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I’ve been WSPRing on 30m today, still with a power of 0.2W. I think WSPR is more interesting when you use low power: it’s always interesting to see how far you can get.

20mW is not the lowest power you can use, though, it’s just the lowest power the K3 will comfortably produce. (You can set the output power to 0.0W but I’m not sure how accurately the rig will maintain the power at such a low level – something to check.

Today my 0,02W into the MFJ magnetic loop in my attic was received by 30 different stations. Here’s the list:

Timestamp	Call	MHz	SNR	Drift	Grid	Pwr	Reporter	RGrid	km	az
2014-01-13 11:52	G4ILO	10.140243	-11	0	IO84hp	0.02	ON7KO	JO21ce	637	124
2014-01-13 11:52	G4ILO	10.140209	-23	0	IO84hp	0.02	DL8HAF/P	JO53dm	899	92
2014-01-13 12:32	G4ILO	10.140206	-26	0	IO84hp	0.02	DK6UG	JN49cm	973	121
2014-01-13 12:54	G4ILO	10.140217	-22	0	IO84hp	0.02	DC5EO	JO31ed	760	117
2014-01-13 12:54	G4ILO	10.140210	-18	0	IO84hp	0.02	G8CRB	JO02bf	355	138
2014-01-13 13:18	G4ILO	10.140195	-19	1	IO84hp	0.02	G0GSJ	IO84jc	61	170
2014-01-13 14:20	G4ILO	10.140199	-19	0	IO84hp	0.02	G4ILR	JO02pp	379	124
2014-01-13 14:20	G4ILO	10.140224	-29	0	IO84hp	0.02	M0BLP	JO02ad	359	139
2014-01-13 14:30	G4ILO	10.140210	-20	0	IO84hp	0.02	OH8GKP	KP24rt	1945	43
2014-01-13 14:30	G4ILO	10.140203	-19	0	IO84hp	0.02	GM4SFW	IO77sn	331	349
2014-01-13 14:30	G4ILO	10.140199	-11	2	IO84hp	0.02	OH3HTI	KP21ag	1760	54
2014-01-13 14:30	G4ILO	10.140182	-13	0	IO84hp	0.02	LA5GOA	JO29oi	737	41
2014-01-13 14:38	G4ILO	10.140197	-23	0	IO84hp	0.02	OZ7IT	JO65df	1001	80
2014-01-13 14:38	G4ILO	10.140194	-13	0	IO84hp	0.02	SA6BSS	JO68	1084	60
2014-01-13 14:48	G4ILO	10.140189	-21	0	IO84hp	0.02	SM6WZI	JO67mp	1067	65
2014-01-13 14:56	G4ILO	10.140208	-21	0	IO84hp	0.02	DC8SE	JN48xi	1155	122
2014-01-13 14:56	G4ILO	10.140180	-7	0	IO84hp	0.02	ON7KB	JO21ei	634	122
2014-01-13 15:04	G4ILO	10.140204	-11	0	IO84hp	0.02	DK4TJ	JO31fc	768	117
2014-01-13 15:04	G4ILO	10.140236	-25	0	IO84hp	0.02	PA1GSJ	JO22da	586	117
2014-01-13 15:14	G4ILO	10.140238	-21	0	IO84hp	0.02	DL1WER	JN58dd	1189	122
2014-01-13 15:24	G4ILO	10.140195	-13	0	IO84hp	0.02	DL1KCQ	JO33uc	746	99
2014-01-13 15:36	G4ILO	10.140188	-25	-1	IO84hp	0.02	M5LMY	IO91oi	405	154
2014-01-13 15:36	G4ILO	10.140197	-12	0	IO84hp	0.02	PI4THT	JO32kf	729	107
2014-01-13 15:36	G4ILO	10.140196	-15	0	IO84hp	0.02	LA9JO	JP99gb	1949	26
2014-01-13 15:36	G4ILO	10.140191	-20	0	IO84hp	0.02	SM0FGT	JO89xg	1384	60
2014-01-13 15:36	G4ILO	10.140182	-12	0	IO84hp	0.02	LA5GOA/RX2	JO29oi	737	41
2014-01-13 15:46	G4ILO	10.140222	-12	0	IO84hp	0.02	DC0DX	JO31lk	776	113
2014-01-13 15:46	G4ILO	10.140215	-17	0	IO84hp	0.02	DC4LC	JN48np	1088	123
2014-01-13 16:22	G4ILO	10.140208	-17	0	IO84hp	0.02	DK4LA	JO54ae	868	88
2014-01-13 16:48	G4ILO	10.140196	-23	0	IO84hp	0.02	HB9FGQ	JN36kk	1163	137

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Javier Solans, EA2GCY, maker of the Iler 20 and 40 kits is now selling a range of kits from YouKits. The new kits are already listed on his very impressive-looking web site. If this means that the Chinese-made kits will now have building instructions to the same high standard as Javier’s own kitsit is very good news for kit-builders.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Paul Stam, PC4T, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from the Netherlands. Contact him at [email protected].

