AmateurRadio.com

We’re enjoying some wonderful weather here in the Lake District at the moment. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get out on the hills for some radio activation. I’ve been plagued with back pain ever since I returned from Blackpool. But not only that, sometimes I have to go somewhere that is of interest to Olga.

Today we decided to take a drive down to visit Holehird Gardens, home of the Lakeland Horticultural Society. For Olga, who is if anything even more obsessed with gardening than I am with radio, this is like visiting a really big ham radio show would be for me. I have zero interest in gardening, but I do enjoy looking at a nice garden, and I enjoyed the day out as much as she did. In fact, we agreed we should visit Holehird more often.

I took along the little Jin Ma Tong JT-228 VHF radio because it is small, light and easily slips in a shirt pocket. The antenna was a short stubby helical. No sooner had we arrived than I heard Phil M0AYB/P calling CQ Wainwrights On The Air from the summit of Great Gable. Phil was rattling off the contacts, and soon heard my call. I was pleased to make a contact using 3W to such a small antenna especially as Phil was also using a stock rubber duck, though according to a panorama engraved on the slate behind me in the picture Great Gable was line of sight from where I was standing so it shouldn’t have been too difficult.

More was to come, as just after Olga had taken my picture I heard Derek 2E0MIX/P calling CQ WOTA from the summit of Hindscarth. I got in a quick call and Derek heard me first, so we had a quick chat. Hindscarth was not line of sight, I think, but Derek was using his SOTA Beam which made a big difference. I was well pleased to make two WOTA contacts using the tiny hand-held radio. I popped it back in my shirt pocket and carried it around for the rest of the afternoon but didn’t hear anyone else although several Wainwright summits were activated.

However I was too busy enjoying the wonderful warm weather and beautiful Holehird Gardens to worry too much about the contacts I missed.

What this proved to me is that you don’t need to be up on the fells to enjoy some WOTA fun. Come to the Lake District and bring a hand-held with you and you’ll be sure to make some contacts!

Alfred Wainwright said that he could not understand why anyone would want to walk round a Lakeland fell when they could walk over it. He never met my wife. Olga has always been a reluctant companion on my summit walks – except a few very easy ones.

In fact, the scenery in this part of the world is spectacular even from the roadside, so it certainly isn’t necessary to climb summits to have a nice walk. Of course, you can’t activate any Wainwrights for WOTA unless you are on the top. But you can still work other people who are on the summits and claim the points for your chaser score. Olga has finally agreed to my doing summit walks by myself. But we still want to do walks together so some of the time I will go for low level walks.

This afternoon there was an excuse for such a walk. Phil, G4OBK had posted that he would be activating Rannerdale Knotts, one of the lowest Wainwrights and one that is hemmed in by higher hills so that it is probably not workable from home. So we decided to go for a walk beside Crummock Water from where Rannerdale Knotts would be in line of sight. As I would be out of range of any APRS digis or gateways I decided to leave the fancy APRS radios behind and take the little Jin Ma Tong JMT-228, a Chinese VHF radio I bought on eBay. As it has mainly been used to monitor my Echolink node the antenna was just a 2 inch long stubby duck. I thought that should be able to make the half a mile path across the lake. I intended to take a better antenna “just in case” but I forgot.

We arrived at the National Trust car park at Scalehill Bridge and I had just got out of the car and switched on the radio when I heard Phil calling CQ WOTA from Whiteless Pike, LDW-106. I stood the radio on the roof of the car while I put on my boots and waited for my turn to work Phil. The audio from the tiny radio was surprisingly load and turned a few heads! Finally I got my report, 5 by 9, and we set off on our walk round the lake.

It was a pleasant walk in the warm sunshine with skylarks singing overhead. I heard Phil working Derek 2E0MIX/P and telling him he would be on the summit of Rannerdale in about 15 minutes. We found a sunny spot looking across to the bumpy ridge and waited. Eventually a couple of figures appeared silhouetted against the skyline – Phil and his walking companion Geoff – followed shortly by CQ WOTA on the radio. I called Phil for the inevitable 5 by 9 report and that was that. Rannerdale Knotts, LDW-209, was on the list. We retraced our steps, not wanting to be out too late as Olga had dinner to cook.

