W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

RCA Radiotron tube art

I once had one of these tubes in this box, it got lost - I regret that.

See VinylSavor for a longer story about this box art. Image used with permission.

http://vinylsavor.blogspot.com/2011/08/tube-box-art-part-1-rca.html

Hamvention 2024 trip report

A trip report from Hamvention 2024 while it's still fresh in the mind.

The ARROW bus from Ann Arbor was a success thanks to AC8TO who stepped up as cruise director. It was nice not to have to drive. We assembled at 430a in Ann Arbor, and stopped in Toledo on our way to Xenia. The bus was full enough to pay its own way.

This was my first visit to Hamvention but likely not my last. I described it to my family as 1 part technical conference, 4 parts trade show, 5 parts county fair and 10 parts flea market. The flea market covered the entire infield of the track (a horse track? there was a smell of horse). I wouldn't say that the quality of the goods was much different than other ham fests I have been to, but there was a whole lot more of it.

Nothing beats seeing things in person and talking to folks who are knowledgable about the products they represent.

I didn't buy anything, but I did come back clutching literature from Elecraft for their KX2 and KX3. The thought of having an HF radio compact enough to put into a backpack and take on my bicycle to the park is pretty compelling.

Looking forward to going back next year!

Fun things to do with radio that are "not real ham radio"

If you enjoy any of these parts of the hobby in the presence of a purist, you'll get the dismissive reply that these are "not real ham radio".

• Digital voice modes. DMR, D-Star, YSF etc get rejected because they use the Internet to interconnect repeaters.

• Packet radio, because there are computers involved.

• CB radio, MURS, FRS because you don't need a ham license.

• Digital data modes. FT8 is ruining the hobby, real hams use morse code or maybe RTTY.

• APRS, because there's an APRS-IS internet interconnect and you don't need a radio to participate.

• Satellite communications (!) because they involve the use of repeaters. (Repeaters in orbit! But still repeaters.)

• Shortwave listening, because if you're not transmitting it's not really ham radio.

• DX listening through remote receivers like KiwiSDR. (The internet again, and radio only counts if it's your wires and not someone else's.)

As originally posted to https://mastodon.radio/@w8emv/112396500981498241

Thanks to contributors: Chris P., N7KOM, VE2UWY, Imogen, KR1ST, croyle, WD9EWK, VE3QBZ, N6UTC, Ian, AC7KY, W1RCP. Special thanks to K8BYP.

CHIRP, for programming your radio

CHIRP is a versatile tool for programming your amateur radio. It supports dozens of radio models and has a straightforward and largely vendor-independent way to get a new radio up and running.

https://chirpmyradio.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Home

A few years back there was a workshop at the All Hands Active maker space in Ann Arbor which was all about taking your new radio, programming in some local frequencies with CHIRP, and then going out into the field (namely downtown Ann Arbor parking structure rooftops) to try it out. I'd love to run a workshop like that again.

https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2014/07/operating-notes-using-a-parking-structure-to-great-advantage.html

Operating notes: Quansheng HT + egzumer v0.22 firmware + Nagoya NA-771 antenna on the Seneca County Total Eclipse Net

I went with members of the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club and the ARROW club to Findlay, Ohio for the total eclipse. The eclipse itself was fantastic - the sudden darkness, the eerie lack of shadows, the bright horizon, and the fabulous corona around the disk of the moon. Well worth it.

While I was there I got a chance to check in to the "Seneca County Total Eclipse Net" which ran on the Seneca County, Ohio (Bascom, Ohio) 145.15- repeater. I know this repeater because when band conditions on two meters are just right, there will be interference between it and the N8DUY 145.15- repeater that shares a frequency but has a different PL tone.

The radio I brought with me was a Quansheng UV-K5, an HT which I got in February 2024 for less than $30. I loaded it with the ezgumer firmware from https://github.com/egzumer/uv-k5-firmware-custom and had very good results operating on frequencies that I didn't have preprogrammed into the radio.

