2010 SCC RTTY Contest

It seems that I've been doing more RTTY contesting lately, and on Saturday, I spent about 8 1/2 hours participating in the SCC (Slovenia Contest Club) RTTY Championship contest. This was a 24 hour contest, running from 8AM Saturday to 8AM Sunday (local time), and it's one of the contests where anybody can work anybody. I like those, because even if propagation isn't cooperating, I can usually work someone in the US. This is a good thing, because propagation wasn't all that great, and as it turns out, just about 50% of my contacts were with US stations.

There are some interesting scoring rules in this contest that I haven't seen before. In many DX contests, you get more points for working DX which favors certain parts of the world where there are literally dozens of countries in an area the size of the US. However, for this contest the rules are set up so that within "big" counties (like the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and others) you get extra points for working stations within that country but who are in different call areas, provinces, or oblasts. I wish that some of the other DX contests would use this system which seems to level the playing field a bit. One other scoring rule that is fun is that the multipliers are the year that you were first licensed. I worked a few stations who were first licensed in 2010 (all of which were, I believe, specially issued callsigns), but it was fun working stations who were licensed in the 1940s and even in the 1930s. I worked a couple of stations who were licensed in the 40s, but both of them turned out to be using club callsigns, which of course were issued when the club was originally founded. (Still quite impressive to be sure). The oldest non-club call that I worked was Charles, W0HW, who was first licensed in 1937. According to the information on qrz.com, he was born in 1922, so Charles, who is now 88 (and obviously still active on the air) got his first license at age 15. I'm sure he's got a lot of interesting stories to tell.

As with a lot of my contesting, I tend to fit it into the "space available" on a weekend. For this contest, I didn't get started until around 3:30PM (local time), at which point I configured my contest logging program for this contest and got on the air. I listened briefly on 15m but since I only heard one very weak signal, I decided to start off on 20m. For about the first half hour, I ran in Search & Pounce (S&P) mode, working just under 20 stations. As I was tuning, I found an open frequency right at the lower end of the 20m RTTY sub-band (14.084Mhz), and I figured that I'd try to see if I could switch to Run mode. As I've mentioned previously, being able to run stations really improves you rate and it's also a lot more fun. It's usually difficult for a low-power station like mine to hold a run frequency for long (because usually a higher-power station will just sort of take over, despite the fact that it's poor operating practice, at best, so do so; it's arguably illegal as well), but I was thrilled to be able to stay on that same frequency for around 4 hours. I can't say that I had huge numbers of stations calling me the entire time, but there were periods where I was working about 2 stations per minute continuously for several minutes. For this contest, it seems that 2 per minute was about the maximum achievable because the rate of information exchanged is fixed (a characteristic of RTTY), and the amount of information that had to be exchanged was of a certain length. Unlike a CW or Phone contest, you simply can't go much faster. (Yes, there are some shortcuts, but they don't make that much difference, especially when you don't have a continuous pileup.) I was very pleased to be able to continue my run for that amount of time.

I took a break and went out to dinner with Sharon (who, as usual, was being very understanding about the contest), and got back to the radio at around 9:30PM, worked a few stations on 20m, then moved down to 40m. The conditions on 40m seemed to be surprisingly good, and I was able to work a good number of European stations first running S&P and then later when I had a run frequency. (That run wasn't nearly as good as the 20m run, but it was still quite productive). After a while, I seemed to have run out of stations on 40m, so I moved down to 80m to see what I could find. During the summer, 80m isn't great for DX because it's noisy due to the thunderstorms that are common during that time of the year. After a while, including a period where I had a rather unsuccessful attempt and running station (plenty of frequencies were available, but apparently nobody could hear me), I moved back to 40m again. Somewhat to my surprise, the propagation had improved, and by that time, some of the early-risers in Europe were awake to work the night-owls in North America. (It was around 1AM at that point.) I continued to work stations on 40m, but at 2AM, I finally threw in the towel and finished up with 207 (non-duplicate) QSOs in the log. As it turns out, I was up for over an hour after that acting as the family "IT guy", fixing a problem with Sharon's BlackBerry. Needless to say, I didn't get up early enough to put a few more QSOs in the log the next morning, so that was my final total.

Here's my detailed score summary for the contest:

Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
 3.5      29      57   25
   7      67     168   42
  14     111     268   50

Total     207     493  117

            Score : 57,681
    

This was my first effort in this contest, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I was very happy with the results.

So that's what it sounds like

While most of you reading this are hams, I have a number of readers who aren't and who probably haven't heard what things sound like on the radio. There are also some hams who aren't active on the HF bands for any number of reasons who might not have had an opportunity to listen to DX. DX, meaning "distance", is what hams use to refer to a "far away" contact. The definition of "DX" varies, but in this case I'm talking about a contact with a ham in a foreign country. What I'd like to do is present a short (42 second) clip of a DX station and explain what's being heard.

First, I'll note that what you'll hear is typical of a DX station making brief contacts. There's not a lot of chat back and forth, but the goal here is to make as many contacts as possible. Second, I picked this clip (recorded earlier today) because the station I was listening to happened to have an exceptionally strong signal and conditions were very good. (For those of you interested, the DX station was using a 2KW amplifier into a 6 element cubical quad. My station is an Icom 756 Pro II with a G5RV antenna up about 10 m in the backyard. I worked him a few minutes before this recording was made.)

With that said, here's the link to the audio file that I'll be describing: http://k2dbk.com/rl3a.mp3 (you may need to right-click and save that to your computer, or you may just be able to click on it to play, depending on how your computer is set up.)

I'll give a start time in seconds for each description to help you follow along, here's what you're hearing:

:00 - "Q R Zed stateside, Radio LimaThree Alpha" - QRZ (hams pronounce the letter "Z" like "Zed" because it's so similar to other letters like C, etc.) is a sort of shorthand for "Who is calling me?". He uses the term "stateside" because he's just interested in making contacts with stations in the United States (though often that really includes Canada and Mexico as well.)  Radio Lima Three Alpha are the radio phonetics for the callsign RL3A, who is the DX station that I referred to earlier. I'll explain more about him later, but what's happening here is that he's saying "This is RL3A and I'm ready for another contact".

:03 - At this point various stations are giving their callsigns phonetically (kind of like kids raising their hands in class and saying "pick me, pick me!"). Because of the way radio propagation works, you can't hear everyone calling him, but you can hear Whiskey Alpha Eight Lima Oscar Whiskey (WA8LOW) along with what sounds like a bunch of other people calling all at once. (In fact, that's exactly what's happening).

:07 - "Victor Echo United, what's the prefix?" Although we heard WA8LOW, RL3A has heard part of a callsign that ends in VUE and he's asking for the beginning of it.

:10 - First a bit of just noise, then "Roger, roger, Victor Echo Three Victor Echo United fifty-nine, QSL?" The noise (most of which I've edited out) is where VE3VEU is giving his complete callsign to RL3A. The reason you can't hear VE3VEU is because of propagation. That's a station in Canada and his signal is probably passing right over me, but was mostly likely very strong as heard by RL3A. RL3A acknowledges that he's heard the complete callsign and gives him a standard signal report, 59. The report is given using the RST (Readability, Signal, Tone) system, but in many cases a simple 59 report is used where the exact value of the report isn't important. QSL is a shorthand way of saying "Did you get the information that I sent you?"