Half way back to the car I heard another CQ WOTA, this time from Derek 2E0MIX/P who was on the summit of Grasmoor, LDW-020. I stopped and made contact and had a quick chat with Derek while Olga took the picture on the right using my phone.

Phil had said he was going to activate Whiteside, LDW-084 if he had the time, which he did. I was back home by the time he reached it. I was listening on the JMT-228 and stubby duck antenna from inside the house and Phil’s signal was 5 by 9. (The JMT has quite a decent S meter by the way, it isn’t all or nothing like many handheld rigs.) Phil didn’t hear me until there was no-one else calling him but when he did he gave me a 5 and 5 report. Not bad for 3 watts into what many people would consider a dummy load, over a distance of 10km.

Phil did comment that the audio from the JMT-228 was a bit low compared with my other radios. I don’t think that’s surprising as the radio is probably set up for 12.5kHz or even 10kHz channel spacing, and the level is not adjustable as far as I know. Still, I’m happy with this little radio and I think it acquitted itself very well on its first outing.

Yesterday I was out hiking round the back of Skiddaw in Wainwright’s Northern Fells to activate Great Sca Fell (LDW-114) and Brae Fell (LDW-134). One reason for being out and about in that area was that Phil G4OBK was planning to activate Great Calva (LDW-095) which is one of the three summits I need to complete the Northern Fells as a chaser. I’d have been less keen if the weather had been miserable, but Thursday was a glorious day, sunny but not too hot and without the breeze that can often make it icy cold on the tops even when it is warm in the valleys.

It is a long, steady plod up from Longlands and I reached the summit of Great Sca Fell around 12:30. I put up the WOTA Pole and then sat down to eat my lunch. To raise the height of the antenna I used my walking pole for the bottom section. This didn’t give me as much extra height as I’d hoped as the inner sections of the telescopic pole slid up inside the PVC tubing so I had to collapse it and just use the thickest, topmost section.

I connected the VX-8GR to the antenna to beacon my position on APRS while I ate the lunch Olga had made me. I tuned around whilst I was eating and heard a couple of distant stations. I observed their signals being desensitized intermittently. Clearly the VX-8GR receiver is not up to being connected to a good antenna in a good location.

After lunch I connected the Motorola GP300 – which has a much more robust receiver – to the antenna and began calling CQ WOTA. I worked 11 stations in all from Great Sca Fell, but they were all from the northen area as signals to the south were blocked by the great bulk of Skiddaw and Blencathra. I waited for Phil G4OBK to arrive on his first summit of the day, Bakestall, so we could have a summit-to-summit contact. I then called upon Mark MM1MPB and Colin 2E0XSD to help with my second objective of the day, which was to do some tests to see how much difference the WOTA Pole made to my signal compared to other antennas.

First I compared the signal between the WOTA Pole (which is a Slim Jim made of 300 ohm ribbon cable inside some PVC electrical conduit) and the 5/8 wave telescopic Black Whip antenna from jeepbangkok on eBay. I’d been pretty impressed with the 5/8 telescopic on previous activations but the reports from Mark and Colin suggested that the WOTA Pole was a couple of S-points better.

Unfortunately while extending the telescopic antenna to make the test I broke it! That’s the end of that, which is a pity because I’m sure there will be circumstances – such as on busy summits or rocky ones where there is no earth to drive the guy pegs in – where the telescopic would still be useful.

For an additional test I tried an 8 inch long single band helical “rubber duck” which I’d previously established to be comparable to a quarter wave whip and a noticeable improvement over the stock dual band antenna that comes with Japanese handhelds. Colin couldn’t hear me on the helical at all, while Mark’s verdict on my signal was “awful.” So the WOTA Pole is very definitely worth the trouble of erecting it and enables me to give points to stations that would not otherwise be able to hear me.

I packed everything up and made my way over to Brae Fell which was half way back to the car by another route. I set up the antenna and finished the rest of my coffee. A lone skylark, perhaps the first of the year, circled calling overhead. I began calling on the radio. Again there were plenty of takers. I worked 12 stations in all including another summit to summit with G4OBK/P on Great Calva.

