So easy a “Child” can figure it out

Every now and again I scoot over to the ICOM Website and take a look around and see whats new.  In the past I have commented on their series of Amateur Radio related comics . 

If you ignored me before… I really suggest you head over and actually read the FREE PDF Comics and then print out a copy.  You could give them to your kids to try and explain what all that gear is in the basement…  If your a bit older (like me) you could give them to your grandkids so they can try to understand what you do in the basement.  If you do a public awareness display it could really help out your explanations… 

Its a great way to introduce the hobby to a younger mind….

Thanks again to ICOM for giving us this great way to showcase our hobby…

73bob

 

Via the email inbox

This little bit of news comes to us from Richard VE3RNM which has a couple of interesting links…

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Don’t know if you know these two websites or not, but I find the downloads very helpful. Check them out. Maybe put them in your Blog.

Richard

 

http://www.haminfobar.co.uk/  and  http://www.dxshell.com/

73
VE3RNM / VA3RXM (RAC CEC)RADIO AMATEURS of CANADA
ARRL
Emergency Measures Radio Group / Ottawa ARES
Regional Amateur Radio Alert Net (RARAN)
CANWARN

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Thanks to Richard for sharing these with us…

 

73bob

December RAC Directors Report from VE3XT

The following is courtesy of Bill Unger VE3XT and posted here as a service to the Amateur Radio Community.  If you have any comments on the article please contact Bill direct at ve3xt@rac.ca

73bob

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North East Ontario Regional Directors Report for December, 2011

 

I will dispense with the details of the November Board of Directors meeting as it dealt with administrative issues primarily. I would like to highlight some of the items that are of interest to you.

RAC membership is increasing. Yep you read that correctly. Albeit it’s at a small rate but for the last 4 months membership is actually increasing. This is a good trend and suggests Canadian Amateurs realise that RAC will be here for the long haul. Expect more on this in 2012 as continuing to increase membership will be a focus for RAC executive in the New Year.

The Maple Leaf Memberships are also rising and are now in excess of 120. I know these are difficult economic times but these folks have stepped up and said supporting RAC is worth a $100. If you find it within your means I hope you will consider supporting RAC at this elite level so we can continue to advocate for Canadian Amateurs.

The companies who joined RAC as Corporate Members are now advertising on the RAC web page.  You may want to check them out and then visit their web sites.

Our Treasurer, Margaret, VA3VXN announced that RAC will finish the 2011 fiscal year in the black. It has been a while since this happened so it’s very good news. Unfortunately for RAC Margaret has decided that she needs to focus more time on her schooling and home life so will complete her term and not seek re-election. If you have financial training and would be willing to volunteer please contact me.

Stephen Mayne, VE3LWX is starting to ramp up in his position as Co-Coordinator of Philanthropy and is building a team to assist him. If you could help with graphics, legal expertise, have experience in philanthropy or fundraising please contact Stephen at ve3lwx@rac.ca.

In the last few weeks I have been active on 30, 20 and 15 Metres with my Elecraft K1 running 3 watts into a homebrew vertical. The band conditions have been GREAT and now have a dozen new countries in the log. I will be sending my QSL’s to Nenad at the outgoing RAC QSL bureau for forwarding. Canada Post charges a $1.75 per card; I will send a dozen to the bureau for less than the price of one.

In the last few days there have been stories on the number of American Amateurs increasing and reaching new highs. The obvious question is “What about Canada?” While talking to Garry, VE6CIA from Red Deer he told me that his group just turned out 21 new Amateurs in Alberta in the last few months. It sounds like we are also attracting new Amateurs in Canada as well. If you or your club has Amateur classes let me know.

I hope to work you in the RAC Winter Contest on December 17^th. Good luck.

Finally on behalf of Rita, and me, we would like to wish each of you all the best this Christmas season. Hopefully you will get a few moments to spend some time in front of your rig and enjoy the good conditions. Merry Christmas and all the best in 2012.

If you have any questions or concerns please email me at ve3xt@rac.ca.

