VE3OIJ -

I recently acquired an Icom ID-1 in order to play with D-Star.  I chose the ID-1 because, quite frankly, I have enough 2m / 70 cm radios around the house: 3 handhelds, 2 mobiles, and 2 base radios.  I just didn't need another radio for that band.  I had head a lot about the wonders of D-Star, but I was skeptical.  I wanted to give it a try to see if it lived up to the hype and a good way to do that seemed to be on the 23 cm band - I expected a general lack of interference, and the added benefit of being able to take a stab at 128 kbps data was a plus.

Recently, I was at the HAM-EX in Brampton, and RadioWorld had a great deal on the ID-1, so I picked it up.  I'll probably review the radio in a later post, but suffice it to say that setting up for D-Star is not for the timid, especially given the quality of translation in an Icom manual.  There is, however, a fair bit of good literature out there written by amateurs to guide you through that process.

I set up my radio, and after waiting for registration, was apparently good to go.  Unfortunately, despite receiving the local repeater at full scale on my antenna at 8 feet, I was unable to reliably access it, even with 10 watts.  I moved the antenna up to 20 feet and was still unable to access it.  It was suggested I needed a higher gain antenna.

Now, I am going to kvetch here for a moment.  I am using about 50 feet of RG/8U coaxial cable to feed an MFJ-1532N.  If 10 watts is coming out of my radio, which it seems to be, I should lose 4.2 dB and let's run with 1 dB loss between the connectors at each end (which is probably overstating it).  The antenna is supposed to have 11.7 dB of gain (presumably dBi, so let's drop 2.15 for dBd which is more realistic), for a net gain of 3.85 dBd, all-in.  That's an ERP of about 24 watts.  Evidently, that's not good enough.  I can only conjecture that the building penetration of 23 cm is not as effective as I was led to believe.  A fluke of positioning (see below) means I have to drill through two buildings.  I must admit, I am more than a little bit surprised that there is so much path loss as a result of this, but it's the only explanation that makes sense barring the repeater's antenna system being inadequate, and since I believe they use the same MFJ-1532N...

It is an excuse for a project. My plan, therefore, is to construct a 20 element yagi for the radio.  I use Yagi Calculator by John Drew (VK5DJ) to run the calculations and produce a design.  My intention is to use old arrow shafts for the reflector and directors (I am an archer), and measuring tape for the folded dipole driver.

Running the appropriate dimensions of materials into the program, this is the result:

(click to see full size)

I have measured the arrow shafts, and I will be using a length of seasoned 1x2 for the boom.  It requires 3 arrow shafts to make all 19 parasitic elements.  One advantage to having long arms - long arrows for antenna elements.

This should give me 4 to 6 more dB of gain (bringing my ERP up to somewhere between 61 and 97 watts.  Hopefully that is enough to blast through whatever the obstructions might be.

As I was writing this, it occurred to me that I might be able to trace LOS on Google Earth.  Sure enough, a perusal of the Line of Sight between my house and the repeater site is somewhat revealing.  There are two obstacles that, coincidentally block my line of sight.  If I lived just a few houses away on either side of my QTH, I'd not have to deal with one or both:

(click to see full-size)

Indeed, it seems that by a coincidence of location, the office buildings for Canada Revenue Agency, and Natural Resources (yes, I put Energy, Mines, and Resources in the image, that's the old name) happen to line up nicely between me and the repeater.  Just a few houses to the west and I wouldn't have to deal with either of them.  A few houses to the east and I could miss one of them.  Evidently then, I have path loss to overcome.

Hey, my wife's uncle has a house about 200m to the west...  I wonder if he'd like an antenna on the roof :)

WVDXA - A major DX'pedition to Palestine, E4X, is scheduled for May 28 to June 6. 10 operators, mostly from Spain and France, will put this needed country on the air for about 10 days. According to their web site HERE, they plan to operate 160 thru 6-M, SSB, CW & RTTY. The 6-M antenna is a 28-foot boom yagi and they will have two Acom 1010 amps so it is conceivable we might be able to work them on the Magic Band.