So a successful day out (apart from breaking an antenna.) I just need to work someone on Mungrisdale Common and Souther Fell to complete the Northern Fells. They have been activated before: unfortunately they are not workable from home due to being of only moderate height and on the other side of Skiddaw. As they are probably the two most boring hills in the entire Lake District they are not often visited so I may have a bit of a wait until I can claim my Wainwrights On The Air Northern Fells chaser certificate.

Yesterday was one of those clear, blue, sunny, still, cold days that make you think it would be a criminal waste to stay inside. I decided to try another Wainwrights On The Air activation using my WOTA Pole, which had been rebuilt since Sunday’s disaster. My intention this time was to visit the summit of Knott, LDW-082, followed by nearby Great Calva, LDW-095. I took the VX-8GR for APRS but this time I also took the Motorola GP-300 to use for the activation which I hoped would avoid the receiver overload problems experienced with the Yaesu.

The weather may have been bright, but I was not. Sometimes I seem to get periods of a few days when although physically I may be awake, mentally I am not. Fortunately I hadn’t driven far before I realized I had not put walking boots in the car, so a complete disaster was averted. That wasn’t the only silly mistake I was to make, though.

I parked at the head of Mosedale and started walking up the Cumbria Way path. I approached the structure you can see from the starting point, which turned out to be a large garden shed! The path seemed to be taking me near to High Pike so I thought I would make that my destination and visit Knott on the way back.

As I approached the “shed” I heard people making contacts with another hilltopper, Gordon G0EWN/P on Grey Knotts. I took the VX-8GR from the rucksack and made several calls using the helical whip as he completed each contact but he always replied to someone else. After ten minutes of standing around I decided to shoulder the rucksack again and continue climbing while holding the radio. I called several times when Gordon listened for “any more calls” but he was not hearing me. I don’t know why that was – another case of a radio front end being overloaded by high signal levels on the fell-top perhaps?

I reached a grassy summit topped by a tiny cairn and checked my position and realized that I was further from High Pike than I thought. I also then realized that I didn’t have my walking stick! I must have left it by the “shed” when I stopped to try to work Gordon! I turned round and went back. I retrieved my stick, but having wasted half an hour I decided to abandon High Pike and carry on to Knott instead.

I arrived at Knott still in sunshine with clear blue sky, the distant summits slowly disappearing in the haze. Although it was calm enough to try using the WOTA Pole supported in my rucksack I decided to use the guying kit from the MFD that I’d brought with me in case of windy conditions to avoid the trouble I’d had on Sunday. That cost the antenna some height, but on the plus side it allowed me to operate sitting down which I was glad of as I’d been climbing for over 2 hours by this point. Whilst I ate my lunch I connected the VX-8GR to the WOTA Pole and it was picking up APRS packet bursts from as far afield as Norway and Holland. VHF conditions were obviously up.

When I finished my lunch I connected the GP-300 to the antenna. This was when I discovered I’d brought the wrong speaker-mic. One of the hazards of owning too many hand-held rados I suppose! It was not a major problem of course, as I could use the radio without it. I made several contacts from the summit of Knott the most distant of which was G6ODU in Ormskirk, Lancashire, not a bad haul from the North Lakes.

The wind was so calm my Olympus voice recorder logging device was able to make a high fidelity recording of the activation. In case anyone is interested to hear what it sounds like at the sharp end of a WOTA activation here is a recording of about 8 minutes of activity. The loud, punchy audio from the Motorola GP-300 really helps so you can hear both sides of the contact equally well. Some of the quality has been lost compressing it down to an MP3 file of reasonable length but it’s still almost like being there!

I would have liked to stay on the hill longer to see what else I could work, or even move on to Great Calva to activate that, but a thick bank of mist was approaching and I didn’t want to be up there in mist. There are few clear paths on these infrequently walked grassy summits and without any landmarks to aim for it would be easy to get lost. Even though the visibility was clear I still went the wrong way off the fell and hit the Mosedale to Skiddaw House path much closer to Skiddaw House than to Mosedale. That cost me an extra 3km or so of walking to reach the car, by which time the mist had arrived and the sky was a grey murk.

This was long walk for only one summit activated. I could have made more if I’d had my wits about me and things had gone according to plan. But on a day like this it’s good to be out however many summits you activate!