:16 - More noise while VE3VUE is talking, then at about :21 "Seventy Three Bill, good luck Q R Zed Radio Lima Three Alpha" Seventy-Three (73) is another ham radio "code" which means "best regards" and is a common way to say "so long" at the end of a contact. If you've been keeping track, you've figured out that the next part is RL3A asking "who wants to be next?"

:25 - More stations calling, then "Whiskey Delta Eight Japan Papa something fifty-nine, over". This is pretty much the same as the previous contact, but in this case RL3A sent the 59 signal report right away. He's got most of WD8JP's call but thinks he might be missing a letter. "Over", as you might expect, just means that he's telling the other station to go ahead and talk.

:34 - I cut quite a bit of the noise out here since it was rather long, and then we hear "QSL John, I am Dima, Delta Italy Mike Alpha and the QTH Moscow. Thank you John for the QSO 73 good luck".  In this case, RL3A is using QSL to acknowledge that he has heard the information sent (it can be used either as a question, as in the clip started at :10, or as an answer). Obviously the WD8 station operator has said his name is John (and it turns out that the complete station call was in fact WD8JP, that's why RL3A didn't respond with the full callsign again, since he had received it correctly the first time), and RL3A's name is Dima, which he spells phonetically. You have probably guessed that QTH is a shorthand for "location", and Dima is located in Moscow. He then closes out the contact with the usual "so long" and after that (though not recorded), he repeated the "loop" of working stations.

I hope you've found this informative, if a bit lengthy. If for some reason you have a problem downloading the MP3 file (it's a bit over 500k bytes in size), please let me know and I'll help you out.

2010 IOTA Contest

I operated a contest yesterday that I'd only ever done before as as DX, The RSGB IOTA contest. In this contest, any station can work any other station, but if you work an island (as defined by the organizers [note that the link goes to a PDF file]) it is worth more points (15, instead of 3 for a non-island contact) and each island you work counts as a multiplier, increasing your score. The contest has some interesting rules regarding hours of operations (you can submit as a "12 hour" or "24 hour" contestant) and some categories that are different from many other contests. (e.g., "Island DXpedition"). I decided that I'd try to operate in the 12-hour, low-power assisted  mixed category as "world" station. That means that my operating time was 12 hours or less, I used 100 watts to transmit, I used the packet cluster to help locate stations, operated both phone and CW, and I was not located on a island.

Unlike many other contests which typically start either in the evening or mid-afternoon for me, this one started at 8AM local (Eastern Daylight Time), and, not being a "morning person", I didn't get on the air until around 11:30 AM, and was a little disappointed to find out that the band conditions didn't seem to be as good as I'd hoped. I started off on 20m phone and made a handful of contacts in the first 20 minutes. I realized that if 15m was open, if I wanted to work anyone outside the US it would have to be early in the afternoon. I switched over to 15m and found ... nothing. Well, almost nothing. I did manage to work two stations in about 10 minutes, one on phone and one on CW. Clearly 15m was not going to be a productive band.

I moved back to 20m and worked stations steadily, thought not terribly quickly using Search & Pounce to find stations. I worked a few dozen stations on phone, then another dozen or so on CW and moved back to phone. After another hour of S&P, I was lucky enough to find a clear frequency to call CQ to try to "run" stations. (During most contests, it's pretty tough to find and keep a frequency, especially for a small station like mine.) I called CQ for a couple of minutes and got one reply from a station in Poland, then about a minute later got a reply from my friend David, K2DSL, who is located nearby. We chatted briefly, then I moved on to work other stations. All of a sudden, a number of stations all started calling me. It turned out that David had "spotted" me on the packet cluster. When that happens many stations will tune to the spot frequency to work whoever is there. For someone like me being spotted is terrific because it significantly increases the rate at which  I can work stations. Prior to being spotted, I'd operated for around 4 hours and had made around 100 contacts, for a rate of around 25/hr. One hour after being spotted I'd worked an additional 65 stations, almost tripling my rate. I finally gave up the frequency after about 90 minutes, making 75 QSOs during that time which comes to around 50/hr. (The final 20 minutes or so of that period was considerably slower). In any case I had a great time and it was a lot of fun being the person that was being called, rather than having to hunt.

After time out for dinner (we were out with friends), I got back on the air at around 11:30PM. The only band that was open at the time was 40m, and because of atmospheric noise due to all the thunderstorms in and around the east coast, the band was very noisy. It was very slow going making contacts, and I suspect that some of the ones that I made then will turn out to be incorrect, since I had a particularly difficult time getting the details of the contest exchange. (For this contest, you gave a serial number, starting at one, and, if located on an island, the island identifier). I gave up after about 90 minutes, with a total of 210 contacts in my log. I thought that it was a pretty decent effort for the seven hours that I operated. Here's my score summary:

        Band  Mode  QSOs     Pts  Sec
           7  CW      10     138    9
           7  LSB     22     246   13
          14  CW      45     399   13
          14  USB    130     990   27
          21  CW       2      18    1
          21  USB      1       3    0
       Total  Both   210    1794   63

            Score : 113,022

Facebook and the ARRL

Earlier today, fellow blogger and Cornbread Road podcaster Jeff, KE9V posted an article on his blog entitled "Screw You Newington". Please take a minute to read that if you haven't already.


While I don't entirely agree with Jeff's comments (and I commented there saying so), I do feel that the ARRL has possibly made a serious mistake in the way they've gone about starting up their presence on Facebook. As I promised Jeff, I've written an email to my ARRL Division Director (Frank, N2FF) and Vice- Directory (Joyce, KA2ANF) explaining my concerns. I have slightly edited what I wrote to them (removing some personal things) and I am posting it here, sort of as an "open letter". Unless they explicitly give permission, I won't be posting their response, but I felt that posting this would give my view of things.

Hi Frank and Joyce,

I hope you've been keeping cool and the DX has been flowing for you.

Recently, the ARRL posted an article on their website about their presence on Facebook. In general, I think this is an excellent idea, as social media, like it or not, is here to stay and is an important part of having public visibility. I think it's a great way to show that the ARRL is active and recognizes that things like Facebook have value to many people. A Facebook presence should help the League acquire new members who may not be aware of the fine work that they do.

However, I do have one concern. The following is quoted from the article:

Thanks to Herman May, KE5HYW, the ARRL has its own Facebook page. Check out the page to see a lot of features you won’t find anywhere else, such as pictures from ARRL events and interactive status updates. [emphasis mine]

I have shared with both of you my disappointment in the current ARRL website, but I think that the worst thing that the League can do is to start posting "exclusive" content elsewhere. While I understand that intent is to provide another outlet for content, asking members to visit a second site doesn't seem to be a good idea to me. If the ARRL wants to keep users coming back to their website (which is typically the goal of any website), the exclusive content should be there, and there alone. I think it's perfectly fine to have some overlap between the sites, but the arrl.org website should be the primary site.

I also think that the League will run into issues with members who aren't willing to join Facebook (they've gotten a lot of bad press lately, some of it deserved, some not, for their privacy issues), and I am sure there will be complaints from users who are being "forced" to join Facebook to view the content.

With that said, I have looked at what's up on Facebook now, and aside from some user-posted pictures, most of the content appear to be cross-posted from the ARRL news feed along with minimal status updates like today's "Who did you have your first QSO with"? If that's really the main thrust of what's going to be available there, then perhaps this isn't really a significant issue, but I am aware of several fellow hams who are taking the information published in the article at face value and assume they'll be missing out on something if they don't join Facebook.

