AmateurRadio.com

Sorry I have been away the last twelve months or so, the Blog has had to take a rest from my typing fingers and Amateur Radio has been put well away on the back burner.

I lost both my parents within five months of each other early last year and I still have not really got over the ordeal yet, which had played out over five years before their demise.

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

Not often is this seen on 10m

 

 VE9KK the world of CW blog would not be complete if I did not partake in the ARRL International CW
DX contest. As always I skipped the opening session Friday evening mainly because my limit is 40m and due to the time, I would have limited operating time before the band closed down for the evening. The contest was very well attended along with great propagation numbers. Now having said that on Saturday the space weather numbers were off the charts and some in my local contest group felt it could had been an error on WWV's part as they were showing 343 and other sites such as Dominion observatory were in the 160s. In any case, the numbers were great and in most logs including mine, 10m displayed the largest contact numbers as sure sign propagation was good. 

For about 90% of the contest I ran and when it go slow I did some search and pounce. Now running in a contest like this you get HUGE pile-ups and it showed me I have to get more serious with pile-up practices using software such as Morse Runner. I have to be honest in saying at times the pile-ups were overwhelming and hard to pick out any call. 

The action on a map view

My Hustle 4BTV worked like a dream and at times my SNR numbers in Europe were great according to the Reverse Beacon Network. One of the challenges was to find an empty spot to call CQ contest. Often I would have to find a new spot as other ops would unknowingly move in. Not a big deal as it's all part of contesting. Entering these contests always helps out my CW skills to improve my skill but towards the end of the contest on Sunday evening I pulled the plug at 23:30 UTC with only a 1/2 hour to go. I was not hearing code anymore just noise and simple calls like M2T were a challenge so it was time to end things and go have a nice glass of red wine and relax.
One of the highlights was contacting fellow blogger Bas PE4BAS on 10m and 15m.

The contest runs for 48 hours and according to my contest program N1MM I was on for 16.5 hours but I take a break every hour and lunch but N1MM keeps running as I don't want to shut it down to just start it up again. So I figure I was on for about 14.5 to 15 hours in total. My best 1 hour run was 148 contacts. On average each hour netted me between 80 to 90 but then there were very slow one hour stints as well.
 

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

 10m remains very active, this is todays activity at 2 different times.

Around 10:30z:

Around 13:55z:

 

Further details about FT8CN see my Blog https://g1kqh.blogspot.com/2023/02/ft8cn-new-free-android-app.html

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

I had a few problems displaying the blog listing of previous blogs yesterday, after I had uploaded a new blog about the FT8CN app. I have found out what caused it and all should now display correctly on your phones, tablets and PC's.

73's Steve

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

At a recent local hamfest, my ARRL Section Manager, Malcolm W5XX, held the annual ARRL Forum. As Division Director David Norris K5UZ was giving his update on the recent Board of Directors meeting. W5XX commented that a club in North Georgia had begun reaching out to licensees of the General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS). Why? There are some 8,000 of them in surrounding counties! Give a statistician a number like that and it’s catnip to a cat.

I had heard of GMRS and the lighter-weight Family Radio Service (FRS) as additional radio frequencies to the famous Citizen’s Band (CB) that I used as a teen. But I didn’t really know much about it. So, I spent parts of a week doing some searching, reading, and, inevitably, database building. I saw the wisdom of the club in question reaching out to this audience. Let’s do a thought experiment to flesh this out.

GMRS licensees use radios up to 50 watts on mobile stations and 15 watts in fixed stations in the mid-400 mhz region. There are limitations on the type of one-way communications (no whistling which would rule out most anyone in amateur radio tuning up an amplifier, lol). But in general, there are parallels to GMRS operators to those holding a Technician license in the Amateur Radio Service with the latter having much greater frequency access, power usage, and other aspects of the radio arts.

After doing some reading, I checked the FCC ULS GMRS license data. There’s an interesting comparison: the ARRL February 2023 numbers show 386,122 Technicians while individual GMRS licenses total 336, 513 after APO addresses and one Canadian are removed. Organizations and some other groups can obtain GMRS licenses. Roughly, there are about as many individual GMRS licensees as there are Technicians, give or take 50,000. Ok, I thought, this is surprising but how do they operate? Are they communicating amongst themselves as ham operators do? How many GMRS repeaters are there? The surprises just kept on coming!

