AmateurRadio.com

There are a number of things I’d like to do radio-wise this year. One of them is to get equipped for SSB on four metres.

I have spent quite a lot over the last two or three years on 2m SSB and have very few contacts to show for it. My QTH in the Cockermouth Black Hole seems to be prevented by the Lake District mountains from receiving good signals from other English stations by normal propagation. I don’t even experience much in the way of tropo openings here. The only real 2m DX I have worked are a handful of Sporadic-E (Es) contacts into Spain and Portugal. One thing I have learned is that 144MHz Es, which is a pretty rare thing in any case, is considerably rarer the further north you get. I was ill and recovering from my brain operation during the peak of the Es season last year but as far as I can tell from DX Sherlock no Sporadic-E openings on 2m reached this far north during 2011 so I didn’t actually miss anything.

Six metres is another matter. I have made lots of contacts on the Magic Band even though my 6m antenna is just the addition of two quarter-wave wire elements to my multi-band attic dipole. Four metres won’t be open as often as Six but it should sustain Sporadic-E propagation a lot more often than Two does. And now that many European countries have granted their amateurs 4m allocations I think there could be a good chance of working some summertime DX.

The plan depends on my finding space in my attic antenna farm for a 4m antenna. One of the first home improvements Olga and I will make this year is to replace the central heating boiler and we’re advised that the most efficient types available now heat the water on demand and don’t need a header tank or pipes in the loft. I’m a bit apprehensive about letting workmen loose in the attic when I’m not sure whether I’m capable of moving around safely up there to check my antennas are OK and repair any damage. But getting rid of the tank and copper pipes will make a bit more space for the antennas and hopefully allow me to mount a 4m Moxon on the rotator where the 2m one currently is.

I will also need a radio for 4m SSB. I guess I’m looking at getting a Spectrum Communications transverter for this. Probably a ready built one as I’m not really sure I can manage to assemble that complex a kit any more. I wonder if anyone has successfully modified an Elecraft XV50 for 70MHz?

Conditions could hardly have been worse for the RSGB’s VHF Field Day contest this weekend. Yesterday I worked a few southern Scottish portables on 2m and 6m, plus the Lincoln Radio Club station G5FZ/P on 2m, and that was that. There did not appear to be a shred of Sporadic-E on either 2m or 6m, according to DX Sherlock. 6m was so quiet my K3 S-meter wasn’t even moving.

Today when I turned on the radio I tuned both 2m and 6m without hearing a single signal. The map on the right probably shows why. We awoke to heavy rain and gale force winds, and I immediately thought of those poor guys on hilltop sites with their guyed poles supporting their beam antennas. If the wind didn’t force them to take the antennas down I dare say the rain and the poor propagation made them decide they might just as well give up.

This has been a really disappointing year for me too, VHF-wise. After working Spain and Portugal on 2m on two separate occasions last year – the last being exactly one year ago – I improved my antenna by 3dB and my output power by 6dB in the hope of doing better during this year’s season. But I have worked nothing and as far as I know the sporadic-E this year has hardly been heard this far north. DX Sherlock showed that a couple of well-sited northerly stations managed to make a few contacts a few weeks ago and I fleetingly heard a station from Romania complete a contact and call CQ at that time, but that was that.

Something is becoming clear to me that I never realized when I lived in the south, which is that just a couple of degrees of latitude can make a huge difference to the amount of Sporadic-E you get. The season isn’t over now but it must be on the wane and I’m soon going to be away from the radio for a couple of weeks, so it’s looking as if 2010 is going to pass for me without any 2m Sporadic-E DX.

This afternoon I made my first DX contact using a hand-held radio. It was a fine, warm day, so after lunch I left Olga doing things in the garden and went for a stroll with the H-520 10m FM radio. I took a footpath through fields to the north of the town that led up to the Carlisle road. It’s quite high up there, with great views down into the town and to the mountains beyond. However I was only carrying what would fit in my pockets, so the camera got left behind.

