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I belong to a small group of transmitter hunters here on Long Island. My Elmer originally got me involved by having me navigate for him, and as I learned the technique, I graduated to running my own vehicle along with my better half, KD2CHE. The last few hunts, she has been driving while I watch the signal strength and maps.

Most of the hunters use doppler equipment, from various vendors. Jill and I have had great luck just using our maps, and a good assortment of receivers. We watch the signal strength on my best receiver, a Kenwood TR-9000, and then keep two HTs set to different levels of sensitivity. I hang the HTs in locations so that I can hear them come on. One with no antenna at all, and the other with a mismatched stubby antenna. This combination has gotten us to the bunny box before many of the doppler-equipped cars.

Friday night we had a hunt. The box was to be hidden within 3.5 miles from the Republic Airport in Farmingdale, NY. The box itself is managed by my Elmer, WA2CDL. It’s an old Radio Shack HTX-202, controlled by a custom PIC controller, powered by an external rechargeable battery, all contained in a surplus ammo box. We set out in our new Kia Soul, with me in the back seat. I folded half the back seat so as to have a kind of desk next to me. There I had the TR-9000 and a Dell laptop with the RTL-SDR setup, and Google Maps. Internet was provided by a hotspot on my T-Mobile HD7. We waited.

Unfortunately no one could hear the transmitter. It was mentioned that it might be operating on low power, since it had not been charged. So we drove around till we heard it. Each time it transmitted (30 seconds on, 30 seconds off), we would get a signal, and as we drove in the direction I though it would be in, the signal got weaker. As I plotted all of the vectors around the area where we heard the signal, it seemed that it was simply nowhere. Every time we chased the signal, it got weaker.

Eventually we were given a hint, and once found, I have to admire the location (about 15 feet off of a trail, in a nature preserve, up in a tree). Only some of the doppler-equipped cars were able to locate the box. As it turned out, my eternally fading signal was caused by the low battery. WA2CDL did some measuring after the hunt and told me that it was starting out transmitting just over a Watt, and finishing the 30 second transmission with about 250 Milliwatts. That explained why we always seemed to be heading away from it.

In practical use, what does this mean? If we were trying to find a lost hiker, for example, who had a radio with a dying battery, we would need to take the fading signal into account. I think if I had known that the signal was fading out each time we heard it due to the battery running low, I would have altered my technique. I think if we had simply moved at one minute intervals and marked the signal strength at each location just for the beginning of the transmission, I would have been able to plot the location. I guess I need to ask what the charge on the bunny box battery is in advance next time, or stay put for a couple of transmissions, and see if the signal fades.

How did the RTL-SDR do? Well, if we had steady signal, or if I had known to compensate, it would have been fantastic. I could see the signal before we could hear it, and signal strength was more visual. The battery quit before the end of the hunt though, because of the difficulty in finding the box. I hope to try it again.

RTL SDR with SDR#

DVB-T Dongle from eBay seller digitalhome88

I received my DVB-T dongle from eBay finally about a week ago.  Here’s a link to the vendor I purchased from.  After getting the drivers loaded in Windows 7 on my aging Dell D630, I was able to get the SDR running.  Using the instructions here at rtlsdr.com, I finally got things up and running.  There was one mistake that made me lose several minutes.  I missed the instruction:  If your dongle doesn’t automatically show up, select Options then List all Devices.  Read carefully!  I’ve found that in my case, SDR# is the better choice of software.  For some reason HDSDR causes the dongle to lock up after changing bands.  I’m sure I’ll find out why because I see many others having good luck with it.  The old Dell was able to keep up, but seemed a bit choppy.  I dropped the sampling rate down a bit, and everything was fine.

My first tests were a little disappointing, yet this was with the cheesy antenna the dongle arrived with, and then with MacGuyver-ing an antenna adapter together.  The DVB-T dongles have a PAL-female connector on them, and nothing in my tin-o-connectors seemed to work.  Radio Shack carries an adapter that is PAL-male on one side and F-female on the other.  I went out and picked one up, as well as an extra F-to-BNC adapter.  Then I was able to go from the dongle to my simple outdoor antenna.