The Quansheng will take Baofeng accessories, so I swapped out the stock antenna with the Nagoya NA-771 that I got a few years back. That helped quite a bit as the stock antenna is not very good.

The ezgumer firmware includes a spectrum montior which pulls in about 2 MHz of bandwidth at a time. As a built-in scanner of sorts it allowed me to find out where the traffic was and to tune into it pretty much right away. For regular channels it has an S meter which is sensitive enough to let you fine tune position.

Front panel programming for the Quansheng is much easier than on any Baofeng I have used. With this firmware loaded the front panel buttons can be long-pressed to do the function that's labeled on the button. There is a big button for a menu to get you to per-channel options that worked as well as I needed it to be.

My best transmit results were to use the rooftop of the car as an extra ground plane, that brought the receive signal up from S2 to S4 and let me check in to Bascom from Findlay (about 20 miles of flat terrain).

All in all a trip well worth it.

Software-defined baseball season, 2024 edition

Previously: 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018

Ball games are shorter now, with the combination of the pitch clock and the free runner in extra innings combining to make games closed to 2 hours than 3 hours. This means that late night baseball from the west coast might be done by midnight instead of 1:00 a.m. as it was.

My current setup for quickly tuning to far-away games relies heavily on work I did in previous years. Key to the effort is the international network of KiwiSDR receivers, which can be typically used to tune the AM broadcast band for up to 4 different simultaneous listeners. Some Kiwis will return 8 signals decoded at once.

The decision process looks like this:

• Who is playing now?
• What is that team's flagship station on AM?
• Which KiwiSDR receiver has good receiption of the flagship?
• If that reception is bad, are there any affiliates in good KiwiSDR locations?

My technology stack so to speak is Tailscale's "golink", https://tailscale.com/blog/golink which gives you named bookmarks. On my personal tailnet I visit the site http://go/tigers which redirects to http://go/wtka which then resolves to a specific KiwiSDR ("Pembleton Farms" north of here) at a speicified frequency (1050 AM). From trial and error and an annual opening day sweep I've pretty much dialed in my favorites.

For a map of KiwiSDR sites see http://rx.linkfanel.net

Alas this year I'm not going to be listening to as many Los Angeles Dodgers games, as my favorite listening posts to Dodgers affiliate KIKI 990 in Hawaii are offline.

"I'm rooting for the team that has the best announcers with good reception." This year I find myself tuning in Cubs games.

Operating notes: ADS-B and a clear view of the sky

My usual ADS-B antenna these days is a mag mount whip, stuck to either a cookie sheet or a curtain rod. It will typically get good coverage with an indoor placement near a window of 60-80 nm range. To my mind that is adequate but not exceptional.

I asked myself if it would make a bigger difference to get a faster CPU to decode signals (I'm on a Pi 3 now), or whether I should focus on antenna design or antenna placement. So I did some experiments with the existing equipment just moving the antenna around.

My best results by far were to open up my attic window and stick the antenna outside with the window open. The particular window opening mechanism has a metal support that the antenna could stick to. The result was far and away better, with 160-200 nm of range. Unfortunately it was temporary because it doesn't do very well to have a window open in the rain.

There are other people who have discovered that a clear view of the key matters more than decoding power or antenna design. See this discussion on Flightaware for a sense of this as well.

https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/clear-view-of-the-sky/69202

(Perhaps one more radio experiment to take to the top of a parking structure?)

Daisy, Daisy on AM radio - synthesized music

The first computer-generated music I ever heard up close was from an AM radio next to an 8080 machine. Tune to the correct frequency, run a program, hear "Daisy Daisy" on the radio. This was in the mid-1970s at the Michigan Tech University's "Summer Youth Program", a week-long class on "Hobby Computers".

I think it was this code (but not this specific computer)

https://digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/altair-sheetmusic/index.html

No transmit antenna needed, there was so much RF output on the unshielded motherboard.

