Author: shedberg

Monday night QSO

Had a nice 80M CW QSO with Jim, K8DEH. He had a great signal from Ohio, solid fist, nice speed. His speed wasn’t too fast, but I still had problems copying. I need to keep working on my copying to build up some speed.

Here some of Jim’s info from QRZ.com:

I was a Novice, KN8DEH, in 1954 – 1955 until I got into school and sandlot baseball. I ran a homebrew 6146 on 40 meters to a folded dipole strung between my father’s house and a telephone pole. My receiver was a BC348Q. After a stint in the Navy, college, marriage, kids, grandkids, and now retirement, I am again finding interest in my old childhood hobby. Although it has been 50+ years, it’s still fun to work CW. The current RIG here is an old Kenwood TS-520se (also running ICOM 746PRO purchased at 2006 Dayton Ham Fest) into a fan dipole up about 25FT in the trees. Look forward to meeting you on the air…..

I’m hoping I’ll get to work Jim again soon.

Online electronics course

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scots_Guide/intro/electron.htm

The Scots Guide to Electronics

This course is designed to help you learn about components, circuits, and the use of electronics. You can explore the contents in whatever order you wish.The emphasis is on providing information starting at the ‘absolute beginners’ level, but we hope eventually to provide material of use to anyone interested in electronics and its applications …

This weekend in the shack…..

GYFWW: Get Your Feet Wet Weekend. This was an interesting event… all CW. My CW skills are atrocious and this was my attempt at improving. I enjoyed it, although at times it was very frustrating. The exchange was RST, name, state, FISTS #, and year licensed. Most folks were good at slowing down and repeating missed parts of the exchange. I spent a lot of time just sending CQ without a response. A contest doesn’t have the personal interaction of a regular QSO. At the end of the contest I had 18 contacts and over 200 points… no records broken here. I still have a long way to go on the CW. I would like to get my speed up to 15-20wpm – that will take a lot of consistent work.

Virginia Beach Hamfest: My second year attending the Virginia Beach Hamfest. A two-day hamfest, I went on Sunday. $5 to get in. There were a few vendors, but I had primarily come this year for RadioWorks, a local company from Portsmouth that makes great wire antennas. I purchased a Carolina Windom, 133′ long, good on 80M to 10M. The challenge now is to hang that bad boy. I’ll be assisted by my CSV19 Pneumatic Antenna Launcher.

T-238+ APRS WX Project: The main board was good to go. I put the modem board together Friday night, checked out and good to go. Then came Saturday, I was interfacing the WX sensors (temp, wind speed and direction)… it worked! I was getting the data to read out properly. However, when I tried to interface the modem board with the radio, the LCD screen started showing all solid squares instead of text and the heat sink got very, very hot. The LED heartbeat light is still functioning, but clearly there is something wrong. Hope I’m not back to square one. http://www.tapr.org/kits_t238plus.html

Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre

Author Danny Gregory went to a flea market and found a ring binder containing 369 colorful and cryptic-looking postcards. Intrigued, he bought the collection and did some investigating. These cards were ham radio QSL cards, which are postcards that hams send to one another after they make contact over the airwaves. This particular collection once belonged to a man named Jerry Powell, an aeronautical engineer who died at age 93 in 2000. Jerry was a lifelong ham radio enthusiast his earliest QSL card is from 1928. Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio won’t teach you how to become a ham, or show you new ham radio techniques. Its not a technical book at all. Instead, this book is about Jerry Powells life as seen through his lifelong hobby, and its a compelling and absorbing read, even for readers who aren’t hams. All QSL cards are unique. They feature the call sign for a radio station, and includes cryptic notes on the conversation, the kind of radio equipment used in this connection, and little personal touches that reflect the ham’s personality. Each QSL card is either made by or for the ham, and it’s very much like a picture postcard from that region. Some cards look like regular tourist postcards, and others are hand-drawn, or feature photos of the ham with family or, more commonly, in their radio shack.

