Special Events This Weekend

May 6, 1400Z-1900Z, Byesville, OH. Cambridge Amateur Radio Association, Inc, W8VP. 5th anniversary from Buckeye Central Scenic RxR Train. 14.260 14.250 7.245 7.235. QSL. Cambridge Amateur Radio Association, PO Box 1804, Cambridge, OH 43725. www.w8vp.org.

May 6, 1500Z-2300Z, Conway, AR. Faulkner County Amateur Radio Club, W5AUU. Toad Suck Daze 25th Anniversary Special Event Station. 21.350 14.260 7.260 146.520. Certificate. Faulkner County ARC, PO Box 324, Conway, AR 72033. www.w5auu.org.

May 6, 0300Z-1200Z, Abilene, TX. Armadillo Intertie, AI5TX. National Radio System of Texas picnic. 21.200 14.230 14.050 7.250. QSL. Bill Lawless, W5WRL, 4000 Crestridge, Midland, TX 79707. www.armadillo.org.

May 6, 1300Z-1800Z, Baltimore, MD. Carroll County Contesters, K3P. Triple Crown Special Event — Kentucky Derby. 21.365 14.265 7.265 3.865. Certificate. Carroll Country Contesters, c/o John F. King, PO Box 64, Hampstead, MD 21074. www.wy3p.net. Special certificate for all three Triple Crown events.

May 6, 1500Z-2300Z, Cookeville, TN. Upper Cumberland Amateur Radio Association, W4W. Cookeville Railroad Rendezvous Street Festival. 14.260 7.260 3.860. QSL. Dennis M. Barrett, 1035 East 6th St, Cookeville, TN 38501. www.ucara.org.

May 6, Baltimore, MD. Carroll County Contesters, K3P. Triple Crown Special Event — Kentucky Derby. 21.365 14.265 7.265 3.865. Certificate. Carroll Country Contesters, c/o John F. King, PO Box 64, Hampstead, MD 21074. www.wy3p.net. Special certificate for all three Triple Crown events.

VIRGINIA DX Cluster Nodes

One tip I received from the Amateur Radio Lighthouse Society guys was to have the ability to spot your lighthouse activation on a DX packet cluster. I was thinking I’d have to bring a laptop and my TNC – which add additional complications to my setup. Then I remembered I have my trusty Kenwood TH-D7A, with a built in TNC. Although most of my packet use with the radio has been APRS related, I’ve used it before to do standard packet work along with an Palm Pilot. So – I think that’s my answer for the next lighthouse activation…. I’ll bring the TH-D7A along with the Palm Pilot and spot myself on the local DX cluster. I need to test it out to make sure I know how to spot to the cluster.

Ark AC4HB 145.090
Bull Run Mt W4XP 144.990 & 441.200 (PVDXSN)
Chesapeake WY7C 145.010 (SEVA)
Chesapeake WY7C 145.070
Elliston K1GG [POOR] 145.090
Elliston K1GG 145.650
Elliston K1GG [DXPOOR] 147.510
Forest N2QT 145.670 (Lynchburg)
N2QT [DXFOR] 145.590 (Jack Mountain)
Great Falls W0YVA 145.510
Hampton WA4OHX 145.010 (SEVA)
Hampton WA4OHX 145.070
Lorton N4SR 145.530
Mt Weather N4OHE 145.710 & 440.925 (PVDXSN)
Richmond WU4G [CVCC] 144.990 & 145.590
Ringgold K4AU 144.910 & 145.610
Woodbridge N4SR 145.530

DX Cluster packet commands: http://www.ng3k.com/Cluster/index.html

Homebrew vertical dipole

I’ve been looking around for good ideas for a portable HF antenna and finally settled on Robert Johns’ (W3JIP) plan from a QST article (Aug 88). The antenna design is a vertical dipole (6M to 40M), using a loading coil at the base of the vertical with a tap and the other half the dipole is formed with a 1/2 wave length cut of wire. The coil is mounted on a 3/4″ PVC pipe which slips into a 6″ length of aluminum tubing. The tubing then slides into a bracket designed to hold a flag. Mounted on the bracket is a SO-239 with the center pin making contact with the bracket. The main element sitting on top of the coil is 8′, but you can lengthen it to 11′.

