Oregon to Tennessee on 1/2 a watt and a breadboard!
With all of the recent hot activity on 10m I thought this story would be fun to share. One of the guys in this QSO had just finished building on breadboards his receiver and transmitter.... heard a call and went for it !!
Here is a first power up video from Ham Radio Outlet for the brand new Yaesu FTM-500D radio! This is the new top of the line mobile that looks very nice! I really like the new slide in/out mounting bracket. Break your piggy bank and order one of these beauties.... and write a review for our website!
"Communication is possible due to interactions between our Sun and the ionosphere, the ionized region of the Earth’s atmosphere located roughly 80 to 1000 km overhead. The upcoming eclipses (October 14, 2023, and April 8, 2024) provide unique opportunities to study these interactions. As you and other HamSCI members transmit, receive, and record signals across the radio spectrum during the eclipse, you will create valuable data to test computer models of the ionosphere."
This Hackaday website provides information and links where all ham operators can contribute to the research being done. By the way if you are not familiar with the Hackaday Site.... you are missing out. Check it all out!
We had a great meeting Saturday back at the fire station. Breakfast was completely eaten, donuts courtesy of Barb Tandy, or Steve Tandy or Terry Jackson? There was some confusion with the credit card haha! Great coffee courtesy of Home Brew Coffee and also thanks to them we had a door prize winner of a Home Brew Coffee Mug, Bill WBØLXZ!
Lot's of updates since we haven't met in so long but most importantly we have made some pending decisions on Field Day 2023 so stay tuned for updates on that. Tyler gave a complete Repeater update along with information on the status of the ARES/AuxComm progress.
We elected new officers for 2023 and 2024. Matt Kassawara KGØW was elected Club President, Steve Tandy NØSLT Vice President and Jeff Chancey KAØEGE Secretary/Treasurer. Matt KØVLL continues as our VE Coordinator. Congratulations to the new faces.
This ham I have posted before, he has great videos and I highly recommend his YouTube Channel. This build is similar to the antenna I first built for portable work and it worked GREAT! I used a "crappie pole", speaker wire and an Altiods Tin as my feed point connectors. Here he demonstrates this kind of build and shows video of his results!
Just a reminder and additional information for our club meeting on Saturday April 29th at 9am in the Fire Station#1 Training Room in Pittsburg. The address is 911 W 4th, and most of the parking is in the rear and enter on the east end.
Like the good ol' days we will have coffee but this time it will be (donated by Home Brew Coffee), a coffee company started by HAMS! There will be breakfast casserole and donuts! We have a few topics like Club Elections, Field Day 2023, planning a Foxhunt and other ideas.
What are you thoughts on the May meeting? For sure we will have to finalize some Field Day plans since that is the last meeting before Field Day which is June 24th-25th.
In honor of Major League Baseball Opening Day.... PLAY BALL AND Get On The Air!!
From the KB9VBR YouTube Channel !!
"A viewer asked: "I am curious if there is a particular reason you haven't added an amplifier to your shack equipment?" Joe and I talk about if an amp is an necessary piece of ham radio equipment and if you should invest in one."
KB9VBR VHF/UHF Antennas:
http://www.jpole-antenna.com
Looking for the best mobile radio? Great video here on that topic! Some of you remember this guy from the Joplin Hamfests! HamRadio 2.0
More details to follow but keep the date open! If you have not been there, parking in rear and the door to enter is on the right in the back.
Here is the calendar info...
Well... it's actually been 10 years since the first post on SEKARC and the club was started. I think we should all be proud of what we have built over the years. Field Days, meetings, coffee's, park events and the big Mining History Special Events!
Let's keep it rolling and growing! The link below takes you to our first post on Feb 23, 2013.
Nice short video regarding fan dipoles. Easy to build, multi band and not that costly! Give one a try! Have you built one? What are your thoughts? I built one and it worked well. Made mine for 70, 20 and 40 meters. I used a Balun Design feed point balun and it was up about 25 feet. Worked good but not the best for getting lots of DX due to it's radiant angle.
I am sure some of you veteran hams have... but I think today I had my second Feld Hell (Hellschreiber) QSO. See videos below of actual signal and the decoding. I was using Ham Radio Deluxe for the QSO.
Here is some history regarding Feld Hell that I learned after the QSO. My interest was peaked and I thought it would make a good post for our website. The source of the information below was from these two websites.
Introduction To Hellschreiber Modes
"The traditional method of sending Hellschreiber by radio is to key a Morse-type (CW) transmitter ON for every black spot in a text character,and OFF for every white place. Different parts of each character are sent at different times. The technique is still in use by interested Amateurs, communicating world-wide. This mode is now called Feld-Hell (Field-Hell), since the pre-war format still used was originally used for field communications by the German Army. Feld-Hell offered good immunity to interference and provided a clandestine transmission capability, because nothing was transmitted until a key was pressed. Commercial variations of Feld-Hell could still be heard occasionally on HF up until the 1980s, transmitting Chinese and Korean characters."
"Feld-Hell characters are sent as a series of dots at 122.5 pixels/sec, using a CW transmitter, or these days, by sending tones to an SSB transmitter. Black dots are represented by a CW dot (key down), and white spaces by a space as long as one dot (key up). The timing requirements are quite precise, like FAX, but Rudolf Hell developed a simple but clever technique, which involves printing the text twice, which can negate the effects of phase and small timing errors, thus avoiding the need for true synchronism."