Hello World was designed by Paul Sahre, a well-known illustrator. His design work in this book is amazing and carefully organized so both diehard ham radio operators and novices can appreciate Jerry Powell’s worldwide ham radio contacts over the course of his lifetime. All the pages are adorned with colorful QSL cards with detailed annotations for many of them. There’s a fold-out map of the world with little dots for all of the ham connections Powell made worldwide, so readers can cross-reference the QSL cards in his collection. There’s also a chart graphing the number of QSL cards that Powell received per decade. 1940-1949 was his most prolific period, with 98 contacts.

http://www.theconnection.org/photogallery/hamradios/default.asp?counter=1

Talk of the Nation, April 30, 2003 Join host Neal Conan for a discussion on
ham radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1248508

Tokyoflash is proud to present the first ever Morse Code watch

The watch has 3 modes for telling the time.
Using a bulit in speaker that refracts the sound off your wrist through the solid stainless caseback it sounds out the time in Morse Code (http://www.tokyoflash.com/images/morse-audio.mp3).
If thats to hard to follow, you can press a button to see the time in Morse Code on the LED display.
If that’s still too hard to decipher or your running out of time, one more press of a button you can see the time in regular digit form.

Stimulate your mind and learn to tell the time in Morse Code.

The quality is second to none with 150 grams of solid stainless, this watch is built like a Navy Seal!
With its high polish strap & mirrored lens – in bright sunlight you could even signal in Morse Code.

* Time only
* 12 & 24 hour mode
* AM / PM in 12 hour mode
* Audio Morse code time
* LED Morse code time
* Regular digit time mode
* 1 Year Warranty
* Polished Mirror finish
* The only Morse Code watch in the world!

http://www.tokyoflash.com/viewwatch76C1morse-code-watches.html

VOAProp – the new propagation predictor

From the G4ILO’s Shack: http://www.g4ilo.com/index.html
I am pleased to announce a successor to my popular HF band propagation program HFProp (http://www.g4ilo.com/hfprop.html). VOAProp has a similar user interface, but uses the VOACAP propagation model. Developed over 50 years by the US Navy Research Laboratory and the Institute of Telecommunications Sciences, with sponsorship from Voice of America, and validated using thousands of reception reports from Voice of America short wave radio listeners, VOACAP is probably the most accurate HF propagation model available.

VOAProp will show you the typical expected propagation for any month and time of day, from now back to the earliest days of radio. It can also generate a point to point propagation chart showing the best time of day, and band, to try to make a contact with any given location.

Lunchtime Update

Crystal Oscillator for the TAPR T-238+: TAPR made good on their promise to send me the missing 32MHz crystal oscillator. I need to stop by Radio Shack on the way home and pick up a 470 ohm resistor (R9) and I should be able to complete the construction of main board tonight. We will see if my kit building success improves.

CW QSO attempt: I was calling CQ on 7110 and received a reply from W8JCR, Larry. His signal started off strong but then he faded into the QRN.

QSL Card: received a QSL card from Jim, W2SY from my Blue Ridge Mountains DXpedition QSO.

Easy programming steps for the Kenwood TH-D7A

Step 1. Press the A/B key to choose the band (example 144/VHF or 440/UHF)
Step 2. Press the VFO key
Step 3. Select your frequency for the main tuning knob, or directly from the keyboard
Step 4. Selecting TONE, press the F Key and there will be a flashing number select F-1, press OK on the joy stick, and the OFF will flash turn the main tuning knob to ON, and then press OK again. The T will show in your display.
Step 5. Press the F Key again go to F-2, press OK, and the PL number will flash turn the main tuning knob to the desired PL/Encode, and press OK again.
Step 6. Memory Entry press the F Key then MR Key, the memory number will flash turn the main tuning knob to desired memory location, and then press MR Key to store your selection. To recall memory just press the MR Key again.