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The Sundance Mountain Radio Association (Palmer Lake, CO) today announced the creation of the Things On The Air (TOTA) program. The radio association’s Need More Lists Committee spent the past year analyzing the effect of various “on the air” programs, including the Islands On The Air (IOTA), National Parks On The Air (NPOTA) and Summits On The Air (SOTA).

The overall trend is clear. The ham radio community used to be satisfied with the basic DXCC list (a list of countries that aren’t really countries so we have to call them entities). But over time, additional lists to be worked have been created. For example, the Islands On The Air (IOTA) was created in 1964. More recently, the Summits On The Air program was established in 2002. It seems that every year or so we hear of another “something” on the air program. Even the normally docile satellite grid chasers created a Walmart Parking Lots On The Air (WMPLOTA) event.

Unfortunately, this has created a miss-mash of programs with inconsistent and conflicting rules. The Need More Lists Committee concluded that the best solution to this problem is to fast-forward to the likely end state: pretty much everything can be put on the air. Inspired by the latest technical hype called Internet Of Things (IoT), the committee named this program Things On The Air (TOTA).

To be comprehensive and inclusive, the TOTA program is based on the existing Maidenhead Grid system. There are 324 fields defined (AA through RR), each having 100 squares (although they really are not square). Each square contains 576 subsquares indicated by aa through xx. So using the six-character locator results in 324 x 100 x 576 = 18,662,400 unique locators. Or, as the Committee likes to say, about 18 million locators. In North America, the six-character locator represents a rectangle about 3 miles by 4 miles. This raises the question of how many things need to be on the list inside a typical 3 x 4 mile rectangle. An in-depth study revealed there are a lot of things that might need to be listed in even a small area.

For TOTA to achieve the vision of being the “last list of things on the air”, it must accommodate an unlimited number of listed things. To start out a 15-digit serial number is appended to the 6-character locator to indicate a TOTA thing. As the program grows and new Things are added to the list, the 15-digit number can be extended indefinitely.

Here’s an example listing of some of the first TOTA designators:

Locator  Serial Number      Description
DM79nb   000000000000001    Walmart Parking Lot
DM79nb   000000000000002    Home Depot Parking Lot
DM79nc   000000000000001    Leroy's home QTH
DM79nc   000000000000002    Leroy's barn
DM79nc   000000000000003    The big tree behind Leroy's house
DM79db   000000000000001    Charlie's home QTH
DM78lu   000000000000001    Pikes Peak Summit
DN70di   000000000000001    Rocky Mountain National Park

When making a valid TOTA contact, the activating station must give a signal report and the TOTA designator: 6-character locator followed by the serial number (at least 15 digits but may be longer). The official TOTA list is currently be maintained on an Excel spreadsheet on Leroy’s computer but a HDFS database is under construction to handle the expected large dataset.

The Committee requests the help of all amateur around the world to submit additional entries into the TOTA list. Eventually, this process will be automated via the ThingsOnTheAir.com web site but for now submissions can be made in the comments field below.

The post Things On The Air (TOTA) Launched appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

While on a canyon country hiking/Jeeping trip in Utah, Joyce/K0JJW and I decided to do a couple of Summits On The Air (SOTA) activations. Abajo Peak (W7U/SU-014) showed up as a suitable target, being an easy-access drive-up summit at 11,360 feet, just west of Monticello. While the forest service map shows this as a 4WD route, it turned out to be a well-maintained road that most 2WD vehicles can handle.

The map below shows the area. The only real challenge was finding B102 heading south/southwest out of Monticello. This later turns into route 0087, which swings south of another SOTA summit: South Peak (W7U/SJ-003) and up over Dickson Pass. (South Peak could be a second summit for a double activation.)

Abajo Peak is an excellent summit for VHF/UHF propagation with a good radio horizon in all directions. There is a substantial radio communications site on top which did create some local interference on 2m and 70cm. Moving a bit away from the actual summit caused the interference to mostly disappear.