I used to take a 2m radio up there but I don’t think I ever made a contact so I lost interest. The other problem with that path is that you sometimes have to run the gauntlet of a herd of cattle. In the UK it’s illegal to put a bull into a field through which is a public right of way. However there is no such restriction on cows. They can be quite inquisitive, and there have been a few cases recently of people being knocked down and injured while walking through a field of cattle. It is quite frightening being followed across a field at less than the safe stopping distance by a couple of hundred tons of beefburgers in the making, as happened to Olga and I a couple of years ago. Shouting “horseradish sauce” at them has no effect at all!

Today, fortunately, the bovine creatures kept out of my way. I found a suitable operating spot, put the whip antenna on the Intek and started calling CQ. After a few minutes I had a call from Zdenek OK1AQW, coincidentally the same station that got away from me yesterday. Today he was strength 9 on the S meter, the same as Roger G0MWE had been from just a few miles away. We moved off the calling frequency and completed a solid 5 minute QSO, kept short only because Zdenek was receiving a lot of interference from other stations on the same frequency.

My report was initially 57, but was amended to 59 dropping to 51. At one point Zdenek informed me that I was coming over another British station that was calling on the frequency. He was running 100W to a quarter wave vertical and I think he was a bit surprised to hear I was running only 2.5W to a 140cm telescopic whip!

Incidentally it turns out OK1AQW doesn’t live near Prague at all as I wrote yesterday. His QRZ.com page is wrong. He is actually more than 100km east of Prague, about 10km from the Polish border, in locator JO80eb. I calculate that to be a distance of 888 miles or 1,430km. Not bad for a voice contact using a battery powered hand-held radio and whip antenna. Don’t you just love Sporadic E?

I didn’t manage any other contacts. I heard DO5DGH calling CQ repeatedly but he didn’t hear me. But this was a nice taste of what is possible. Some people might wonder why someone who owns nice radios like a K3 and even an FT-817 should put so much effort into trying to make contacts using a modified hand-held CB but I think to talk to someone direct using a battery powered self contained hand-held radio, without the aid of a satellite, a repeater or internet linking, is the ultimate challenge and far more exciting than anything I could achieve even if I had the full legal power, a tower and a beam!

Another glorious day and Olga and I took a picnic lunch up to Watch Hill. We go there not because it is a SOTA summit but because it is near home, a nice walk, not a steep climb (so Olga is happy to come with me) and one of the easiest operating sites for me to reach when I want to get away from all the electronic QRN I’m plagued with at home. Unfortunately there isn’t a picnic table up there and I haven’t yet found a way to support the MP-1 antenna on a bare hilltop. Using a right-angled PL-259 adapter and a 259 to 3/8 adapter on the back of the FT-817 only works if you have a level surface to put the radio on and no breeze. So despite taking them with me I wasn’t able to get any use out of them. No doubt a photo tripod would do the job but that is too much ironmongery for me.

I did also take the Intek H-520 Plus and a couple of BNC mounted whip antennas but although there clearly was propagation on 10m I didn’t manage to work anything. I did hear something puzzling though. After one call on 29.600 I heard what I’m sure was a native English speaking voice announced something on the lines that this was the EA????? repeater. Unfortunately I’m getting increasingly slow witted these days so I don’t remember the exact announcement nor the full call and I didn’t hear it again. 29.600 is supposed to be the 10m FM calling frequency and not a repeater output so what could it possibly have been?

Back home later in the afternoon and VHFDX.net showed that there was a big Sporadic-E opening on 6m and even 2m in Eastern Europe. I decided to try 10m which seems to be the neglected band and managed to make several contacts including a new country for me, OD5NH in Beirut, Lebanon.

Once again, WSPR is revealing the existence of consistent propagation paths every day on 10m between Iceland (TF), the Faroes (OY) and northern Norway (LA/LB) and the UK and north-west Europe when there is no Sporadic-E and no other propagation except over very short distances between closely located stations. This has occurred even during periods of zero sunspots.

