AmateurRadio.com

Hanz and I went canoeing on Hermit Lake this morning. We made a QSO with NC while /mm and then we stopped on an island and made a few more… it was all makeshift because I forgot a tuner!

It was 85 degrees on Hermit Lake… hot and humid, but with a nice breeze. We set out about 10:30 with an FT-817, a bit of wire and hopes for a great adventure. That’s when things started going wrong…

As I began to raise the 14 foot fiberglass pole, I broke off the tip and had to rethink my strategy for attaching a wire. I knotted the wire around the tip and pretended everything was fine. I reached for the tuner, only to discover I had left it behind in a last minute gear switch. I thought the adventure was over… but recovered quickly. Oh well… who needs a tuner? We’ll just find the band with the lowest SWR and hope for the best.

After putting up the antenna, I stuffed the wire into the center conductor of the SO239 on the back of the rig. I didn’t even use a counterpoise. I turned the rig on 17 meters and there was K2J, the 13 Colonies Special Event Station from North Carolina, calling CQ with an S9 signal. I called him signing /MM. He came right back to me. Hanz and I grinned from ear to ear. I told the operator I was on a lake in New Hampshire and thanks for the contact! Then I realized I had forgotten to switch on the external battery. I was running with 2 1/2 watts on the internal AAs with no tuner. And all that with a few feet of wire wrapped around a 14 foot pole lashed to the canoe with rubber bands… and no counterpoise. To make things worse, the bands were clearly very poor. Geepers!

We floated around for a while but there wasn’t a lot of activity. At one point we heard KG4TO in Guantanamo Bay. He heard us and tried coming back to the /MM, but he couldn’t quite get our call. We headed for an island to get
out of the wind a bit.

Once there, we decided to land and set up a dipole cut to frequency. We grabbed the gear, and headed up a short but steep hill. At the top was a clearing with some tall trees. We heaved a wire over a branch and pulled up 33 feet of wire and laid a counterpoise over the tops of some bushes, and listened around. 20 meters sounded like the best bet. We had to shorten the wires a bit to lower the SWR, but quickly made contact with Paul, KW7D in NM. Paul gave me a 579 and we were thrilled. Hanz took the key.

Hanz worked K2G, the 13 Colonies station in Georgia. Tim gave us a 599. We figured we’d beaten the odds of an outing with no tuner and called it quits.

Jim Cluett, W1PID, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Hampshire, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

QRP at Luther Marsh... note one of Julies cameras

On Saturday morning Julie and I decided to take a hobby trip (Julies photography and my ham radio) we were off to a place called Luther Marsh. We have never been there before so we Google mapped it and off we went.....what could go wrong.....LOTS. This was a place that Julie was recommended to go by some bird watchers. It's about an hour and a half from where we live but they say getting there is half the fun.....and boy was it. Our trip according to Google maps brought us zigging and zagging all over the map. Once the road adventure was done we ended up on a lonely dirt road with a gate saying " DO NOT ENTER" Hmmmm it was time to bring out the Iphone GPS and find out where the heck we where. Well it was about another 20 minutes of driving  and we did arrive at our destination. We loaded up the camera and ham gear into our "hobby stroller" and ventured down a path in the wildlife

A view from below

sanctuary. We were not alone on the trail it was me, Julie and 

Julie's shot of the day an Osprey

deer flies!!!  We did have bug repellant  but it just had no affect on them at all. I was not bothered but poor Julie had at least 10-15 buzzing around her head all the time....and biting her!! We turned around and decided to call it a day, on the way out we noticed a path and this path lead to a lookout about 3 stories high. We went up to have a look and low and behold no deer flies. We had our lunch up there and Julie was able to take pictures and I was able to have to some radio time.
I took with me my Elecraft KX3, Alexloop, tripod and a spare battery. It was great, there was no noise level at all on the KX3 and one would wonder if the rig had a receive problem. I started to call CQ and it was not long before VE1AB in Nova Scotia  came back to me. John gave me an RST of 559 and we had a nice long CW chat it seemed that John had been to Luther Marsh several times when in Ontario.  I did have to say 72 to him as my batteries had to be changed in the KX3. I then called CQ again on 20m and WW2SUB came back to me.......hey guess where he was???? This was the first time EVER I had contacted a Submarine . He was on the USS batfish. I thought my CW was off and it was supposed to be copied as battleship. When I got home and did a QRZ.COM search....it was in fact called the USS Batfish!

Camera and ham gear stroller (mainly camera gear)

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

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].