In closing, I hope that you take this note in the spirit in which it's intended, which is to provide constructive criticism of something that I think the ARRL could be doing better.

K2DBK/VP9

As I mentioned previously, Ed, VP9GE helped me to get a license to operate from Bermuda (VP9) for my vacation last week. Since this was all pretty last minute, the exact plans to get on the air were pretty much non-existent, but Ed suggested that I contact him on the repeater when I got down to Bermuda and work out the details that way. I decided to bring along my Icom W32a HT (a full-featured 5w transceiver) as well as my little Icom Q7a HT, which is very small, runs off two AA batteries, but only puts out 500mw (1/2 w).  I haven't used the W32a much recently, and although I've tried to keep the batteries (I have 2 battery packs, one stop and one an extended capacity version) topped off, I think they may have simply reached the end of their life and don't seem to hold a charge very well. Still, I figured that I might be able to get enough power out of them to make contact with Ed.

I didn't mention previously that we were taking a cruise to Bermuda, and because of the location of the ship (we were docked in "Dockyard" it was very difficult to reliably hit the repeater. The first day there, we decided to take the high-speed ferry to Hamilton (the capital city) and I took the small Q7a with me, hoping that there would be good-enough coverage there. As it turns out, that did work out quite well, and I was able to contact Ed via the repeater, using my K2DBK/VP9 callsign. Ed is constantly running around (he runs some guest apartments on the island) and had a number of runs to the airport and meetings over the next couple of days, but we agreed to try to contact each other again at around noon the next day.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in to the repeater the next day, as we were doing some sightseeing in St. Georges, and apparently the repeater doesn't have good enough coverage there to pick up my little 1/2 watt signal. I didn't know it at the time, but I was close enough that I could have worked Ed simplex, but I never tried.

So although I did manage to operate at least once as K2DBK/VP9, I wasn't able to get on HF or 6 meters. Still, it was fun doing that, and if I ever get back to Bermuda, I'll try to plan a bit more in advance and hopefully get on the lower bands.

Fun with Larry & Coleman

Sharon & I spent last weekend visiting my friends Larry, N4VA, and Coleman, K4RZ who live in Virginia. Last year we visited them during the same weekend and I went with Larry & Coleman to W3LPL's open house, which I wrote about when first attended in 2005. Sharon came with me last year as well and she visited with some friends who lived in the area while we visited the big aluminum farm. This trip has become an annual thing for us, and what happens is that I take off the day from work on Friday and drive down, arriving (hopefully) just before rush hour hits the DC area. We have a great barbecue dinner with some friends (mostly non-hams but also with Fred, K3ZO, who is fairly well-known in ham circles), go to W3LPL's Saturday and head home Sunday, with the space in between (when not eating or otherwise having a great time) gets filled with "playing radio", propagation permitting.

When we arrived on Friday, 6 meters was cooperating, and literally just as I walked in Larry had picked up Dennis, 5J0BV who was operating from San Andres Island (which is located to the east of Nicaragua but considered to be a "department" of Columbia). Dennis had a good signal but when I tried to work him with Larry's paddle, I had a really tough time sending my callsign correctly. I make no secret of the fact that I normally send "computer assisted" CW from a keyboard, but given that I'd just gotten out of the car from the 5 hour drive, I was having a really tough time trying to use the paddles. (By the way, I'll say that I had no trouble decoding what Dennis was sending by ear, I just could not get my fingers to cooperate.) Larry finally gave me a bit of an assist, and I was able to count this as a "new one" on 6 meters. Very shortly thereafter, Dennis switched to sideband and I was easily able to complete a contact there as well, even having a bit of time to chat and apologizing for the mess I'd made with the CW contact.

After  dinner 6 meters continued to be open to the west, and I had a good time watching Larry pick up a bunch of new grid squares. Grid squares, like "countries" can be used to earn credit towards certain operating awards, the most popular being VUCC for grid squares and DXCC for countries. For both of these awards there are rules about where you have to be to gain credit, and those rules say that while you can get credit for any DXCC entity while working anywhere within the same entity/country (in other words, I can get DXCC credit regardless of where in the US I'm located), for the VUCC award you can only count new grids that you work from your home grid. (There is actually a little leeway, I'll leave reading the rules as an exercise for the reader.) As a result, although my contact with 5J0BV counted for DXCC, it, along with the other grids that Larry was working that evening, don't count for me for the VUCC award.

More to come ...

Now I've got too much to write about

It's been quite a while since I wrote last, mostly because I didn't have all that much that I felt was interesting. There were a few bits here and there, but none worth writing about. All of a sudden, I have a lot to write about. 

I'll start with a couple of relatively quick things here, and try to get another update out in a couple of days with more.

First, I may be on the air at some point next Wednesday, Thursday and/or Friday as K2DBK/VP9 from Bermuda.  I'm going to be there on vacation and while I hadn't planned on getting on the air, through a series of events I wound up connecting with Ed, VP9GE. If you've worked VP9 on 6m, chances are that you've worked Ed.  This was all very last minute, but I'm trying to arrange at least an "eyeball QSO" (that's a face-to-face meeting for any non-hams out there) with Ed while I'm in town, and Ed's already said that he's going to try to get me a license to operate from there. I don't know how much I'll know before leaving, but hopefully if I make it on the air I'll get spotted on the packet clusters, and if possible I'll try to post here, on my page at qrz.com, and even on twitter.com (@k2dbk).


The other quick thing that I wanted to post about was that fellow blogger Jeff, KE9V, has started a new podcast called "Cornbread Road". As Jeff describes it, it's a "different kind of podcast", and here's what his "About" page says: 

Deep in the Heartland a small group of ham radio enthusiasts enjoy an idyllic existence of wide open spaces, no antenna restrictions, low-noise levels, dark skies, and good fellowship. But things aren’t exactly as they seem on Cornbread Road. Unexplained lights in the night skies, satellite signals masked from the ether, strange late night visitors to this small farming community…
Cornbread Road is a ham radio mystery delivered in tiny audio giblets.

I listened to the first episode during my ride into work this morning and I really enjoyed it.

Sometimes three strikes is a good thing

For those of you outside the US who might not be familiar with baseball, there's a common saying that says "three strikes and you're out". This refers to the fact that you are allowed to "miss" a pitch three times before you are no longer allowed to bat. (For you purists, given that this isn't a baseball blog, I'm going to ignore foul balls, etc.) Taken figuratively, the expression is often used to mean that you only get so many tries at something before you have to stop. In my case, I had the opposite happen over the last week.


About a week ago I wrote about how I'd contacted my first new DXCC entity of 2010, BX5AA in Taiwan. Strike one. Earlier this week, I wrote about my second new DXCC this year, VR2XMT. Strike two. Now I'm very happy to be able to write about strike three.

