This episode’s feature covers the latest ICQPodcast Live session.
Amateur radio videos: W6LG on SWR, CW without Morse Code?, M0NTV on impedance matching
W6LG on SWR
Standing wave ration (SWR) is arguably one of the most debated—and misunderstood—topics in amateur radio. Here is Jim, W6LG’s, take on it.
CW without Morse Code?
In amateur radio, we tend to use the terms “CW” and “Morse Code” interchangeably. Technically, though, we send Morse Code using continuous wave (CW) transmissions. CW could be used to send other codes, such as the one proposed by this video.
It doesn’t’ seem like the code proposed here is all that practical, but YMMV. Let me know what you think.
MONTV on impedance matching
Impedance and impedance matching are two more misunderstood topics. Here, Nick, M0NTV, explains some of the basics of LC matching networks. What good is knowing this? Well, for example, if you really want to understand how your antenna tuner works, you’ll want to watch this. This is Part 1 of 2 videos.
Random Noise: Wet antenna, POTA ragchewing, more ops sending BK
Rain puts a damper (literally!) on 30m operations
I love my homebrew Cobra antenna…
…but it suffers from one big drawback. When it rains, the ladder line impedance changes and I have to retune the antenna. And, when it rains constantly for more than a couple of hours—like it has been here for the past 24 hours or so—I can’t tune it at all on 30 meters. That’s a bummer because 30 meters is my favorite band.
Oh well….It looks like the rain has finally let up here, so I should be back in business on 30 meters this evening.
POTA Ragchewing?
One of my ragchewing buddies is Howard, K4LXY. He’s fun to chat with because he always has something interesting that he’s doing or working on. A couple of days ago during our QSO, he suggested that POTA would be even more fun if somehow one could get credit for ragchewing from a park.
I like this idea. Perhaps if one had a ragchew of 15 minutes or more from a park, that one contact would qualify the operation as a legal activation and 10 contacts. What do you think?
More breaking, less IDing
It used to be that, at the end of a transmission, one would send the other station’s call, then “DE”, then your call, then “K”. So, for example, if I was working W1ABC, I’d send “W1ABC DE KB6NU K”.
Lately, however, I’ve been noticing more stations simply sending “BK” when they’re done with their transmission. I’m cool with this. The regulations say that one only has to identify every ten minutes, so why waste time sending call signs over and over? What do you think?
QSLs from the “Motor City”
I’ve written before about the cache of old QSLs that my brother came across several months ago while conducting an estate sale. The recipient of these QSLs lived near Detroit, so it’s understandable that many of the cards he received came from hams in the “Motor City.”
W8IFI proudly proclaims himself to be “The Voice of the Motor City.” W8BNG more modestly announces that he is “in the Motor City.” W8KWX’s card simply says, “The Motor City.”
I looked up these addresses on Google Maps, and the only house still standing is the house at 1294 W. Grand Blvd. It looks like 5317 Maybury Grand was razed to make way for the I-96 Freeway. 6128 Comstock is simply gone. The date that Google Maps last shows a house there is August 2013. Now that whole block is almost completely deserted.
Amateur radio videos: Extreme toroid winding, CW bandwidth, KB6NU on LICW
Need to wind some toroids?
While I’m waiting for my QRPLabs’ QMX kit to arrive, I thought I’d try to learn something about toroid winding. This video takes toroid winding to a whole new level.
W2AEW on CW bandwidth
Question T8A11, in the Technician Class question pool asks, “What is the approximate bandwidth required to transmit a CW signal?” The correct answer is 150 Hz. The question says “approximate” because the bandwidth depends on the speed at which the Morse Code is being sent.
In this video, Alan, W2AEW, actually makes some measurements to determine the bandwidth of a CW signal.
KB6NU on LICW
A couple of weeks ago, Bob, K4LRC, asked me to speak to the LICW Portable Ops group about getting better at CW. I guess they ran out of qualified speakers. I don’t know if the group learned anything, but it was fun to speak to the group. TL;DR getting on the air and making contacts is the best way to improve your CW.
Amateur radio in the news: Hackable ham radio, ham radio at the museum, club hosts Scouts
The Most Hackable Handheld Ham Radio Yet
The [Quansheng] UV-K5, released last year, might be the most hackable handheld ever, with a small army of dedicated hams adding a raft of software-based improvements and new features. I had to have one, and $30 later, I did.
