Up and Running in Guatemala

After an interruption in ham radio activities and blog entries, I am back on the air, more or less. The interruption was due to several months of planning and executing a move to Guatemala and then getting settled here in my new digs and setting up a basic radio shack. At the moment I am only using a 26 foot vertical wire supported by a tree so my signal is not very good but I'm out there on PSK and Hellschreiber. You can usually find me evening and nights from 7070 to 7074, signing TG9/KW2P. Give me a call.

Once I collect the materials I plan to put up a 270 foot vertical loop. I have some tall trees here that will support a vertically oriented 80m full wave loop. I've had both vertical and horizontal loops of that size and they worked great so I expect good results, especially in the tropics where QRN can be a problem. The loop should improve things drastically but getting the materials down here takes some doing.

73 de Phil, TG9/KW2P

HAARP Moon Echo Experiment--Slight Return

On the second night of the experiment, January 20, 2008, I copied signals at 6.7925 MHz from 0130 until 0139 EST, at which time the signals abruptly stopped and I subsequently received nothing. (nothing audible and nothing on the spectrum readout, which is much more sensitive.) I monitored continuously for another 15 minutes and then spot checked until 0230 EST. I moved to 7.4075 MHz and also copied nothing there.

HAARP Moon Echo Experiment

Tonight, the HAARP transmitter in Alaska was used to direct exceedingly powerful radio pulses (around 4 Gigawatts effective radiated power) at the moon at a frequency of 6.7925 MHz and I could easily receive the echoes from the two second bursts here on earth with my amateur radio rig.

Waterfall spectrogram of radio echoes from the moon.
Click on the photo, then on "all sizes" for a larger image.

Wednesday Night 40m Hellschreiber Net

Well, 40 meters was being very ornery tonight at net time of 9 PM EST. Here in West Virginia I had no copy, no signal at all on net control or anyone else except I had about a 50 percent copy on WB2HTO. I saw the name Leslie go by, and I believe I saw a QH in AL. At 9:35 PM EST I checked in again and the band had greatly improved. I had net control, about 90 percent copy on WB2HTO but work got in the way and I did not have time to check in.

I'll be there next week unless work overrides my plans. Thanks to W8LEW for running the net.

070 Club PSK Fest Recap

Well the PSK Fest was fun. I started out QRP but got no bites so switched up to low power (50 watts) and worked 117 uniques on 40 meters, spending almost all of my time between 7070 and 7073 kHz. I made a couple of friends along the way and we're going to set up skeds to try out more of the digital modes. I checked down at 7035 a few times but there was no workable DX from here in West Virginia. I worked a couple of Americans down there at 7035 and noticed that a couple of CW operators were intentionally QRMing the PSK signals. There seemed to be plenty of space on the band so I'm not sure why that would be.

I did notice something unfortunate. Quite a few PSK operators were overdriving their rigs with signals 300 Hz wide. One signal I saw had repeating audio harmonics that spread his signal across 1,500 Hz. One of the 300 Hz wide operators asked me how his signal looked and I told him, but he didn't seem to care. I wonder if those operators realize that distortion and wide signals actually harms their readability, in addition to spoiling the band.

I'm looking forward to the next digital contest!

070 Club PSK Fest

The PSK Fest starts tonight at 1900 EST. The contest is sponsored by the Penn-Ohio DX Society (PODXS) and runs from 0000z to 2359z January 12, 2008. I prefer PSK63 for contesting but this contest is PSK31 only.

I plan to run QRP single band (40 meters). If conditions are terrible on 40m like they were last night I may switch up to the low-power class. I hope to see you out there.

Contest info is here: http://www.podxs.com/html/pskfest.html

de KW2P

Dial + Audio Offset

Modern sound card digital modes have introduced a layer of ambiguity when it comes to citing an operating frequency. Some operators quote a single frequency which means their dial frequency and assume an audio offset of 1 kHz. Some operators quote a single frequency that means their actual RF emission frequency. Others specifically quote their dial and offset, such as 7070+1500.

It would be great to quote just one frequency--the actual emission frequency--but today there is confusion with this. If a digital operator quotes a single frequency and we do not know that operator personally and know his or her practice (their personal favorite audio offset), we cannot be sure what is meant. So the only sure-fire way to remove all doubt is to cite dial+offset. Then we know for sure what is meant. We know that an unstated audio offset is not being omitted.

40m Hellschreiber Net

Well that was fun. I checked into the Wednesday night 40m Hellschreiber Net, 7077 kHz +1000 Hz audio at 9:00 P.M. EST (0200z). Net control was Lou Wulfekuhler, W8LEW, in Lansing, Michigan. The net started out in Feld Hell but conditions were poor so we switched to FM245 and got much better results. There were checkins from Delaware, New Mexico, and Hawaii, although I could not copy the fellow in Hawaii. Thanks to Lou for running the net. I'll be there next week if I can.

A Couple Photos of the Rig

Icom IC-706, MFJ-949E, Astron RS-20M

First Sunspot of Cycle 24

Yippee! The British Solar Observatory announced that the first sunspot of cycle 24 (the next sunspot cycle) appeared in the northern hemisphere on January 5th. It's a good time to be getting into ham radio!