And so it begins

In April I posted that my birthday gift had arrived which was the Hustler 4BTV vertical antenna. Well, this week the installation began and weather permitting I can move closer to the complete installation. We have been having more days of rain than sunshine for June along with some vacation time away from home the antenna had to wait. A few days ago I began by installing the support pole for the antenna. To me this is one of the most important steps as the antenna is no good to me if it falls over, begins to lean or becomes loose and unstable. 

The hole was about 4 feet deep and I used fast-setting concrete, this product is poured into the hole and you then add water and stir. I placed my 1 5/8 metal post in the hole, made it level and waited. I decided to use a metal post used for fences as this was readily available at the building supply store. It was also a lot cheaper than buying a 10-foot piece of metal electrical pipe (called EMT). 

Making certain it's level

As advertised the concrete was dry in about 40 minutes, having said that I also had to fully understand once the concrete was mixed with water I have very little time to make sure the support pipe was level before things started to harden.  

Once finished I added a cap that was temporarily taped in place but will become permanent once the job is complete. At this point that was it for the day as it was very hot and humid out as well I wanted to leave the concrete overnight just to make sure it was fully set.

The finished product

The next step in the dig a trench from the house to the antenna base for the coax. 

For the June VHF contest, I operated Single-Op Portable from the summit of Pikes Peak. I combined this with Summits On The Air (SOTA) and Parks On The Air (POTA) activations. In a few hours, I made 80 QSOs on 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and 23cm bands. It was a fun time.

Quite a few of the contacts were made on 2m FM, The Utility Mode. Even though CW, SSB and WSJT modes are more efficient (especially with weak signals), FM is still the least common denominator for modulation. Everyone has it, so there are more QSOs available with that mode.FM is the default choice for easy VHF simplex communication.

Where Be Digital?

Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen in my brain, but I started to wonder:

Why the heck, in the year 2022 are we still using an analog mode for so much of our amateur communication?

FM was invented in the 1930s, which is ancient history from a technological point of view. Of course, we do have many handheld and mobile radios available that support digital voice (DV) modulation. In fact, we probably have too many digital formats to choose from, all incompatible, which has fragmented the market. The three dominant digital voice modes are D-STAR (first out of the chute), DMR (a commercial standard) and Fusion (Yaesu’s C4FM offering). I think these all have their advantages and disadvantages which attract various people to support one or more of them. However, none of them is dominant and universal, like FM. It is interesting that virtually all DV radios on VHF/UHF include analog FM because it is The Utility Mode, the fallback modulation that keeps us all compatible.

Universal Digital Voice

For this post, I am primarily looking at this from a SOTA and POTA perspective, which means simplex operation and not repeaters. (However, you could extend this idea to repeaters, too.) I am also not so concerned about keyboard modes, just DV plus some basic digital telemetry that goes with it. It can’t be too complex or it will not be fast and easy to use.

I propose a universal DV mode that is implemented in all VHF/UHF transceivers (think in terms of your typical handheld or mobile transceiver for 2m and 70cm). And yes, go ahead and also implement D-STAR, DMR, Fusion, or whatever, but give us a universal digital format that just works. The key idea is to have a digital least common denominator mode that replaces FM. This mode can be the defacto standard for “meet me on simplex” and become the Next Generation Utility Mode. How cool would it be to get on top of a summit and push the DV Call button and work stations on digital many miles away? The station’s callsign should be embedded in the digital stream along with location data (lat/lon or grid locator) and some user-defined fields ( SOTA reference or other information). This format should also have really good weak-signal performance, significantly better than FM, for when the signal-to-noise ratio is low. All the technology must be open, to encourage wide adoption, with no proprietary codecs or modulation schemes.

The technology for this already exists and it would not be difficult to implement. The real challenge is the lack of industry coordination and collaboration between amateur radio manufacturers. Unfortunately, I don’t see this changing any time soon.

That’s my thought for today. What do you think?

73 Bob K0NR

The post Universal Digital Voice appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Hello and welcome to Episode 472 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics epsiode, the hosts discuss several amateur radio and open source related topics including improvements to GNU Radio, the new book from Science is Elementary, Shotcut, WunderGraph, an update on Hamshack Hotline and much more. Thank you for listening and we hope you have a fantastic week.

