AmateurRadio.com

In this episode, Martin Butler (M1MRB) is joined by Dan Romanchik KB6NU, Edmund Spicer M0MNG, Ed Durrant DD5LP and Leslie Butterfield G0CIB to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and in the episode we feature is The Lost Tribe, the Pied Piper and the Executive.

We would like to thank Mark Weber, AB4IX, and our monthly and annual subscription donors for keeping the podcast advert free. To donate, please visit - http://www.icqpodcast.com/donate

- VP0 New Prefix - Laboratory Test Model of 'Sputnik 1 EMC/EMI', 1957 - You can now order Pizza with Morse Code - ARRL Clean Signal Initiative on the Horizon - Broadcaster in Ham Radio 40m Band - High School Students Learn how to use Ham Radio - Denmark's 40 MHz Beacon is Back on the Air - New UK Mock Exam Papers Available - Pearl Harbor Day Memorial Special Event

Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].

In this episode, Martin Butler (M1MRB) is joined by Dan Romanchik KB6NU, Edmund Spicer M0MNG, Ed Durrant DD5LP and Leslie Butterfield G0CIB to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and in the episode we feature is The Lost Tribe, the Pied Piper and the Executive.

We would like to thank Mark Weber, AB4IX, and our monthly and annual subscription donors for keeping the podcast advert free. To donate, please visit - http://www.icqpodcast.com/donate

- VP0 New Prefix - Laboratory Test Model of 'Sputnik 1 EMC/EMI', 1957 - You can now order Pizza with Morse Code - ARRL Clean Signal Initiative on the Horizon - Broadcaster in Ham Radio 40m Band - High School Students Learn how to use Ham Radio - Denmark's 40 MHz Beacon is Back on the Air - New UK Mock Exam Papers Available - Pearl Harbor Day Memorial Special Event

Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].

 

Now you see them now, you don't.... the fun of active solar conditions

Earlier this week and last week the solar conditions have been great, and I have been able to make some nice CW DXpedition contacts. The whole DXpedition thing is new to me, as in the past I have seen the pileups and just passed them by. With the increasing flux number and with the blog reading I have been doing, it occurred to me that the times are a changin!  I did some reading up on my Icom 7610 and operating split with it. Low and behold, I have been able to make contact with some nice DXpeditions. 

Being new to this expedition thing, I have in the past read of those who indulge in this slice of our hobby. I have now come to see firsthand the mayhem of a pileup situation. I don't want to make this post about grinding my axe.....BUT......and you know what they say about a sentence that begins with a "BUT". In my very very short time of hunting out a DXpedition contacts I have come across some odd....... Let's say behaviour. 

1. As you are listening on the DXpeditions transmit frequency they vary between S4 to S8 at my end, and I am trying to get the flow of their operating........... When someone for some reason is tuning up their amp on top of the DXpedition?  To be honest I have never owned an amplifier and am not sure how the whole tune-up thing works........BUT....... I assume it does not have to be done on the DX transmit frequency. Please correct me if I am wrong? 

2. Ahh, then those who I guess who do not do their research with understand the idea of split frequency operation or don't care.......BUT..... they transmit on the DXpeditions frequency. So what happens here is stations like me can't hear who the DXpedition is coming back to as this station just keeps dropping their call on the WRONG frequency. Ok, I get it, and we all screw up thinking our rig is in split when it's not.....BUT..... with my limited time trying to work split this happens a lot. With polite op's from a DXpedition they send "up up up up" hoping the offending station will get the idea. Oh, but wait then there are the clusters such as DX summit and in the comment section, other ops are not so polite about things. 

3. Often I have heard the DXpedition station sending "VE3?" meaning he wants the VE3 to come back to him as he needs the rest of the call.  As they listen for the VE3 there are also a few op's sending their call that is not even close to "VE3". It really messes things up for both the VE3 station the DXpedition. 

Now, there is some other behaviour that I come across that make DXpeditions a pleasure.

