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YEK - 329 (courtesy ve3gop.com)

Propagation on MF has been excellent this past week and hopefully will continue to be good.

A 'challenge target' for listeners in North America is YEK - 329kHz in Arviat, NU, on the NW shore of Hudson Bay. It's widely heard throughout North America and is a good target for listeners on both coasts. Listen for YEK's upper sideband on 329.424 kHz with your receiver in the CW mode.

When tuning for NDBs, put your receiver in the CW mode and listen for the NDB's CW identifier, repeated every few seconds. Listen for U.S. NDB identifiers approximately 1 kHz higher or lower than the published transmitted frequency since these beacons are modulated with a 1020 Hz tone approximately.

For example, 'AA' near Fargo, ND, transmits on 365 kHz and its upper sideband CW identifier is tuned at 366.025 kHz while its lower sideband CW ident can be tuned at 363.946 kHz. Its USB tone is actually 1025 Hz while its LSB tone is 1054 Hz.

Often, one sideband will be much stronger than the other so if you don't hear the first one, try listening on the other sideband.

Canadian NDBs normally have an USB tone only, usually very close to 400 Hz. They also have a long dash (keydown) following the CW identifier.

All NDBs heard in North America will be listed in the RNA database (updated daily) while those heard in Europe may be found in the REU database. Beacons heard outside of these regions will be found in the RWW database. These databases have recently been re-vamped and are slicker than ever before!

From CLE coordinator Brian Keyte (G3SIA), comes the following CLE info:

Hello all,

Here are all the details for this weekend's co-ordinated listening event.
First time CLE logs too?  Yes, please!
Short logs are always as welcome as long ones.

     Days:     Friday 22 January - Monday 25 January
     Times:    Start and End at midday, your LOCAL time
     Range:    320.0 - 334.9 kHz

Please log the NDBs you can positively identify that are listed in the frequency range (no DGPS please), plus any UNIDs heard there too.

Send your CLE log to the List, if possible not in an attachment, with CLE264 and FINAL at the start of its title.
Please show on EVERY LINE of your log:

  # The date and UTC (the day changes at 00:00 UTC).
  # kHz - the beacon's nominal published frequency, if you know it.
  # The Call Ident.

Show those main items FIRST on each line, before any optional details such as the NDB's Location, Distance, Offsets, Cycle time, etc.
As always, make your log meaningful to everyone by including your listening location and details of the receiver, aerial(s), etc.
It would be OK to use one remote receiver, with the owner's permission if necessary, provided that ALL your loggings for the CLE are made using it.

Joachim or I will send the usual 'Any More Logs?' email at about 20:00 UTC on Tuesday so that you can check that your log has been found OK.
Do make sure that your log has arrived on the List at the very latest by
09:00 UTC on Wed. 27th January.
We hope to complete the combined results within a day or two.

You can find all CLE-related information from our CLE page ( http://www.ndblist.info/cle.htm ), including a link to the seek lists provided for this Event from the Rxx Database.

Good listening
    Brian & Joachim
---------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Keyte G3SIA          ndbcle'at'gmail.com
Location: Surrey, SE England     (CLE co-ordinator)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 

If you are interested in some remote listening - maybe due to local difficulties - you could use any one remote receiver for your loggings, stating its location and with the owner's permission if required.( e.g. see  kiwisdr.com ) A remote listener may NOT also use another receiver, local or remote, to make more loggings for the same CLE.

These listening events serve several purposes. They

Hello and welcome to the 387th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss concepts related to building software from source code. Topics include proper build environments, packages to install for easy building of software, how to get source, commands for building software and much more. We hope you find this talk interesting and informative and we hope you come back for Episode 388.

73 de The LHS Crew

Lately, for the ARRL January VHF contest, I try to find a SOTA summit to activate. Operating time is usually just a few hours, so it does not make for a big score. The main advantage is for VHF SOTA (Summits On The Air) because there is a lot more activity on 2m CW and SSB. This year, I wanted to go for the mountaintop trifecta of SOTA, POTA (Parks On The Air) and VHF contest in one activation.