73 de The LHS Crew

YIV-300 Island Lake, MB (ve3gop.com)

It's CLE time once again. This is a challenge for all newcomers to NDB listening and the ultimate test of your medium frequency receiving capabilities. Can you meet the challenge?

In this episode, Martin Butler (M1MRB) is joined by Dan Romanchik KB6NU, Caryn Eve Murray KD2GUT, Edmund Spicer M0MNG and Ed Durrant DD5LP to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and in the episode's feature HAM RADIO Friedrichshafen 2022 Preview.

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

• Young Person's Morse Tutor Kit Building Event
• AMSAT announces Youth Initiative at Hamvention
• The Mainstreaming of Morse Code
• New Insights from Retooled Disaster Drill
• Two Brits Arrested in Albania as Police Accuse them of Spying after Seizing Radio Gear
• Military Use of 50 MHz Frequencies
• Alamogordo Hamfest 2022
• Distance Learning for Full Amateur Radio Licence Exam
• Radio Ham Becomes Archbishop

I’ve mentioned this work in various episodes of the ICQ Podcast as well as on social media in my Twitter account and now it’s published. Dr. Scott McIntosh and I collaborated since my original feature interview with him in Episode 332 of the the ICQ Podcast back in 2020. He paid a return visit with me for a follow-up feature interview by Martin Butler M1MRB in Episode 377 recently. The article by Howell and McIntosh, “On the Cusp of A Scientific Revolution,” is the cover story in RadCom, the magazine published by the Radio Society of Great Britain. Here’s the cover with a very nice photo of the sun and the ESA Solo satellite facing it. Kevin M6CYB, layout and design specialist at RadCom, put this cover together using resources from the ESAATG Media Lab, for Elaine Richards G4LFM, Editor of RadCom.

Elaine G4LFM is a delightful Editor to work with! As my readers no doubt know from previous posts on this blog, I served as Editor-in-Chief for Springer Media, a very large scientific publisher based in The Netherlands. So I’veb oo that side of the editorial desk for both journal articles and book manuscripts. Moreover, the untimely loss of her Technical Editor, Giles Read G1MFG (sk), added to her workload recently. But she handled all of that, plus her pending retirement, with the utmost aplomb. There’s no muss, no fuss in submitting a paper. No waiting for 6-8 weeks or more for the Editor to “maybe” get back to you. I highly recommend RadCom as a potential outlet for your work.

This is Part 1 of a lengthy and detailed paper. Part 2 is scheduled to appear next month, in the August issue. It’s not an elevator speech so be prepared to read it like you would read a schematic diagram. We think it will be worth your time.

There are some other great articles in this month’s edition of RadCom. Here’s a screen shot of the Table of Contents so you can take a look at both the regular columnists and contributions by authors such as Scott and me.

So what’s all of this about?

We place the current situation of significantly different Cycle 25 predictions of sunspots into the framework of how science works. I’m not speaking of which test tube or microscopic plate to use, for that involves the mechanics of each specific scientific field (Yep, I realize just how outdated those examples are but you get my point.) How does “science” as an institution work?

This diagram illustrates how Thomas Kuhn depicted “scientific revolutions” in paradigm change:

We argue that understanding the solar cycle is in the model competition stage of this diagram.

Dr. McIntosh is the solar physicist. I’m not. But I taught philosophy of science, research design and modeling various scientific phenomena in obscurely named course titles like Structural Equation Models with Latent Variables and Spatial Analysis. I also edited and created a few journals in my career, too. Moreover, I’ve worked for NASA in their Commercial Remote Sensing Program at Stennis Space Center and managed peer-review panels in Washington, DC. So I’ve witnessed how this works in several fields of science, especially when I’ve been invited to reconcile disputes in funding or peer-reviews (e.g., integrated pest management).

