Buildathon, anyone?

Buildathons, such as those pioneered by Steve G0FUW, are now being copied around the world. A recent report describes how they are being used in New Zealand.

The report described as ‘A Model to Lift the Profile of Amateur Radio & Attract New Amateurs’ was submitted to the 14th IARU regional conference in New Zealand and highlighted the Buildathons held in United Kingdom by Steve Hartley, G0FUW.

Read the IARU report (.doc)

The 3rd Bath Buildathon

“The Buildathon will allow those with limited soldering experience to develop their skills under the watchful eye of some very experienced homebrewers. The kit chosen [...] has been specifically designed for the newcomer so you can be confident that you will go home with a working 80m voice transceiver.”

(from southgatearc.org)

Ham Radio in Computerworld mag

from southgatearc.org:

Computerworld has published an article on Ham Radio.

The article says “Abundant spectrum resources and an engaged research community are drawing wireless experimenters back into a hobby that many had forgotten.”

Read the full article at
http://tinyurl.com/ComputerWorldHamRadio

Thanks to Steve NU5D for spotting this item

Safety – Safety – Safety

Maybe it is the efficiency of the ARRL and other Amateur Radio news aggregate-rs to get these stories out, but I feel there have been an awful lot of deadly accidents recently involving the pursuit of our favorite hobby.  PLEASE be careful.  Be aware of your surroundings.

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2009/10/13/11135/

73/Brian

N6HI’s Great RTTY Adventure

N6HI’s Great RTTY Adventure

I can almost say that I have never operated RTTY. Almost.  Back in the 70’s in Palatine Illinois, Marty AI9V (then WB9LMZ) and I had on old mechanical RadioTeletype (“RTTY”) machine in our basement.  In those days, RTTY operation was still mostly from those large mechanical machines you may remember as “telex machines”.  Marty became quite a RTTY expert, having restored an aging military surplus teletype machine to completely perfect operation.  It was an ongoing maintenance nightmare that Marty accepted as a challenge, and so I also got to reap the rewards by having a teletype machine available to work RTTY on the ham bands!

I fondly remember those endless reams of yellow teletype paper, the rolled-up testament to the success of Marty’s mechanical expertise.  We RTTY hams even exchanged crude “pictures” created by printing the line-by-line graphic images created using only the printable fixed character set of that machine.  We fondly referred to our basement as the “channel one newsroom”, in honor of the tremendous noise created as the hammering teletype machine droned on and on, like a perfect 60 word per minute typist that never pauses or slows down, generating the hard-copy that was used to display the QSO conversations.  RTTY is what some would consider the first real “digital” mode, although CW enthusiasts would probably argue the point!

The yellow rolls of paper hard-copy eventually gave way to CRT screens displaying the QSO conversations, and for many years now, hams have gravitated to using their computers built-in sound cards to “decode” the two alternating tones of the RTTY signal to be displayed on their computer screen, and also to generate the tones to be transmitted by their transceivers to send messages back.

Because of it’s mechanical heritage, RTTY has been popular with hams for a VERY long time, and so of course, among other things, that means there are RTTY contests, just like there are contests for CW and SSB operators.  Prior to this weekend, I had never made a “modern” RTTY contact, and had not been on that mode since those old “mechanical” days.

This weekend was CQ Magazines World Wide RTTY DX Contest, the most popular RTTY contest of the year.  I decided that with all of that RTTY operation going on, it would be a good time to see if I could actually make a RTTY contact or two …  So, I fired up DM780 (Digital Master 780), part of Ham Radio Deluxe, a FREE software package that allows operation on RTTY as well as CW, PSK, and MANY other digital modes.  I have been using PSK31 for about 2 years now, so I have a good feel for “operating digital” modes in general, but I always use a program for PSK31 called Digipan 2, (also FREE) which is a GREAT, easy to use, nice full-featured program, but Digipan 2 allows for PSK operation only.  I have VERY little experience with Ham Radio Deluxe / DM780, and the midst of a contest is NOT the time to learn, but I figured what the heck, I really only want to get it to work well enough that I can just make a contact or two, so I can at least say that I have worked SOME other digital mode besides PSK.

