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I have just worked OZ1HXM on 2m SSB, using 100W to a SuperMoxon antenna in the attic of a house on the west coast of England with a lot of mountains between here and Denmark. The fact that he was using 200W to a pair of 10 element Yagis must have helped a bit!

This is my first European DX on 2m and I am thrilled to bits. I can only imagine what the band must be like for people with a decent VHF take-off. OZ1HXM is the only station I can currently hear on the band so there doesn’t seem to be much chance of working anyone else.

I was reflecting on what I wrote yesterday about the EchoLink app for Android and why I find it and similar developments disturbing. I thought it was because it made me uneasy having to face the fact that the internet and a cellphone appears to make ham radio redundant by allowing us to make the same contacts so much more easily without using the ham bands at all. Then I had a blinding revelation. Ham radio is not about making contacts. It is about not making contacts, or making them only with luck and some difficulty.

I almost stumbled across this truth a few months ago after I sold my first VX-8R to do APRS on a smartphone using Lynn KJ4ERJ’s excellent APRSISCE software. It worked far better than the 2m radio, allowing me to be tracked and exchange messages in places where there was no 2m signal. But I went back to using RF for precisely that reason. The smartphone didn’t provide the interest of allowing me to see how VHF RF propagates around the local terrain. The disappointment of not being tracked as I slogged up the mountain was balanced by my surprise when a beacon was gated from a location I wouldn’t have thought possible and the interest created in working out how it happened. There is also the technical challenge of finding ways to improve coverage and get a radio signal out of difficult locations, for which buying a smartphone is simply a cop-out.

When you look at other ham activities that remain popular or are even gaining in popularity it’s obvious that the interest is not in how easy it is to make contacts, but how hard. DXing isn’t about pressing the PTT and ticking another entity off the list a minute later, it’s about what you have to do – buy equipment, improve your antennas, learn about propagation, develop operating skills, be patient – in order to achieve it. People boast about the DX they’ve worked, but what keeps them interested in DXing is the places they haven’t worked and how hard it will be to work them. Dialling up a contact using an internet application has nothing to do with it.

Contesting isn’t popular because it’s easy to amass a winning score but because you need the best equipment, the best antennas and lots of skill to get even close. It isn’t meant to be a level playing field. That’s why many people dislike developments like reverse beacons and skimmers that take away some of the skill required.

QRP pursuits like WSPR or MEPT beaconing aren’t about making contacts at all, but just about seeing how far a whiff of RF can go. The excitement isn’t in being received by someone for the nth time, it’s that first barely detectable trace on the screen of someone or somewhere new that makes you punch the air (if QRPers go in for such QRO expressions of emotion.)

The thing about VHF FM activity is that for the most part it isn’t about the achievement of the contact at all. It’s just about being able to converse with people. When I was first licensed, before mobile phones and inclusive call packages, chatting on 2m FM was actually the best and certainly the cheapest way of keeping in contact with my local ham friends. But things have changed over the last 35 years and I haven’t been paying attention. I’m the dinosaur who wouldn’t disclose his mobile number to the radio club database because I felt that if someone wanted to talk to me about radio they could wait until they can contact me on the radio. But I suspect that everyone else has moved on. If they want to speak with one of their ham buddies they pick up the phone. Which may partly explain why the VHF bands these days are almost dead. Or even the development of D-Star, which provides some of the convenience of calling someone on the phone without totally abandoning use of the ham bands.

In only a handful of pursuits like SOTA and WOTA where the point is to make a contact direct using radio is 2m FM still used in what I would call a traditional manner. People will struggle to hear their signal report even if the activator is right down in the noise and get a feeling of having accomplished something when they are successful.

So EchoLink on a smartphone really doesn’t change anything. It already changed. Whether hams call one another on the phone using their phone number or their EchoLink node number really makes no difference. It has just been blinkered thinking on my part to have felt that if people hold ham radio licenses they ought to talk to each other using ham radio even if it isn’t the most convenient way of doing so.

A couple of months ago I acquired a Kenwood TM-D710 dual band FM transceiver with APRS as it was the best solution to the problem of how to operate an APRS gateway without losing the ability to monitor for voice contacts on 2m when you do not have the space for two widely separated antennas. I have been quite pleased with the radio but rather alarmed at the number of reports of loss of sensitivity due to the failure of one or more of the IF filters. I asked on the Kenwood Yahoo group whether this was just a faulty batch of filters affecting radios of a certain age or a generic problem that was likely to affect any TM-D710 eventually and  was directed to this explanation in the blog of Tasos, SV8YM.

It has been a long time since I read such a well written explanation of a technical phenomenon and I’m sure you’ll find it interesting, especially if you own a VHF radio with 455kHz IF filters. In fact I’m sure many of you will find other articles of interest in this blog. I’ve added it to my regular reading list.

Olga and I have returned from a long weekend in London. I took my VX-8GR along, hoping to see some APRS activity or even make some contacts. But I heard absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, not a braap on the APRS frequency nor any signs of life on the simplex or repeater frequencies.

