AmateurRadio.com

My wife, Cris, and I are staying in New Mexico for the holidays and our kids don't arrive until Christmas Day. So what better time for a SOTA activation than Christmas Eve, right. This time of  year, the higher elevation peaks and thus the higher point value peaks have too much snow on them to make access practical. So in Santa Fe that means some of the peaks in the 7,000 - 8,000 ft ASL are much more accessible this time of year.

The Sierra De Las Valles Range, west of Santa Fe, feature many peaks in the mid 7,000's. The range is located in the Caja del Rio (Spanish: "box of the river"). Caja Del Rio is a dissected plateau, of volcanic origin, which covers approximately 84,000 acres of land in northern Santa Fe County, New Mexico. The drainage from this region empties into the Rio Grande River. The center of the area is approximately 15 miles west of Santa Fe. Most of the Caja is owned by the U. S. Forest Service and managed by the Santa Fe National Forest.  Access is through New Mexico Highway 599, Santa Fe County Road 62, and Forest Service Road 24.

 I decided to climb Montoso Peak, which at 7,315 ft. ASL is one of the tallest peaks in the Caja and Cris decided to come along for the hike. The climb is not particularly tough, other than there are no trails. The climb is 100% bushwhack and volcanic boulders and cactus are the primary obstacles. From where we parked our Jeep, we had a 640 foot vertical ascent over a one mile hike. It took us about 40 minutes to get to the top.


Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Christmas Eve is so special to me. Growing up in a Polish family, Christmas Eve IS Christmas! So I had a hard time deciding what I should post that would be special for Christmas Eve 2013 – childhood memories of Christmas Eves past?  Then, thanks to Steve WX2S, who jarred a very, very special Christmas Eve memory from 45 years ago, I decided to post this.  It is so appropriate!

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

The tranquility of my morning was disturbed by receiving an email “Disk Usage Warning” from the web hosting service for the g4ilo.com website.

This was worrying as I had not made any significant changes to the site for several months. I was concerned that hackers might have found a way to upload files to the server so that it was serving porn or some other equally objectional stuff.

After a look around using the disk management tools in cPanel the public_html directory seemed to be excessively large.

I FTP’ed in to the server with FileZilla  and found that the error_log file was astronomically large. I took a look at it and the file was full of warnings about a deprecated PHP function:

PHP Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /home/g4ilo/public_html/lib/classes/class.contentoperations.inc.php on line 881

A sI hadn’t changed anything my suspicion was that the web host had changed some global PHP setting. When I submitted a support ticket they didn’t admit to anything but with a bit of help I was able to turn error logging off. This seems to have solved the problem so I am crossing my fingers that ‘s  the end of it.

It was fine maintaining and supporting a website when my mind was sharp and my eyesight good. But I don’t find messing with this kind of thing very easy nowadays and I could do without the hassle and stress of things like this.

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

I love twitter. Some years ago I thought it was a load of rubbish, and had no purpose. But actually there is a fantastic community on the social media network, and more importantly a group of like minded Radio Hams are also on their sharing ideas, knowledge and experiences.

Take Dec 23rd for example. A simple thread was started about how we are progressing learning Morse and how we are attempting to up our speed. The conversation naturally came around to what’s best – paddle or straight key, and which particular keys do you own. For some crazy reason I mentioned I would complete a YouTube video of my keys, and share with the other participants of the conversation. Well I’m delighted to see that others have gotten on the band wagon and are sharing their keys and their experiences with them. Have a look at the following. I’ve ordered them in chronological order :

Dan Trudgian, MØTGN, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Wiltshire, England. He's a radio nut, IT guru, general good guy and an all round good egg. Contact him him here.

I was elated to work ZD8X on “Ascension Island” last month. I considered myself both fortunate, and lucky, to work this new DX entity for me. At the time, there were hundreds of operators trying to work him. This isolated Island in the Atlantic Ocean, between South America and Africa, was a long, long way from West Virginia, and there were thousands wanting him in their log books. .

I remember Jorma (OH2KI) skillfully pulling my 3 watt QRP signal out of the enormous bee hive. It was a difficult contact. My salutations and congratulations are to him for such a wondrous accomplishment!

Anyone who can do such a thing at 5,362 miles, is a true magician!

I rarely request a confirmation QSL card from a long distance DX station, and this card was no exception. My verification’s are normally done through the E-QSL site since postage is much too expensive now. For those wanting a paper card, I always require a SASE, and am happily willing to return my card to them. I’ll put his return card in the mail immediately.