 

Bill VE3XT

North East Ontario Regional Director

Radio Amateurs of Canada

VA3QV/QRP/P – Weston Park Ottawa

If you were following my tweets this afternoon (Saturday Nov 26th) then you knew that I was heading over from my place to Weston Park to toss the Par into the tree and have some fun with the FT817.  I got a bit of a late start but arrived at the park just before 1300 eastern and got the gear all set up and ready to go… 

My first contact was with K4VRC on 10m (28.400 usb) around 1315 hrs.  His signal was a booming 5/9 but the FT817 has a great RCV section.  Dave was at the mic in Florida and he had no troubles whatso ever copying my QRP signal.  This was a distance of just under 1200 miles as the crow flies or as the prop bounces…  I don’t usually work much 10m so this was an extra treat…

View Larger Map

 

My second contact was withN4UED Chuck in Roanoke  Rapids North Carolina.  I worked Chuck 0n 14.294 and his signal was just booming.  According to QRZ the distance between us was about 630 miles or 13 hours drive from Ottawa as my old RV used to drive. 

View Larger Map

Small world but Roanoke Rapids is the location where we used to take our first break with the RV after fueling in Watertown NY on our trips to Florida for March Break with the family.  I did not realize where he lived till after I got home and looked at Google Maps but…  We had a great QSO that lasted about 5 minutes and I hope that he gets his last state needed for his WAS QRP CW which would be Alaska.  So if your an Alaskan CW OP listen out for Chuck.

Shortly after that I got the chance to explain Amateur Radio to a fellow who was walking his two huskies in the park and soon after that it was time to head back home before I was missed at the home front…  Also just around 1500 the sun was dipping into the trees and to be hones as the sun got lower the temps were dropping a bit so…  Really was time to head home…    I guess this is something that I have to start to remember but its gets chilly in the park once the sun starts to drop so what this means to me is getting out there earlier so I can get more radio time in.  However much earlier is not good for band conditions so its a matter of timing and luck…

The bottom line is that contacts were made and fun was had…  The FT817 came through again…

73bob

At least its dry…

Wednesdays snow has finally melted…  Just a few snowbanks (where the plows deposited the parking lot snow) and they seem to be departing very quickly…  The forcast (best guess) for today  is overcast with temps around 7 deg C (thats 45 deg F in American) .  The key part of the forcast however is they think its going to be dry and above freezing…  Seeing that we are not going to get many more days this year where I can walk to the park and set up to play radio without the need for a Parka and Mukluks (warm style of winter boots) I am getting the urge to charge up the battery on the FT817 and head out around noon to stretch the Par End Fed QRP Multiband antenna from a tree branch and take advantage of the good band conditions and the above average weather conditons.

I’ll do some listening from home before I plan to leave and if the bands seem open and the weather is still cooperating I think a walk to Starbucks with a walk to Weston Park right after could the activity of the day… 

73bob

A very interesting website

While taking a break from watching the NFL on Fox today I decided to do a bit of surfing…  I’m not really sure how I ended up at this site but it was worth the effort it took to fluke onto it…

Here it is and be sure to bookmark it….

Share with your friends…

Happy Thanksgiving to my American Neighbors…  We do share more than a common border…  But then radio waves cross borders without effort

73bob

Getting back to “normal” ops…

First define “normal”…

I spent Monday and Tuesday doing lots of “amateur radio releated activities”  but not as much “on air time” as I would normally get.  If you remember I had lots of issues with RFI locking up my HRD/Logging computer whenever I re tuned with the auto tuner after a frequency change during the ARRL SSB Sweeps.  Strange as it seems the 100w signal on SSB caused no ill effects but the 10w tone while the autotuner did its thing (either autotuner – Internal or External) would knock out my computer.  I had assumed that it was some sort of issues with an addition of a couple more radials just before the contest started.  This might of been true but the problem did go away after I spent a couple of hours on Monday carefully routing the radials and resecuring them radials and the feed line in my back yard…

Everything was performing flawlessly on Tuesday and then the snow arrived here on Tues late evening and carried on to Wednesday am and my backyard was covered by approx 3 inches of a heavy slushy wet snow…  Wednesday am when I went to check a frequencie I noticed that the old problems were back.  Now the only difference between Tuesday and today is the addition of the snow.  There is an easy way to check this out as the temps are supposed to rise again by the weekend and I am expecting to have a brown back yard by Friday as compared to the white back yard today.  Either way…  I still gotta work on the problems….