The weather forecast wasn’t promising, even though the morning was fine. But I was keen to get out on the fells. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours making an antenna specifically for Wainwrights On The Air operating and I wanted to try it out. So I headed for Broom Fell, LDW-169.

I’d had the idea for this antenna for a couple of years but hadn’t got around to making it. I was going to call it the WOTA Pole. As, for reasons I will come to, I’m unlikely to be publishing a detailed description of it, I’ll give you the outline of it now. It’s a Slim Jim made from 300 ohm flat ribbon cable, housed in a tube made of white UPVC electrical conduit. The tube breaks down into four sections for easy carrying using UPVC jointing pieces. It’s a similar idea to the SOTA Beams MFD except that is a half wave dipole and has a T piece with a coaxial balun and can be used vertically or horizontally. The Slim Jim should theoretically have some gain over the dipole but it can’t be used horizontally, which is no disadvantage as 99% of WOTA activating is done on FM.

One reason I haven’t used the MFD very much is the difficulty in deploying it. The antenna is provided with two velcro straps so it can be attached to a convenient fence post. Unfortunately our hilltops don’t often have convenient fence posts on the summit. My intention with the WOTA Pole had been to stuff the antenna in my rucksack for support so the radiating element would be above head height. Unfortunately UPVC jointing pieces aren’t very strong and it’s impossible to lift a rucksack onto your back whilst keeping a 2 metre long antenna perfectly vertical to minimize the strain on the joins. As I lifted it up I heard a crack and the antenna fell to pieces!

I didn’t see any damage. It was quite windy up there and I thought the culprit was the wind, plus perhaps I hadn’t pushed the jointing pieces tightly enough together. So instead I decided to strap the antenna to a convenient fence post which fortunately Broom Fell just happened to be equipped with right by the summit cairn. You can see the result in the photo. Lords Seat is the fell on the right in middle distance, with the Skiddaw range further away on the left.

Sunday lunchtime is not the best time to go WOTA activating. I think many chasers are busy filling themselves with roast beef and yorkshire pudding and nowhere near their radios. However Colin 2E0XSD was on frequency having been following my progress via APRS. He gave me a 59 plus report on the new antenna. After a couple of fruitless CQs I started to think that was going to be the lot, then Geoff GM4WHA came up, followed by Malcolm M0XAT. Then no-one. As the wind was bending the WOTA Pole rather a lot I took it down. I then tried a couple more calls using a helical antenna and got Mark MM1MPB and Tony G1OAE. Finally Colin 2E0XSD came up again to say I was only 4 by 3 on the helical antenna. The WOTA Pole had made a huge difference. It’s just a pity there hadn’t been anyone further afield listening at the time.

I walked down the hill a short way to get out of the wind and have the sandwiches and coffee that Olga had made for me. While I was down there I thought I would have another try at hoisting the antenna on to my back in the rucksack. Then I noticed that one of the UPVC jointing pieces – the one at the top of the lowest tube that takes most of the strain – had cracked. When I tried to get it aloft a piece broke away completely and the antenna fell to the ground. Another idea bites the dust. Literally!

On the way down I was pondering what I could do to make this idea work. Clearly the Slim Jim itself performed very well. In fact if anything it worked a bit too well on receive. The VX-8GR receiver exhibited clear signs of overload. I’d noticed this before when I’d used that radio with the MFD. I should really use the Motorola GP-300. Ironic that a radio that cost me £1 at a rally works better than a fancy Yaesu costing more than £300!

The problem with my WOTA Pole idea is the mechanical design. If I’d made the tube two one metre pieces instead of four 50cm lengths it would be stronger. But having something sticking 50cm above the top of my rucksack would be a nuisance when walking under low branches or ducking under fallen trees as I actually had to do on this walk.

Perhaps I should give up the idea entirely and try to make a rucksack mount for BNC fitting antennas. Then I could use the telescopic 5/8 wave that I usually use on less windy days fitted directly to the radio. What do you think?

The webmaster of Summits On The Air kindly gave me permission to access the SOTA Spots RSS feed from the Wainwrights On The Air website so that spots for SOTA summits that are also Wainwright summits can automagically appear in the WOTA system. I started work on that the day before yesterday. I also noticed that APRS objects for the position of Mads, M/LA1TPA/P, were not appearing because the length of his call exceeded the maximum length of an APRS object name. I implemented a fix for that by lopping off the /P if the name would exceed 9 characters. Yesterday morning I did not receive any SOTA alerts over APRS at all so I wondered if I had broken something.