The popular site, RepeaterBook.com, does list some GMRS repeaters. But the mother ship is the myGMRS.com website. One has to have a GMRS license to register but there ‘s enough information available to the public to show just how organized parts of the GMRS community already is. I’ve taken a screenshot of the map display, nicely done with clustering repeaters until a certain zoom level is reached, showing the GMRS repeaters in the U.S. Note those in Puerto Rico: I had recommended that the ARRL assist in getting a permanent repeater on the westernmost mountains near Mayaguez after a devastating hurricane. Perhaps even an HF ALE type station directed at Florida or North Carolina. Looks like the GMRS community has done some work here, too.

The map below illustrates the set of repeater hubs and their links around the U.S. There are national and regional Nets held regularly. An audio stream can be monitored using the website for each hub, not unlike Hoseline for the Brandmeister DMR Network. Hmm. If ham radio were only this organized, so quickly.

After downloading the February 2023 GMRS data from the FCC ULS ftp site, I processed it and filtered out the overseas military licenses. These records were then georeferenced to street addresses, with some that did not have street addresses geocoded to zip codes and a few to city centroids. The map below illustrates this: the GMRS individual license IS a compelling market for amateur radio recruitment.

It’s easy to see that the North Georgia region is part of the Appalachian Mountain range that is covered with GMRS licensees But so is most of the region east of the Mississippi River, the West Coast and the mountainous areas of the Southwest. Here’s another view zoomed in to the ARRL Delta Division where I live. Licensees in GMRS tend to follow population centers but note the areas, like Nashville, where the topography gives more height-above-ground than others. Northwest Arkansas is another such location. Interesting patterns!

We know little to nothing about the age distribution of GMRS licensees as year of birth is not contained in the ULS database released to the public (only 18 or over). But it stands to reason that GMRS licensees are likely to have a broader age range of adoption. From perusing the names on the licenses — license holders can authorize other family members to use additional radios in this Service — there are gendered-naming patterns. More women in GMRS than ham radio? Possibly.

Some interactive maps of these data are now available over at FoxMikeHotel.com under the Maps tab.

An important note is that an unknown number of those holding GMRS licenses today also hold licenses in the Amateur Radio Service. The FRN is not contained in the GMRS data so it would take “fuzzy matching” with less than perfect results to examine this idea.

The ARRL has taken an interest in my proposed initiative to treat public libraries in the U.S. as “new served agencies” for recruitment strategies, according to Division Director David Norris K5UZ. See my two blog posts here and here. Should the GMRS licensees be viewed as another direct marketing opportunity by the ARRL?

I’ve taken the GMRS data and spatially joined the ARRL Division and Section fields to the license record using GIS. These files were then split into separate spreadsheets by Division with the Section as a separate field. I’ve put them on my public folder in Dropbox for all to retrieve should they desire. This would make it easy for a direct-mailing to GMRS licensees. In a cover letter identifying the contact info for their ARRL Section Manager, a brochure should be inserted describing the much greater options available by adding the Technician license through a VE exam. It works for some yield rates for other membership services. (Check today’s mail if you doubt this isn’t used frequently.)

It would not be inexpensive with USPS rates. But it would be directed at a market that is already known to have some interested in operating radios for communication. Perhaps it should begin with GMRS licensees in areas where there are existing repeater operations. This would be a good test case to see the yield from such a direct mailing.

What won’t work is to simply send the information “down stream,” expecting SMs to do all the heavy lifting. It simply won’t happen. The League already conducts a commercial mailing operation which is where this activity should be situated.

This would be a third recruiting rail for the ARRL, including the Teacher Institute (getting in schools), the pending (I’m told) Plant the Seed initiative for public libraries, and the direct mailing to known radio communication licensees in the GMRS arena. Recruit the Generals, anyone?

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

Around 16:30z I switched to 10m, the band was wide open to the UK.

Examples of FT8 decoded using FT8CN on my android tablet:

 

 

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].

There is a new FT8 APP for Android doing the rounds, called FT8CN from BG7YOZ (China). It is a free download and unrestricted in use. It is in the early stages of development, but is already up to version 0.86.

Download the APK file from here:https://github.com/N0BOY/FT8CN/releases

You  will need to give your device permission to allow install of the APP.

There are various ways to configure the radio connection. The simplest VOX appears to use the Android device's internal mic and speaker.(Of course you could pipe the audio directly in and out via the audio socket on your Tablet or Phone). Direct CAT allows a USB connection, Bluetooth is available, and connection via a WiFi network. All these seem to be in early stages of development.

 I soon got it installed, and enabled, decoding the audio using the internal mic of my Android tablet..

 

 

Split mode enabled showing Spectrum scope and received decodes.

 

 

 

It also plots the action to a live map via another quick tap on the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at [email protected].