Setup in the car

Early in the week the weather was forecasting a warm (+8C) day for Saturday....rain but warm. Over the past week the temp's have been around -22 C without the windchill so a day of +8 that had to be a day to take advantage of outdoor radio!! Seeing that it was supposed to rain and it sure did I decided to go stationary mobile using my Elecraft KX3 and mobile mono band whips. Before going out I checked the propagation conditions and to my surprise 20m was not really the band of choice it seemed to be 15m. I did bring all my whip antennas but choose to put up the 15m whip to start. I setup in a small parking lot right on Lake Ontario. I was operating 5 watts QRP calling CQ as well going up and down the band for those calling CQ as well. I ran across HB9TNW in Switzerland calling CQ. I gave him a call and he came back to me. He gave me a 429 but that was fine with me for a QRP signal from the mobile. There was lots of fading in

A shot from the car of the lake

and out on both our parts so the QSO did not last all that long but we were able to swap QSO details. I then moved over to 20m and was able to contact N4LTS who came back to my CQ call. Ray was in Florida operating QRP at 3 watts and I was still 5 watts. It was nice to have a QRPxQRP QSO. We had a good QSO for about 10 minutes and conditions started to change so we gave each other 72 and went on our way. That was more or less it for the contacts for the day but I was very pleased with the contacts that I had. I was also impressed while having a QSO with N4LTS there were some op's that came onto the frequency but noticing there was a QSO in progress they stopped transmitting and moved on.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

Series Seven Episode One of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast has been released. The latest news, Martin (M1MRB) and Colin (M6BOY) discuss the future of shortwave radio and Martin reviews Glues and Adhesive.

• New CATfix software for the Kenwood TS-590S and TS-990S
• Hong Kong radio hams lend a helping hand
• Tokyo Hy-Power ceases trading
• InnovAntennas acquires Force 12
• Amsterdam Island DXpedition
• W100AW active for ARRL's Centennial Year
• Limerick Radio Club Special Event Callsign EI4LCC
• Successful Ham Radio DF Hunt

Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].

The ARRL just reported that the number of FCC amateur radio licenses hit an all time high of 717,201 at the end of 2013. Since we all know that the interwebz has made ham radio communication obsolete :-), this is a difficult statistic to comprehend. Joe Speroni AH0A keeps a useful collection of ham licensing statistics including the ability to generate plots of the data. I used Joe’s site to generate this plot of total US amateur licenses versus time. Note that the vertical axis does not start at zero, so the plot tends to exaggerate the amount of change.

 

From this plot, we see that the number of licenses was in decline from about 2003 to 2007. The no code Technician license was introduced in 1991 which is earlier than the data on this chart. The FCC completely dropped the Morse Code requirement from all license classes in 2007, as indicated on the chart. (See Wikipedia for the exact dates.) The decline in licenses was reversed at that time and has been growing ever since.  There is an interesting inflection point in 2010 that coincides with the release of a new Technician License question pool. The line is noticeably less steep after this point, which seems to imply that something happened to slow down the rate of new licenses.

Over the last ten years, Technician licenses have grown slightly as a percent of the total, going from 47% to 49%. So about half of US licenses are Technician. The grandfathered Novice and Advanced class licenses are in a slow decline and currently represent 2% and 8% (respectively) of the total licenses. The percent of General licenses has grown slightly over the past ten years, from 21% to 23%. Extra class licenses showed the most growth over the decade, going from 15% to 19% of total licenses.

While it’s encouraging to see continued growth in the number of ham radio licenses, these statistics immediately raise a number of questions:

• How many of these licensees are Silent Keys and their FCC license is just clocking time until it hits the 10 year expiration date?
• Given the aging ham population, when will we hit a demographic brick wall and see the number of licenses decline?
• How many of these licensees are actively involved in ham radio? I have a number of friends that keep their FCC license current but are never on the air.

Clearly, the 10 year license term will tend to mask any decline for a while but it seems that sooner or later the numbers will flatten off and probably start to decline. I don’t know of anyone that has collected and analyzed the age distribution of hams, so I am basing this on what I see at radio club meetings and major ham radio events.

How many of these licensees are active? Really difficult to say. It seems that in the 21st century, people have many activities to choose from and their interest in any one of them may fade in and out. Not everyone is a Full Up 24/7 Ham Radio Enthusiast.

In the mean time, I am going to keep teaching Tech license classes and helping people get started in a hobby that I find to be a lot of fun. Remember the The Universal Purpose of Amateur Radio: To Have Fun Messing Around with Radios.

73, Bob K0NR

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