On Friday morning, I was again working from home, this time because I had some reports to complete that had to be done by the end of the day. It's often easier to do these kinds of things from home since I get disturbed less often. (And yes, I actually got everything done.) P29TL, Tom had been spotted quite a bit recently on 20m, and while I'd heard him a bit earlier in the morning, he wasn't really coming in strong enough to work. On top of that, given the location (Papua, New Guinea) the folks on the west coast had a much better path to him and were apparently working him easily. As with my contact with VR2XMT a few days earlier, I turned down the volume on the radio while I worked on my reports, until I realized that I could hear Tom more clearly and there were fewer folks calling him. In fact, the folks that were working him seemed to be mostly on the east coast, meaning that the band conditions had changed. Sure enough, I called him a few time (he was using upper sideband on 20m), and after a while he replied to my call and gave me a 5x5 signal report (I gave him 5x7). Strike three!

Fortunately, in the DXing game, I'm not limited to just three strikes, so I'm looking forward to working some more "new ones" this year. It just goes to show that even though over the last couple of weeks the conditions have taken a dip, it's still possible to make some really good contacts. (For reference, PNG is around 9,000 miles from my location.)

Today's silver lining

Today's bad news is that the toothache that I'd had for about a week hadn't gone away this morning, and after my dentist took a look yesterday and tried one thing to fix it that didn't work, this morning I made an appointment with an endodontist to see if I needed to have a root canal on that tooth. The folks in his office were nice and managed to get me a late-morning appointment, which meant that I'd work from home in the morning (the endodontist's office is only about 10 minutes from home, so going all the way to work in Secaucus and coming back made no sense) then head to the appointment. (The other bad news is that I did indeed have the root canal procedure done. The procedure itself wasn't so bad, but now that the anesthetic has worn off it's pretty uncomfortable.)


As usual,  when I work from home I usually leave that packet cluster up and running, and this morning was no exception. I saw a spot for Charlie, VR2XMT in Hong Kong on 20m, which is another entity that I still needed to work. I've heard Charlie before and even tried working him but hadn't had any success. While working on some emails for work on my laptop, I tuned to the spot frequency and heard Charlie's very strong signal. I called him several times but wasn't able to get through, so I turned down the volume a bit and kept listening while working. After a while it seemed that there weren't as many callers, and in fact it got to the point where there seemed to be nobody calling at all, so I gave my callsign a few times in response to Charlie's "CQ", and he responded to "the station ending in Echo Bravo Kilo". I figured that he might have been calling me so I called phonetically a few more times and sure enough, he was calling me. We exchanged 5x5 signal reports, I thanked him, and I had a new one in the log!


Unfortunately, Charlie doesn't participate in Logbook of the World, but since this is an all-time new entity I would have been sending for a paper QSL card anyway, which I will get in the mail very soon. It's always great to work a new DXCC entity, and it was especially great to have worked my 2nd new one this year within less than a week of working the previous one.

 

My first new entity for 2010

Yesterday morning, I got a nice surprise. I was working from home in the morning and chatting on the computer with Larry, N4VA. He was also at home and told me that Jimmy, BX5AA was coming in very strong on 20 meters. Jimmy is located in Taiwan, and that's a DXCC entity that I'd never worked before, so I was anxious to try to make a contact. I tuned to the frequency and at first, I only heard a very weak station, which I assumed was Jimmy, and figured that I wasn't going to have a chance to work him. It wasn't surprising that he'd be louder to Larry, since he's got a beam on his tower instead of just a G5RV (wire) up in the air.

However, it turns out that I was hearing a local station that Jimmy was working, and when it was Jimmy's turn to transmit I heard him very well. (I had heard him and tried to work him in the past, but the signals were much weaker.) Although he had a pretty good pileup, he heard part of my callsign (the "BK" part always seems to get through), and he asked just for the "Bravo Kilo" station. It took a few tries, but he was patient and eventually he got the complete and correct callsign, and gave me a 5x5 signal report. (I gave him a 5x9). That was that, and he moved on to working other stations.

I noticed on his website that he uses Logbook of The World, so that night I uploaded my contact with him, and to my surprise I found that he'd already uploaded his contacts and there was a confirmed QSL record generated. The time from contact to confirmation was probably under 12 hours. Not bad for a station from Taiwan!

I'll be sending for a paper card anyway, as while I think LoTW is fantastic, there's nothing like having an old-fashioned QSL card to look at.

The new ARRL website is disappointing

I'm going to stray a bit from my normal topics to discuss the newly updated ARRL website which after several attempts finally went live this week. My overall response was one of disappointment. I am well aware that any it's often difficult to get pretty much anything right in Information Technology  the first time. (In fact, I was commenting to one of my colleagues at work that if you think you've gotten something right on the first try, you have overlooked something). My fellow bloggers Dan, KB6NU and David, K2DSL have written posts describing some of the flaws, and I suggest you read them for the details.

David in particular enumerated a lot of the different issues, and while I'm not going to add anything to his list, I will mention that in particular, the two things that are particularly annoying are the fact that it seems that even with the "favorites" feature, nearly everything requires a lot more clicks to get to (which is one of the main things you don't want to do if you want people to keep visiting your site) and that you no longer remain logged in for very long. (It looks like they may have adjusted this value since David wrote his blog, but in any case, it should allow you to remain logged in for at least a few weeks minimum; this isn't a banking site.)

I want to make clear that I am a big fan of the ARRL, and that I really appreciate the advocacy they provide for our hobby. I know that an undertaking of this magnitude must have been quite difficult, but I think that they should have allowed ARRL members "preview" access much earlier in the process. (Yes, I'm aware that there was an article in QST, but static images are not the same as actually using the site.) I suspect that the reason for not doing so was a concern over the flood of input that they may would have received, but when you are developing something that is supposed to provide service to your members, you need to take their feedback into account.

I sincerely hope that the ARRL will listen to those of us who have been sending in feedback and will be able to make the changes to make the website at least as useful as it was before the changes. I also hope that we, the members, don't hear that "it's too far along in the process to change things".

The NA-034 operation that almost wasn't: Epilogue

Well, I was wrong. Or was I?

When I got home after my NA-034 operation, I wanted to try to understand what happened. I was sure that I'd operated solely off a car battery in the past and as long as I was connected directly to the battery I hadn't had any problems. Based on some testing that I did, I discovered that I may have been mistaken. The short version is that I discovered that by using the battery in my car without the engine running, I was able to reproduce the "strange noise in headset" that I recently wrote about, and that by running the car engine, that problem went away. There's a bit more to it though. Read on if you're interested.

I needed to have some way to measure the voltage from the battery and the amount of current that it was drawing while the radio was transmitting. While I could do this with a couple of meters when I was home, based on some recommendations that I got from W3FF, K8EAB, and NE1RD, I picked up a Super Whattmeter from Astroflight for around $50 plus shipping. These devices are used by folks who fly electric model airplanes because you really don't want your battery to die when it's up in the air. As it turns out, they are well-suited for monitoring your power when operating portable. Of course, they work fine too in the home shack, though my power supply has meters so it's not needed. The picture here shows it hooked up that way for testing, and you can see that the Astron supply is supplying 13.8v.

As a side note, I started using quick-disconnect connectors made by Workman Electronic quite a number of years ago, before Anderson Powerpoles became popular. I was looking for some kind of quick disconnect power connector and found patch cables similar to the ones in the picture at a hamfest. I typically cut them in half and crimp them onto whatever I need to, be it battery clamps, the power cord for a radio, and so on. The good part is that I've been able to find them surplus at hamfests (though I've seen from a number of places online that they are now discontinued) but the bad news is that they don't match what most other folks use. I keep meaning to make myself a set of adapters to connect to Powerpoles.