With a solid connection to my outdoor wire antenna (just a wire thrown into a nearby tree, and a counterpoise out on the roof slope), I was able to get all of the local repeaters, as well as repeaters in Manhattan, and much farther.  4 different NOAA stations came in, and aircraft traffic from the whole tri-state area.  I even grabbed a couple of 2 meter USB contacts, and quickly switched over to the TR-9000 to speak with one of them.  Performance with this setup was much, much better than I had expected.

My Elmer had stopped by Sunday to deliver a rig he repaired for me on his way out to Eastern Long Island, and I gave him a quick demo.  After playing with it for about 20 minutes he said “Send me the info.  I need to get one of these!”  Here is a quick video I took of some local repeaters, including a Ham ordering coffee from a McDonald’s drive-thru.  Sorry for the shaky video.

Click here for video: RTL SDR with SDR#

–Neil W2NDG

My father was not a technical guy.  He knew numbers.  In the early days of our family business, my mother kept the books, and answered the phone at the house, while dad revolutionized the dental products business in the northeast.  My brother Paul ran the stockroom, and I would help, usually reluctantly in the beginning, with some of the basic tasks that a nine-year-old could handle.  My oldest brother Lee joined later, and became, and still is, one of the best Dental Equipment specialists in the business.  You see, dad took his skills as a supermarket manager, and combined it with the business model of SnapOn Tools, and created MoDent, and for more than 15 years, made the competition wonder how he pulled it off.  Dad passed away in California in 2009, and in his honor today, I would like to re-post something radio-related from my own blog I wrote about him.  Happy Father’s Day dad!

(Dad’s Sony was originally published here at my blog Fofio! in April of 2011)

My father grew up in the ‘Radio Era’ which made him more radio-aware than my children are now. He was by no means a hobbyist, but knew enough to tell good from bad. He knew that AM radios had to be turned for best reception, and a good swiveling whip antenna was necessary for FM reception. For him, the radio needed to be able to pick up his NPR stations, WCBS-AM, and get the Mets games when he was on the road.

I ran a sales territory for our family business. As Dad got older, he eventually came off the road, and ran the company from inside. Every now and then though, he would schedule to ride with one of his salespeople to keep an eye on things. He rode with me for few days once on my Northern New Jersey run. Thursdays on that run, I would sometimes stop at the offices of Gilfer Shortwave, and chat with the Jeanne Ferrell & Paul Lannuier. I had purchased several radios there over the years, and would buy the various shortwave books and guides from them as they were released.

That one Thursday that Dad came along, he got a kick out of Gilfer, and all of the radios. He and Paul talked for a bit, and he purchased a Sony ICF-SW20. Partly because he really liked the quality of the little radio, and partly because I think he liked the folks at Gilfer as much as I did.

Dad had this radio from then, till he passed away in December 2009. It was his main radio. I saw it on his nightstand, in the bathroom, and on trips back east to visit us. Even with all of the selling and swapping I’ve done lately with my radio collection, I will never get rid of this radio. To me it was an acknowledgment from dad that my interests in radio were appreciated, and is a memory of the man I miss. It currently lives on my desk at work, sometimes called to duty for news, and music. Thanks for the radio Dad! I’ll pass it down the line someday to Alec.

The Sony is still on my desk at work.  Another note here:  Dad always wanted me to get my ham license, and even bought me the equipment when I was a kid to encourage me.  I wish he was around to see how much I enjoy this hobby, and how it has helped me find some of the best people I have ever met.  73 dad!  

I’ve seen several times in various forums, when people ask about setting up cross-band repeaters, some Hams mention that they cannot think of a use for that feature.  Here is your example.

With a second car coming sometime in the next few weeks, the YL and I have been keeping our eyes open for a second dual-band mobile.  We had 2 vehicles up until about a month ago, when my old minivan got to the point where my investment in repairs exceeded my nostalgic affection for it.  I had a chance to get rid of it quickly when my mechanic said he had someone interested in taking it, as-is, for more than scrap value (steel is high out here, so don’t laugh).