I was concerned that we would not find enough activity on VHF in this rural location, so I put the word out to some of the hams in Utah and western Colorado with capable 2m SSB stations. Our equipment was a Yaesu FT-817 (all mode, 5W) driving a 3-element yagi antenna. We also had a 50W Yaesu FT-90 that can provide a bit more power out on 2m FM. And we had the usual collection of HTs.

Around noon, we started calling on 146.52 MHz and worked N7VWX in Nucla, CO (about 57 miles away). We switched over to 144.200 SSB and worked W0DSW in Cedaredge, CO (113 miles). Then we worked Bill/K0UK in Grand Junction (95 miles) on 144.200 SSB…not real strong but we made it. A bit later we came across KB7REB on 146.52 FM who said he was out hiking in a canyon and was surprised to hear anyone.  We also worked KB7TRA on 146.52 (I think he was mobile east of us). We also worked W0DBB in Montrose, CO. I kept beaming to the west looking for W7DHH and I eventually heard him calling on 144.200 CW. I tried getting back to him but he was apparently not hearing me. N7KMK (same vicinity as W7DHH) came on the air and I was able to copy him on SSB. He also had trouble hearing me, but for a few seconds the signals came up a bit and we made the contact. N7KMK was my best DX for the day at 154 miles.

Four contacts are required to get the SOTA activation points and we probably would have been successful just randomly calling on 146.52 MHz FM. However, taking along the SSB transceiver and alerting the 2m weak-signal crowd certainly paid off with some longer distance QSOs. It is always a blast to be working over 100 miles on VHF QRP.

73, Bob K0NR

The post VHF SOTA: Abajo Peak (W7U/SU-014) appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Proper use of a phonetic alphabet can be very helpful when working phone under marginal conditions. I’ve written a basic article on phonetics over at HamRadioSchool.com, so you might want to review that. I recently came across an article by Andy/AE6Y on some tips and tricks to use during contests. He does a super job of explaining why the ITU phonetic alphabet isn’t always the best choice. I don’t usually reprint other author’s work on this blog but somehow this article really got my attention. Reprinted here with permission. – Bob K0NR

Phone Contesting Tips For DX Contests

Andy Faber, AE6Y
3/29/18

This article is prompted by the recent WPX SSB contest, in which I worked thousands of guys from Aruba as P49Y, which engendered much reflection (and teeth-gnashing, to be sure) about how U.S. hams can be best understood from the DX end.  I’m not addressing this to relatively clear-channel domestic contests but to the situation where you are trying to get through to a DX station that may be hearing a pileup, plus noise, ear-splitting splatter from adjacent stations and all of the other sonic annoyances that make many contesters prefer CW. If there is no pileup and you know the DX station can hear you completely clearly, then you’ll get through regardless, but if not, here are some suggestions:

First, be sure you are calling on his exact frequency.  In CW contests, it can be helpful to separate yourself from the pack by calling off frequency, but that’s not true in SSB.  Off-frequency stations sound distorted and are hard to understand.  The DX station may well come back to a weaker, but more intelligible station that is on frequency, even if you are louder.  In order to work you, he has to figure out which way to adjust the RIT, and then go ahead and do it. A tired operator on the other end may just not bother, until he has worked everyone else.

Second, make sure your audio is clean.  It is so much easier to understand clear audio, even if it is weaker than a louder, distorted signal.  KH7XS mentioned in his 3830 posting that this year there particularly seemed to be over-processed signals coming from South America, and I noticed the same thing.  It used to be that the Italians who were the worst offenders, but they seem to be better now.  This weekend, the Cubans were particularly hard to understand. The prize for the easiest audio to understand goes each contest to the hams from the British Isles.  The G’s, M’s and their derivatives invariably have very clean (and usually nicely treble) audio that can be understood even when the signal doesn’t budge the S-meter.  On several occasions I chose a weak but clear Brit over a loud, but distorted, competitor.