I crimped a set of the quick disconnects onto the Whattmeter and did a test with the power supply and radio in the shack to ensure that the meter was working and found that it worked perfectly. The shack power supply was putting out just over 13.8 volts with the Icom 756 Pro II drawing around 3 amps while receiving. (Interestingly, this is about 0.6A below what the ARRL reported in their testing, but I've had some repair work done on the radio and it's possible that some of the newer components draw less than the originals.) The next step was to reproduce what I'd set up while in Florida.

As luck would have it, the weather was beautiful this weekend, and as we had no plans on Sunday, I took the 706, the Buddistick, the Whattmeter, the antenna analyzer, and a length of coax outside. I set up the Buddistick on the front lawn (I just had it on the mini-tripod sitting on the lawn, though I did put the radial over a couple of plastic lawn chairs to keep it off the ground) which while not optimal for DX, took me all of 5 minutes to set up with a good match to the radio, as verified by the antenna analyzer. I connected the radio to the antenna then connected the power cables to the car battery, with the Whattmeter in-line. My thoughts were to do a few tests with the engine off, fully expecting that I wouldn't have any issues, then turn the engine on to see what kind of difference it made. I found an empty frequency on 20m and started testing. As soon as I transmitted, without looking at the meter, I knew that, to my surprise, I'd reproduced the problem: That nasty noise in the headphones was back.

What I figured I'd do was to collect data using various levels of transmit power to see the effect on the voltage and current draw. The meter itself also shows power in watts, though of course that's trivial to calculate if you already have current and voltage. (From Ohm's law, P=I×E). I quickly discovered that the car battery wasn't able to supply sufficient voltage unless I was transmitting with about 10 watts or less. The specification for the 706 MkIIG is that it requires 13.8vdc ± 15% meaning the minimum allowable voltage is 11.73vdc. With the car engine turned off, I measured 11.68v with the radio drawing 5.79A when transmitting using 10w. At 40w (the next step I measured; when I was in Florida I was able to "get away" with 40w when testing with KH6ITY), I measured 11.52v while drawing 8.23A.  At 60w transmit power and up, the voltage dropped to about 11.4v but the radio was simply unable to draw the current needed.

With the car running, it was a completely different situation. Even at full transmit power (100w), the voltage supplied to the radio was 13.24volts at 14.77A. (I'm not sure why my current draw measurement at that power was different from the specifications for the radio, which were also pretty close to what the ARRL measured). I took the results and plotted it out in transmit power vs. watts consumed for both the case with the engine on and the engine off, and it's pretty clear that with the engine off, the battery simply isn't able to supply the required power. (You may need to click on that chart to have it display in a readable size. If you're reading this via email and that doesn't work for you, go to the web version of this post at k2dbk.blogspot.com and it should work from there.)

You can see from the chart that not only couldn't the battery supply sufficient power for the transmit needs, it was only able to supply less as the radio tried to use more, presumably because the battery simply couldn't "keep up". So all my empirical testing seemed to prove that with the setup that I was using, I simply couldn't operation at full power using just a car battery with the engine running. 


However, similar to bees who simply don't know that they can't fly, so they do, apparently my radio didn't know that it didn't have enough power to operate, at least during my 2004 and 2006 operations from NA-034, so it worked just fine. During those operations I know that I did not have the car running, yet I had no issues with power. The key for me know will be to find out what has changed. I am using the same power cables and the same radio (the antenna was different, but that shouldn't matter), yet something has changed. The next thing I am going to do is to see if perhaps there is a problem with the power cables that may have occurred over the years. 

Although I attempted to measure the resistance in the power cables and came up with a measured 0.1 Ohms, my meter is probably fairly inaccurate at such low resistance, so I did a calculation instead assuming that I've got all 12 AWG wire in place. (Part of it is actually 10AWG, but I'm using 12 to account for any losses due to connectors and splices.) Using a 12v supply with a load of 15A (matching what I saw when the engine was running) and a length of 20 feet, the voltage drop calculator that I used shows an estimated voltage drop of around 8%. Allowing a bit of wiggle room for the length, it appears that the voltage drop would be somewhere between around 6% and 10% which corresponds to a voltage at the load (radio) of between 11.3v and 10.8v. Even the highest end of that range is too low for the radio to operate properly. Dropping the transmit power to 40w results in the voltage to the radio of about 11.5v which is a bit below spec but probably would allow operation, with some minor distortion. That seems to match what I had experienced.


The other factor that I haven't played around with much is temperature, and I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. At this point, I think the best thing to do is to shorten the power cable as much as I reasonably can, replacing the section that is currently 12AWG wire with 10AWG wire. I suspect that will help ensure sufficient current flow while minimizing voltage drop.


I would be very interested in any feedback from anyone who can shed a bit more light on these issues, as I know that there are other factors that may come into play, such as the battery chemistry and perhaps other parts of the car's electrical system.

The NA-034 operation that almost wasn't, Part IV

If you haven't read Part I , Part II and Part III first, you might want to do that.

As I mentioned previously, once I got the power problem figured out I was able to easily make contacts with other stations, which is what I'd planned to do in the first place. In the first half-hour of operating, I made contact with about 25 stations. Compared to rare DX stations this is very slow, but my operation was very low-key and I'd often spend a bit of time to briefly chat with the other operators, so this was far from the typical "K2DBK you are 59 thanks QR Zed" that you hear in those operations. I was having a great time working stations, and after a while I started to hear folks in Europe calling me, but they were covered up by the US callers. I figured that I'd try to work as many folks outside North America as I could, so I asked for only stations outside of North America, and worked 9 stations in as many minutes, all outside the US. I worked folks in Italy, Poland, Spain, and Belarus all in fairly quick succession. Thanks very much to the folks in North America who very politely stood by while I worked the other stations. Not one single person from North America called when I was asking for the other folks. (By way of explanation, it is an unfortunate fact of life that all-too-often hams will "call out of turn" and ignore requests from contacts from specific areas. When they do that, it just slows down the process.)


After I had contacted the folks outside North America, I went back to working any station that was calling me, and I picked up a mix of both US stations and some more DX from Italy, Serbia, and Belgium. I had a couple of other chats during a few lulls with Larry, KH6ITY, and finally shut down for the day at around 4:45PM local time to head back to have dinner with the Sharon in St. Armands.

The Legendary Salty Dog

The following day I got somewhat of a later start than expected, but I did want to stop at The Old Salty Dog again, this time to have what is one of the most delicious and presumably most unhealthy foods in existence: Their signature "Salty Dog". A Salty Dog is a jumbo hot dog dipped in beer batter and deep fried. It is indescribably delicious. Of course, it must be washed down with a nice cold bevarage (a Bass Ale for me, thanks). 


When I arrived at the park, the parking spot I'd had the first day was taken, and I was having trouble finding a place to park where I could be close enough to be able to set up on a picnic table, but as I was walking around (I'd parked temporarily "out of range") someone left and I was able to pull in close to a different table, this time right out in the sun. The only downside to this location was there there wasn't another table nearby so that I could set up the antenna on a different table, but I was able to set up the antenna on one end of the table and operate from the other without any issues.  Well, not at first.