1. While the op is calling on the DXpeditions calling frequency they politely answer them with a 599 and TU. 

2.  Operators who, while sending out their call, can hear the DXpedition station answering someone other than them, and they stop calling right away. They can achieve this as they have their radio set to full break-in mode. This will allow you to hear  between your own dits and dahs, I will admit it takes some getting used to, but it's a great operating skill. 

3. Operators who politely post on the cluster the operators call sign and leave a message that they have to transmit up and not on the calling frequency.  Having said that, I have also seen some messages that are not polite at all. I understand folks get frustrated, but there is no reason to be rude, after all it is a hobby. 

Well, we are going away on vacation this week, so the DXpeditions will have to wait for another week. But I sure have been having fun working them. 

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

 

Now you see them now, you don't.... the fun of active solar conditions

Earlier this week and last week the solar conditions have been great, and I have been able to make some nice CW DXpedition contacts. The whole DXpedition thing is new to me, as in the past I have seen the pileups and just passed them by. With the increasing flux number and with the blog reading I have been doing, it occurred to me that the times are a changin!  I did some reading up on my Icom 7610 and operating split with it. Low and behold, I have been able to make contact with some nice DXpeditions. 

Being new to this expedition thing, I have in the past read of those who indulge in this slice of our hobby. I have now come to see firsthand the mayhem of a pileup situation. I don't want to make this post about grinding my axe.....BUT......and you know what they say about a sentence that begins with a "BUT". In my very very short time of hunting out a DXpedition contacts I have come across some odd....... Let's say behaviour. 

1. As you are listening on the DXpeditions transmit frequency they vary between S4 to S8 at my end, and I am trying to get the flow of their operating........... When someone for some reason is tuning up their amp on top of the DXpedition?  To be honest I have never owned an amplifier and am not sure how the whole tune-up thing works........BUT....... I assume it does not have to be done on the DX transmit frequency. Please correct me if I am wrong? 

2. Ahh, then those who I guess who do not do their research with understand the idea of split frequency operation or don't care.......BUT..... they transmit on the DXpeditions frequency. So what happens here is stations like me can't hear who the DXpedition is coming back to as this station just keeps dropping their call on the WRONG frequency. Ok, I get it, and we all screw up thinking our rig is in split when it's not.....BUT..... with my limited time trying to work split this happens a lot. With polite op's from a DXpedition they send "up up up up" hoping the offending station will get the idea. Oh, but wait then there are the clusters such as DX summit and in the comment section, other ops are not so polite about things. 

3. Often I have heard the DXpedition station sending "VE3?" meaning he wants the VE3 to come back to him as he needs the rest of the call.  As they listen for the VE3 there are also a few op's sending their call that is not even close to "VE3". It really messes things up for both the VE3 station the DXpedition. 

Now, there is some other behaviour that I come across that make DXpeditions a pleasure.

1. While the op is calling on the DXpeditions calling frequency they politely answer them with a 599 and TU. 

2.  Operators who, while sending out their call, can hear the DXpedition station answering someone other than them, and they stop calling right away. They can achieve this as they have their radio set to full break-in mode. This will allow you to hear  between your own dits and dahs, I will admit it takes some getting used to, but it's a great operating skill. 

3. Operators who politely post on the cluster the operators call sign and leave a message that they have to transmit up and not on the calling frequency.  Having said that, I have also seen some messages that are not polite at all. I understand folks get frustrated, but there is no reason to be rude, after all it is a hobby. 

Well, we are going away on vacation this week, so the DXpeditions will have to wait for another week. But I sure have been having fun working them. 

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

The historical research I recently published in October issue of The Spectrum Monitor is now available on my companion website, foxmikehotel.com. It’s on the home page. TSM allows authors to hold secondary publication rights to articles so I can freely post the PDF now that the November issue is published. Have a look if you don’t subscribe to TSM.