Ok, so you have a clean signal and are calling on frequency, now how do you get the information through, both your callsign and your contact number (for WPX)?

Here are some tips:

If you are loud enough and have an easily recognizable call, you can skip phonetics.  So this weekend, when K1AR called, he was easy to pick out, same for K3UA, K3ZO, N6AA, and a few others. But for most guys, and when in doubt, use phonetics.  Endless bandwidth has been expended on the subject of phonetics, and people have differing opinions on the topic, but here are my thoughts from being on the DX end:

The first thing to understand is that the standard, “recommended” international alphabet works dismally in marginal conditions.  The words are too short, and some don’t have unique sounds. Generally speaking, the one-syllable words just get lost, while the two syllable words are better, and the longer ones are even better.

Thus, one-syllable words like “Fox”, “Golf” and “Mike” are horrible.  Some of the two-syllable ones are OK (e.g., “Hotel” and “Quebec”), but others, such as “Alpha” and “Delta”, or “X-ray” and “Echo”, “Kilo” and “Tango” sound very similar, so are easily confused.  I worked a guy with the suffix XXE, and had to get a number of repeats until he finally said “X-Ray X-ray Ecuador,” which did the trick.

There are two basic cures for these problems. The first is only to use these crummy phonetics the first time as a trial.  If the DX station asks for a repeat, say your call twice, once with the standard phonetics and once with different ones.  Don’t just keep repeating your call the same way.  Something in either the way you say it or the way the DX hears it is creating ambiguity.  If you keep repeating the call the same way it may well be that part of it is just hard to decipher, and it may not get any easier.

If the DX station is a good English speaker then custom phonetics may work, such as “King George Six…” In fact when I thought a KK4 station was a K4, he used a very effective phonetic, “King Kong Four…” WA2JQK uses “Jack Queen King” in domestic contests, but that won’t work well for non-native speakers.  The Wyoming station N7MZW uses “Many Zebras Walking” sometimes domestically, but I noticed he was using normal phonetics in WPX.

The second approach is to switch to the geographical phonetic alphabet.  This features longer and more distinctive-sounding words, which are much easier to understand.  For example if your suffix is, say, HLF, then you can say “Hotel Lima Fox,” then try “Honolulu London Florida.” When I give my call with last letter “Yankee” and get asked for a repeat it works much better to say “Last letter Yankee, last letter Yokohama.” Many of the geographic phonetics work particularly well for speakers of Romance languages like Spanish and Italian (e.g., terms like “Guatemala”, “Nicaragua”, and “Santiago”). There are a few letters for which there are not good geographic equivalents.  Obviously, “X-ray” is one of them. For “Echo”, “England” is sometimes used, but “Ecuador” is better.  Although “London” and “Lima” are both geographic terms, “London” is much better.  And “Denmark Mexico” is many times superior to “Delta Mike.”

Numbers in the callsign can also cause trouble.  What if the station comes back to “K3” instead of “K6”? In general, just try to repeat the number, but if he still doesn’t get it, you can try counting, e.g. “Kilo Six, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.” Or for us West Coasters, “Kilo Six in California, West Coast” can be useful.

Which brings me to the subject of numbers in exchanges like WPX.  I commented in a 3830 post a few years ago that the English numbers that everyone uses are just too ambiguous, most of them being plain too short.  I recommended using some Spanish numbers, like “cuatro” and “ocho”, but that suggestion went nowhere, so I hereby drop it, unless you are trying to get through to a native Spanish or Italian speaker.  In fact, In WPX, I just couldn’t understand a number from a CO8 station with terrible audio. I kept asking, “your number 424?”, “your number 242?”, “your number 224”, etc. Normally, one doesn’t confuse “two” and “four,” but this guy’s audio was driving me crazy and I wasn’t sure how well he was understanding me either.  Finally I had the presence of mind to ask in Spanish, and when he said “dos cuatro cuatro,” he was in the log.  If he had said that in the beginning I would have understood him in spite of his maladjusted audio.