Buddistick set up for 20m with counterpoise thrown
over a tree branch

I started off working stations on 20 meters and worked a number of US and Canadian stations, as well as a station from Slovakia and one from Hungary. I'd been trying to set up a contact with Scott, NE1RD, who was now operating from the island of St. Thomas (as KP2/NE1RD) on and off for a while by this point. I emailed Scott from my BlackBerry that I was currently on 14.260Mhz and Scott quickly threw together an antenna for 20m, but by the time he got on the air, I'd lost the frequency that I was using and we didn't make the contact. "Losing" the frequency means that I was using it to make contacts, but due to the way that propagation works, sometimes two (or more) stations will be using the same frequency, both unable to hear each other until the conditions change, then usually one of the stations will wind up "taking over" the frequency. This is what happened in my case, and I "lost".


As it turned out, Scott had already built a 2 element beam for 15 meters using the Buddipole gear that he'd brought, which would provide a much better signal to me. I reconfigured my antenna for 15m (very easy to do), and coordinating once again via email we were able to contact each other. Neither Scott nor I consider ourselves as "rag-chewers", which are folks who prefer to get on the radio and have a nice long chat with someone. I've certainly done that in the past, but most of my current interest is in working DX stations and contesting, both of which  require very brief, specific exchanges of information. However, Scott and I found that we had a lot to talk about, so the contact was not a brief one. About 10 or 15 minutes into our conversation, I got another visit from Mr. Murphy.


As we were talking on the radio, I thought that I noticed the odd sound in my headset that I'd heard previously. This didn't make any sense, since the car was still running (as you'll recall, the battery alone was unable to provide sufficient power to transmit at full power). Scott then commented that he could hear my signal starting to distort, so it sounded like the problem was returning. We both tried to figure out what might be going wrong, and while trying to figure out what could have "broken" while operating (nothing had been touched since I originally got on the air that day), I thought that perhaps our relatively long chat had caused the power cables to heat, which in turn would increase the resistance in the cables, reducing the power available to the radio. I felt along the length of the cable but didn't feel any warm spots. I was about to rule out the wire heating up when I realized that I'd closed the hood on the car almost all the way and when I opened it, obviously (in hindsight) the portion of the power cable that was closest to the battery, and under the hood, was quite warm. It hadn't heated up solely from transmitting, but also because it was a warm day and with the engine running and the hood closed, the engine compartment was quite hot. The solution to the problem was now quite simple: Leave the hood of the car open.


After just a minute or two, the power cables cooled enough to allow enough power to flow so that my radio was again transmitting normally. Scott and I finished our chat, and I decided to stay on 15m where I worked stations from Puerto Rico, Italy, Portugal, and the US, finally finishing up with a nice chat with Andy, AE6Y who was operating from Aruba as P49Y, having just arrived there prior to the WPX Contest that was coming up. When I finished with Andy, it was time to shut the station down to head back for a final family dinner, since we were leaving for home the next day.


In all, despite losing a day of operating due to the power problem, I would rate this as a successful operation for a number of reasons. First, I did finally get on the air and made contact with 16 different DXCC entities (countries) and at least 10 different states. (It was almost certainly more than that, but I didn't always get the name of the state for the station that I was talking to.) Second, I was able to give back a bit to the hobby by talking to, and with Larry, KH6ITY's class. If even one of his students goes on to get his ham license that would really be a wonderful extra benefit. Third, I've made a number of new friends both as the result of both my operation on the air and the attempts to troubleshoot with the wonderful folks from the Buddipole Users Group. Fourth, I've learned a bit more than I already knew about troubleshooting this type of problem. Finally, and perhaps most important, despite the issues that I ran into, I had a really good time doing this.


I have really enjoyed writing this series, and I want to thank those of you who've commented about how you've enjoyed it as well. There is a bit more information that I want to share that I'm going to write as an epilogue to this series, please look for that soon.


Until then,
73,
David, K2DBK

Update: I've posted the epilogue.

The NA-034 operation that almost wasn't, Part III

If you haven't read Part I and Part II first, you might want to do that.

As I mentioned previously, meeting Larry, KH6ITY on the air turned out to be a great stroke of luck for me, and the contact proved to be beneficial for both of us. Larry is a technology teacher at a high school in Texas, and when he responded to my call on the air, he was looking for a contact to speak with his class via ham radio as a demonstration. I was more than happy to do so, but what Larry told me was that while he could hear me, my audio was very distorted and I was extremely difficult to understand. Somehow, I managed to convey to him enough that he understood that I'd done some pretty extensive troubleshooting on the antenna system, so he suggested that I try to reduce the transmitter power to see if that would help. Since I'd connected the radio directly to the car battery, I figured that power wouldn't likely be the source of the problem, but given that nothing else I'd tried had worked, I figured I'd give it a shot. 

I turned the power down to about 40% of the maximum and transmitted, asking Larry if my signal was any better. Before he even answered, I knew what the answer was: I was no longer hearing that odd noise in my headset, and Larry confirmed that indeed my signal had no issues. Although the signal strength was somewhat reduced, Larry was able to report that the audio artifacts were completely gone. He then asked me about what kind of radio I was using (an Icom 706 MKIIG), and when I told him that, I think that both he and I figured out the problem, both from similar past experiences. First, a little bit of background. 

All electronic equipment requires a power supply that is capable of supplying a certain amount of electrical current at a voltage within a specified range.  According to the manual, the 706 MKIIG  draws up to 20 amps at 13.8 volts DC+/- 15%. Although the electrical system in a car is rated at 12 volts DC, it turns out that a charged car battery will provide somewhat more than 12 volts, and the battery is charged at somewhere between 13.2 to 14.4 volts. A running engine which is charging the battery should provide enough power for the radio, but what happens if the car isn't running? It turns out that in practice, there is some "give" in these numbers, but at some point, the radio doesn't function properly. 


For those of you who have forgotten (or never knew), one of the most basic formulas in electricity is known as Ohm's Law. It states the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance. In order to try to keep my readers awake, I'll skip all the details and say that Ohms law explains that the length of the power cord, among other factors, affects the amount of actual power that the car battery is able to deliver to the radio. I'd used this exact same setup previously from at least two different vehicles without any issue. However, it seems that the battery in the rental car (a Mazda 5) that I had was a bit weaker than the others that I'd previously used and it just wasn't capable of delivering enough power to the radio. 


The Icom 706 MkIIG is probably one of the most popular radios made in recent years. It is very portable, capable of transmitting on all the HF radio bands, (10m through 160m) and can also transmit on VHF (6m and 2m) and UHF bands (70 cm). This was the first HF radio that I ever bought, and it has served me very well for the almost 10 years that I've owned it. However, it does have one problem (perhaps common to other similar radios): When it doesn't get enough power to transmit properly, instead of simply shutting down or refusing to transmit, the transmitted audio gets distorted. 


Both Larry and I had previous experiences where the radio wasn't supplied enough power and exhibited this problem. In my case, the very first time that I ever tried to operate from a car, I was parked outside a friend's vacation home in upstate New York, and figured that the accessory adapter (we called them cigarette lighters back then) looked like an easy way to hook up the radio. It turns out that the wiring for the lighter plug wasn't capable of carrying the 20amps at 13.8vdc that the radio requires to transmit at full power. My audio was distorted, and a helpful ham in Italy (I wish I'd made a note of his call) helped me to troubleshoot the problem. At the time, the solution was to simply connect the radio directly to the car battery, which did the trick.