Threemile Mountain (W0C/SP-107) emerged as the activation summit because it is not too far from our cabin and accessible in the winter. (This time of year, the roads to many of our favorite summits are blocked.) For POTA, it is located in the Pike National Forest (K-4404). Because it is a short hike, I concluded that I could carry the Yaesu FT-911 and the 20 Ah Bionno battery. This would cover all the bands, give us more RF punch and still have plenty of battery capacity.

I carried quite a collection of antennas which gave us plenty of operating choices. We started out on 2m and 70 cm FM, working mostly local stations. This quickly got us enough contacts for SOTA and POTA points. We used a rollup J-pole for 2 meters and 70 cm, until it became intermittent and the SWR went wild. Then we switched to the Arrow 3-element Yagi for 2 meters.

About that time, I decided to see what was happening on 2m SSB. There were a number of contest stations on the air, mostly from the front range cities (Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, …). I worked a bunch of them using 50 watts from the FT-991 to the 2m Yagi antenna (horizontally polarized).

Suddenly, I was surprised to hear N0LL from Kansas calling me. I’ve worked Larry before from Colorado but it usually was from a really good location such as Mt Herman or Pikes Peak. Even then, we often had to switch to CW to complete the contact. Today he was louder than many of the Denver stations. We easily worked on SSB, which turned out to be a new personal best DX for me from a SOTA summit (372 miles).

After things slowed down on 2m SSB, I decided to make some HF contacts. The North American QSO Party (SSB) was active, so I decided to set up for 20m and see who I could work. Running 100 watts to an endfed halfwave kept me competitive with the contest stations. Then I moved up to 17m SSB and worked non-contest POTA and SOTA chasers.

We both accomplished the three-in-one mountaintop activation for SOTA, POTA, and the VHF contest. I also worked the NA QSO Party, so that makes it four-in-one, but who is counting?  The January weather cooperated with us with almost no wind on the summit, about 28 degrees F. We sat there in the sunshine and just enjoyed the view before hiking back down.

73 Bob K0NR

The post Radio Fun on Threemile Mountain (W0C/SP-107) appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

In this episode, Martin M1MRB is joined by Chris Howard (M0TCH), Martin Rothwell (M0SGL), Ed Durrant (DD5LP), Frank Howell (K4FMH) and Bill Barnes (WC3B) to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin M6BOY rounds up the news in brief and in this episode’s features How to improve your Handy Talkie.

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AmateurLogic.TV Episode 152 is now available for download.

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1:26:31

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Charlie/NJ7V and Gaston/KT1RUN did a comparison of VHF antennas during a SOTA activation. Specifically, they compared a rubber duck antenna, a J-pole antenna on a tall mast, and a 3-element Yagi antenna. Spoiler Alert: the rubber duck sucks (they all do) but the Yagi and J-pole performed about the same.

Joyce/K0JJW and I use the Arrow 3-element Yagi antenna for most of our SOTA activations, so I am very familiar with that one. We also have a rollup J-pole that we use once in a while.

Charlie used the Yagi the same way we do: handheld at ground level. The J-pole was on a mast, maybe 12 feet (?) in the air. Although they were on a summit, there is some performance improvement getting the antenna higher than the surrounding terrain. The gain of the Arrow 3-element Yagi has been measured at about 6 dBd. The gain of a J-pole, being a halfwave radiator, is 0 dBd. The additional height of the J-pole has to make up this 6 dB of gain difference to be roughly equivalent.

A big difference, though, is that the Yagi antenna has to be held and pointed. The J-pole is always pointing in the right direction so you can just focus on operating and logging. We may have to consider using a omni antenna instead of the Yagi.

Good stuff!

73 Bob K0NR

The post Best VHF SOTA Antenna? appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Welcome to the 386th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack, our second episode of 2021. In this episode, the hosts discuss changes and additions to state QSO parties, the cancellation of upcoming ham radio related events, the next QSO Today virtual expo, PeerTube, Project Lightspeed, Linux Mint, getting rich with Open Source, Raspberry Pi clusters and much more. Thank you for listening and we hope you have a great week.

73 de The LHS Crew