One source of confusion for the DX station is not knowing how many digits there are, particularly later in the contest when a number can have 1, 2, 3, or 4 digits.  There are a couple of ways to help. For example: suppose the DX station thinks he hears “[garble] six six” and he asks: ”your number six six?” If your number is just 6, you can say to be helpful “Negative. My number zero zero six, number six.” Adding the word “number” in front of the digit indicates there are no missing digits.  If your number is 66, just say “Roger, roger.” If it’s 56, say “Negative, number five six, fifty–six.” If it’s 256, say, “Negative. Number two five six, two fifty-six (or even “two hundred and fifty-six”). I know we were taught that it is incorrect to say “two hundred and fifty-six,” and we should just say “two hundred fifty-six,” but using the “and” makes it more intelligible.

In general, it’s usually best to say your number twice, in two different ways.  For example it’s often hard to discern, “two three” from “three three”. So you can say: “five nine, two three, twenty-three,” since “twenty” and “thirty” sound very different.  Similarly if your number is 15 and you say “one five”, that might be confused with “one nine”, so say “one five, fifteen.” If it’s late in the contest and you might be expected to have a three-digit number you can say “zero two three, only twenty-three”. And if you have a one digit number late in the contest, it’s best to add zeros, saying, e.g., “zero zero nine, number nine”, not just “nine.”

I hope these tips from the DX end are helpful.  They should be even more useful in the next few years, as declining sunspots forcing us increasingly into the QRM alleys of 20 and 40 meters.

The post Phone Contesting Tips For DX Contests (AE6Y) appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Back in the summer of 2013, I did the first Summits On The Air (SOTA) activation for W0C/SP-094. This is an unnamed summit (10350) near Trout Creek Pass not far from our cabin. Although I did activate it, I only made two radio contacts from the summit (so no activator points awarded). A thunderstorm had moved in and I decided to abandon the effort. Actually, I don’t recall much from that activation other than getting skunked due to weather.

So today, Joyce/K0JJW and I returned to the summit to set things right. Following Walt/W0CP’s suggestion, we drove the Jeep from the south (Hwy 24) taking FR 305 to FR 376 and parked just off the road at 38.86967, -106.03146. FR 305 is a good 2WD gravel road; FR376 is easy 4WD (or high clearance 2WD). A winter storm warning was in effect the night before we hiked, so I wondered if the weather was going to win again. As it turns out, we had 3 or 4 inches of new snow on the ground which was not a problem.

From the parking spot, the hiking route is not critical. Just head for the summit. We decided to swing slightly to the east which gave us a little less slope. It also provided us a nice walk across the top of the ridge that extends out to the southeast. As you can see from the photo, the summit is flat with a reasonable number of trees. Round trip distance is 1.5 miles with 700 feet of vertical. Easy peasy.

Once on top, we called on 146.52 MHz and worked Bob/W0BV, Skip/W9GYA, Jim/KD0MRC, Walt/WZ0N, Dave/N0KM and Ken/WA6TTY. We also made a couple of 446.0 MHz contacts with some of the same stations.

Earlier, as we left for the trailhead, I got an email from Steve/WG0AT that he was headed up Mt Herman (W0C/FR-063). This sounded like a great summit-to-summit opportunity! I figured we’d need our best 2m fm station, so I got out the Yaesu FT-90 and the Arrow 3-element yagi. I saw him spotted on SOTAwatch so I called him multiple times on 2m fm. Finally, I heard someone else talking to him on 146.52 which caused me to swing the antenna back and forth. Sure enough, I could hear him…barely…with the antenna pointed way south of his location. This often happens in the mountains…the direct path is not always the best path on VHF. I just barely worked Steve and got him in the log.

We stayed on the summit for a while, enjoying the view of Mt Princeton, then hiked down. It was a wonderful activation…much better than the first time.