I’m guessing that because we have only in the last few weeks had a large number of WSPR monitors on 10m because of the Sporadic-E season, no-one has previously observed it. But I’m surprised at the lack of comment about it. Perhaps this is a phenomena known to everyone but me, in which case I’d welcome some enlightenment.

As some of you know, I’m a bit of a sucker for hand-held radios. Whilst browsing eBay I’d often come across the Intek H-520 Plus CB hand-held and thought what a nice looking rig it was and wouldn’t it be nice if it could be converted to amateur 10m usage. A couple of days ago I stumbled across a site that gave the details of how to convert it for amateur 10m use so I decided to order one. It arrived this morning.

Never has a radio been taken apart so soon after its arrival. (Real hams don’t care about warranties!) Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find again the site that had the modification information, but I vaguely remembered the details. Beneath the battery compartment there is a loop of wire. Snip it and push the ends apart. I’m not sure what that does. Now put the batteries back in and turn on the radio whilst depressing the Menu button. You can then select the option “Po” by pressing the down arrow button. Press Menu again, then press and hold the up arrow button until the frequencies displayed are in the 29MHz region. You now have a 10m FM / AM hand held.

Whilst I was doing this I was WSPRing on 10m and I saw some very strong traces from stations in Germany indicating that there was short-skip Sporadic-E on 10m. Were conditions such that I would actually be able to make some contacts with the new radio today?

The antenna supplied with the Intek H-520 Plus is about 15cm long so I suspect it will be less than useless for making any DX contacts. Clearly what I need in order to use this as a portable radio is some kind of long BNC 10m antenna, but at the moment I don’t have one. The H-520 comes with a “car kit” which screws to the bottom of the radio and allows you to power it from an external supply and connect an antenna with a PL-259 plug. So I hooked it up to the shack supply and the attic dipole.

I tuned around and there seemed to be things going on, so I found a clear frequency, 29.520MHz, and called CQ. After a few seconds jack PE1JRP called CQ on the same frequency. I called him and we made contact. He found my signal was up and down, as I did his, but he gave me a 53 report. He said that Leo PA3ELQ was waiting on the frequency and he then called, for my second contact. My report in this case was 57. They were both pretty impressed with my signal running – as I thought – 4W output.

I decided to check the H-520 Plus on my power meter and found that, far from putting out the advertised 4 watts, it was only radiating a whisker over 2. I took it down to the CB channels and even there it was giving barely 3W output. I also recalled that the web page that I could no longer find mentioned the need to turn up the deviation for 10 FM use.

I managed to locate and download a service manual for the H-520 Pro and this gave a procedure for adjusting the power. I had to turn the power control pot all the way up and I still only got about 3.6W on battery power (and just about 4W when running from the car adapter.) That’s good enough, though. From the block diagram I also was able to identify the FM modulation pot and turned that up a bit, though neither of the Dutch stations had complained about my audio. In the picture above, the red circle shows the wire loop that you cut, the green circle shows the power out pot and the blue circle the modulation control.

With the radio back together I hooked it up to the dipole again and worked Oliver DH5PK, receiving a 53 report. I am quite happy with my three contacts considering that I only opened the box after lunch and the radio spent much of the time disassembled. I saw from VHFDX.info that there was a great opening on 6 metres at the same time, but making contacts with less than 4W of FM is more challenging.

What I’m hoping, of course, is that I can make some contacts like this using the H-520 Plus as a hand held radio with a whip antenna!

The screengrab below, from WSPR at 0815 this morning, shows just how selective Sporadic-E propagation can be. For a change, G4ILO is hearing and being heard by all the European stations while those in the south of England aren’t getting anything.

Look, too, at all those lines going off the top of the map to OY1OF. I wish I could understand the propagation. It appears that if you like the 10m band, the best place to live is the Faroe Islands!