I have a Radio Shack HTX-242.  My first mobile rig.  A great eBay find last year, but it was not holding up to everyday use.  It’s also a little numb in the receiving department, so it’s currently sitting on my elmer’s workbench.  The goal there is to get it receiving well enough to use a my doppler receiver.  The main radio is an Icom IC-207H dual-band with the option for remote mounting.  Jill gets to use that one during the week, as I’m in the car for less than 10 minutes while she drives me to the train.  The 207H will probably go into the new car when it comes, because of the remote mounting.  I want to keep the install as clean as possible.  That leaves the Buick as my daily driver, and without a decent rig.  I decided to look for something that can do cross-band repeat for my next rig, and finally picked up a used IC-2350H the other day.  It needs a little TLC, but nothing too complicated.  As-is, it transmits OK on the 440 side, but it will not let you hear anything received, even though it IS receiving.  The 2 Meter side is functioning great.  Some quick troubleshooting shows that the volume/squelch pot for the 440 side is damaged, but fixable.

I tried the cross-band repeat function last night, which works great, even with the problem.  I now have solved an issue that I was having in my home.  We live in a bit of an RF hole, about halfway between my club’s Eastern, and Western Long Island repeaters.  I can hit the Western repeater fine from the living room, with a rig attached to my homebrew wire antenna.  Anywhere else in the house, though, I cannot.  Sometimes during a few of the nets that I like to participate in, I need to be in the kitchen, or at my desk, or outside at the grill.  With the cross-band repeater, I can use my little Baofeng UV-3R to transmit through to the Western repeater’s input, and still be able to hear the output directly on the Baofeng.

To work correctly this requires the use of the programming software on the Baofeng to set up a split channel (receive on 2M, and transmit on 440).  I’m running the 2350H at 10 Watts, which is enough.  It is passing the PL tone from the Baofeng so no need to encode again.  The only feature I’m missing is tone-squelch on the Icom, so that un-authorized people don’t get in.  Even if they do though, the chances of them using the correct tone to pass through to the repeater I’m targeting are slim.  This weekend I’m going to test the receiving range of this setup with the mobile.  I think this will even cure some of the dead spots that I have issues with in the neighborhood.

I intend to use this elsewhere too.  We go on excursions up to the Adirondacks to my friend’s farm.  Cell phones are marginal there, at best, and my Sprint phone just laughs at me when I try to use it.  This would be a great way to communicate on his property.  I can turn it on in the car, before we go hiking.  I expect my son to also have his license soon, as well as Jill’s oldest, so we’ll have 4 licensed Hams when we go up there.  Definitely a good investment.

–Neil W2NDG

Have you ever had one of those days?  Something that I refer to as The Shidas Touch.  Wherein everything you touch turns to feces.  I successfully managed to break my iPhone, Dell laptop, and a Garmin Nuvi 250 all in the course of about 12 hours.  None of my radio equipment seems to have been affected by the condition, with my Icom dual-bander actually seeming to repair itself recently.  The iPhone was an easy fix.  Just a tethered reboot did the trick.  I seem to always go one step too far when playing with things on my jailbroken Sprint iPhone 4.  The Garmin was actually already broken, but I did manage to break it further.  The person who borrowed this from my YL must have been trying to delete his history from the thing before he returned it, and managed to delete all of the maps in the process.  Some research, and a few trial-and-errors brought the device back, and now is actually working better than before, but in the process I was pretty sure I had bricked the thing, and shoved it aside in favor of salvaging part of a good night’s sleep.  The Dell, however, is a sad story.

I bring this up, because it is this same Dell laptop that was the processing muscle behind my testing of the Soft66LC4 that was sent to me to evaluate.  In a fit of kindness, I was attempting to clone a USB flash drive that I use for radio programming, and accidentally hosed the partition structure of the Dell’s hard drive.  How, you ask?  Well, let’s just say that if you ever use a wonderful little program called Drive Image XML, don’t do it with any major distractions competing for your attention.  It’s very easy to click the wrong thing, and BOOM!

I have managed to back up the damaged partition so that I can restore any settings in all of my radio software on there, but it is not rebuild-able at this point.  I did manage to get it working for a little while using a program I like called TestDisk, but then when I tried to rebuild the Linux partition that I had also lost (along with some of Jill’s files), it killed all of the progress I had made earlier.

So, it’s done.  Time to reload.  So, for anyone who was waiting for more info on the Soft66LC4, We are experiencing operator difficulties.  Please stand by.  Good thing I didn’t try to work on the car that day!

–Neil W2NDG

The answer is yes, and no.  Using the software utility available here you can stretch the coverage of your UV-3R Mark II.  This

UV-3R Mark II

only works on the Mark II (dual watch display) and the new Plus model.  There are two options for changing the coverage.  You can stretch up from VHF or down from UHF.  Only the UHF option seems to work.  Now, before you run off and do this, let me pass a few warnings.  First of all, the UV-3R is NOT designed to do this, so transmitting at full power on a band your radio was not designed to work on has the potential to fry something.  Second of all, most users have put the output power between 1 and 16 milliwatts (yes, milli), and my tests concur with this.  It does receive OK on 220, but not as well as it does on 2M or 440.  The procedure can be a little complicated, but there is plenty of help at the UV-3R Yahoo Group.

So, does it really work?  During my morning commute, my train passes south of my club’s main repeater site.  Now this is on a rather high building, in one of the highest points on western Long Island, and is pretty much line-of-site for a 4-5 mile stretch of my train ride.  I tested to see if I could key up our 220 machine, and it seems that the effective range was about 4 miles this morning.  Now that was just keying the repeater up.  I’ll have to check to see if I can actually be HEARD on it.  For listening to the 2 or 3 220 repeaters near my office though, it works fine.  Also, keep in mind that this was all done with the stock antenna, which is most likely far from optimal at 220 Mhz.

Once again, I can’t stress enough that if you don’t want to risk breaking your radio permanently, don’t try this.  So far, my little radio has suffered no ill-effects, but your mileage may vary.

-Neil  W2NDG

I received a Soft66LC4 SDR receiver for evaluation. The review of this radio will be in 3 parts, initial impressions, usage test, and full technical test. Here are my initial impressions.

The Soft66LC4 is the newest SDR receiver from Kazunori Miura JA7TDO. There have been several revisions of this inexpensive

Soft66LC4

SDR over the last couple of years. The evaluation unit came in about a week from Japan in a plain envelope with no documentation or software. You are expected to refer back to JA7DTO’s website for help. Although the setup is a bit complicated, it wasn’t too bad for me since I deal with a lot of control software that uses USB-to-serial connectivity. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my Dell laptop’s internal sound card can process at 192khz, giving me a full 192khz of visible bandwidth.

The Soft66 is a bit larger than an Altoids tin. JA7TDO’s eBay store states that you have to finish the case yourself and drill holes, but it seems that he is doing this for you now. There is an SMA antenna connector, a mini USB port, and an indicator light on one end. On the other end is a 3.5mm audio jack, and a hole for access to an adjustment pot for RF gain. I found that my sample needed a slightly longer mini USB plug as the first one I tried did not stay in well.

Driver installation can be quite complicated but I intend to help him with this by writing up some easy-to-follow instructions. One issue that exists with this SDR for now, but will probably be resolved soon, is that there isn’t a way to control the SDR with WinRAD yet. You have to use the separate control application which makes the process a bit clunky. I believe that once more of these newer LC4 models are out there there will be support for WinRAD and other SDR Applications, as there were for the previous Soft66 radios.

Initial usage tests at my location were favorable, considering my lack of a decent antenna (about 10M of wire in a tree outside my window), and excessive RFI at my location.  I hope to get out to a more remote site to perform the detailed usage review in a more interference-free environment.  Coverage is from 500 khz to 70 Mhz.  For now, the control app does not warn you if you enter a frequency outside that range, but simply crashes.  Luckily, this does not lockup the controller, and you simply need to relaunch the application.  I was able to receive MW AM stations, CW, SSB, data, and AM on the amateur bands, and plenty of SW BC.  I did not try WinRAD’s DRM feature yet.

I’ll try to get this set up for remote access if possible, but for now, with no way to control it other than with the supplied application, I will hold off.  Special thanks to Kazunori Miura for supplying the test sample so quickly, and to my friend WA2CDL, who offered to perform the technical testing.

On JA7TDO’s eBay store these radios sell for $108 plus shipping, and are fully assembled. Well worth the money as long as the proper DLL files are made available for using it with WinRAD. A more extensive test will follow.

eBay store link:  http://stores.ebay.com/HAMShopJapan?_rdc=1

Soft66 page: http://zao.jp/radio/soft66lc/

–Neil W2NDG