This video shows the demo we showed at Hamvention 2022, in Dayton, Ohio.
This demonstrates the core underlying technology behind what we’re calling “SDRconnect”
“SDRconnect” is the new name for the multiplatform version of SDRuno (up till now we called it SDRuno V2)
We demonstrated the completely rewritten Core DSP engine for Spectrum and Waterfall displays – with the prototype software running on a Mac M1 computer. We also show the networking capability by remotely accessing an RSP based in the UK.
This is still an early stage demo, and the software team have a lot to do to complete the graphical user interface.
Work is underway on the new graphical user interface which:
• Retains the style and popular features of SDRuno
• Offers a more consistent and intuitive layout
• Addresses fixes and improvements suggested by users ever since SDRuno was first adopted.
Jim Szabo of SanCap Ariel had recently posted some of his work on Facebook and I thought the club would appreciate these photos. I met Jim through the Sanibel Island Facebook groups and was fortunate to spend some time with him and his lovely wife when he lived on Sanibel. Fortunately he moved well before Hurricane Ian devastated the island and the surrounding area.
He currently lives near Tampa Florida and has been doing drone work and is FAA Certified For All Aerial Photographic Needs in Commercial Real Estate, Construction Updates, Tower Inspections, SAR, Developer Portfolios, Public Safety and has recently retired.
Nice to know you Jim and we hope to meet again... and yes I will bring you more molasses crinkles and NO, this HAM guy doesn't wear overalls!! Love these shots!
From "The Voice of ChatGPT is on the air" by Hackaday Please read the whole post, it's very interesting. And a little unsettling. Did I write this... or did ChatGPT?
"AIs can now apparently carry on a passable conversation, depending on what you classify as passable conversation. The quality of your local pub’s banter aside, an AI stuck in a text box doesn’t have much of a living quality. human. An AI that holds a conversation aloud, though, is another thing entirely. [William Franzin] has whipped up just that on amateur radio. (Video, embedded below.)
The concept is straightforward, if convoluted. A DSTAR digital voice transmission is received, which is then transcoded to regular digital audio. The audio then goes through a voice recognition engine, and that is used as a question for a ChatGPT AI. The AI’s output is then fed to a text-to-speech engine, and it speaks back with its own voice over the airwaves.
[William] demonstrates the system, keying up a transmitter to ask the AI how to get an amateur radio licence. He gets a pretty comprehensive reply in return."
Here is an example I came up with after logging into ChatGPT.
Here is a great video that kind of goes along with the previous post about POTA activations. This amateur operator K4OGO also has many great videos so check those out here on YouTube!
I have been thinking about chasing the many Parks on The Air (POTA) stations since everyday on HF it seems there are POTA activations all over the bands. So I began to look in to it some. I found this POTA intro video below and I encourage you to check it out below! I also found these websites with helpful information and spotting.
I then reached out to one our local operators that does a lot of activations for POTA to get his input. Dennis WØHL and he has been working and calling CQ for POTA many years. Here are his thoughts on working POTA.
"POTA, Parks on the Air, has brought so much life back to Amateur radio. I see comments all the time that POTA has got me back on the air.
I started hunting POTA activators back in Fall of 2018. Fun but I wanted to get out and activate portable. My first activation as an Activator was October of 2019. Like I tell people, once you activate you are hooked!! I started with a Yaesu FT-891 which is a great radio. It was fun running 50 watts but I kept seeing these Activators running low power. I have also wanted to run QRP. So I bought a Xiegu G-90. Output was 20 watts. Great radio and no problem working even the DX stations. I did not do much activating in 2020. I did have a friend who was looking for a FT-891 and had an ICOM IC-7300 he wanted to trade. Being the ICOM person that I am, I jumped on the deal. I mainly use the 7300 for digit operation. That would be PSK31, Olivia, Rtty, etc. Yes even SSTV has been used. I don’t do the FT-8 mode. I like to do the work but a lot of people activate using FT-8.
I was very active last year. I had 59 activations for the year. Not a lot for some people but I was happy with it. I should mention that my wife got me an Elecraft KX-3 for Christmas in 2020. One of my goals for the year was to get back on CW. I have been activating using 15 watts on SSB and most of the time only 5 watts on CW. It is amazing what you can do with 5 watts.
My goal for 2023 is activating a summit. It is known as SOTA. Summits on the Air. We do have some areas in Missouri that qualify. I enjoy chasing the SOTA guys who are up on those high mountains only running 5 watts into a piece of wire.
Awards? Yes for both the Activator and Hunter. You just create an account on the POTA website and all awards are there for you to download as an PDF. You may already have an award and not know it.
If you are interesting POTA, please check out www.parksontheair.com."
Dennis Kimrey
W0HL
This a fascinating story I ran across on YouTube. Very interesting telling how two teenage "hams" made living/working at the South Pole in the 1950's better using their amateur radio station in New Jersey.
"The eleven nations included in the Antarctic portion of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year created several permanent research stations, including the first permanent station at the South Pole. The effort to create a permanent scientific presence at, literally, the end of the earth required enormous effort of scientists and military personnel. Aided, uniquely, by a couple of teenagers from New Jersey."
This is an excellent explanation of a j-pole build, it's ohms and it's DC vs RF grounding. Dave KEØOG always produces great material. I recommend following him and I plan on posting more of these here so stay tuned!
