AmateurRadio.com

If your better half complains that you have too much radio equipment, just show her this article.

A couple of times I have been told by a station I was in contact with that my signal was “Radio Five”. I was a bit offended. As a classical music lover I would have preferred to have been “Radio 3”, or at least “Radio 4” which is the BBC’s highbrow channel with news, arts and current affairs programming. But joking apart, what were they trying to tell me?

I don’t want to sound like one of those curmudgeonly old farts who believe that it would have been better if newly licensed hams had never been born in the first place. I’m well aware of how such an attitude can, and has, put off newcomers to the hobby, and don’t wish to discourage someone who might just have plucked up the courage to make their first QSOs by telling them they are doing it wrong. At the same time, I’m afraid that if one does nothing, says nothing, these nonsensical phrases will slip into common usage like a virus as others hear them on the air and think that’s what they are supposed to say too.

So let’s set things straight. The only “Radio” you need to mention during a contact is the make and model of the box you are talking to me with. If you are giving me a report on how well you are receiving my signal then the term is READABILITY.

I have never owned a Ten-Tec transceiver (although I once built and used one of its transverter kits) but I always thought that the thing the company’s products were most renowned for was their good support for CW operation and excellent QSK. So I was surprised to visit the Ten-Tec website a few days ago and see beneath the logo the slogan “The SSB Company.” Obviously CW isn’t seen as so important these days.

In the last couple of years Ten-Tec has dropped its kit range, its QRP Argonaut transceivers and most recently has been in the news for announcing that it will be rebranding the Chinese-made HB-1A QRP CW transceiver as a Ten-Tec product. I suppose someone somewhere has decided that this makes commercial sense but it doesn’t seem to me like the way to hold on to a reputation as an innovative indigenous American manufacturer of quality radio products for the discerning amateur.

I think the frequency readout of my IC-910H is out by about 400Hz and unfortunately I can’t receive any accurately calibrated beacons like GB3VHF to set it with. I also like to check my K3’s calibration from time to time and would like to take advantage of the option to lock it to a 10MHz frequency standard should Elecraft ever provide it as originally promised. So I decided to have a look on eBay for frequency standards.

There seem to be a number of ex-equipment 10MHz rubidium frequency standards at prices starting from around £50 – which is about the right level for me – available from China. For a bit more you can have a GPS locked time and frequency standard, though where time is concerned the NTP software is good enough for me. There is also a smart looking Quartzlock off-air frequency standard, though that is a bit outside my price bracket for this and would take up a bit too much space for the G4ILO shack.

I don’t know anything about this equipment and aren’t sure if any of these things would be any use to me. The rubidium frequency standard pictured has a frequency adjustment setting which surely defeats the object. If you need to calibrate it against something else then that’s no use to me. I want something of known accuracy to calibrate my radios against. Perhaps the GPS type would be more useful?

Does anyone know about these things?

British and European hams who are in the US to visit the Dayton Hamfest may find it a bit tricky to get back next week. Changing weather conditions are likely to cause ash clouds from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano to return to the UK. The Department of Transport is predicting that UK airspace – including the busiest airports in the south east of the country – may be closed from Sunday until Tuesday. Travellers are advised to check with their airlines before setting off for the airport.

There is speculation at the moment about whether Icom will release the new IC-9100 top band to 23cm transceiver at Dayton, and what the price will be.

I wish someone could tell me why there is this trend towards do-everything shack-in-a-box radios instead of separate VHF/UHF rigs like the now discontinued IC-910H which I just bought? One of the reasons I switched from using a transverter to having a separate rig for VHF is that I can’t use HF and VHF at the same time. An all-in-one radio would have just the same limitation.

Just because technology makes it possible to cram everything into one box doesn’t mean that there is no longer a reason to have separate radios. If you want a new multimode radio for 2m or 70cm you have to buy an FT-817, FT-857, FT-897 or TS-2000 – which are all compromise rigs with fairly poor performance – or wait for the IC-9100. No wonder good single VHF band multimode rigs like the IC-275H are now worth their weight in gold bullion.

I phoned up Radioworld this afternoon to ask why I hadn’t received the 2m 5/8 vertical I ordered a week ago. After looking up the order the girl told me that the stock hadn’t come in yet. “We sent you an email yesterday” she said. That was presumably in response to my shirty enquiry yesterday. I checked through my Spam folder and I didn’t receive any email from Radioworld. I mentioned twice that I had received an email saying the item was despatched on the day I ordered it, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of an apology, just a repetition of the fact that the stock hadn’t come in yet. Radioworld goes on my list of dealers to avoid.

LAM Communications by contrast has been a pleasure to deal with. After failing to win any VHF multimodes on eBay I decided that rather than gamble my money on the stock markets or leave it in the back at an almost zero rate of interest I might as well buy any radio gear I want, so I treated myself to an Icom IC-901H. LAM had a used one for sale so I phoned up to ask about it. I was told it was in really nice condition but when I asked its age the salesman (Dave) didn’t know, so he promised to phone Icom UK to find out when the guarantee ran out and call me back.

This he did after a few hours. He was a bit apologetic, saying that it was made in 2003 so there was “a bit of age behind it” and in view of that he would knock an extra £50 off the price and throw in carriage for free. I decided to go for it and he then warned me that the FedEx courier had already called so it wouldn’t go out until the following day. Fine, so it would arrive today. It did, well-packed (the Icom box was bubble wrapped and inside a larger box) and was exactly as described. Better, in fact, I can’t see a single mark on it. I am well pleased, and would be more than happy to buy from LAM Communications again.

The worst offenders in my experience for service have been Waters and Stanton. I forget the details of all the times I had to hassle them to send things I ordered, such as when I bought a rig advertised as with a free desk mic in RadCom and they didn’t send the free desk mic. A classic example of dealing with W&S was when I ordered the MFJ magnetic loop a few years ago. I didn’t receive any email or acknowledgement and no money was taken from my account so I decided that the online order hadn’t gone through. I started to have second thoughts about needing the antenna so I decided to forget about it, which I did until one day, more than three months later, without any prior warning, a courier knocked at the door with a very large box…