Twenty years ago I lived in London, in Charlton SE7 and I seem to recall that in those days there were four London repeaters on 2m and plenty of activity. I also seem to recall that some of the repeaters were plagued with abuse. Last weeked even a kerchunker or a pirate playing music would have been a welcome sign that someone was using the amateur frequencies.

I took a laptop with me – the small Eee PC running Ubuntu Linux, with APRSIS32 under wine – to monitor activity and see if my RF beacons were heard. I received a greeting from G5YC via the APRS-IS internet network and that was that. What a contrast to Prague, where I was a month ago, where the APRS activity just didn’t stop.

Tim, G4VXE, posted yesterday about creating APRS objects for repeaters using OpenAPRS.net. I commented that it was all very well, but these internet created objects are never transmitted on RF so they never fulfil the intended purpose of the mode which is to inform visiting mobiles of the local repeater frequencies. Unfortunately with the lack of radio activity here in the UK one cannot deny that APRS works much better as an internet application than it does over RF. Anyone who has a computer can call up aprs.fi and see the local picture – if anyone has taken the trouble to create the objects. If they were transmitted on RF, would anyone hear them?

I could say much the same about 2m FM. If I’d had an iPhone I could have made some contacts using the newly released Echolink app, which again is more than I was able to do using my Yaesu. What has happened to ham radio that one can’t find any activity even in the UK’s biggest city? It seems to me that we have all decided that cellphones are a much better tool for contacting our ham buddies. If we lost the use of the VHF and UHF bands would anyone actually notice?

As regular readers may recall, I have a pathological hatred of SMA connectors when used as antenna connectors for hand-held radios, which has become even more entrenched since I had the centre pin of the TH-F7E stock antenna break off in the adapter I use for testing such antennas on my antenna analyzer. I now have an SMA to BNC adapter permanently installed on my VX-8GR. The picture on the right shows my latest adapter which is anodized black and looks like an integral part of the radio. The previous one I used was gold plated with a knurled body and whilst it worked perfectly and provided a robust fitting for the BNC antennas it looked a bit ugly.

If you never change the antenna on your HT then one of these adapters isn’t necessary, but SMA connectors were never designed for multiple connections and disconnections (in one email group I saw someone state they were rated for 100 disconnections) so if you want to change between a short stubby antenna for inconspicuous local use and one with more gain the BNC adapter is the way to go.

All of my BNC whips are 2m antennas, which is fine most of the time as almost all my operating is done on 2m, but there are rare occasions when I might want to use 70cm and removing the BNC adapter in order to attach the stock antenna kind of defeats the object of it. So I ordered from eBay a Nagoya NA-701 antenna which is a short dual band whip similar in size to the ones supplied with amateur dual band handhelds but with a BNC connector.

I tried it out on my antenna analyzer and it showed a nice sharp SWR curve with the minimum around 147MHz. It could be better, but it’s closer than some stock antennas I’ve tested. I couldn’t check it on 70cm as my antenna analyzer doesn’t go up that high.

I need to devise way to make comparative tests of all these HT antennas, because asking for signal reports or seeing if you can hit a repeater is a pretty crude measure of performance that won’t reveal small differences. This little antenna doesn’t perform as well as a six inch monoband helical on 2m, nor a quarter wave telescopic, but that is only to be expected. The beauty of the BNC adapter is that if you need a gain antenna you can easily whack on something like my 5/8 wave Black Whip, which you certainly couldn’t use with a standard SMA connector.

I know that one of the purposes of my website is meant to be to demonstrate that you can play ham radio even if you can’t have outside antennas. But sometimes the frustrations of not quite being able to achieve what you want to make become almost too much.

On Tuesday I replaced my home made ribbon cable Slim Jim 2m antenna with a commercial dual band colinear from Moonraker. I wasn’t sure the home made antenna was working as well as it possibly could. Originally I planned to replace the Slim Jim with a single band 5/8 wave Sirio, but after a month waiting for Radioworld to deliver it I cancelled the order and gave up. Then I got the Kenwood TM-D710 which is a dual band transceiver, so I decided I should have a dual band antenna to give me the option of running a public Echolink node on 70cm.

During the last few days I have been searching for signs of improvement in my 2m receive capability, but the signs haven’t been good. I’m hearing a frustrating number of APRS “braaps” that are just not strong enough to decode.

The antenna certainly works. I’m getting almost end-stop signals from the repeaters GB3DG and GB3LA, whilst GB3AS is about S5 with a bit of noise on it. I have had a couple of solid contacts using the antenna but nothing to form a basis for comparison until today, when Noel G4PEW drove past.

On the left of the screengrab you can see his track on Monday, when I was still using the Slim Jim. On the right you can see today’s track, received using the new antenna. It’s a lot shorter. I certainly heard a lot of packets after the last one shown by the grey blob, but none were strong enough to decode.

If only I could have the antenna outside the attic, up above the apex of the roof, I’m sure that extra little bit of height would make all the difference.

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.