Operating notes: AA-001 Allmendinger Park, Ann Arbor Parks On The Air

Successful activation of AA-001 Allmendinger Park this morning, 2024-02-26, for the 800a weekday morning roundtable net on the N8DUY repeater 145.15-.

Allmendinger Park is just west of Michigan Stadium and covers roughly four city blocks. There is a play area in the NW corner, and the photo shows my N9TAX roll-up J-pole antenna hung on the climbing structure.

There's plenty of space in the field if you were to want to set up a bigger antenna for HF operations, or throw a wire into one of the trees.

The one snag I had here temporarily on my first transmission was the UHF-to-BNC adapter that I was using wasn't screwed in all the way. Fixing that solved an intermittent problem. Next time I get an antenna it will have a BNC connector already on it.

Wiki page for AA-001 Allmendinger Park: https://localwiki.org/ann-arbor/AA-001

See https://localwiki.org/ann-arbor/Ann_Arbor_Parks_On_The_Air for the full list.

On order: "Rothammels Antenna Book" from DARC Verlag GmbH

Rothammels Antenna Book is available in a first English edition, translating from the 13th German edition. I have it on order from https://rothammel.com/Rothammels-Antenna-Book and look forward to opening up a copy and seeing what there is to see.

My current antenna placement is that I have either a home attic to put wires in, or a bicycle saddlebag to carry a portable antenna, or my backpack to carry an HT plus whatever makes the reception and transmission best when carried on my back.

Some reviews:

Juan, posting to DX Engineering which sold copies at one point (not in stock): "This is a 1,600 [page] treatise on Antennas! It is more theoretical than the ARRL Antenna Book, but quite less than John Kraus classical textbook. It has a ton of data and practical information. It is a very good comprehensive reference book on antennas"

Frank K4FMH on https://www.amateurradio.com/rothamels-antenna-book-an-authoritative-source/: "I was researching HF loop antennas for an article. I was thrilled at the depth of coverage and the detailed citations and patents included. It greatly helped me organize my thinking on how to improve the design and deployment of an HF horizontal loop antenna."

Alex KR1ST on mastodon.radio , https://mastodon.radio/@kr1st/111794722432508536 "That is one of the best gifts you could have given yourself!! I have the German version and it's my go-to book on antennas. There are antennas in that book that many folks have never heard of and I have never seen described anywhere else."

Based on the size of the book this is a desk reference and not a handbook. Given the number of times I have done counterproductive things with antennas I am very much looking forward to absorbing some good sense and intuition and understanding.

Operating notes: 2 meters simplex with the TK-790

Notes from spending about an hour all told tonight doing radio, with the Washtenaw Amateur Radio Public Service Corps (ARPSC) net. We started with the usual net on the 145.15- N8DUY repeater.

After the net there was a simplex net to test simplex sending and receiving. This was my first time doing simplex through this new rig, an ex-railroad Kenwood TK-790 acquired and programmed via Thom W8TAM (45 watts on 2 meters).

Happily the rig was programmed with simplex channels, so I didn't have to do anything more than pick the correct one for the exercise.

Less than ideal: I could see some of the signals on the waterfall for my OpenWebRX+ SDR, but the signal was not strong enough to break squelch unless it was a station that was very close by (Matt WS8U) or that had a very good antenna position (Don AC8TO, Steve KB8AY). I need to figure out how to adjust squelch here to open up the channel and just listen when there's simplex nets.

Much less than ideal, I had a dickens of a time getting the microphone plugged in and recognized. (Maybe a stuck pogo pin?) In any case it eventually all worked well enough that that was not the issue, and I'm not detaching the mic from the rig unless and until I need to.

All in all a very good exercise, and an excuse to get an outdoor antenna for this radio.

---

Previously, park operations (through a repeater) with this ex-railroad Kenwood TK-790, a 45 watt 2 meter monoband rig operating bicycle portable.

https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2024/01/operating-notes-2-meters-45-watts-bicycle-mobile-with-a-kenwood-tk-790.html