To my surprise, that first contact or two came easily, but because I had not really learned HRD/DM780’s features yet, I did not even know how to LOG the contacts … so, as I worked stations with DM780, I actually logged them into my normal Excel Spreadsheet log.  That’s certainly not very efficient, but it did the job!  I spent several hours on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons playing around in the contest to see how many countries I could work in my “first weekend on RTTY”.  I ended up working 18 countries, and all continents EXCEPT Asia.  I could have got up in the middle of the night and easily snagged a contact with Japan to get Asia, but I didn’t really care about that, my goal was just to see what I could work.

It was a surprise how much “good dx” shows up for this particular contest.  I worked several stations in Europe, including Luxembourg, which you don’t hear too often, and I made one contact with Africa.  Saturday afternoon we had a very good opening to Europe on 20 meters, and on Sunday afternoon 15 meters provided strong signals from South America and the Caribbean.  ALL my contacts were made with 2 Watts output power, and the antenna for all contacts was a 20 foot long hunk of hookup wire with a rock tied to the end, thrown into a tree out my window.

It was a ton of fun, and I will have an easy time beating my own best next year!  I found that RTTY is a good mode for QRP, too!  I was also surprised to see how useful the 300Hz CW filter in my rig is for RTTY.  In several cases, it allowed copy with very closely adjacent very strong signals that would not have been readable without the filter.  I also found that the ability to “slide” the center frequency of the narrow filter up and down the software “waterfall” display by using the I.F. Shift control was really slick for RTTY, as it is for PSK and other digital modes, as long as they are not WIDER than my filter. (Such as MT63, Olivia 500, etc).

I still think it is a little strange that there are many RTTY contests and only a few for PSK31.  Also, many DXpedition stations operate RTTY but almost none of them operate PSK31.  This is bound to change in the future, as there are just too many advantages of PSK over RTTY.  You can easily fit four or five PSK31 stations in the same bandwidth space as one RTTY station, and there are many software packages for PSK31 that support automatic decoding of multiple PSK31 signals simultaneously which is very impressive.  The first time I saw that I was truly amazed, and now I take it for granted.

I have grown very fond of contesting, and in the past I have always dismissed RTTY contests as something for “those guys that are into RTTY” … but now that I see that I can use this mode to potentially add to my low-power QRP countries list, I will likely be adding the CQ World Wide RTTY DX Contest to my QRP Contest Calendars in the future!  Meanwhile, I eagerly look forward to the day when all DXpeditions will include PSK31 in their plans!  And, who knows, maybe some day there will even be a CQ World Wide PSK DX Contest !!   I hope so !

73, John N6HI

( Phoenix )

N6HI.QRP@gmail.com

N6HI WEB SITE

… all QRP, all the time …

Surplus Sources

Dan KB6NU has compiled a list of places that sell surplus electronics and other stuff that might be of interest to ham radio operators:

• Mendelsons Electronics Company, Inc.
• Marlin P. Jones & Assoc.
• All-Electronics
• BG Micro The Super Store
• American Science & Surplus
• Surplus Center
• Electronic Goldmine
• All-tronics
• Web-tronics
• Herbach & Rademan
• Hosfelt Electronics Inc.
• C and H Sales Company
• Skycraft Parts & Electronic Surplus
• Halted
• Surplus Electronics and Equipment for Amateur Scientists

FCC Blogs, Twitters

On Tuesday, August 18, the Federal Communication jumped on the technological bandwagon and began “Twittering.”  Twitter allows text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers; to date, the FCC’s Twitter page  has almost 1900 followers.

The FCC has also started a blog called Blogband. 

Source: The ARRL Letter Vol. 28, No. 33 August 21, 2009

MFJ acquires Cushcraft

On August 7, MFJ Enterprises announced they had purchased the Cushcraft Amateur Radio antennas product line from Missouri-based Laird Technologies effective July 31. According to MFJ, Cushcraft — makers of HF/VHF/UHF vertical, beam and Yagi antennas for the Amateur Radio community — will continue to be manufactured in Manchester, New Hampshire.  Read more

Bathtubs tracked by APRS

The Nanaimo Amateur Radio Association took to the airwaves Sunday (July 26) for an active role in the Great International World Championship Bathtub Race.  Read Article.  View the tracks here.

Video of digital modes

Frank K2NCC has posted video of various digital modes, showing what they sound like and look like on the waterfall.  See all the videos on his YouTube channel.

Online Study Guides

KB6NU has posted online his “no nonsense study guides” for the Technician and General exams.  He is also working on one for Extra class (still incomplete).