Since I was already connected directly to the battery, the only other thing that I could do was to start the engine, hoping that the charging current provided by the car's alternator would provide enough power to the radio when transmitting at full power. I adjusted the transmitter output back to 100%, and Larry verified that my audio was still clear. Finally, I was on the air, and could start making contacts.

The antenna was mounted on a picnic table about 15 meters away, I was sitting underneath some trees, and I was able to make contact with other stations all around the world. This was what I'd planned to do.


However, Murphy still had one surprise in store for me, which didn't crop up until the next day.


The sage concludes with Part IV.

The NA-034 operation that almost wasn't, Part II

If you haven't read Part I of this series already, you might want to do that first.

It turns out that there was indeed a park at the southern end of the island named South Lido Park that was the perfect location to try again. There was a parking lot that bordered the park, and there were a few parking spots that were close enough to picnic tables that I could easily set up the radio and antenna on a table (or even on different tables) with the power cables connected to the car battery. This seemed like a good opportunity to get the antenna even farther away from the car and the radio, and hopefully away from the source of the RF interference. I set up the antenna, and was able to throw the counterpoise over a nearby low tree branch. (One of the recommendations for this particular antenna is to keep the counterpoise at least 2 feet off the ground.) I carefully checked the SWR with the antenna analyzer and found a good match.

I decided to try to eliminate the feedline that I'd brought with me as a possible issue, so I connected the antenna to the radio with a very short (about .5 meter) patch cable that I'd brought with me. Normally it's not a very good idea to set up that close to the antenna, but I figured that for diagnostic purposes I could do it. It turns out that I wasn't going to transmit very long that way anyway since I had the same problem. At this point, I decided to go back to the regular feedline, which is a 15m length of RG-8x that I've used for the past several years without issue. What I did was to create an RF choke by coiling some of the excess feedline at the feedpoint. The idea behind doing this is to help keep RF off the outside of the feedline, where it can radiate and cause issues. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to help either.

During these tests, in addition to just hearing the odd noise in my headset, and on the radio speaker when I disconnected the headset, I was attempting to call some stations that I had been hearing all afternoon. The location that I had now moved
 to was even better than my previous location, as there was water on 3 sides, which means I had an especially good path to Europe, South America, and the southwest US. Some of the stations that I'd tried to contact were extremely strong and should not have been difficult at all to contact. I was finally able to make a contact with S55OO so I knew that the radio was actually transmitting, though he was in the middle of working many other stations so I didn't have a chance to ask him for a signal report. At that point, I was confused and frustrated at not being able to locate the source of the problem, and given that it was getting late in the afternoon, I decided to break down and shut down for the evening.

After heading back home (well, not to NJ, to where we were saying), I sent an email the Buddipole Users Group to see if anyone there had any ideas what the problem might be. I got back responses from a number of folks within a few hours, most of them suggesting that I try most of the things I'd already tried (which of course they didn't know I'd done). A couple of folks suggested trying to use some ferrite beads in various places on power cable, microphone cable, and power cables. Unfortunately, I didn't have any with me, and they aren't the kind of thing that are stocked in a local hardware store or even Radio Shack. Budd, W3FF, and Scott, NE1RD pointed out that since I'd made one contact that the radio must be transmitting, but it did seem that there was still some problem.

The next morning, I woke up, checked my email and found a few more things to try, packed up the car, and headed out for lunch at The Old Salty Dog on nearby Siesta Key. I was still frustrated that I hadn't figured out what the problem was, but things always seem better after a beer and a fried Grouper sandwich. They probably would have seemed even better after two or three beers, but since I still had to drive back to the operating site I decided to stop after one.

When I arrived at South Lido Park, I found an even better location than on the previous day, where the operating position was under trees for shade and I was able to set up the antenna on a different table from the operating position, putting even more distance between the antenna, the radio, and the car. I made sure to have the RF choke in place as close as possible to the feedpoint, and wound up as much of the excess feedline into that choke to try to eliminate as much of the unwanted RF on the outside of the feedline as possible.

I was still hearing what I thought was RF in my headset (or from the radio speaker when I switched to the hand microphone), but I decided to call CQ anyway, hoping that perhaps someone would be able to hear me and perhaps let me know what my on-air signal sounded like. I finally got an answer back from Larry, KH6ITY who, as it turns out, was a technology teacher in Texas and was in the middle of demonstrating ham radio to his class. As it turned out, meeting Larry on the air was a wonderful stroke of luck.

Click here for Part III.

The NA-034 operation that almost wasn't, Part I

As I mentioned in my posting from last week, I spent a few days in Florida recently. I was down there visiting family, but had free time in the afternoons and had planned on operating for a few hours each day from Lido Key, which is IOTA designator NA-034. Briefly, IOTA (Islands On The Air) is a program where hams operate from various islands all over the world and make contacts with other hams. There's an awards program for contacting various numbers of islands. The rules (link goes to a PDF file) for what qualifies as an island for IOTA purposes are a bit complex, but Lido Key, just west of Sarasota, Florida, qualifies. I've made a couple of trips down there in the past and had a lot of fun operating from that location.

My plan was to head out to the parking lot of Lido Beach and set up there, as I've done in the past.This location is very easy to get to, and the parking lot has never been full when I've been there, so I can take up as much space as I need. For this portable operation, instead of using hamsticks (which are very straightforward to use but since they are nearly 2 meters long, are hard to ship), I decided to use my Buddistick vertical antenna. I've written about the Buddistick quite a bit here before, you can do a search from the search box on the right of the blog home page for "buddistick" to see all the references. Because Sharon and I didn't want to have to check baggage, I shipped the radio (my trusty Icom 706MkIIG), feedline, power cables, and Buddistick down to a relative a couple of days before we left NJ.

I set up the radio and initially mounted the antenna on the rear of the rental car, a Mazda 5, which seemed to be a good way to get it up fairly high and also allowed me to toss the counterpoise wire over a low tree branch. (It's a bit difficult to see, but you can view the counterpose wire just above the bottom of the picture, it's the very thin wire.) I set up the antenna, configured it for 20m, and checked it with the antenna analyzer, where I found that I had excellent SWR at my intended operating frequency of 14.260Mhz (one of the standard IOTA frequencies). I connected the antenna to the feedline, and used the built-in SWR testing in the radio to ensure that the SWR was still good (it was), found that my intended frequency was unoccupied, and started to call CQ. That's when I discovered that I had a pretty serious problem.

The problem was that when I keyed the radio and called CQ, I could hear a lot of what sounded like RF feedback in the headset. My assumption was that for some reason, the transmitted signal from the transmitted signal from the radio was being fed back into the radio, and causing the noise that I was hearing in my headset. As it turned out, I was wrong about the source of the problem, but I didn't find that out for another 24 hours. Working on that initial assumption, I tried to move the antenna to a slightly different location on the car, and even tried to use the very small Buddistick tripod to place the antenna on the ground much farther away from the car, but had no success. (By the way, that's a wonderful little tripod, but it's really not designed to work on a concrete parking lot surface where you can neither dig the legs in nor secure it to anything. All it took was a tiny breeze to knock over the antenna. Fortunately, no damage was done to the whip antenna, but I'll be a bit more careful about trying that again.)