In addition to the two Acom amps, they plan to have two more SPE Expert 1K-FA amps. Also, 4 HF transceivers will allow them to have at least three stations operating at the same time on different bands and modes. Antennas for HF are not that extensive but include a Spider beam, a Hex beam, verticals for 30 & 40-M, Inverted-L for 80-M and a sloping dipole for 160-M.

Palestine ranks 51st on the 100 Most Needed Countries List so I'm sure a lot of WVDXA members will be looking to either pick this one up as an All-Time New One or to at least fill in some needed band slots. QSL info lists only Direct via EA5RM.

VU2SGW -
On Saturday 10th April, 2010 worked 3W6C on 20M 14.220 up 10 (Split) at 14.56 UTC and checked out conformation on http://www.clublog.org/

3W, VIETNAM (VERY RARE IOTA #2). An international group of operators are now active as 3W6C from Con Co Island (AS-185) until April 18th. This multi-national project, being coordinated by Swiss ham-radio operators, consists of roughly 20 individuals including one woman and members not only from Switzerland but also from Vietnam, Germany, USA and Japan.

During their stay they plan to have 4 stations on the air. Their goal is to make contacts on as many different frequencies as possible, even on the 80 meter and 160 meter bands which makes this DXpedition very special. The team will also be on the satellites. The following satellite will be used: AO-07*, AO-51*, HO-68*, SO-50 and SO-67 (*first priority - not all overflights and sats will be used).

Please note that only AO-07 will be activated in the SSB/CW-mode. All other satellites are in the FM-mode.The main areas in the footprint are: East-Asia, Japan, China, India, Australia and eastern part of Russia.

KB9MWR - For the last few months (Jan-April 2010) in Linux Journal, there has been an ongoing article on Parsing Your Twitter Stream - Twitter response bot, by Dave Taylor.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/work-shell-parsing-your-twitter-stream
http://twitter.com/davesbot

I'll post an excerpt below because I can see such a scripted bot useful for ham radio in conjunction with APRS/Packet and the slow speed user-messages portion of D-Star.

When used in conjunction with a Vellman K8055 Board or homebrew serial or parallel port device you can control external devices by short text messages.


Last month, we circled back to Twitter and started developing a shell script that lets you actually parse and respond to queries sent via Twitter. The idea was that if you were a store, for example, a tweet of “hours?” could be answered automatically with a response tweet of the store’s hours—simple, but interesting nonetheless.
ftp.linuxjournal.com/pub/lj/listings/issue191/10695.tgz

For fun, I’ll let people send the query “time” and get the current output of the date command too, just to demonstrate how that might work. Here’s the code block:if [ "$msg" == "time" ] ; then
echo "@$id asked for the time"
$tweet "@$name the local time on our server is $(date)"
fi

DX World of Ham Radio - Bob, GM0DEQ will be activating up to 15 Scottish islands within 24 hours in June using a sea plane as transport. His callsign will be GB4DTD [Dawn To Dusk]. Activity will be on the HF bands, 40-10 meters. QSL via GM0DEQ. The island list is subject to change due to a few factors governing their [...]

DX World of Ham Radio - Sergey, RA3NAN will be active as 8Q7NA holiday style operation from Bodu Hithi Island, North Male Atoll (AS-013) from 11 to 19 of April, 2010. QSL via H/C.

NT7S -

Clackamas in TPC-41 Enclosure

Yesterday I got the Clackamas all dressed up nicely in its new Ten-Tec TPC-41 enclosure. I have such a stack of bare, half-finished circuit boards laying in the shack that it’s always a real pleasure to get a project to the point where it’s well enough developed to put it in a case. It’s also much nicer to operate the rig when you don’t have to fumble around with holding a pot or switch in one hand while trying to work the control with the other. One valuable lesson that I’ve recently learned about the mechanical side of things is that a step drill bit set is an indispensable time saver, especially when you have many different sizes of holes to drill in the same enclosure.