73, Bob K0NR

The post Return to SOTA Summit W0C/SP-094 appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Our radio club (Tri-Lakes Monument Radio Association) offers a 2-day Technician license class which has resulted in over 300 new Technician licenses in past years. We also offer a number of activities to help new licensees get started in ham radio. Still, we wonder how many of our newly-minted Techs have actually gotten on the air and are actively using amateur radio.

To assess that, I surveyed 258 people that went through our Technician license class from 2010 to 2017. We’ve actually had more students than that get their license but I don’t have valid email addresses for all of them. To improve the response rate, I kept the survey short at 5 questions.

The response rate was 42% which is quite good for this type of survey. I suspect there is a response bias in that active ham radio folks are probably more likely to reply to this survey. People that have lost interest are less likely to reply. That’s just my opinion; I don’t have data to support that.

Almost half of our Technician class students upgraded to General but only a few went on to Extra. Overall, I see this as a good result but I expected to see a few more Extra class licensees.

Most of the respondents have been on air recently: 60% of them have made a radio contact in the past 6 months. On the other hand, that means about 40% of not made a contact in half a year. It is disappointing to see that 13% have never made a ham radio contact.

There is quite a range on how active the respondents are with 45% making 10 or fewer contacts in 6 months.

About one half of the survey respondents are members of our radio club. Some of them are also members of other radio clubs in the area. Some of our students travel a long distance, up to 100 miles, to attend this class so it makes sense that they find a radio club near their home.

Most of the respondents reported being active on 2m/70cm FM. About 18% of them are on HF Phone. The total for all forms of HF operating (CW, digital and phone) is not shown on the chart but it is roughly 20%. While roughly half of the respondents have their General or Extra class license, only 20% are actually using the resulting HF privileges.

Conclusions

My broad conclusion is that our radio club should continue to provide opportunities for our members to develop their operating skills and expand their radio operating. I filtered the responses to our club members only to see if our club member responses are any different from the larger group. Basically, our members indicate they are somewhat more active than the rest of the respondents but the overall story does not change.

Obviously, this is a small slice of data relevant to our local situation. It may not apply to other parts of the country.

What do you think?

73, Bob K0NR

The post Are Recent Technicians Getting on the Air? appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Operating from countries outside the US can be a lot of fun. I just completed another another Slacker DXpedition, this time to the Cayman Islands. The formula for this type of operation is simple: identify an interesting vacation spot that is also considered DX, travel there with friends & family, take along some compact radio gear and get on the air. A key point is to not overdo the radio operating or the friends & family will veto any radio activity on future trips.

Licensing for the Cayman Islands is relatively easy if you hold a US FCC amateur radio license. Complete info can be found on the Ofreq web site. Licensing for the Caymans is typical of many Caribbean countries: fill out the application form, send it to Ofreq by email along with a copy of your US license, passport and $25US. Visitor call signs have the prefix ZF2 and you can request your favorite two-letter suffix. That’s how I got ZF2NR.

I was issued a Class A license which has all operating privileges. My spouse Joyce/K0JJW holds a US General Class license and was issued a Cayman Class B license, which has limited HF privileges (no phone on 40m, 20m, or 17m). So keep that in mind if you have a General Class license.

Grand Cayman is in grid EK-99 and is IOTA NA-016.

My equipment strategy was the same as my V29RW operation on Antigua (see V29RW: Slacker DXpedition to Antigua).  The basic kit is a Yaesu FT-991 driving a  end-fed halfwave (EFHW) wire antenna for the band of interest. Never underestimate the power of getting a halfwave antenna up into the air. The FT-991 fits in my carry-on bag and it covers all bands from HF through 70cm.

There is a 2m repeater (146.76 MHz) on Grand Cayman that works quite well. We received a friendly welcome on the repeater from Phil ZF1PB and several other Cayman hams.