The next episode of the ICQ Podcast, Number 363 that will drop on Sunday November 7th, will feature an audio version of these new research results. For those who’d rather listen than read, this might be a viable option.

One upshot of my research is this: if you begin with the ARRL-published and famous book, 200 Meters and Down by ARRL Secretary Sutton, you are going to be terribly mislead about how amateur radio got organized in the United States. The new website, worldradiohistory.com, amidst other sources such as online historical newspapers (e.g., https://www.newspapers.com), the Internet Archive, the Hathitrust archive, various university-based archives, and other sources, really opens up our ability to more fully understand the origins, emergence and organization of wireless telegraphy which begat amateur radio.

I’ve included a picture from Wikipedia of a person who made voluminous but unheralded contributions to the emergence of amateur radio. This included selling parts to the person who Elmered one of the founders of the ARRL into the hobby. (Did you know there were two co-founders?)

Do you recognize him from this picture?

If not, you’d find the TSM article and the ICQ Podcast feature in the next episode very informative. I’ve included another, one that looks a bit wacky from the day but if you’re familiar with 3D immersive technology, it was “seeing” far into the future of…today! (See the search results using the term, Oculus Quest, if you’re not familiar.)

During a somewhat boring world history class in college, I heard my professor say, “Yes, history is boring to many. Until it touches your life.” He had a point. I was living through some important history of America back in the late-sixties and early seventies. It led me into studying social movements and how they intersect the lives of not only the current participants but those who come afterwards, too.

I hope that the research I’ve done into the early part of the last century on this topic will touch your amateur radio life, so to speak. It has mine as I learned quite a bit from almost a year’s worth of reading and study. I’m delighted that we have an outlet like TSM whose Editor, Ken Reitz KS4ZR, is willing to publish pieces like this.

Frank Howell, K4FMH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Mississippi, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

This imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; link) covers a busy period of activity in October, during which we witnessed an X1.0-class X-ray flare.

From late afternoon October 25 through mid-morning October 26, an active region on the left limb of the Sun flickered with a series of small flares and petal-like eruptions of solar material.

Meanwhile, the Sun was sporting more active regions at its lower center, directly facing Earth. On October 28, the biggest of these released a significant flare, which peaked at 15:35, 28 Oct 2021 UTC.

This X1.0 X-ray flare that erupted from Active Region 12887 (we typically drop the left-most digit when referring to an active region, so this is AR2887) is the second X-class flare of Solar Cycle 25, as of the time this video goes live.

The first X-class flare occurred on 3 July 2021 and measured X1.59. It, too, caused an HF radio blackout. These blackouts will occur more often as the cycle activity increases, because the higher sunspot activity leads to many more flares, and thus cause the geomagnetic storms as the typical CME is erupted out into space, possibly colliding with Earth’s magnetosphere.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground. When intense enough, they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. Some of these disturbances to communications are called radio blackouts. They cause the lower layers of the ionosphere to become more ionized, which results in the absorption of shortwave radio frequency signals.

This flare on October 28 was classified as X1.0 in intensity. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, and so on. Flares that are classified X10 or stronger are considered unusually intense.

This was the second X-class flare of Solar Cycle 25, which began in December 2019. A new solar cycle comes roughly every 11 years. Over the course of each cycle, the Sun transitions from relatively calm to active and stormy, and then quiet again; at its peak, known as solar maximum, the Sun’s magnetic poles flip.

Two other eruptions blew off the Sun from this active region: an eruption of solar material called a coronal mass ejection and an invisible swarm of solar energetic particles. These are high-energy charged particles accelerated by solar eruptions.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

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Hello and welcome to the 438th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts discuss the educational possibilities of ham radio, the proliferation of 5G, Russia and Ukraine's radio war, tiny satellites, tiny utilities , multi-radio SDRs and much more. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful week.

73 de The LHS Crew

Russ Woodman, K5TUX, co-hosts the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast which is available for download in both MP3 and OGG audio format. Contact him at [email protected].