The rig is all ready to make the trip the Dayton for show and tell. In the meantime, I’m going to try to make a few more QSOs with it when I get a few spare moments. Hope to catch you around 7.030 MHz.

G4ILO - Following a posting and subsequent clarification on the APRS UK Yahoo Group I have discovered that in order to legally operate an APRS digipeater or Internet Gateway it is necessary to apply for a Notice of Variation (NoV) to my license that must include the nomination of at least three people who can close down the station within 30 minutes, even if the station will only be operated when I myself am present.

The reason for needing an NoV is because all authorization to transmit third party traffic (i.e. traffic not from you, nor for you) was removed from the new Lifetime License that was introduced in 2004. I don't actually have any problem with needing an NoV, though I'm sure I am not the only person who used packet radio back in the '80s without any special dispensation and didn't realise that this was no longer possible. However, the requirement for the NoV application to nominate three closedown operators even if the gateway or digipeater will only be operated when the licensee is present is simply ludicrous, as well as being a major obstacle for anyone who does not have three people who can meet that requirement. If the rules are silly, I won't play the game.

As I understand it, it is legal to transmit position reports on RF (because they are from you), it is legal to transmit APRS messages (because they are from you) and it is legal to run a receive-only Internet Gateway (because you are not retransmitting what you receive.) But digipeating or transmitting packets received from the Internet for other stations heard by you is carrying third party traffic and therefore illegal without an NoV. I think many people such as myself who are not dedicated APRS operators but see it as just another mode to use from time to time will take the easier option of operating without an NoV even though in the opinion of Rob Compton M0ZPU receive-only gateways "cause problems to the network in terms of it's capability to carry messaging ... by causing "dead-ends" to intelligent routing (where software utilises the reverse route for a message)."

It's hardly surprising that the RF APRS network in the UK is so poor compared to the USA and other parts of the world.

DX World of Ham Radio - Michel, HB9BOI will be QRV from the north of Sal Island, AF-086 between July 1 – 13, 2010. Active on HF bands. QSL via H/C.

DX World of Ham Radio - From 16 - 18 April, the Mountain Rescue (Team) of Crimea will provide training in rescue operations, with emergency radio communication training included. They plan to operate all HF Bands and 2m. The team: UR5FIR – Aleksandr, UU1JN – Valery, UU3JS – Vladimir, UU5JA – Anatol, UU5JHQ – Nikolay, UY7IQ – Roman, SWL – Anna. They will operate as [...]

SolderSmoke News - Just look at that circuit! That's a complete QRSS beacon transmitter, including a multivibrator (the two transistors on the left) to generate a recognizable pattern on the grabber screens. This diagram appears in SPRAT 134. Hans Summers ran this rig with just a couple of volts from his homebrew bleach-based battery system back in 2008. I plan on putting a version of this rig into the solar

W8MRC -

This is a great archive that I found that has all the archives of the Popular Science magazine going WAY back.

Steve

—

Source: Popular Science

We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

In the future, we’ll be adding more advanced features for searching and browsing, but for now, enter any keyword into the box below and dive in.

Teen Radio Journey - If you are an active listener of this podcast, then you are most likely familiar with the Echolink net I do every Sunday afternoon at 3:00PM CDT. Unfortunately, from time to time I miss the net due to family or friend commitments. I am looking to see if anyone would be interested in being a co More >

ARA of Nebraska - Thanks to everyone who made it out to the college to help install the new repeater.
From the sounds of it we will have great coverage and also into Grand Island.
Great work! Thanks again.

WØSTX

ARA of Nebraska - We got the new repeater with the duplexers installed at the CCC site in Hastings today.

So far it seems to be working well.  We have to do some final tweaking on the controller and we are going to try to get the IRLP node installed on it.

We have had p...

VA3STL -

D-RATs window on Sunday afternoon, showing reception of VA3OMP's beacon

This weekend’s radio activity has been mostly D-STAR in nature.

