AmateurRadio.com

For the last 3 years I’ve favoured begin part of one special event station. SOS radio Week. It is one of those events that seems to bring in a few QSO’s from all round the country to support one of the countries most easily forgotten about emergency service. Unless of course, like me, you live by the sea. The Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) has been running in some form or another since the year dot and its volunteers save lives at sea in all conditions. It is entirely funded by donations and the Workington club are once again putting on 3 stations and our sister club at Furness will be putting on a fourth to make up the ‘LBC’ or Lifeboat Cumbria set.

St bees is a very small village in West Cumbria and our lifeboat is thankfully not called out to often. My first close up encounter with them was a few years ago when they were called into action to rescue to young boys who had been jumping off the rocks and got into difficulty. During last years operation they were called out to rescue a fishing boat that had lost power and was drifting towards the head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a £250k rib driven by a £350k submersible tractor down the slipway and into the water with such speed. There’s nothing particularly appealing about the Irish sea in January and I’d imagine that being under it is a tractor is even less appealing.

So this year, as with all years, we’ll be attempting to raise a bit of cash as well as awareness. the LBC group of stations have raised over £3000, approximately a third of the total raised by the whole country. This year we’ll add to that total and support our volunteers as best we can. Please keep an ear out for the stations between the 25th January to the 2nd February 2014 or have a look on the website SOSRadioWeek for all the other stations around the country. Band to be decided but this year we’ll have 2 stations, one for domestic and one for DX.

Gb1LBC – Silloth

GB2LBC – Workington

GB4LBC – St Bees

GB5LBC – Barrow

SOS Radio Week 2014 – 25th Jan to 2nd Feb

Series Six Episode Twenty-Four of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast has been released. The latest news and Martin answers questions.

• Three Ham Radio satellite deployments in November
• RAC election of officers
• Southeastern Division election results
• 2014 Bath Buildathon
• ARRL files 'Symbol Rate' petition with FCC
• Essex Hams get free data viewer
• MacLoggerDX version 5.50 released
• African 4x4 Tour
• UK Emergency Group marks 60th anniversary
• UK Radio Amateurs extend 76 GHz distance record

Unboxing the Icom IC-F4161DT

As my wife would say, I am at it again with radios. I just picked up the Icom IC-F4161DT NXDN Radio. If you do not know much about NXDN I would recommend that you check out these few pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXDN

http://www.nxdn-forum.com/

The reason I jumped aboard is that my club NI4CE has taking the leap with our 10 country coverage of repeaters we have started the process of updated them to NXDN. http://www.ni4ce.org/nxdn/

Here is a blurb, but you could read more at their site: Earlier this year, the West Central Florida Group, Inc. made a strategic decision to replace the D-Star digital repeater at Riverview with an industry standard NXDN repeater from ICOM. In addition, the new ICOM FR6000 UHF repeaters now in service at Verna (442.950 MHz) and Holiday (443.450 MHz) also support MIXED mode 25 KHz analog voice and 6.25 KHz NXDN digital communications on demand.

I decided that it was time for me to think about this challenge since I always like to be on the latest technologies and also I love radios ☺ I think we all know that by now if you have read my articles about Ham Radio.

Full post: http://nicktoday.com/unboxing-icom-ic-f4161dt-nxdn-radio/

Series Six Episode Twenty-Four of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast has been released. The latest news and Martin answers questions.

• Three Ham Radio satellite deployments in November

• RAC election of officers

• Southeastern Division election results

• 2014 Bath Buildathon

• ARRL files ‘Symbol Rate’ petition with FCC

• Essex Hams get free data viewer

• MacLoggerDX version 5.50 released

• African 4×4 Tour

• UK Emergency Group marks 60th anniversary

• UK Radio Amateurs extend 76 GHz distance record

While many are talking about how Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest since the Maunder Minimum (the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time — see this Wiki entry), there are moments when activity on the Sun strongly increases, providing brief moments of excitement.

Here is a case in point, witnessed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; see SDO Mission) on June 7, 2011, when the Sun unleashed a magnitude M2 (a medium-sized) solar flare with a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME). The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area almost half the solar surface.

SDO observed the flare’s peak at 1:41 AM ET. SDO recorded these images in extreme ultraviolet light that show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material — at temperatures less than 80,000 K.

This video uses the full-resolution 4096 x 4096 pixel images at a one minute time cadence to provide the highest quality, finest detail version possible.  The color is artificial, as the actual images are capturing Extreme Ultraviolet light.

It is interesting to compare the event in different wavelengths because they each see different temperatures of plasma.

Credit: NASA SDO / Goddard Space Flight Center

Video: http://g.nw7us.us/1aOjmgA – Massive Solar Eruption Close-up (2011-06-07 – NASA SDO)

Visit: SunSpotWatch.com

I have just received my first telemetry from the FUNcube satellite, a.k.a. OSCAR 73. It was a piece of cake, one of the easiest things in ham radio I have done. What helped make it easy was that I was using a FUNcube Dongle Pro as the receiver (thanks, John!) . The FUNcube dashboard software supports it out of the box. No drivers to install or soundcards to configure. It was a piece of cake.The Dongle automatically tunes to the right frequency.

Of course, the whole project has been designed to be used by teachers with no previous experience of this kind of stuff. So you would expect it to be easy for a seasoned radio ham!

The FUNcube Dashboard software

The whole thing went something like this:

1. Download and install .NET Framework 4.0 from Microsoft.
2. Download and install FUNcube Dashboard from http://data.funcube.org.uk/
3. Register your call at the FUNcube data warehouse https://warehouse.funcube.org.uk/.
4. Download, read and follow the instructions (PDF files) from the FUNcube site.
5. Connect dual band colinear to FUNcube Dongle.

Sit back and wait for a pass.

 I was not present when the satellite went over as I was downstairs having lunch.

There are no suitable passes over this location this evening or tonight so I will have to wait until tomorrow for another try. Unfortunately apart from an FT-817 and the dual band vertical I don’t have equipment that can operate 2m ans 70cm so I’ll have to leave tryi ng to work through the transponder to someone else.