This coming weekend is the annual ARRL CW DX international contest. This contest covers the whole weekend and is very well attended by some very nice DX and rare DX as well. Last year during this contest I was using my EndFed antenna and this year I will be using my Hustler 4BTV vertical antenna.

 If you are a CW contester this is a must-contest for you. If you are not a contester but into CW this also can net you some nice DXCC contacts. The exchange is simple, your 599 report and your State or Province and that's it. The DX station will send their 599 and the power they are using.

 Let's say your CW is a bit rusty and contest CW speed is beyond your comfort zone. Well, do what I used to do years ago use a spotting network to find the rare stations. This way you get their call and tune them in, now use a CW decode program such as MRP40 which was the one I used to use. It sets up via your sound card and decodes up to 60wpm. I found it very accurate and there is a full feature trial version available. Now you can read the machine gun code like a pro! 

As for contest software N1MM+ is free and many setup videos are online for most rigs. So there you go with a little effort you can stack up some nice DX over the weekend. 

Who knows maybe you will rekindle the love for CW and start a new adventure in ham radio.

I have read on a few blogs from the Netherlands about a contest called PACC it has been around since 1955 and is a mixed contest of CW and SSB. So there is a mode available that most hams would feel comfortable with.

 It is always on the 2nd weekend of February and lasts for 24 hours. On Saturday afternoon I was able to get some radio time in and I found several Dutch PACC contest stations on the bands. I set up my contesting software N1MM+ for the contest and in I went. The exchange for the Non-Dutch (me) is a signal report and QSO number. For the Dutch station, I was to receive a signal report and a 2 letter province code, of which there were 12.

I did breeze over the rules but missed the part about a 10-minute band change rule. If you made a contact on a certain band you had to stay on that band for 10 minutes. Well for me that was not the case and the penalty was me going from the category of Single Op CW low power all band to Multi op two transmitters mixed category. Oh well, live and learn! I have attached my score and the contacts I made. 

In this episode, we join Martin Butler M1MRB, Martin Rothwell (M0SGL), Frank Howell (K4FMH), Bill Barnes (WC3B) and Leslie Butterfields (G0CIB) to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin Butler (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and in the episode's feature is Thoughts and Reviews from the Caney Island Rally

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Hello and welcome to the 495th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts discuss ChatGPT, ARDC grants and programs, impropriety at the ARRL, the dark side of Open Source, Pop!_OS, additional specialized Linux distributions, Linux gaming and much more. Thanks for listening and have a great week.

73 de The LHS Crew

In reworking a wire antenna around the edge of my shingled roofline that was installed 10 years ago as a (mostly) horizontal HF loop, I discovered a couple of things. After applying them successfully and preparing a draft of the principles, procedures and results, Don G3XTT decided to publish my work in the March issue of Practical Wireless magazine. Thomas K4SWL, Kirk NT0Z, and Scott K0MD gave me valuable advice on this journey.

One is that the current ARRL Antenna Book mainly parrots the wisdom of “just use 450-ohm ladder line and you’ll be fine.” Usually. OK, that’s the Cliff Notes version and they do have more to say than that. But they repeat that Philosopher of Knoxville, Larry Cebik, in his well done set of antenna models for HF loops as the main source of this wisdom. L.E. Cebik, to the surprise of many hams, was not an engineering faculty member at the University of Tennessee but a Professor of Philosophy. A good one at that.

The new English translation of Rothamel’s Antenna Book had references! It’s a more thorough and deep-dive treatment of HF loop antennas. It’s “grounded” in the published literature which “bonds” things together in terms of the reader’s comprehensive of what has been published about these HF antennas. (Sorry for the Ward Silver puns here!)

A second is that the problem with doing what most antenna texts say, measure the impedance of an antenna at the feed point, is that the loop needs to be up in the air where it’s going to be installed. This is a far climb on a ladder with an antenna analyzer!

It dawned on me that the new era analyzers with bluetooth connectivity that are light weight offer a way to measure the feed point impedance at the “bare wire” ends of the loop while keeping one’s feet on the ground. Here I am on a step ladder with my Rig Expert Stick Pro with a banana plug adapter to the bare wire ends of a loop being installed at Clay AC5Z’s house among four tall pine trees. I’m making sure that my iPhone has a good bluetooth connection to the analyzer before I attached the second bare wire end to the banana plug and let AC5Z hoist it up to it’s intended height above ground.

We used Clay’s IC-7300 set at the lowest power output (5w) to run a WSPR beacon for 12 hours on most HF bands. Below are displays from WSPR.Rocks for the fundamental 80M band (pounding Eastern Europe over night!), 20M (Europe, Australia and vicinity, Hawaii) and the 10 & 12M bands (getting to Australia and Japan).

80 Meters

20 Meters

10-12 Meters

This particular loop is nearing our final optimization. It can be optimized a bit more by raising the balun wind from 4:1 to 6:1 and taking about 3 feet off of the bare wire. This should situate the 80M band to Clay’s liking and bring the higher harmonics more into line with those bands, too. It seems to be working from the test phase.

I’ll cover it and perhaps another one being planned for Mike N5DU’s house soon. Read about the process I’m using in the March issue of Practical Wireless magazine. I cover it in detail for the loop at my HOA-based residence that didn’t just follow the conventional wisdom. It got a much improved optimization. Even being matched to 160 meters for an 80 meter fundamental design frequency!

Ham College episode 97 is now available for download.

Extra Class Exam Questions – Part 35
E7E Modulation and demodulation: reactance, phase and balanced modulators, detectors, mixer stages.

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