Friday night Maurice-Andre, VE3VIG, and myself did some D-RATs work on 2m simplex. This included keyboard chat, sending locations to maps and attempting file transfers.  As with previous testing the findings show that you may have a simplex connection which is reasonable for voice, but it can still be marginal and a problem for data transfer.

Saturday I controlled the very first Ottawa Amateur Radio Digital Group Saturday morning net.  We had six check-ins beside myself, these were:

• VE3XZT, Dale
• M0GRU, Andy (via Skype and ‘XZT)
• VA3OMP, Greg
• VE3VIG, Maurice-Andre
• VA3KS, Kieran
• VE3NVK, Andrew

The net went well and will run again next week.  Thanks go to all those that checked in.

Also on Saturday I decided to order a DVAP Dongle, after hearing good things from Rick, VE3CVG and Dale, VE3XZT.  The idea of having access to the D-Star network from home by using the HT and this digital voice access port was too attractive.  Summer is coming and needing just the HT around the house and yard to access D-STAR is appealing.  Plus my birthday is not too far away and the Canadian dollar is effectively on parity with the US dollar (this was good enough rationalization of the purchase for my wife).  I order the DVAP from HRO Saturday PM  and it has already shipped according to the US Postal Service. Very good work HRO!

I also did some D-RATs beaconing on Saturday and Sunday and did receive some signals from Greg, VA3OMP.  He is a new D-STAR user and doing a great job.  I received his location on Sunday from his set-up which he admits is limited due to the low temporary installation of his antenna. He plans on raising the antenna to roof level in the near future.  See the image at the top of this post to see the D-RATs chat window and map showing the received data.

As for HF (and not D-STAR);  I had a nice chat on PSK31 with Harald, DL2OCE, on 20m. The antenna I was using was the Par end-fed dipole. Last weekend I moved the antenna by tying its end point to a much higher tree. Now the end is around 30 to 40 ft up, with the antenna sloping off from there.

Overall a good weekend.

KB6NU -

A recent post to the SolidCpyCW Yahoo Group, which, in my humble opinion, contained some misinformation, got me to thinking about what I might do help people to get started in using and enjoying CW. Since I have already helped a lot of people get started in ham radio with my “No-Nonsense” license study guides, I’m thinking of writing The No-Nonsense Guide to Operating CW.

The topics I’d cover include:

• learning the code;
• selecting a key;
• making contacts; and
• other stuff, including CW clubs, modulated CW (MCW), and whatever other miscellaneous stuff that I can think of that would help hams enjoy operating CW.

There are already lots of books out there covering this stuff, most notably The Art and Skill of Radio-Telegraphy. This is a great book, but the copy I have has more than 240 pages. Does someone really need to plow through 240 pages to learn the code?

So, what do you think? Do you think that I have the topics right? What else would you include? What resource did you find most useful when you were learning the code? What do you know now that you wish you knew when you got started learning Morse Code?

I’ve finished the very first C code for my latest project: Rewriting The Nitros9 Operating System in C.

Nitros9 started as a disassembly and reverse engineering of a commercial RTOS for the Tandy-Radio Shack Color Computer that dates back to the early 80’s. A few Really Smart People started hacking away at this source and improved on it to come up with Nitros9. The entire thing is written in hand-coded and highly optimized Motrola M6809 assembly language. My project is to convert the whole thing to C.

There are many reasons why I am working on this. I wanted a challenging project to help keep my programming skills up. Over the past few months a friend and I have been tinkering around on our own Intel x86 kernel. I thought that the very simple design of Nitros9 might be useful to this project, so I’m doing this to really learn how it all works.

I have no idea if rel.c actually compiles or works yet, but the first milestone in a new project will is exciting. I can always come back to it later if it doesn’t.

The next step is to move on to the heart of the kernel.

Posting pictures of the radio install in my 2008 Toyota Tacoma for the Icom ID-1 TechNet. The installs were done by Harliv W6EMT.

Click here for Pictures