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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

If you asked me a couple of years ago whether I’d ever participate in a contest on 160 meters I’m sure I would have said no. If you’d asked me two weeks ago, I would have said no. In fact, I did say no, answering the weekly ARRL website survey. It turns out that I was mistaken.

The main reason why I never expected to participate in a contest on 160m is because I really don’t use the 160m band very much. The two reasons why I tend to stay away are because I don’t really have a very good antenna for that band, and because the relatively few times that I’ve been on it’s always been horribly noisy (mostly from atmospheric noise, though perhaps there’s some man-made electronic noise there as well.) The reason for the lack of a decent antenna is that antennas for that band tend to be very, very long. As a reminder, 160 meters is about 525 feet. Although you don’t need an antenna that long to transmit on the band, what I do have in place (my G5RV antenna) is really too short to operate properly on that band. I can use the antenna tuner in my radio to cause the radio to think that the antenna is suitable for use on that band, but in reality there’s a lot of loss and my signal just isn’t very strong. Despite the relatively short antenna length, I do manage to pick up an awful lot of noise.

160m is primarily a nighttime band. Although you can make groundwave (those that don’t bounce off the ionosphere) contacts during the day, the band is even noiser during the day and it’s just not practical to try to make a lot of contacts. (That’s not to say that the hardcore contesters aren’t out there trying.) The fact that it’s a late-night band worked to my benefit, since I’m a nightowl.

The 160m contest starts at 5PM local time on a Friday and ends at 11AM local Sunday morning. I was chatting with my friend Larry, N4VA Friday afternoon, and he suggested that I try to make a few contacts in the contest. I was going to be home anyway (my son was recovering from a minor surgical procedure) so I figured that I’d at least listen and see if I could hear anything other than static.

By the time I started to listen, it was around 5:30PM local time, which is after dark at this time of the year and 30 minutes past the contest starting time. I was surprised to hear that not only were there a lot of strong signals, but where nobody was transmiting, the band was actually relatively quiet. I figured that I’d see if I could get the antenna to tune and maybe make a few contacts, “giving out points” to others in the contest.

I was surprised that for the first hour, I made around 20 contacts (and that includes a break for dinner; as I mentioned, I wasn’t really expecting to spend a lot of time in the contest.) What was even more surprising was that for the 4th hour of the contest, I was up to 33 contacts for that hour and 30 the next hour. (All those contacts were “search & pounce”, I wasn’t going to attempt to run stations.) While this isn’t “super-station rate”, those 63 contacts are 3 more contacts than I’d made in total on the 160m band prior to the contest. I continued to operate for a while, taking a few breaks and turned in relatively early Friday night. (I’d been up since 6:30 AM for my son’s procedure).

Late Saturday afternoon, I made another handful of contacts, and then, after we came back from dinner with friends, I got back on the air at 1AM (now Sunday morning) and picked up another 17 stations in that hour. At that point, tuning up and down the band all I was hearing for the most part were stations that I’d already worked, which meant it was tough to find “fresh meat” to work. I figured that I’d try to find a frequency to “run” stations, which means that instead of me trying to find stations who are calling CQ, I’d find a frequency and call CQ myself.

If you’re not a contester yourself, I should explain that in most contests, it’s generally the “big guns” (more powerful stations) that “run” other stations. For one thing, it’s generally easier to hear their signals, and for another, it’s a lot tougher for another station to just jump on top of them and start CQing, “stealing” their frequency. Having your frequency “stolen” is unethical and could theoretically be illegal. For US hams, the FCC says that you cannot intentionally interfere with another station, but in a contest, it’s very difficult to prove (especially for a weak station) since when a stronger station “takes over” your frequency they can simply say they never heard you. That might or might not be true, but it’s hard to prove. The simple thing to do, for a “little pistol” station like me, is to simply move elsewhere.

Fortunately me for me, for the 2AM (local time) hour, I was lucky enough to get a frequency pretty low in the band (1808 mHz) and actually keep that frequency for over an hour. (Lower in the frequency is better, usually, since other operators who get on the band to make a few contacts typically start at the lower end of the band and work their way up.) Remember that his is now 2AM local, and most of the stations that I was working were relatively local, within a timezone or two of me. While I didn’t set any rate records, over the next hour I worked almost 30 stations, which was just for me a lot of fun. I probably could have kept going, but at about 3:15 AM I decided that I’d had enough fun and shut down the radio.

Overall, I wound up working 251 stations (plus 2 “dupes” who I’d previously worked but who called me when I was “running”). Most of the stations that I worked were in the US or Canada, but I did work stations in Jamaica (6Y), the Bahamas (C6), Netherlands Anitilles (PJ), Turks and Caico (VP6) and possibly (the contact was a little “iffy”, hopefully I am in his log) Martinique (FM). In total, I worked stations in 43 ARRL or RAC sections pluss the 5 other countries), which I thought was pretty respectable.

My final claimed score looks like this:

    Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
    1.8     251     517   48
 
   Score : 24,816

I don’t think I’m going to win any awards, but I’ve very pleased with my results. And, as I’ve said in the past, the most important thing is that I had a lot of fun.