If you have laffed at my earlier attempts you know that I have added groundstraps to all the gear except the laptop (no where to attach a ground strap) and all cables have terroids or chokes attached to both ends of them.  I have an ugly balun choke at the antenna end of the coax and a terroid choke where it attaches to the auto tuner.  The patch cord that runs from the auto tuner to the radio has chokes at both ends of it and the usb to serialport cable that attaches to the FT450 has chokes at both ends as well.  No as we had no issues on Tuesday (before the snow) and have the problems today (after the snow) I am assuming that the radials have something to do with it and the snow is making things more efficient and some how some RF is excaping the chokes and terroids and finding its way into my laptop.  Looks like I will be buying that new desktop I was drooling over.  I am of the opinion that the metal case of the desktop combined with the fact I will be able to connect the desktop to my grounding system it should eliminate the RFI problem.  In the meantime I will have to disconnect the control cable and manually do the logging thing and QSY thing so I don’t have to reboot when I try to chase DX.

If you  check my on line log page here on the blog  you will notice that while I was doing the checking of the changes I had done yesterday I managed a few contacts on the higher bands.  England and the Great State of Tennessee on 15m  and Puerto Rico on 10m.  The contact with John AJ4L was really interesting because it turned to to be a 15 minute (or so) ragchew and I feel I made a new friend.  Not the usual TNX for the contact your 5/9 QRZ??? but we chatted about radios, antennas and operating conditions.  We even managed to get compare WX comparisions although his 70 deg F did make my 7 deg C seem cold…  Here it was…  John had worked the English station (2E0UDX) on 15 just before I did and when I finished my contact I heard “Bob take it up 10″ so I went up 10 and ID’d myself and the next time I was actually having a conversation rather than exchanging signal reports.  It was fantastic and something I must try again…  No DXing or net QNI but actually talking on the radio…

If you live in Eastern Ontario let the weather melt the snow….  Remember your age and your heart if you insist on shovelling your walk of that very wet and heavy snow…  It should all be melted by Friday and a couple of days of a shushy sidewalk shound not hurt you….  The alternative could do more than hurt…   Check out some Ottawa Newspaper stories on the storm ….

Ottawa Sun Newspaper

Ottawa Citizen Newspaper

And yes that is a City Transit Bus sitting on its side in the Ottawa Citizen article

To my American Neighbors ….  Happy Thanksgiving…. as this is your weekend…  We hold Canadian Thanksgiving in October so we can travel to be with our families before the snow gets nasty…

73bob

All good things must come to an end

And at 1600 est we pull the plug on the 2011 ARRL SSB Sweeps… 

This year was a great year for contacts but I am talking Quality over Quantity.  The bands were fantastic and although I had some equipment issues which caused some down time it was a great time for me…  After getting ready for this contest for over a week what ever possessed me to start adding radials to the system just before start escapes me.  Although the addition of the radials did improve the performance of the antenna…  The benefit from the improved performance was negated by the RFI locking up my laptop EVERY TIME I retuned for a new frequency.  I had a slight issue previously with RFI so… I shoulda known better…  On the plus side as it performs much better I think I will continue to work on the radial system and then just replace the laptop with a desktop/minitower unit with a metal chassis and case I can ground.  There is nothing on the laptop I can ground to that I can find and I aready have snap on chokes/terroids on both ends of every cable that comes to the computer and radio/autotuner including coax, patch cables and usb cable to the radio.  The TV and sound system are fine the only thing that gets buzzed is my shack computer…

If I can trust my paperlogs I think I have about 75 contacts in about 30 sections.  Not really anything to write home about but I had fun when I was not rebooting the laptop…  I managed to work most of Canadian Provinces Territories and for the contest I did work all the Canadian Sections.  I did fairly good in the far west of the US but failed greatly in the Mid West…

Highlights for me were…  Working VE8EV in NWT on 20m.  Actually I heard John on 10, 15, 20, and 40m.  As the contest only allows one contact (any band) it was a bit dissapointing not to be able to get VE8 into the log on more bands.  just think that two years ago I had never worked any Northern Canada stations and now I hear them on most of the bands.