When I interviewed Scott in 2020 for the ICQ Podcast, it was clear as a bell to me that the issues he and his colleagues were having in getting some of this “revolutionary” work published in solar physics outlets reflected a clash of theoretical paradigms. Pure and simple. It represents a competing paradigm attacking many of the anomalous findings (or lack thereof) involving the amplitude and cycle transition. Afterwards, he asked me to read a draft of a key paper establishing the linkages between the Hale Magnetic Cycle and the Solar Cycle in which I made voluminous comments and suggestions on the data, modes of analysis, and how to deal effectively with reviewers as a former editor. I’m sure I made a number of “rookie mistake” comments since I’m not a solar physicist, lol. But he was very kind to not mention those, only suggesting other sources for me to read and review.

When it was published, I was greatly touched to have received an acknowledgement for my impact on the final paper (see Scott W. McIntosh et al. (2020). Deciphering Solar Magnetic Activity: 140 Years of the ‘Extended Solar Cycle’ – Mapping the Hale Cycle. Solar Physics (2021) 296:189 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-021-01938-7). Considering that this could be a seminal paper among those published by the McIntosh team that might precipitate a paradigmatic revolution in our understanding of the solar cycle and sunspot amplitude and the transition from one cycle to another, it’s an even greater honor to receive this acknowledgement outside my own field of science.

Scott and I have developed a close collaborative relationship and I’ve learned a lot from him and his published work. He is just a delight in “elmering” me about solar physics. But have no confusion: he’s the solar physicist and I’m the statistician and philosopher of science. We hope that through this collaborative paper, his team’s theory, models and data reach the wide audience that is amateur radio. We hams are one of the significant consumers of this slice of solar physics. But we decided that my expertise would help identify the paradigm boundaries of Scott’s new paradigm as well as some other facets of communicating outside of solar physics. Perhaps even within solar physics, too.

As we “shockingly” disclose in RadCom, the current NASA/NOAA “official” predictions for Cycle 25 do not release any of their methods or assessments to the public. (Insert record scratch here.) Yet, their forecasts are decidedly lower in amplitude than those published under peer-review by my co-author, Scott McIntosh, and his team of collaborative scientists. Amateur operators, however, view the official NASA-NOAA Panel predictions over the past several solar cycles are the Holy Grail source of sunspot activity. We’ve seen this movie before:

While Scott has published beaucoup papers documenting his team’s explicit theory of how these aspects of the sunspot cycle (as amateurs like to call it) work together, our RadCom article attempts to lay it out in comparison to those “official” predictions by the NASA-NOAA Panel. One team will ultimately be proven to be more correct as Cycle 25 matures; the one based upon Panel votes of “expert opinion” or the one based upon a peer-reviewed alternative paradigm.

Those who see SSNs as the critical daily index shaping their amateur radio operations will want to see which team is “right.” To facilitate this, there is a website where the NASA-NOAA predictions, the McIntosh team predictions, the average SSN over the horizon, and the observed SSNs for each month are published in clearly annotated graphs for all to see. No “smoke-filled rooms” where just a professional opinion is offered, but observable empirical data, updated monthly.

Hmm. I wonder whether I’d trust a team of physicians who just met in a conference room and voted to see if I had cancer (which I did in 2005) or a team of physicians who took X-Rays, MRI’s, blood samples and so forth to aid in their diagnosis and treatment plan. Which one do you think is more worthy of your trust? Well, it’s largely up to the observed SSNs and the two sets of predictions, even though one is formally devoid of a stated theory, isn’t it?

Here’s the money graph here:

As the reader can see, the McIntosh predictions (in black) are decidedly closer than the “official” NASA/NOAA/ISES Panel’s predictions (two different blue lines) to the actual observed smoothed sunspot numbers as of July 2022 (green lines).

This is not unlike how the educated world awaited a specific set of photographic plates from an eclipse to determine whether the famous Sir Isaac Newton or the (then) young, whipper-snapper Albert Einstein was correct about Relativity. That was how the Newton-Einstein debate was largely resolved. The McIntosh team has put it’s scientific reputation on the line with observable data, which is how science has moved over the centuries since its emergence in modern societies.

You can find out more about Dr. McIntosh at NCAR (his research center), on Twitter, or by listening to the two podcast episodes I noted above on the ICQ Podcast website. In addition, Scott has given many talks to amateur radio clubs on this team’s work. Youtube is your friend here. I’m already scheduled for late July to talk about this RadCom article to the Denby Dale Club. If you’d like a talk on this to your club, feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to accommodate you. I’m good on QRZ.