me hope. Amsterdam Island is close to 10,000 miles away from New Jersey, so that’s a long haul by any standard. Right there, that puts you close to 2,000 miles per Watt. With my dinky antenna farm, I am sure that if I work them at all, it will be during the second half of their stay on the Island. I read somewhere that if all goes well, the DXpedition will remain in place until about February 20th. So that gives me some time, and I will do my best to get them in the log.

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].

On Christmas Eve, I was sitting at my in-laws’ kitchen table with the Small Wonder Labs SW-40 I built as a high school kid in 1998 listening to beautiful music and I got the itch to come up with a radio smaller (and less expensive) than the K3 to drag around with me when I go places.  My mind wandered to the NorCal Sierra, which was a featured project in ARRL Handbook’s of my youth.  I was able to come up with a draft version of that Handbook article on the web—pause for a moment and think how revolutionary that is—my in-laws don’t have an ARRL Handbook, let alone the one that contained the Sierra article.  I looked at the bill of materials and realized that I had some 70% of the parts in my junkbox.  This seemed like a good idea until I went searching for a PCB.

Why PCB?  Well, I’ve done the dead-bug thing and it works great but it’s a pain to troubleshoot and unless you have decades of experience doing it, it looks like a Mexico City suburb, sprawling unpredictably in every direction with only the most tenuous connections to the core.  Since I was seeking a travel radio, I wanted it to be compact, easy-to-troubleshoot, and relatively rugged.  Due in no small part to the wishes of the Sierra’s designers (not coincidentally founders of Elecraft), boards are no longer available.  I looked into doing my own board, but if you don’t mix chemicals yourself, you’ve suddenly spent $150 on PCBs, plus the layout effort.  I toyed with making the board smaller (a win in several ways) by using surface-mount parts but even that was a non-starter since my junkbox parts are through-hole, requiring me to buy everything.

Astute readers can extrapolate what occurred next.  I went to the Elecraft web site to price the Sierra’s successor, the K1.  I had all but made up my mind to sell off some junkbox items and raise the capital to buy a K1 kit when something occurred to me:  fellow ham blogger Mike, VE3WDM, had recently moved to a smaller QTH and was offering a half-completed K2 kit for sale.  His asking price was only a little more than the K1 kit with some of the options I wanted and it was all-band.   The ad had been posted for some days by this point, so I fired off a sheepish e-mail to Mike asking if the radio was still available.  It was.  We sealed the deal and the radio made the somewhat tortuous ride (for us, not the radio—it sat in Chicago for two weeks) from his QTH to mine via the postal system.

I would not have bought a partially-finished kit from just anyone.  However, since this was Mike’s second K2 build and he was documenting it carefully in a blog, I figured it was a pretty safe bet.  So far, that is definitely true.

While I was eagerly awaiting the radio’s arrival, I redoubled my efforts to get a friend’s TS-930S off of my workbench, a task that involved replacing all 115 electrolytic capacitors on the cookie-sheet-sized “Signal Unit” board (similar to the K2 and K3 “RF unit”).  That radio still has low drive (it has ALC again and sounds like a million bucks), something I traced to a hard-to-find semiconductor that’s now on-order.  So, I gathered it up and started work on the K2 on Sunday afternoon.

Last night, I got it on 40 meters RX-only and peaked up the RX BPF.  Former K2 owner KL9A mentioned to me that it has some blow-by on strong signals but that he thinks it’s a pretty good radio.  I can confirm that based on my experience last night.  It sounds really really good on CW.

More on the build to come…including a look back at some troubleshooting of the BFO circuit.

Ethan Miller, K8GU, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Maryland, USA. Contact him at [email protected].