 I also heard a  VY1 running a pile up I could not break on 20m and then 40m no matter how hard I tried.  But it was encouraging to hear that rare Canadian Zone. 

I did not hear any VY0 or Vo2 stations during the contest and I also did not hear any VE1 stations.  Not hearing any VE1 came as a bit of  a shock as the Halifax ARC has a good bunch of contesters who I normally hear every contest.  Not only did I not hear the above mentioned stations I did not even see any spots for them on the DX Clusters so it was not my ears…  No one heard them…

So thats the fun I had….  I have a month to get ready for the RAC Canada Winter Contest.  In the next 30 days I have to run more radials for the vertical and get the VHF and 6m Loops back up in the air.  I also will have to get some sort of computer to handle logging and computer control of the radios (FT 450 and FT897) up and running and with any luck RFI will no longer be an issue.  Of course I could always run the FT817 instead in the QRP Catagory and see how I do.  Actually my best ever showing in the RAC Canada Winter contest was as VA3RCS in the early 2000′s in the QRP Catagory using a FT817 and a home brewed G5RV

CU later down the log…

73bob

Something about Lemons and Lemonade

The sweeps have been going very well for me from a radio point of view.  However the Radio point of view is much different from the orignal goals point of view…

Lets look back and see… 

Have Fun-  Well so far outside of some equipment failures (computer-not radio) I have been having a blast.  I gotta figure out how to live stream the video from my webcam so you can see the smiles on my face as I make contacts.  Only downside to this is that I would have to clean up real good for the audience and also watch what I say when the station I’m trying to work can’t hear me…

Complete my WAS-  By my count I have picked up about 25 states and a few of them were in the areas (North West and South West) where I was lacking before.  EQSL says I need to confirm 20 more so this one could be close especially if people check their esl accounts after the contest…

Make a contact in VY1-  Oh well…  This time I heard a VY1 and sat trying to break a pile up on 20m for over 30 minutes but finally gave up.  Even as I type this I am watching the cluster and hoping that I’ll find that the band will have improved.  I did manage to get VE8EV last night and have heard him on 15m several times today so I know we have prop aimed up north.  But I’m also betting that John’s amp has a bit to do with things…

Get at least 40 multis in the log- Not going to happen but will be close.  Once my computer issues started up again I decided to search and pounce for various rare stations rather than rack up the contacts as I never know when this computer will lock up due to RF and I’ll have to reboot again.

So after many reboots which really ruins the rythm you try and get set up when working contests…  I gave up…  Even as I was typing the above lines I had to reboot once when I tried calling and typing at the same time…

I am trying to get all the Canadian Provinces/Territories within a 24 hour period.  With 3 hours to go I have to find a VO2, VE1, VE2, VY0 and VY1 so as you can see its not an easy quest. 

But it will be fun to try…  And even (when) the computer barfs again knowing that I only need to log 5 contacts the paper logs will do till I can reboot again.

More on this later…

73bob

Sweeps goals

As with every contest…  I don’t expect to win or place but I do expect to show…. 

For this contest I have the following goals and if they were met I would concider the contest a success:

#1 Have Fun- As I have said every time in the past this is a hobby and hobbies are supposed to be fun.  If it ain’t fun then why the &&^^%&*^ am I doing it…

#2 Complete my WAS- As this contest uses North American Geographic zones as the multipliers I am hoping to get the remaining 15 (or so) States needed to complete my WAS

#3 Make a contact in VY1-  In the 20 years I have been an amateur I have only heard a VY1 station (once).  I have worked every other Province/Territory in Canada except VY1.  I am hoping to complete Canada in the logbook this weekend.

#4 Get at least 40 multipliers in the log-  In the process of attaining my first three goals I would hope that I would also be able to put 40 of the 80 ARRL/RAC sections in the log.  I am not aiming for anything else but a “Clean Sweep” but being realistic ….. a 50% rate would not upset me.

Now this time you can laff along with me as I have configured HRD to put my log on line.  Every now and again if you feel like it you can look at the last 15 contacts in my log by using this link. 

If any of the goals are attained its a safe bet I will be yelling about it as it happens on my twitter account.

So have a great weekend and enjoy the hobby.  If you participate in the Sweeps good luck and if you don’t participate then I hope you are doing what you want to be…

73bob