Vacation Home

Our group rented a nice vacation home near Rum Point on the north side of Grand Cayman. This place is right on the water with an excellent sand beach. Denny KB9PDF/ZF2PF and I put up the EFHW 20m antenna supported by my SOTAbeams pole strapped to a palm tree. This setup worked quite well and we soon had a nice pileup of stations calling us on 20m. We did have some issues with local noise sources, the worst of which was traced to some dimmer switches in the house. This is one of the problems with a portable setup like this…you never know what RFI problems you’ll encounter. Later in the week, we put up a 40m EFHW and made a few contacts on that band, too.

ZF1A

Bruce/K0BJ suggested that I check into using the Cayman Amateur Radio Society club station (ZF1A) which they make available to visiting hams. I connected with Eden/ZF1EJ who confirmed that the station was available later in the week. Again, I did not want to overdo the radio thing, so we settled on operating at ZF1A during the middle of the day on Wednesday.

This turned out to be a great move. ZF1A has multiple towers with some very capable antennas. Like I always say: Never underestimate the power of using a large directional antenna on top of a big tower.  Eden/ZF1EJ met us at the station (it is literally in his backyard) and helped us get situated. Our operating strategy was simple: use the highest HF phone band that had good propagation and work as many stations as possible. We were also prepared to use FT8 if things were really bad but that was not needed. It turned out that 15m was dead but 17m was open into North America and Europe, so we did most of our operating there.

Here’s a short video to give you a taste of the pileup.

I did work some of the folks back home, which was a treat: K0AV, W0CP, K0BJ, W0RLY, W0GAS, WG0AT, KD0RQU. I had noticed that Steve/WG0AT was doing a Summits On The Air (SOTA) activation on Crooked Top Mountain (W0C/SP-090) and I gave him a call. Being QRP, his signal was very weak at my location but he could hear me with no problem.

Here’s the QSO audio that Steve recorded on his end:

Satellites

We worked two OSCAR satellite passes (AO-91, AO-92) using a pair of handheld radios and an Arrow 2m/70cm yagi antenna. The pair of handhelds gave us full-duplex capability: I ran the 70cm uplink on my HT while Denny ran the downlink on 2m. No surprise to find the FM satellites quite busy and a bit frustrating to work. I logged these stations from ZF2NR: KI0G, K3SV, TI2CDA, TI4DJ, HP2VX.

Results

My ZF2NR log shows 376 HF QSOs, most of them made by me. Joyce K0JJW/ZF2JW braved the pileup to make a few contacts. Denny/KB9DPF had some additional contacts as ZF2PF.  QSL to our home callsigns.

I’ve loaded the ZF2NR log into Logbook of The World.

Band Mode QSOs
   7 LSB    5 
  14 USB   65
  18 USB  306
 Total    376

In retrospect, I realized that we had the antenna pointed north most of the time and we probably should have looked in other directions. In particular, we only worked a few South American stations.

Most important is that a good time was had by all. Thanks to everyone that worked us while we were in the Cayman Islands.

73, Bob K0NR/ZF2NR

The post ZF2NR: Another Slacker DXpedition appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

It is time for another W0C (Colorado) Summits On The Air dinner!

Last year, we had 15 people get together for an informal dinner in south Denver (Lone Tree): Steve WG0AT, Wayne AD0KE, Brad WA6MM, Caleb W4XEN, Carey KX0R, John N0TA, Curtis KC5CW, Mark N0MTN, Bob K0NR, Joyce K0JJW, Steve K7PX, Al  KH7AL, James KI0KN, Walt W0CP and John N1OIE. It was so much fun meeting people and swapping SOTA stories that we are going to do it again this year.

Wednesday March 21^th  at 6 pm
Chili’s, 10460 Park Meadows Dr, Lone Tree, CO 80124-5413

Dinner details:
   No agenda, no organization, just have fun, pay for your meal
Please wear something with your name/callsign (name tag, shirt, cap, etc.) to aid in making connections

Please send this to anyone you know that might be interested.
RSVP back to Bob K0NR: [email protected] so we have an accurate count for the reservation.

I hope to see you all there!

73, Bob K0NR

The post WØC Summits On The Air Dinner appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.