AmateurRadio.com

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].

I own a Wouxun KG-UV2D from Import Communications and a KG-UV3D from HRO. They are both great radios and I honestly can’t complain too much about their small annoyances. They are extremely affordable and have proved durable and reliable. They represent a great value and I continue to recommend them.

About a year ago, however, my KG-UV2D developed an annoying habit. Out of the blue, it would lose all of its programming and revert to some kind of factory default. The condition is easy to detect as it starts talking Mandarin on power up. Really handy if you’re in the middle of something important.

At first I attributed the problem to the fact that the radio may have been dropped one too many times, and maybe I’d bent the battery contacts causing the radio to somehow reset itself. I bent the contacts out a little and things seemed to be OK for awhile. After it started happening again, I invested in a second Wouxun, the KG-UV3D, and relegated the KG-UV2D to backup status. It still worked fine, but it I had become concerned about its reliability.

Fast forward a year…. Now my KG-UV3D is exhibiting the same annoying problem. Is it due to user error? Abuse and neglect? Maybe, to some degree. But I find it strange that the same problem has now occured in both radios.

There is very little information online about this problem, but there has been some discussion about it occurring. Some people report that it happens when you let the battery run dead. Others report that it can occur when swapping batteries. Neither of these scenarios describe my situation. My radios were fully charged and I only use the batteries supplied with each radio.

One common factor between both radios is that I use the excellent KC8UNJ KG-UV Commander programming software. I have had great luck with this and recommend it for its ease of use and intuitive memory channel management. Could there be something about the software, how I’m using it (number of memories or settings), or how it programs the radios that is causing the radio not to retain programming in some cases? This really doesn’t make sense as I know MANY people who have used this software without any problem.

Have you experienced similar problems with your Wouxun HT or heard of it happening? If so, have you had any luck tracking down the issue?

Thanks in advance!

 

 

Matt Thomas, W1MST, is the managing editor of AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

Not strictly ham radio but parts of it are. For a while I’ve used rss readers to get the content I want into the reader of my choice. For a while that has been Google Reader. But since its demise I’ve lacked a concise and simple way of getting that information into a reader I use daily, MS Outlook. The annoying thing was that there are a bunch of ham radio news aggregators about that do a great job of popping content onto your virtual doorstep but most of them send out excerpt’s rather than the full text. Something that bugs me a bit.

So I decided to find a way of aggregating the rss data I want into a single feed, to remove duplicates and give me full text and photos of the news. So here’s how I did it.

1. Find the feeds you want http://g7kse.co.uk/feed (for a bit of shameless promotion)

 

 

2. See if the feed is chopped off by looking at the content. If its short all the time then chances are it is. Mine isn’t but many are

3. If it is, head on over to FullTextRSSFeed and plonk int the URL and let it do its thing

4. Login / Sign into yahoo to get to Yahoo Pipes

5. Pinch my pipe and make it work for you. They are fairly self explanatory and much underused. Replace the URL’s with yours. Run the pipe and get the RSS feed from that

6. Run the pipe and get the rss output (highlighted) and you should see something like this. The full URL is written there, bit of a mouthful. I tried to shorten it to something a bit more catchy and it didn’t work so just use the link above.

There seems to be more efficient ways of doing this but this method seems to work well enough for me. I’m sure there will be some aspects that don’t work for everyone, I’m not a developer so basically I don’t really know what I’m doing and this is the result of my fumbling about. I do hate it when computers don’t do the things I want them to though and spare a thought for my boss who gets a full rant every now and again when there isn’t a button to press to do a computers job !

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

My 1/2 built K2 is up for sale

Many decisions have been made here at VE3WDM in the past few months. We decided to downsize to a condo in so doing we moved to a very nice condo on the lake in Toronto. Many things had to be sold including ham radio related items. The shack had to be downsized but not shut down! Over the weekend I took another look at items I have that I'm not using. So some small items went up for sale and one BIG item that I have been mulling over for some time.....my 1/2 built K2 went up on the market today. This was a hard decision as I really enjoy kit building but with the small space it was just not going to work out. This is my second K2 and I did have a blast putting the first one together as well as 1/2 of this one. It's up on the Elecraft user group site. There was a heart stopping moment when one email asked me what the serial number was of the kit. No problem I packed it in three boxes, once opening them the contents were just the casing and the boards that I had 1/2 built.....WHERE ARE THE PARTS!!!! Did I toss them with the "junk". A fast check of  some boxes in the locker cleared up the question and all were parts were found safe and sound.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

Here’s another update of interesting important stuff spewing forth from the internet.

The Ham Hijinks crew continues to pound out some provocative ham radio reporting.  I can really relate to this story: Man Climbs Tower, Won’t Come Down Until Family Leaves. It was great to hear about this breakthrough: World Issues Solved On Local 2m Repeater. This one is destined to be a Christmas classic: Ham Op Gets CB Radio Christmas Gift Again  Warning: Do not take these guys seriously.

The HamRadioSchool.com team has been busy as well. Check out Stu’s article: Introduction to UHF/VHF FM Repeaters and my article: Practical Signal Reports.

You may have heard about the ARRL petition (FCC RM-11708) to modernize how Part 97 regulates the bandwidth of digital signals.  I’ve reviewed the proceeding and filed brief comments in favor of it. As I read through the filed comments, I found that some hams think this rule change is a threat to everything good in ham radio. I don’t know where they get this idea and I wonder if they’ve actually read the petition before commenting. For more on this, see: ARRL’s “Symbol Rate” Petition Nears Top of FCC’s “Most Active Proceedings” List .

Sverre LA3ZA posted a nice piece comparing the low cost Baofeng handheld radios: The best of the Baofeng handhelds . I don’t agree with his conclusion though…I find the UV-B5 to be the best choice due to the improved receiver, better antenna, improved S meter and rotary dial. But his article does a great job of comparing the radios so you can make your own decision.

Merry Christmas and 73, Bob K0NR

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