Archive for the ‘amsat’ Category
Modern Amateur Radio Hobby – An Introduction
June 27th, 2024 | 
Author: This video is an introduction to an international public-service and technology hobby known as ‘amateur radio’ (or ‘ham radio’).
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K40HpIjDLRs[/embedyt]
Amateur radio (also called ham radio) describes the use of radio frequency spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency communication. The term “amateur” is used to specify “a duly-authorized person interested in radioelectric practice with a purely personal aim and without pecuniary interest;” (either direct monetary or other similar rewards) and to differentiate it from commercial broadcasting, public safety (such as police and fire), or professional two-way radio services (such as maritime, aviation, taxis, etc.).
The amateur radio service (amateur service and amateur-satellite service) is established by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) through the Radio Regulations. National governments regulate technical and operational characteristics of transmissions and issue individual stations licenses with an identifying call sign. Prospective amateur operators are tested for their understanding of key concepts in electronics and the host government’s radio regulations. Radio amateurs use a variety of voice, text, image, and data communications modes and have access to frequency allocations throughout the RF spectrum to enable communication across a city, region, country, continent, the world, or even into space.
Amateur radio is officially represented and coordinated by the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU), which is organized in three regions and has as its members the national amateur radio societies which exist in most countries. According to an estimate made in 2011 by the American Radio Relay League, two million people throughout the world are regularly involved with amateur radio. About 830,000 amateur radio stations are located in IARU Region 2 (the Americas) followed by IARU Region 3 (South and East Asia and the Pacific Ocean) with about 750,000 stations. A significantly smaller number, about 400,000, are located in IARU Region 1 (Europe, Middle East, CIS, Africa).
Activities and practices
The expansive diversity found in the amateur radio hobby attracts practitioners who have a wide range of interests. Many hams begin with a fascination of radio communication and then combine other personal interests to make the pursuit of the hobby rewarding. Some of the focal areas amateurs pursue include radio contesting, radio propagation study, public service communication, technical experimentation, and computer networking. But, that is just a sampling of interest areas found in the hobby.
Amateur radio operators use various modes of transmission to communicate. The two most common modes for voice transmissions are frequency modulation (FM) and single sideband (SSB). The FM mode offers high-quality audio signals, while SSB is better at long distance communication when bandwidth is restricted.
Modern personal computers have encouraged the use of digital modes such as radioteletype (RTTY) which previously required cumbersome mechanical equipment. Hams led the development of packet radio in the 1970s, which has employed protocols such as AX.25 and TCP/IP. Specialized digital modes such as PSK31 allow real-time, low-power communications on the shortwave bands. More robust digital modes have been invented and improved, including such modes as Olivia, JT65, and WSPR.
NASA astronaut Col. Doug Wheelock, KF5BOC, Expedition 24 flight engineer, operates the NA1SS ham radio station in the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station. Equipment is a Kenwood TM-D700E transceiver.
Amateur radio operators, using battery- or generator-powered equipment, often provide essential communications services when regular channels are unavailable due to natural disasters or other disruptive events.
This video comes to us via Canada, and is used by permission from Bernard Bouchard – / ve2sms – The original video was published on Feb 28, 2013.- Website is https://www.ve2cwq.ca/amateur-radio-club-ve2cwq/
Voici maintenant, la version complète du documentaire «La radioamateur» d’une durée de 11 minutes. On y aborde toutes les activités sur le monde de la radioamateur. Ce vidéo a été produit par le Club Radioamateur VE2CWQ / Canwarn-Québec. Pour information: https://www.ve2cwq.ca/
Connect with me at https://NW7US.us
USA Amateur Radio information: http://ARRL.org
Check Out My New SDRplay RSPdx Software-Defined Radio Receiver – Live!
My new SDRplay RSPdx software-defined radio receiver is live, via http://www.sdrspace.com/Version-3, using the SDR Console software (Version 3).
The receivers are online whenever I am not transmitting and when there are no local thunderstorms.
Antenna Port A is a wire antenna (100′), while Antenna Port B is a VHF/UHF discone. Both have an AM Broadcast band reject filter, reducing local AM Broadcast signals by about 30 to 40 dB. I need to use these because the very close KLIN transmitting tower is just miles away and those signals overwhelm the receiver. When I use the signal filters, the local AM Broadcasting signals no longer overwhelm the receiver.
Let me know what you think. Enjoy!
To use my receiver:
Install the latest version of SDR-Console which can be downloaded from https://www.sdr-radio.com/download
Install SDR Console according to the directions given. Once you have the software installed, you will want to add my server.
It takes a little to get familiar with the software, but there are online FAQs on how to begin.
My server is known as, ‘0 NW7US‘ — it will be online when I am not using my antenna systems for transmitting. It will be offline during thunderstorms, or during times when I must use the systems for transmitting.
Software-defined radio is a great way to hear all sorts of communications, from local AM broadcast stations, FM stations, VHF Air Traffic, to shortwave radio stations including amateur radio HF communications.
Thank you for watching, commenting, and most of all, for subscribing; please subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://YouTube.com/NW7US Also, please click on the bell, to enable alerts so that when I post a new video, you will be notified. By subscribing, you will be kept in the loop for new videos and more.
Video:
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHj917E1bKA[/embedyt]
73!