Like Baofeng’s 5R, Quansheng’s K5 as a radio transceiver is fine. (I’m using K5 here to refer to both the original K5 and the new K5(8) model.) The key technical distinction between the 5R and K5 is a seemingly minor design choice. With Baofeng’s 5R, the firmware resides in read-only memory. But Quansheng stores the K5’s firmware in flash memory and made it possible to rewrite that memory with the same USB programming cable used to assign frequencies to preset channels.
ICHMS collaborates with IRARC
CASPIAN, MI – The Iron County Historical & Museum Society (ICHMS) will have two new exhibits this summer thanks to a collaboration with the Iron Range Amateur Radio Club (IRARC) and a grant from the Crystal Falls/Dickinson Area Community Foundation. “We couldn’t be any more excited about this collaboration and the exhibits that will come from it”, states museum director Kathlene Long. The club members are in here helping build the exhibits and are bringing their expertise along with their own artifacts to build these exhibits in time for this coming summer season.
The Club is building a working ham radio station in the museum. It will be fully functional. Museum visitors will be able to see the exhibit and signs will help visitors understand the importance ham radios – and amateur operators – have played in our county’s, and our country’s history. They will also learn why they continue to be so important. In addition, the Club is recreating a display of a vintage WIKB studio from pieces they have collected over the years. All of this is being paid for, in part, from a $500 grant from the Crystal Falls/Dickinson Area Community Foundation. “All in all, this is a lot of moving parts finally coming together to make this happen.” Long explains.
SIERA hosts Scout amateur radio merit badge day
METROPOLIS, IL — Boy Scouts talked to amateur radio operators as far away as Puerto Rico and Arizona during a radio merit badge class hosted by the Southernmost Illinois Emergency Radio Association (SIERA). Five scouts from Troop 2007, out of St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Paducah, attended the class on Saturday, March 23, at Trinity Church in Metropolis.
Scouts experimented with tuning forks and a wave generator and had the opportunity to talk on both handy-talkie and high-frequency base radios during the class. They also learned about the science and mechanics of radio as well as important safety measures.
Operating Notes: Bandscope observations, a pirate on 2m, VU2
Bandscope observations
If you who read my blog regularly, you know I’m a big fan of bandscopes. Here are a couple of relevant observations:
- I almost missed a DX contact because the DX station called about 250 Hz below my frequency. Because I had my bandpass set to 300 Hz (+/-150 Hz), I couldn’t hear him at all. I did seem him on the bandscope, though, and after I adjusted my receive incremental tuning (RIT), I worked him just fine.
- Not having a radio with a bandscope can lead you to be more pessimistic about ham radio than you should be. I worked a fellow who lamented how quiet the band was and how no one operated CW anymore. I found this baffling, as the band looked pretty active to me. It turns out that the guy was using a radio without a bandscope and when he tuned around, he couldn’t hear anything. I, on the other hand, could see the activity.
A pirate on 2m?
I am the main net control station for our club’s Monday night 2-meter net. (The net convenes every Monday night at 8 pm Eastern time on the 146.96- repeater. Join us if you can hit the repeater.)
Last week, a fellow checked in the call sign K1TKE. Since I have a computer in the shack, I like to call up the QRZ.Com page for people I haven’t worked before. There was no page for K1TKE.
Now, I know that there are some licensed amateurs that don’t have a QRZ page for one reason or another, so when it was K1TKE’s turn, I gave him a call. I got no response, so I’m guessing that this guy was unlicensed. That’s the first time this has happened to me.
VU2!
After all these years, I finally worked a VU station, logging VU2GSM on March 10 on 30-meter CW. I know this isn’t the biggest accomplishment in my ham radio career, but nonetheless it’s pretty cool to me.
I must say that Kanti had great ears. He wasn’t all that strong here, so I imagine that I was equally weak there. Even so, he got my call correctly the first time.
Debouncing switches can be a challenge
One of the challenges that I faced when I started my Micropython keyer project was debouncing the switch closures. There are seven in all: five pushbuttons and the dit and dah inputs.
So, I did what everybody does nowadays—perform an internet search. I searched for “switch debouncing with Micropython” and got about a zillion references.
One of the first references is actually part of the Micropython documentation. The documentation suggests that one read the current value of a given pin, wait for the value to change, and then verify that the new value is stable for at least 20 ms. They give the following example code:
import pyb
def wait_pin_change(pin):
# wait for pin to change value
# it needs to be stable for a continuous 20ms
cur_value = pin.value()
active = 0
while active < 20:
if pin.value() != cur_value:
active += 1
else:
active = 0
pyb.delay(1)
And, here’s how you would use this function:
import pyb
pin_x1 = pyb.Pin('X1', pyb.Pin.IN, pyb.Pin.PULL_DOWN)
while True:
wait_pin_change(pin_x1)
pyb.LED(4).toggle()
pyb, by the way, is a library of functions that support the PyBoard, a small microcontroller board that was designed specifically to run MicroPython. Pin is one of the classes in the pyb library that provides I/O pin functions.
More stuff from the internet
This is a simple solution, and really too simple for my project. So, I kept looking and found a bunch more solutions:
- Jack Ganssle, a long time embedded systems consultant, has published a couple of pages on debouncing on his blog, A Guide to Debouncing, or, How to Debounce a Contact in Two Easy Pages. Being a hardware guy, Ganssle gives a nice explanation of the problem before he goes on to show us his solution.
- Hack-a-Day has also tackled this issue with two posts, Embed with Elliot: Debounce Your Noisy Buttons, Part I and Part II.
What I ended up using is the asyncio library that was developed for MicroPython. This allows a programmer to implement a form of multi-tasking called “cooperative multi-tasking,” which is widely used in embedded systems. It’s more complicated programming this way—you have to keep in mind all the various things that can be running at the same time—but there are definite advantages as well.
For example, I think when I get to the point of implementing accepting commands via the USB port, it will be easier to do this. Commands will be arriving asynchronously, after all.
Another advantage to using this library is that it has drivers for switches, pushbuttons, ADCs, and incremental encoders. The switch drivers, for example, include functions that detect both short and long presses. This is a feature that I’m using in this project.
Hardware solution
There is also hardware solutions to debouncing switches. These range from simply soldering a capacitor across the switch to connecting the switch to a Schmitt trigger. For more information on these solutions, and how to make the tradeoff between hardware and software solutions, see Ultimate Guide to Switch Debounce by Max Maxfield.
Operating notes: New CW ops edition
I’m hearing some new ops on the CW bands these days, and I think it’s very cool. I’m not sure what’s motivating them, but whatever it is, I’m all for it.
Here’s one email I got from a fellow after our QSO:
Dan,
I’m a new CW operator and I heard your call tonight and recognized it from podcast fame, so I answered. I appreciated that you slowed down right away, but I immediately regretted my decision when you sent more than RST and state 😉. I could tell you were asking questions, but I was lost. Then my fingers panicked and stopped working 🙂. I bet I’m the only guy that’s ever happened to.
I’m using the Morse Code Ninja podcasts which are great (only a few characters left). I try to hunt a few POTA activators here and there for the simple/predictable exchange, and listen far more than I send.
Anyway, I got you in the log and hopefully our paths will cross again once I’ve got some more QSOs under my belt. Thanks for trying.
73,
Todd
Here’s another:
Dan,
It was good making contact. I hope someday to be able to copy. :-) I probably got about 60% of what you sent. I think I got the gist of what you were saying. Thanks for your patience.
This is the class I’m taking https://cwinnovations.net/ Glen put it together and this is the second time he/they’ve taught it. It is ten weeks long. We started on the 6th. I’ve read tons of stuff on learning CW and have taken the beginning and intermediate CWops classes. It will be interesting to see what innovations he has in this course.
I’ve been using a paddle until this point and have decided to try a straight key in this course to see if the tactile motion improves copying. It might be helping some, but who knows as I’m doing other stuff and getting experience every day.
I know one thing that holds me back is when I do stuff like POTA, WES or SST, I search and pounce assisted. If I know what is coming, copying is easy. :-) That’s why I need to do more rag chews.
Thanks again. I look forward to seeing you in Dayton.
Robert
A third fellow sent me a QSL card after struggling through a QSO, and after I sent him an electronic version of my book, CW Geek’s Guide to Having Fun with Morse Code. He wrote:
I didn’t realize until after our QSO that I have the No Nonsense Extra Class License Study Guide on my Kindle. Thanks again for the CW advice!
These weren’t the smoothest contacts I’ve made lately, but I give them a lot of credit for trying. I hope that if you find yourself in the same situation, and hear me calling CQ, that you’ll give me a call.
And, if any of you more experienced operators hear these new ops, be slow and patient with them. They’re making the effort, so you should, too.
ICQ Podcast Episode 426 – HamSCI Eclipse
This episode’s feature is more information about HamSCI’s activities during the upcoming full solar eclipse.