AmateurRadio.com

No posts for the last little while! Like most people, I guess, the run up to Christmas has been busy. But since finishing work on Friday, in between visiting and other Christmassy things, I have been playing radio in the downtime.

One day last week, I had a nice QSO on the way to the station with Paul G0HWC. We talked about digital SSTV and in particular, Easypal. I told Paul that I had never managed to get it going on my PC and he kindly gave me some ideas (wipe it out completely, clean the registry and then reinstall). Did that and unfortunately it still crashes on load and there are no clues. What a shame! It probably doesn’t like something on this old laptop.

Thinking about SSTV did encourage me to get MMSSTV (analog SSTV) going again and I put it on 28.680 one afternoon and received some nice pictures from TA1BM in particular and VA2PGQ and some others. I then wondered if I could get it going on 145MHz through the FT-8900. I rigged up the interface and fired up MMSSTV and actually it worked well! I haven’t made any QSOs on there so far, but I did use my phone and a Baofeng handheld to check the signal and it seemed to be working fine.

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at tim@g4vxe.com.

I have never had any contacts on the 5 MHz or the 60 meter band. But I guess it’s time for that now.

Both my K2 and my K3 support it and about 40 countries now have access to this band according to K1ZZ in his column “It seems to us” in this month’s QST.

As a first test I ran my 0.2 W Ultimate 3 GPS-controlled WSPR transmitter over night and the image shows the result. I am using an 80 m long loop skywire antenna (horizontal loop) tuned to 60 m.

The results were encouraging with the best DX being UR5VIB in Ukraine at a distance of 1887 km. By the way, considering that it is 1093 km to LA9JO in the north of Norway, one sees the distortion in the map projection used for the Google map.

I have also operated the antenna as a vertical (about 8 meters) with top-hat loading by tying both feed-line conductors together and feeding it against a ground plane. The result is quite similar. The article by Dave Fischer, W0MHS called “The Loop Skywire” in QST November 1985 is the reference for both uses of the loop. The article starts out with this catchy phrase: Looking for an all-band HF antenna that is easy to construct, costs nearly nothing and works great DX? Try this one! This matches my experience exactly as this antenna has been instrumental for my 8 band DXCC.

Sverre Holm, LA3ZA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Norway. Contact him at svholm54@gmail.com.

Courtesy: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/sapporo50w

Add Japan to the growing number of countries now allowing their radio amateurs access to the 630m band. A recent note from JA8JPO and others,  indicates that JA stations will have access to the band as of January 5th, 2015. Operation on their new band however, comes with a  few provisos.


Operations on 630m will be permitted at 1W EIRP, not as high as some jurisdictions, but adequate for plenty of exciting experimentation and for some DX opportunity. Additionally, there can be no operation if there is a house or an office within a 200m radius of the station, unless it is owned by the station operator. This restriction can be lifted if permission from the home or property owner is received. As well, the station will be subject to inspection by Telecom authorities before the licence is granted. No reason for these additional caveats have been offered as of yet but JA amateurs speculate that it may be for fear of disruption (by radiated harmonics) to broadcast-band reception or with possible interruptions to ADSL modems, still commonly used in rural Japan....time will tell.

In the meantime, it is reported, that hundreds of excited amateurs in Japan are now readying their stations for two-way 630m work, happy to have the band under any restrictions...if only the same level of excitement were seen among Canadian amateurs for their new band!


Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at ve7sl@shaw.ca.

X108 HF Radio Second run

Fred Lesnick, VE3FAL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Thunder Bay Ontario, Canada. Contact him at ve3fal@tbaytel.net.

Undoubtedly, most of you are familiar with and may have watched (many times!) the movie "A Christmas Story".


I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!
Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at w2lj@arrl.net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_WWYBp1aJs

HamRadioTweets is a service that was originally developed and operated by Bruce Sutherland KO4IN. The idea behind his work was inspired by conflicts overseas, it was meant to be a proof of concept on how to get your message out if your government restricts your internet access.

Mr. Sutherland originally created the software as a means to send messages over satellite such as the International Space Station and others that have on-board APRS Digipeaters. I am however getting ahead of myself.

Sometime in late 2014 I had begun learning to write software in ruby, an interpreted programming language, I had quickly found how easy it was to work with sockets allowing me to interact with servers on the internet. I wanted to merge my programming with my love for ham radio. This is when the APRS-IS network came to mind.

I wrote a small ruby gem allowing me to interact with the APRS-IS network, I could see all traffic on the network and filter it in any way I saw fit. Naturally I thought I could add some type of service to the APRS network. There was already a ruby gem that simplified posting to twitter so I figured an APRS to twitter gateway would be a good way for me to hone my new found skills.

After a little research I found that Mr. Sutherland had already developed an APRS to Twitter gateway and even presented it at a computer security conference known as Defcon, However to my dismay I found that it had been offline for some time with what seemed to be no sign of a return. I wasn’t able to find any source code for the software, all I knew was that it had been written in Python.

I thought to myself, if he can write it in Python then I can write it in Ruby. After just two short hours of work I found myself with a simple test server that did exactly what I wanted it to. It would register itself to the APRS-IS network with the callsign designator ‘TWITR’ this would allow anyone from any APRS gateway send a message to twitter by sending it to that callsign.

Later I had contacted Mr. Sutherland and asked him for permission to take over the website and development, which he greatly obliged to and gave me full access to the domain. I began running the server 24/7 on November 23rd of 2014 using the code that I published as an open source project.

The service is back online and available for Amateur use, I plan to continue development in my free time while working on additional services that we could add to the APRS network.

Website: http://hamradiotweets.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hamradiotweets
Software Source Code: https://github.com/KR0SIV/APRS-to-Twitter-Gateway
Github Repository: http://github.com/kr0siv

Harold Giddings, KRØSIV, is a special contributor to AmateurRadio.com. He is a Ruby programmer and maintains the website Signals Everywhere. Contact him at corrosive@signalseverywhere.com.

Christmas reading time, Sprat 161 popped through the letterbox in this mornings post. I see Graham (G3MFJ) gave me a little mention about the TDA2003's that I recently had come across, he had decided to grab a batch for G-QRP members sales:   http://www.gqrp.com/sales.htm

What interests me about this chip, as well as being a high powered 10W audio Amp, plenty of circuits which are available on the web. The TDA2003 has also been used in VLF PA design Amateur projects. From G3XBM: https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/vlf/8-97khz-earth-mode-transmitter

Also at 73KHz The Heyphone John Hey (G3TDZ):

http://bcra.org.uk/creg/heyphone/
 http://bcra.org.uk/creg/heyphone/pdf/heyphone-schematic-tx.pdf
 
I emailed John recently about the TDA2003 and  he reckons that they will work at 137KHz depending on manufacture? Time to get testing a few on the end of a signal generator..






Steve, G1KQH, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from England. Contact him at g1kqh@arrl.net.