Ham Radio Deluxe 6.4.0.794 Released
I just received some good news from Mike, WA9PIE. He writes in an email:
The first release of Ham Radio Deluxe for 2018 (Ham Radio Deluxe version 6.4.0.794) is now available for download. Please download it from the Download pages on our website at:
https://www.hamradiodeluxe.com
This release includes a number of important changes including the addition of the Icom IC-7610, resolves a Logbook exit problem, resolves “sort on LOTW date”, API for QSO Forwarding now populates Logbook with My Station data, a number of fixes for the Kenwood TS-480, applications remember screen position, enable CI-V address to be entered directly, and a number of stability enhancements.
The full release notes can be found here:
http://ReleaseNotes.hamradiodeluxe.com
I would like to acknowledge and thank Mike Blaszczak (K7ZCZ) and our beta team on their hard work in getting this release out.
All those who have purchased Ham Radio Deluxe at any time in the past should download and install this version in order to benefit from all bug fixes. You are entitled to them. Our clients who are covered by an active Software Maintenance and Support period are entitled to Feature Enhancements.
As announced previously, we expect to release as many as 9 releases in 2018. There will be no releases between 1-Nov and 1-Jan. We continue to focus on reducing our development backlog with five developers dedicated to all applications in the suite.
Please watch these newsletters for updates. Pass these updates along to your friends. Newsletters will also be posted on our website’s blog at:
https://www.hamradiodeluxe.com/blog
Thank you es 73 de Mike, WA9PIE
HRD Software, LLC
Everything Ham radio podcast Ep 93 – NASA On The Air(NOTA)
I’m sure that you have heard of NPOTA, National Parks On The Air, and SOTA, Summits On The Air, and probably even POTA, Parks On The Air, The US program for the World Wide Flora and Fauna, but have you heard of the latest event that starts on Sunday, Dec 11, 2017?
Starting at 0000 UTC time on December 11, 2017 the new year long event celebrating multiple anniversaries for the NASA program will start. It is called NOTA or NASA On The Air.
With several NASA clubs doing several special event stations of the coming year, they decided to make a year long event where you, as the end user, can contact the stations to earn points through the year. You can even gets points during other events like Winter Field Day, the ARRL Field Day and others.
Losten to my latest podcast episode where I talk with Rob Suggs about it:
ARISS 20th Anniversary SSTV
The 20 year history of ARISS was displayed through a collection of 12 images highlighting the accomplishments of the project over the last two decades.
As the ISS has orbited the world it has been transmitting the SSTV signals using FM on the usual downlink of 145.800 MHz, here at my QTH in the UK the passes have occurred late at night into the early morning, averaging 3 - 4 reasonable passes each day.
The signal has been very strong and so some excellent low noise images have been received by many people using just modest equipment. While not the greatest technical achievement in the world it nonetheless generates much needed interest in ARISS and amateur space communication.
My own system consisted of the Yaesu FT-857D and MMSSTV running on the shack PC and was left on automatic receive (I was tucked up in bed) and managed to get decent copies of all the images.
Image 8 reminded me of the fun I had back in 2011-2012 of receiving the ARRISAT-1 and was one of the key things that convinced me to finally get off my backside and actually get licensed, even if it took me another 12 months and to this day haven't really cracked satellites myself! My previous blog posts on that can be found at http://nerdsville.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/arissat-1
Here are the best of my images, for a full description of what each one depicts visit http://ariss-sstv.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/anniversary-image-descriptions.html
ARISS 20th Anniversary SSTV
The 20 year history of ARISS was displayed through a collection of 12 images highlighting the accomplishments of the project over the last two decades.
As the ISS has orbited the world it has been transmitting the SSTV signals using FM on the usual downlink of 145.800 MHz, here at my QTH in the UK the passes have occurred late at night into the early morning, averaging 3 - 4 reasonable passes each day.
The signal has been very strong and so some excellent low noise images have been received by many people using just modest equipment. While not the greatest technical achievement in the world it nonetheless generates much needed interest in ARISS and amateur space communication.
My own system consisted of the Yaesu FT-857D and MMSSTV running on the shack PC and was left on automatic receive (I was tucked up in bed) and managed to get decent copies of all the images.
Image 8 reminded me of the fun I had back in 2011-2012 of receiving the ARRISAT-1 and was one of the key things that convinced me to finally get off my backside and actually get licensed, even if it took me another 12 months and to this day haven't really cracked satellites myself! My previous blog posts on that can be found at http://nerdsville.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/arissat-1
Here are the best of my images, for a full description of what each one depicts visit http://ariss-sstv.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/anniversary-image-descriptions.html
Hamvention Is Here – ETH069
With Hamvention already on top of us, I figured I’d throw my two cents worth into the mix with everybody else’s. In this episode of the Everything Ham Radio Podcast, we talk about some of the interesting things that are going to be going on at this years Hamvention at it’s new location in Xenia, OH.
DARA teamed up with The Miami Valley Mesh Alliance (MVMA) to setup a Mesh network on channel -2 at 10 MHz bandwidth. The SSID is AREDN-10-v3.
We talk about all of my fellow podcasters/youtubers that are there and what they have going on and where they are at.
Lastly, we discussed some of the interesting forum topics that are going on during the weekend. To listen to the episode as well as check out all the links and further information on the topic, check out the show notes at:
