KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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Funk is German for radio

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“Funk” is German for radio, and I’ve been in a funk lately. That’s why it’s been so long since I’ve posted here. This happens to me every year at this time, when the days get shorter and darker. (Here’s an interesting tidbit of information: While the shortest day of the year is December 21, the sun sets earliest on December 8.)

Even though I’m in a funk, I thought I’d put a post together from some random thoughts and links. Here goes….

Project backlog

small radio
The QMX on my bench looks nothing like this………yet.

My lack of motivation has resulted in  a backlog of projects. First of all there’s the QRPLab’s QMX kit that is sitting on my workbench. After finishing the toroids, I decided to take a break, and I’ve just never gotten back to it. My goal now is to finish it be the end of February, so I’ll be ready to take it on POTA activations.

The lack of progress on this kit is not stopping me from getting started on other projects. The next new project on my list is the Pi-Pico RX. I’ve ordered the parts for this project, and am hoping to receive them soon, so I can get breadboarding.

I also ordered parts to build up the circuit for the EMF Explorer Badge. I like this project because it’s pretty simple to build, and eminently hackable. I would love to find someone that’s good with KiCAD to design a PCB with a ham radio theme and then maybe build and sell some of them at Dayton next year. If you’re interested, please get in touch.

More Pico

I went to a ham swap a week ago Sunday, and a guy I know was selling Raspberry Pi Picos, and I bought a Pico W for $12. It’s connected to this computer right now. I followed the Getting started with your Raspberry Pi Pico W tutorial on the Raspberry Pi website, and in about an hour, I had the Pico W serving a web page.

It was a fun little exercise. Now, I’d like to figure a ham radio application for this litte microcontroller. Maybe I could make a wireless remote-control for my transceiver. If you have a cool idea, let me know.

Social(?) media

cartoon of a man sending Morse Code
This is my icon on Mastodon and BlueSky.

So, I deactivated my Twitter account last week. I was kind of sorry about that as I had quite a few followers there, but it’s turned into such a pit that I felt it was the right thing to do.

Several months ago, I joined Mastodon several months ago. I’m @[email protected]. I currently have 632 followers there, and I think that’s pretty good.

I’ve been hearing all this stuff about BlueSky, though, so I decided to sign up there. I’m @cwgeek.bsky.social there. I just signed up and haven’t really participated much there yet, so I can’t really comment on how useful it is, but please follow me there, and I’ll follow you back.

 

Video: Ham Radio for Hackers at HOPE XV

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This is a recording of my “Ham Radio for Hackers” talk that I gave at HOPE XV at St. John’s University in New York City on July 12, 2024. The fellow to my right is frantically trying to get my MacBook to talk to the A/V system in the room. In fact, that’s why I am hemming and hawing more than usual. In the beginning, I was giving the talk from memory.

Funny story (at least I think it is.) When I first walked into the room where I was giving the talk, I thought I was in the wrong place. One reason for this is that even though I was about ten minutes early, nearly all of the seats were already taken. Also, a slide was being projected for the talk that had just preceded mine. I got halfway to the front of the room, turned around, and started heading back.

I realized then that I had to be in the right place, and all the seats were filled because they actually wanted to learn more about amateur radio! By the time, I started speaking there were people standing in the back of the room and sitting on the floor.

You can check out all the talks from HOPE XV on the 2600’s YouTube channel. The channel has videos from all of the HOPE conferences dating back to 1994.

Ready for a challenge?

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Fabian Kurz, DJ5CW, has done it again! Fabian is the guy behind Learn CW Online—lcwo.net—a website that has helped hundreds, if not thousands, of radio amateurs learn Morse Code.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Fabian’s latest project is the 52-Week Ham Radio Challenge. Slated to begin on January 1, 2025, the website says this about the challenges:

  • The challenges are meant to inspire you to extend your horizon in amateur radio by weekly challenges through the year that touch all aspects of ham radio (and related fields).
  • A lot of the challenges may be trivial for some participants (because it is what they do all the time), but very challenging to others.
  • Participants of the challenge are encouraged to help each other in any way possible. There’s no cheating and you decide on your own success or failure.
  • The challenges may be done in the suggested chronolgical order, or in any other way you like. For maximum synergy and fun in comparing how it’s going, going chronologically is recommended!
  • Participants are encouraged to post their progress, ideas, questions on Mastodon with the tag #hamchallenge. There is also an IRC channel: irc.libera.chat/#hamchallenge
  • You’re encouraged to make use of your own equipment as much as possible, but it is perfectly OK to use borrowed equipment, or use WebSDRs/KiwiSDRs or other remote setups.
  • Progress is tracked by mentioning the @[email protected] bot on Mastodon in your toots:
    • If you succeeded in a challenge, include HCnnS in your toot (where nn is the week). You will receive a point for the challenge.
    • If you didn’t succeed yet, you can still include HCnn in your toot about the challenge, and it will be linked.
    • The bot will reply with an acknowledgement including your current score and streak length. If your toot was a direct message, the reply will be private, too.

I intend to blog about each challenge prior to the week of the challenge. I’ll explain what the challenge is about and link to some resources that will help a participant complete the challenge.

I think this could be a lot of fun for both new hams and older hams. What do you think?

ICQ Podcast Episode 432 – Dayton Hamvention 2024 Part 2

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In this episode, I joined Martin Butler M1MRB, Caryn Eve Murray KD2GUT, Edmund Spicer M0MNG, and Ed Durrant DD5LP to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. The topics we discuss in this episode include:

Fair waring….This episode kind of long, even for us. We think you’ll enjoy it, though. The feature for this episode includes interviews from the Dayton Hamvention.

From the Fediverse: Ham gallery, M17 mailing list, 44-ft. doublet

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I’ve quit Twitter/X, and am now part of the Fediverse. There are quite a few radio amateurs in the Fediverse, and if you’d like to follow me there, you can follow @[email protected]. Mastodon.radio is a space for radio amateurs and SWLs, but it’s not the only radio-focused Fediverse server. It connects with the servers listed on fediverse.radio, including mastodon.hams.social, a server here in the U.S.

Mastodon seems to have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than Twitter. Here’s a few links I found and things I learned on Mastodon last night:

K8CX Ham Gallery. K8CX has an interesting collection of photos from Dayton, DX sound clips, and a QSL card museum. I’ve submitted a couple photos of me and the ICQ Podcast crew at Dayton 2024.

M17 Users mailing list. The  home page for this mailing list says, “The primary assumption of this mailing list is that M17 is (in June, 2024) in usable (enough) form for actual deployment and use in amateur radio.” They believe that all the pieces are there now.  Typically, to use M17, you’ll have to be “somewhat of an experimenter” to work around the inevitable glitches in using M17, but in the opinion of this list founder, “all the pieces are there now”.

44-foot doublet. Last night, there was some discussion of portable antennas, mainly the 44-ft. doublet antenna. This is the antenna that L. B. Cebik describes on the web page, “1 Wire, 7 Bands, 2 Directions, or The 44′ Doublet as a 40-10 Meter Antenna.” There’s a similar antenna out there called the NorCal Doublet. The NorCal Doublet uses ribbon cable as the feedline to reduce weight. These two antennas look like they’d be worth experimenting with.

Schematic diagram of an antenna.
The NorCal Doublet.

See you in the Fediverse!

Dayton 2024 had it all: Four Days in May

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On Thursday, May 16, I attended Four Days in May (FDIM), an event put on by the QRP Amateur Radio Club International (QRP ARCI). The first FDIM was held in 1996, and QRP ARCI has held it every year since, excluding the Covid years. This year, nearly 300 people attended the event.

Like the name implies, there are FDIM events on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but the main event is the series of talks on Thursday. These start at 8 am and run until 5 pm. This year, the talks included:

  • The Construction and Use of a WhoZat by Jack Purdum, W8TEE. Jack is a retired professor from Purdue University, a frequent speaker at FDIM, and the designer of many microcontroller-powered ham radio projects, including transceivers and antenna analyzers. This year, he talked about his latest design, the WhoZat. WhoZat is a portable, battery-powered device that allows an operator to type in a call sign prefix and obtain information about the country associated with the callsign. It will give you the country name, and the azimuthal bearing from your location to that country. One of the takeaways from this talk is that the WhoZat is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico, and Jack encouraged everyone to consider the Pico for future projects because it has more computing power and more memory than most Arduinos.In addition to talking about the WhoZat, Jack was promoting his latest book, Digital Signal Processing and Sofware Defined Radio. It’s available on Amazon for $45.
  • Top 10 Junkbox Projects by Hans Summers, G0UPL. Hans is the genious(?), madman(?), entrepreneur(?) behind QRP Labs. In this talk, he extolled the virtues (as I have done) of a well-stocked junkbox. The project that resonated the most with me is the one-tube transmitter.The reason it resonates with me is that I’ve been threatening to build one for years myself. Hans actually did it, though. In fact, he made his first QSO with a transmitter he built from an ECL82 tube.At the end of his talk, Hans gave a little plug for his newest transceiver, the QMX+. The embedded SDR rig covers 160 – 6m, in a slightly bigger form factor than the QMX, for only $125. It’s incredible, really.
  • zBitx–A Portable Station for the CW Operator by Ashar Farhan, VU2ESE of HF Signals. In this talk, Ashar described his zBitx, a portable CW/FT8 SDR transceiver. This isn’t a radio that Ashar is selling (yet!), but it does look like a complete design. And, of course, that design is completely open source, something he ribbed one of the other presenters about.
    A small radio with a smart phone user interface.
    The zBitx is a very small, portable CW/FT8 radio that uses a smart phone for an enhanced user interface.

    This radio is powered by a Raspberry Pi, specifically the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This module costs $15 and runs Linux. Ashar says, “If Arduino was a matchbox RC car, this Raspberry Pi is an Airbus A380, both in terms of size and speed. It can run WSJT X, fldigi, and full-stack SDR.” The radio also takes advantage of the WiFi capablity of the RPi. There’s an app that runs on a smart phone that acts as a front panel.

    At the end of his talk, instead of flogging a product, Ashar passed out a small PCB assembly called the sBitx Hat. Designed to plug into a Raspberry Pi, it includes an Si5351 clock generator and a 96 kbps, dual-channel audio codec. It looks it will be a fun thing to play with.

  • Adventures of a QRP Evangelist by Cliff Batson, N4CCB, proprietor of the QRP School YouTube channel. Cliff gave us a primer on QRP operation and on how to make YouTube videos. He encouraged us all to go out and make videos. I’m not so sure about this myself. It seems to me that there is already too many ham radio videos to watch.
  • Amplifying Your Adventures, Minimizing Your Power by noted YouTuber Tom Witherspoon, K4SWL. In his presentation, Tom concentrated on the personal and operating aspects of QRP, not the technical. The conclusion published in the proceedings does a good job of summarizing his talk. It reads, “Since my journey into ham radio began in 1997, I’ve encountered countless naysayers proclaiming, ‘That won’t work’ or ‘Life’s too short for QRP.’ These discouraging words often came from individuals who lacked firsthand experience in the field. Rather than accepting the pessimistic views, I’ve treated them as a checklist of challenges to overcome. my approach has been simple: get out there, experiment, and fully immerse myself in the moment. It’s through this hands-on exploration that I’ve discovered the true joy and potential of QRP operations.”
  • Designing the Elecraft KH1: From Vision to Reality by Wayne Burdick, N6KR. Wayne certainly needs no introduction. His talk concentrated on how he made some of the decisions he made in designing the Elecraft KH1 hand-held HF transceiver. It was a great talk that gave quite a bit of insight into the design process. Personally, I’m not sold on the KH1, but Elecraft can’t make them fast enough, so I guess that tells you how valuable my opinion is.
  • The Amazing Thermionic Valve by Greg Latta, AA8V. Greg is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering from Frostburg State University. He delved into some of the theory of how vacuum tubes work and some of the practical applications.
  • Stealth Operation from Hotel Rooms and Other Unlikely QTHs by Ross Ballantyne, VK1UN.

Unfortunately, Ross was unable to present, either in person or via Zoom. According to the paper in the proceedings, Ross was part of several peace-keeping missions to remote spots around the world. On these trips, he operated from many hotel rooms and gained quite a bit of experience doing so. For example, he writes that virtually all of his antennas are made from wirewrap wire, which he gets from Ali Express. To couple the wire antenna to the transmitter, he uses a Z-match tuner or a modified Z-match tuner called the FRI match ATU. It’s a shame that Ross wasn’t able to adress us in person, as he sounds like quite an interesting fellow.

A walk with VU2ESE

After the talks, I decided to take a walk and stretch my legs. Just as I got to the street, I ran into a friend of mine, Arun, W8ARU, and Ashar, VU2ESE. We decided to walk together, and ended up walking about a mile and a half or so.

Arun and Farhan have been friends for many years. In fact, Arun hired Ashar to work for a company that Arun owned when he lived in India. (Arun now lives in Ann Arbor, MI, which is how I got to know him.) Arun once told me the taught Farhan how to solder. I confirmed that story at Hamvention last year when Ashar visited the ARDC booth.

In addition to all his development activities, Farhan recently joined the board of directors of Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC), the private foundation that I retired from last May. We had a great chat about the future of ARDC and amateur radio in general, among other topics. It will be interesting to see in which direction the new board members take ARDC.

Vendor Night

Thursday evening, FDIM holds Vendor Night. It’s a great deal for vendors. There’s no charge to participate as a vendor, and it’s a lot of fun. A couple of years ago when I did Vendor Night, I also shared a booth with the Dayton Makerspace on Friday and Saturday at Hamvention and ended up selling more books in 2 hours at the FDIM Vendor Night than I did in 2 days of Hamvention.

This year, I sold about $150 worth of books. What was even better was meeting everyone, including those who have used my books to get licensed or to upgrade. For example, Tom, K4SWL, came over and shared his story with me.

He said that one year his wife said that she would also get her ticket as an anniversary present. He gave her my study guide and ten days later, she had her license. How cool is that?

Kudos to QRP ARCI for another successful FDIM. If you’d like to get a copy of this year’s proceedings, you can contact them by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]. QRP ARCI also has some other goodies, if you’re interested, in their Toy Store.

Amateur radio videos: ARDC community meeting, Hamvention award winners, send texts over VHF/UHF

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ARDC Community Meeting 2024-02-24

Here’s the latest update from ARDC on their activities.

Hamvention 2024 award winners

The winners this year include:

  • Special Achievement Award: Anthony Luscre, K8ZT
  • Technical Achievement: Ward Silver, N0AX
  • Club of the Year: Young Ladies Radio League
  • Amateur of the Year: Edward Engleman, KG8CX

Text over radio with Rattlegram

This might be something interesting to try on a repeater that’s not very active.

Random thoughts: DLARC on Radio Survivor podcast, open-source software packaging, speed key test

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Podcast peeks behind the scenes at DLARC

Radio Survivor is a podcast that covers anything related to radio, including amateur radio. In a recent episode, they interview Kay, K6KJN, curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC).

SatDump Gains Notable Updates

I found this on Amateur Radio Daily:

SatDump, a popular piece of software used to decode imagery from weather satellites such as NOAA-18 and others, has gained significant updates to the way it processes and projects received images on maps. Imagery projections are much more accurate as a result of recent code refactors. A detailed deep-dive into the changes have been published.

SatDump is available for all major platforms.

This looks like a pretty cool program. I’ve added this to my list of projects to get up and running one of these days.

Speed key test

I forget on which mailing list or forum this came up, but the talk rolled around to the poor fists of some operators who use bugs and cootie keys. Someone mentioned that Navy radio operators had to pass a “speed key” test before they were allowed to use a bug on the air, and when they passed the test, they were given a certificate, like the one at right. Then, someone, with tongue firmly in cheek, suggested that hams should have to pass a similar test.

I realize that the logistics of developing and administering a speed key test for radio amateurs—not to mention enforcing it fairly—would make it an impossibility. Even so, I would encourage straight key users and cootie key users to test their fists. You can use either fldigi or a a program called Precision FistCheck to do this. Improving one’s sending not only makes it easier for the other operator to work you, but should also help you make more contacts.

Random and partly-baked thoughts: ARRL email addresses, pics on QRZ.Com, amateur radio advocate to quit Congress

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One of the features of WordPress is that you can create a draft post by jotting down an idea or cutting and pasting a URL into a blank post. I  do this frequently, then abandon the drafts. There are several reasons for this:

  • The idea was only partly-baked or just a random thought.
  • I was too lazy to write a whole post about it.
  • It wasn’t that great of an idea to start with.

I think that some of these ideas do deserve to see the light of day, however. They may get others thinking and spur discussion about a particular issue or technology. That being the case, here are some things that have crossed my mind lately.

arrl.org vs arrl.net email addresses

If you’re an ARRL member, you can request an ARRL email address. If you’re an ARRL staff member or a mucky-muck volunteer, such as section manager, you get an arrl.org email address. If you’re not one of the chosen few, they give you an arrl.net email address.

This is something that has griped me for a long time. It’s just another indication of how the ARRL views its members and makes it clear that members are second-class citizens in the ARRL hierarchy. By contrast, I am also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE has many more members than the ARRL, but when you apply for an IEEE email address you receive an ieee.org address, no matter if you are a Nobel Prize winner or a student member.

Photos on QRZ.Com

One thing that always bugs me is that when I look up someone on QRZ.com, I find a photo of their radios or their shack. Pictures of equipment, such as the one at right, do nothing for me.

What I want to see is your face like the one at left. That will tell me a lot more about you than the brand of radio that you operate.

Amateur radio advocate will not seek re-election to Congress

Representative Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) has announced that she will not seek re-election in 2024. In May, the ARRL reported that Lesko (AZ-08) introduced The Amateur Radio Communications Improvement Act (H.R. 3241) on May 11, 2023, to require that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminate the obsolete HF digital symbol rate limit with a 2.8 kHz bandwidth limit. Hopefully, someone else will pick up the ball and run with it.

 

Ham Radio Wiki Seeking Knowledgeable Writers

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This popped up on /r/amateurradio yesterday, and I thought it deserved a bit more publicity…..Dan

I’m one of the founders of a project called OpenHam Wiki – a project dedicated to collecting ham radio knowledge in one central location for easy access and research for projects, on-air techniques and knowledge, and more.

Projects like this have been attempted before, but not many have attempted it with the right group and right tools. OpenHam would really appreciate more elmers registering and being willing to help create and edit content!

To join as a writer, register on the website and DM me your username either here on Reddit or to one of the admins on the Discord server (https://discord.gg/dtk9uuJGdQ). This is our current spam-prevention method, although we are working on a better solution. Once you’ve requested editor access, please give us 48 hours to get you setup.

We’re also looking for people knowledgeable in MediaWiki administration and writing to help us work on system administration, spam prevention measures, and style guidelines.

Overall, any help and writing would be greatly appreciated and we’d love some advice or notes on the project as a whole! I know it’s a costly endeavor and hasn’t been successful before, but I’m enjoying what we’ve worked on so far as my side project. :)