It didn’t help that I had trouble accessing aprs.fi to see whether the APRS spots were getting out. That might have given me a clue as to where the problem lay. As it was, it took quite a lot of time before I realized that the problem was my internet connection. Although the ADSL was up and working, I was having trouble connecting to various sites including the APRS-IS Tier 2 servers and packets were being lost along the way.

This forced me to address another problem. Currently all the APRS packets are sent by the WOTA website calling a file on a web server running on a network attached storage (NAS) backup device running in G4ILO’s shack which is actually a little Linux computer that runs Apache. This server hosts the script that sends the packet to the APRS network. I had tried running the script on the WOTA web server itself but it hadn’t worked and I didn’t know why so I decided to go for the path of least resistance since life is too short for making computers work the way I want them to.

Apart from the problem of connectivity with this solution there is also one of continuity. I don’t like to run computers 24/7 because it adds a significant amount to an electricity bill that is already high due to the fact that there are two people using even more computers and equipment home all day. Also, Olga is not happy about leaving any equipment running when we go away. Whilst it is unlikely that anyone will activate summits in the middle of the night they are certainly going to do so while we are on holiday. So I really need to send the APRS alerts entirely from the web server.

After another couple of hours of getting nowhere I filed a support ticket with the web hos. They replied that they block port 8080 which is the one used to post APRS packets to the network using HTTP. When you are paying $8 a month for web hosting there is a limit to the amount of help you can expect particularly when it comes to changing the configuration of the server (which no doubt hosts hundreds of sites) just for my convenience. The last reply said “please try now” but I did and it still didn’t work. So it looks as if I might have to live with having APRS spot functionality that goes QRT when we are on holiday.

Meanwhile I am waiting for someone to activate a SOTA summit in the Lake District so I can see whether my script to check the SOTA spots RSS file is doing what it supposed to.

Today Geoff GM4WHA became the first Wainwrights On The Air (WOTA) chaser to claim a certificate. He worked me on Longlands Fell (LDW-179) thereby completing Wainwright’s Northern Fells having made contacts with stations operating from each of the fells in that book.

Noticing that a few chasers were just a few fells short of completing a book, I suggested in the WOTA forum that chasers should post the fells they need, which might motivate some activators to go out and activate them. Geoff duly posted, and Longlands Fell was one of the ones he needed. As it is only about 20 minutes drive from here and an easy walk, I thought it would be a good idea to blow away the cobwebs of more than two months of slothful inactivity by activating it. So I did.

Despite an early start (for me) I was lucky to find a place to park at Longlands near the Uldale Common track. The ascent is quite easy up a grass path, but due to the long period of inactivity (and having put on a couple of kilos since Christmas) I had to stop for a breather rather a lot. The photo shows the view from the top with the summit cairn in the foreground, Over Water in the middle distance and the often visited summit of Binsey (LDW-190) in the background. What it doesn’t show was the bitingly cold strong wind which numbed my fingers and made it too difficult to use the 5/8 telescopic antenna.

Despite using a 7in. helical antenna (which tests have shown to perform comparably to a 19in. quarter wave whip and much better than the dummy load supplied with the handheld rig) I made 9 contacts from the summit including the all-important one with Geoff, which is good going from such a summit which is well screened to the south.

I have probably said this too often, but WOTA keeps on getting more and more popular. I’m hearing new chasers all the time – the latest recruit is Steve, M6CDX – and even people who originally said they were getting too decrepit to climb the fells have been heard operating from some of the lower ones. So far this year I have worked 50 different summits and made 72 WOTA contacts from home, not far short of my total for the whole of 2010, and we’re only a bit over half way through the second month. I’m sure others have also noticed the greatly increased activity.

There is great camaraderie among all the participants, too, many of whom feel like old friends even though most of us have never met. I think it is fair to say that the success of WOTA has exceeded my wildest expectations. Combining two of my favourite activities – walking in our wonderful mountains and making contacts on the radio – it doesn’t get much better than this!