I spent the morning gathering the parts, had a hard time with some of the specific items, but ended up with a couple work-arounds. I put the coil together first, that went pretty easy. W3JIP’s plan calls for #8 aluminum ground wire for the coil – which no one has. I used copper instead. I wrapped the copper around a 4″ piece of PVC. The directions call for 12 turns, but I only purchased 12′ of copper (the directions didn’t say what length to get)… ended up getting 9 turns. I mounted the coil to the PVC and then secured the trailing end up the coil to a piece of aluminum tubing inserted inside the PVC. The element gets mounted above the coil and I secure the tap at the base of the element.

Once I had everything together, I went outside and mounted the coil section to the top of a tripod, inserted the 8′ aluminum element above the coil, set the tap at the top of the coil, ran a length of wire out as the other half of the dipole, ran some RG-58 out from my Icom 706 and after playing with the tap a bit was able to get out to Texas on 20M.

I have some more work to do:
– better secure the SO-239’s center pin to the bracket and bottom of the coil
– attach a banana plug to the ground side of the SO-239 to allow quick changes for switching bands
– find a way to secure the base of the antenna to a painter’s pole

I know the antenna will work on 20M, now I would just like to get it working on 40M.

Lighthouse activation

On Sunday I headed out to Fort Monroe and activated the Old Point Comfort Lighthouse with limited success. About 4 hours on the air and two contacts. The first contact was Colorado, a loud, booming 59. The next was Virginia Beach…. about 5 miles across the water. I need to come up with a better plan than my hamstick vertical. I’d like to do the next activation during Amateur Radio Military Appreciation Day coming up on Memorial Day weekend.

Anyone have any antenna ideas?

Upgraded memory

Just added some more memory to the Linux tower (aka garage box)… dropped in an additional 512MB SDRAM SIMM and after a reboot it is now operating much quicker. Also made an adjustment to the xorg.conf to fix the video card. It’s an old VooDoo 3Dfx card and although recognized, it defaulted to a screen resolution of 800×600 without allowing any changes. Now it’s defaults to 1200×1048… much better.

Now it’s back to weeding through the old harddrives.

Building another linux box

I pulled out all my junkbox computer parts, gathered the two desktop towers that had gone south some time back, and hauled it all in to the family room along with a huge monitor. The mission – setup a desktop tower running Ubuntu Linux in the garage and attach it to the network with a wireless connection. I want a desktop that I can use for data storage… music, video, pictures. I’ve got a lot of old harddrives, including USB drives, that I have no idea what’s on them.

Out of the parts box and between the two desktop towers I was able to come up with one working motherboad (Tyan S1854), a Pentium III 450MHz CPU, and 64MB of PC100 RAM (2x DIMMs, 32MB each). Not too impressive. But it worked. I installed Ubuntu to a 18GB harddrive, using a bootable CD for the install. 64MB is slow going.

The task now is to get the Linksys wireless NIC card up an operational.

Linux – multimedia is good to go

I got all the various multimedia files to play nice with my Ubuntu installation. To include streaming media… I really enjoy listening to NPR using streaming audio and I’m glad I got that working. I’m reading a new book called Beginning Ubuntu Linux, which is helping quite a bit. I think the next stage is to revive one (or more) of my dead desktops and setup a file server out in the garage.

World Amateur Radio Day 2006 certificate

World Amateur Radio Day, Tuesday, April 18, commemorates the founding of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) in Paris in 1925. The 2006 theme is “Amateur Radio: A gateway to information and communications technologies (ICT) for today’s youth.” With support from PZK, the Polish Amateur Radio Union, MK QTC, the Polish radio amateurs’ journal again will sponsor the World Amateur Radio Day (WARD) certificate. To qualify, stations must complete 10 HF contacts or 5 VHF contacts on April 18 between 0000 and 2400 UTC. To obtain the full-color certificate, send a log extract including the list of QSOs and $6 US (€5) to: The Radio Amateurs’ Journal MK QTC, Suchacz-Zamek – Wielmozy 5b, 82-340 Tolkmicko, Poland, on or before May 31, 2006. The World Amateur Radio Day certificate also is available to SWLs who log the same numbers of reports.

Digital Modes Samples

Click on a digital mode to hear a brief (most <100 kilobytes) sample of the sound these modes make. Hopefully this link will help you identify a mode you've heard (or help me identify ones I've heard!). Many folks have submitted excellent quality, lengthy files which are no trouble for me to accept, but I do generally drop the sampling rate and length to make them more reasonable to download over a dial-up line. The intent here is more for recognition by ear than for signal analysis. I have higher quality samples of some files, please email me to request them (up to 3MB). http://kb9ukd.com/digital/