The thing that really impresses me about this card is the time Jorma (OH2KI) took to send me an additional special acknowledgement:

He apparently read my comments from my earlier blog entry, and made the special effort to send me this note. Professional operators such as this, and the entire ZD8X team, are what makes this hobby so rewarding and fulfilling for all of us.

This is a nice Christmas present for me.

Thank You!

John Smithson, Jr., N8ZYA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from West Virginia, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

This rather grainy photo is probably going to be the last one of the Radio Shield. Mainly because of its un-christmas like behavior. the little monster has been misbehaving for a a while. It decides when and if it wants to decode any packets, which is pretty mean if you ask me and to cap it off a new fault has occurred, the LCD screen is very intermittent. The way it works is a bit like this.

1. Plug it in and watch it power up and display the splash screen – all good so far

2. Turn on the rig and tune into 144.800MHz

3. Send it a packet from my VX-8G and watch the LED flash green to say its happy listening and then display the callsign, SSID and associated data

4. turn it off and enjoy some dinner

5. Turn it back on. Get the usual start up message

6. Do nothing else regardless of what I throw at it.

The really annoying thing is that the serial monitor displays other messages that should go onto the LCD bu they stubbornly don’t bother to show themselves. There is definitely a fault somewhere on here so I’ve had to email Argent Data for a bit of a clue. Other little issues are that you can set the contrast or brightness by code (which you should be able to do).

It seems as though you get intermittent packet decoding and intermittent LCD displays, even if you wire up a few others to test. Hmmmm, perhaps I’ll tackle the other parts to the code enhancements later.

Humbug

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

Every Saturday morning from 9am until around noon, the Hurst Amateur Radio Club meets for tech-talk and all-around live ragchew at the Hurst EOC, which is located at Hurst Fire Station#2 in Hurst, Texas.  This is a fun time to get together and talk shop on anything related to Amateur Radio. Usually there isn’t a scheduled format, we’ll just pick a topic at random and share ideas, information, and answers to questions.

Today’s topic was the Broadband Hamnet. I posted about this topic the other day for the first time. I also purchased a Linksys WRT54GS router on eBay this week, which arrived in the mail yesterday, so I was able to bring it with me to flash the firmware and get it ready for the Broadband Hamnet.

In short, this is a wireless network that is separate from the standard Wi-Fi network used by the public.  With certain routers you can change frequencies that the router uses, which fall inline with ham-usable frequencies, and setup a sub-network to communicate only with other hams.  From what I understand there is an entire network already covering Dallas-Fort Worth, with nodes setup on towers and buildings that any Wi-Fi  router, after modification, can connect to, and allow the operator to use this network for communications with other hams. They have a great “getting started” page here.

I’m now officially online at my QTH in Grapevine, but I wasn’t able to find any other nodes in my area. Of course I only have the stock antennas on the back of the router, inside my home. So its time to find some external antennas and a setup the router outside.

This, of course,  poses some challenges since these routers aren’t really made to be weatherproof.  The coax line between the router and the antenna can’t be more than a few inches (there is probably a formula, but I don’t know what it is).  So you basically have to mount the router right next to the antenna.  There are enclosures that will house the router and a power source, and are weather-proof, and mountable onto a mast or tower.  Listed below are some links I have found for doing all of this.  I’ll probably change or update this list before the project comes to fruition, but for now, here is the build-list I am planning:

• A WRT54GS router.  There is the version with the most memory, according to this hardware list.
• An Enclosure.  I found a Multilink RNI-3620 Outdoor Residential Enclosure (Cable Box) on eBay.  Under $24 with free shipping, and it comes with mounting hardware.
• A couple of Antennas.  The WRT54 routers have dual antennas on the back, which are movable, and connect via a plug called RP-TNC.  Finding the correct connector shouldn’t be too much of  problem, but pay attention to this.  The cool thing about having dual antennas is that I can connect both a directional yagi or dish type antenna and point directly to another node, and also an omni-directional antenna which should listen and talk to anything within a certain distance.  Titan Wireless is a good place to find 2.4GHz antennas for base mounting.
• A power source.  You can use PoE or you can run an outdoor, weatherproof extension cord up to the router and connect the power directly.  This will depend on where I decide to mount the enclosure.  At this point in time I am thinking about mounting it to the top of my chimney on my 2-story house.  This will be about 30 feet in the air. I could run an extension cord from the chimney, down the side of the house, and into the garage.

Jason Johnston, KC5HWB, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].