At that point, I had to take a break from troubleshooting to join a conference call at work. (Yes, even though I was on vacation.) After the call and a follow-up call, about 90 minutes had passed. I tried a few more attempts to play with the radial height, move the location of the radio, and to create an RF choke by coiling some feedline at the feedpoint of the antenna, but was still having no success. I decided to try to find another operating location, hoping to find a park where I could mount the antenna on a picnic table much farther away from the radio, hoping that any RF problems coming from the antenna would be significantly reduced by the distance. I looked at the GPS I'd brought with me and it appear to show a park farther south on the island, so I put all the gear in the car, and headed south.

The saga continues in Part II.

Another operation from Lido Key, NA-034

I just wanted to put up a quick note to say that I expect to be active from IOTA NA-034, Lido Key from March 22-24, 2010. I'll be down there visiting family but I expect to have a few hours each day (probably between about 15:00-20:00 GMT) to operate. Instead of using hamsticks as I have in the past, I'm going to be using my Buddistick which gives me a bit more flexibility as to the bands I'll be using (and was a lot easier to ship; I didn't want to have to deal with checking a 6-foot long hamstick for the flight). It should perform reasonably well since my normal operating position is from a parking lot that's just a few dozen meters from the Gulf of Mexico, and the saltwater should help with propagation, particularly to the south and west.

Most likely I'll only be on SSB for this short trip, and I'll stay close to the standard IOTA frequencies, primarily on 20m (14.260) and 15m (21.260), though I may move around if the bands cooperate.

If anyone is in the area (Sarasota, FL) and wants to get together during one of those afternoons, please drop me line.

Help Support The Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Enhancement Act of 2009

Please help support The Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Enhancement Act of 2009. I'm going to quote from the ARRL's Government Relations page to explain what it will do:

What S 1755 Does

If enacted into law, S 1755 - the Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Enhancement Act of 2009 - would instruct the Secretary of Homeland Security to undertake a study, and report its findings to Congress within 180 days, on the uses and capabilities of Amateur Radio communications in emergencies and disaster relief.

The study shall:

• Include recommendations for enhancements in the voluntary deployment of Amateur Radio licensees in disaster and emergency communications and disaster relief efforts;
• Include recommendations for improved integration of Amateur Radio operators in planning and in furtherance of the Department of Homeland Security initiatives;
• Identify unreasonable or unnecessary impediments to enhanced Amateur Radio communications, such as the effects of private land use regulations on residential antenna installations, and make recommendations regarding such impediments;
• Include an evaluation of section 207 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-104, 110 Stat. 56 (1996)); and
• Recommend whether section 207 should be modified to prevent unreasonable private land use restrictions that impair the ability of amateurs to conduct, or prepare to conduct, emergency communications by means of effective outdoor antennas and support structures at reasonable heights and dimensions for the purpose, in residential areas.

To support this bill, the ARRL says:

Please contact Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA-30) and Ranking Member Joe Barton (R-TX-6), urging them to send this bipartisan bill to the House floor for adoption. A sample letter can be found here. Send your letters urging consideration of S 1755 by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to Rep Waxman via fax at 202-225-2525, and to Rep Barton via fax at 202-225-1919. Also, please fax a copy of your letters to the ARRL's Washington representative, Chwat & Co at 703-684-7594.

If you're like many of us and have free dialing to anywhere in the US and have a fax machine, this is a very easy and very inexpensive way to support amateur radio. Make sure that you sign the letter (which proves that this isn't just some kind of automated system sending it) and if you can, customize the letter or, better still, hand-write a letter which will draw even more attention. If you aren't able to edit the letter from the link, please post a comment to my blog and I can convert it to pretty much any format that you need.

Thanks for helping.

(Apologies to those of you outside the US for this US-specific posting).

Happy hamiversary to me

Today is the 10th anniversary of me getting my first ham radio license, which was officially issued by the FCC on March 1, 2000. My original callsign as issued was KC2FZT, though I changed to the current vanity callsign (K2DBK) later that year, just before I upgraded to my General license. At the time I was licensed, I had to take both the old Novice and Technician written tests to receive a Technician class license. (Major license restructuring occurred on April 15, 2000, when they reduced the number of license classes from 6 to 3 (Technician, General, and Amateur Extra). I didn't take a Morse code test at the time (which would have given me "Technician Plus" privileges), but I did take a 5wpm test later that year as part of the General Exam. And no, I didn't have to go to the FCC office in New York City as used to be the process, I took my exams in Joyce, KA2ANF's basement from a dedicated group of Volunteer Examiners.

I first got interested in getting onto the HF bands after participating in Field Day that year. Alan, KG2MV, helped me work the 15m phone tent (and yes, the bands were a whole lot better then, so we were pretty busy) and I got hooked. In addition to friends in my radio club (the 10-70 Repeater Association), I also had a lot of encouragement from a co-worker Jim, WK8G, and of course from my good friend Larry, N4VA, who continues to encourage me today.

Reflecting back on 10 years as a ham, there are a number of things that I've come to realize are why I so enjoy the hobby. There is always something new to try, be it a new digital mode, a new contest, or operating from a new location, although you can always go back on something you already know well and with which you are comfortable. The hobby is there when I'm ready for it; I don't have to depend on good weather or some particular location. And of course, there are good friends and good times for those of us drawn together by a common avocation.

Sunspots are back ... and so am I

Those of you who are regular readers here know that I normally try to publish something around once every week or so. I've had some unplanned downtime in the past, and that's the case with my recent 2 month absence. For the most part, I have been trying to get on the radio, but I've been dealing with some things for a while and I haven't really felt up to writing. I'm going to to try to change that and get back on a somewhat regular schedule again.

The good news is that there is something to write about. As I indicated in the title of this post, solar cycle 24 finally seems to have taken hold. For weeks or even months at a time, the sunspot number had been a miserable zero. Now and then there would be a single brief spot over the past few months, but typically they wouldn't last very long or be large enough to have any positive effect on the ionosphere. That seems to be changing, at long last.

For the past couple of weeks, the sunspot number has been in the 30-50 range. The number itself is a little confusing: as I write this, the Boulder sunspot number is 37, but that doesn't mean that there are 37 sunspots. This explanation from spaceweather.com gives a general overview, and there are many others (ask your favorite search engine for "sunspot number), but a really simplified explanation is that the number represents both the number of groups of sunspots as well as the actual count of spots. For hams, higher is better, as it causes more ionization to occur, which in turn means that we've got a better "surface" to use to bounce our signals.

In addition to the sunspot number, one of the other important indicators is the solar flux index. This number had been stuck at around 69 or 70 (the minimum) for many months. Finally, it's started to move up the scale and has been in the mid-90s for most of the week. Again, this is an indication that propagation will be good.

My recent on-air experience has shown that things have improved significantly. Increased propagation means that bands like 10m and 12m become useful. This has happened recently, and I took a look at my log to try to see just how good things have gotten.

I've made 8 contacts in the last two days on 12m, including working into South Africa and Nigeria. That doesn't sound like much until you consider the following: In 2009, I had 2 contacts on 12m, and one of those was with 4U1UN, the United Nations station, which is only about 20 miles or so from me. (That was ground wave propagation, not bounced off the ionosphere.) In 2008, I had 4 contacts, 7 in 2007, 8 in 2006, and so on, I hadn't made a significant number of contacts since 2002 and earlier on 12m.

The point is that things are finally starting to turn around. The bands are improving, and I am having a tremendous amount of fun being able to pick up some new bands for a bunch of countries again.

As I've told a few hams who weren't around for solar cycle 23, You ain't seen nothin' yet.