I few weeks ago I took a trip to Santa Fe, NM for a long weekend and activated a couple of SOTA Summits. I was fortunate to meet Fred, KT5X and John, K1JD. I learned quite a lot from them on portability and efficiency. So motivated by John, I have developed my new portable SOTA Station.

I purchased an ICON portfolio designed to carry an iPad or similar notebook. It is hard sided and the inside lining can hold on to velcro.

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

Is this coming Sunday from 20:00 to 24:00 UTC. That’s from 4:00 to 8:00 PM EDT for those of us here on the East Coast. I will have to participate as W2LJ/2 (technically), as I won’t be home. Tomorrow we’re leaving for our yearly sojourn to Lake George, NY.

Of course, the KX3, Buddistick, and PAR ENDFEDZ 40/20/10 will be accompanying me. Not sure if I’ll operate from near the cabin with the Buddistick, or perhaps from a park, or even from a nearby mountaintop with the PAR.

In any event, I am looking forward to some well deserved R&R. I anticipate a lot of reading, and a lot of radio in addition to all the fresh mountain air and cool lake breezes.

I have some good books loaded on my kindle, including James Rollins’ new one, “The Eye of God”. If this Sigma Force novel is as good as his others, I should burn through it in two or three days. For the past several years, I have been able to read two books during our time up north. In addition to Rollins’ new one, I also have several of David Baldacci’s novels loaded on the kindle.

FYI, any requests for Skeeter numbers will be processed when I return. So if you send me an e-mail, I will acknowledge it, and I may even issue you a number. However, I won’t be able to update the online roster until I return.

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].

How to Save Ham Radio – Parts 4 & 5 – N1IC  – The Easiest Two!

 

 

So first of all let me say that I had a started 4 and 5 a long time ago when I was writing this series but due to some personal challenges with my health I had to take a step back from blog posting and this series … with that said I wanted to close it out. 4 and 5 as I started writing them were both serious topics but I wanted to combine them since one will be a little more controversial than the other and hopefully 5 will help bring everyone back from their thoughts on the 4^th part 🙂

 

http://nicktoday.com/how-to-save-ham-radio-parts-4-5-n1ic-the-easiest-two/

Nick Palomba, N1IC, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Florida, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

At the end of last month I was testing a new version of WSJT-X for Joe, K1JT, under NDA. The program has now been released, so I can write about it.

WSJT-X 1.1 can decode both JT65 and JT9 at the same time

The major new feature is that WSJT-X 1.1 supports both JT65 and JT9. What is even more remarkable about it is that it can decode both modes at the same time! Enabling dual modes is optional, but if you use the feature and double-click on a station to reply to it the program will switch to the correct mode for the reply.

Another thing about this new version is that it can decode signals in a bandwidth 4kHz wide. If you have a transceiver that can receive such a wide bandwidth – Flex SDR radios can do this, as can the Kenwood TS2000 and my Elecraft K3 with FM filter installed – then you can take advantage of this capability. I didn’t think my K3 could go that wide, but all that was needed was to run the K3 Utility and enable the FM filter in DATA mode.

If you’re sharp then you will have thought of a snag. What happens if you reply to a station on the right hand side of the bandwidth? Receiving may be OK through the FM filter but on transmit the 2.7KHz SSB filter is used. The solution is clever: you keep the audio in the range 1 to 2kHz, engage SPLIT mode and set the transmit frequency to shift the signal up or down so that it matches the frequency of the station you are working.

I must admit that this perplexed me at first as I didn’t understand the significance of operating in split mode. My audio tones (heard with the K3 monitor turned up a little) were often lower or higher than the station I was replying to, and I was afraid I was replying on the wrong frequency. In fact, I was: I had forgotten to switch SPLIT on!

To avoid mistakes in future I created a Windows shortcut using a little utility I wrote to send a CAT SPLIT ON command before starting WSJT-X 1.1 and equally importantly, set SPLIT OFF when I had finished a session with WSJT-X. It’s just too much to expect me to remember to do this manually! I suggested to Joe that WSJT-X itself should send the split commands, but apparently it’s not that simple when you have to cater for every transceiver under the sun. So if you are working JT9 or JT65 and  stations reply to you one or two kHz off-frequency don’t be surprised.

I should make it clear: WSJT-X 1.1 doesn’t decode both modes across 4kHz. It decodes JT65 in the lower half and JT9 in the upper half. You get to decide where the dividing line lies.

Joe K1JT thinks that JT9 users will move down a bit into the top end of the JT65 range, to enable people whose transceivers don’t give them 4kHz bandwidth to take advantage o9f the ability to work dual modes. In fact, at the moment, the result seems to be to have enabled JT65 users to spread out over 3kHz or more as is clearly illustrated by my screenshot. Time will tell.

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