KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

I was just tuning around on 30 meters when I heard KC8SWR on 10.110. KC8SWR is a station located in the Plymouth Historical Museum. On February 14 & 15, 2004, they are going to be operating a special event station commemorating Lincoln’s birthday. Since I’ve signed up to operate Sunday morning from 10 am to 11 am, I thought I’d give them a shout. I had a nice, short QSO with Bob, and then let him go see if he could work any of the European DX that I’d been hearing.

After saying 73, I tuned down the band and caught IS0GQX on Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy in the center of the Mediterranean, calling CQ. Bruno gave me a nice 559 report before saying his 73s.

Well, that’s the short and long of it on 30 meters this afternoon.

I’ve just finished writing a grant proposal that could fund a community-based amateur radio station in Saline. I’m asking for $5,000 for this project.

The grant would come from the Saline CARES program. Their website says:

In 1999 the Saline Area Schools and the Coalition for a Quality Community (CQC) cosponsored the Saline Community Wide Planning Process in which approximately 150 community members met for 15 months to answer the question: What needs to happen in the Saline area to address growth and improve the quality of life? In September 2000, as a result of the recommendations of the Community Wide Planning Committee, voters passed the CARES Recreation Millage for 0.85 mills for 10 years. The millage will provide annual funding for five specific programs and also create a Discretionary Fund which may be allocated annually through a grant process to meet additional recreation needs.

Writing this proposal was an interesting exercise. I had to ask a lot of questions: How much should I ask for? Is $5,000 too much or too little? How can I make this sound like an attractive proposal?

The proposal, in its current form asks for $5,000. This money would be spent to purchase an HF transceiver, a tower, and antennas. That’s just the physical plant, though. In addition to setting up the station, the proposal also commits ARROW to conducting license classes and other classes related to amateur radio. That’s the real benefit to Saline of this program. The station just serves as a focal point.

I think this project, should it be approved would be a good thing for Saline and for amateur radio in this area. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Some say that Morse code is the original digital communications technique. That being the case, isn’t the combination of Morse code and the Internet a natural combination? Some people seem to think so, namely MRX Software of Australia.

They have several different products, include a Morse code trainer and a PC-based spectrum analyzer (or analyser as they spell it there), but perhaps the coolest is the CW Communicator, or CWCom for short. Working somewhat like EchoLink does for voice communication, CWCom enables anyone with a computer to communicate with Morse code over the Internet. And just like EchoLink, CWCom is free.

To use CWCom, you have to first download and install the program. This is a very straightforward process. I have the program running on an old Windows98 laptop. Next, you have to decide how to “key” the computer. CWCom can be configured to receive input from a straight key or paddles using either the joystick port or serial port, or you can use the down arrow of your keyboard as the “key.” You can also type directly to the program, and it will translate the characters you type to Morse code.

I chose to make a cable that allows me to connect either my straight key or my Bencher paddle to my laptop’s serial port. I did try using the down arrow key as a straight key, but that feature didn’t seem to work on my computer.

If you use paddles, you can configure the program to act as if the paddles are connected to an iambic keyer. This feature works very nicely. You perform all of the setup with dialogue boxes, and it’s very straightforward and quick to do.

Once you have your key or paddles connected and the program configured properly, you connect to one of the channels on the CWCom server. There are thousands of channels available, but only once in the past few days have I seen more than two channels occupied. Currently, nearly everyone meets on either channel 1000 or channel 100. To find out who’s on, you simply click one of the function keys, and the program queries the server and displays a table listing the people logged onto the server and the channels they’re on.

Who can you talk to on CWCom? Well, over the past couple of days I’ve had contacts with a half dozen CWCom users. Most of them, obviously, are hams, but there are a few users who do not have a license. Of the hams on CWCom, many are from the UK. I guess it’s the Commonwealth connection.

I hope to use it to help my code class students “get on the air,” so to speak. I figure that once they know the letters and numbers, we can get on one of the CWCom channels and go as slow as we need to. I also think that this would be a great medium for the FISTS Code Buddy program. Using CWCom, anyone who’s volunteered to be a Code Buddy, can be one no matter what kind of radio equipment they have.

If you’re at all interested in operating Morse code, give CWCom a try. We could certainly use more operators, and it’s a lot of fun.

Another bit of information from my colleague Martin Rowe…

“Here’s something useful, a free program (all 150 kB in size) that lets you print graph paper. You can select either or both axes as arithmetic or logrithmic. I tried it and it works.

My blog entry from a couple of days ago laid out the description of a Palm computer program I proposed to write. Well, I now have the very first version ready. Download it here. After you unzip, install both the NSBasic Runtime (NSBRuntime.prc) and the HamHandy program (HamHandy.prc). I know that’s a little kludgey, but in future versions, I’ll combine it all into one file.

Any and all feedback would be appreciated.

Yesterday, my brother-in-law and his family came over for a visit. They don’t visit that often as they have lived in Tokyo for the last three years, so they’ve never seen my ham equipment before. When they arrived, I happened to be in the shack, so before we all went upstairs, they got a quickie demo of ham radio.

The demo must have struck a chord because after dinner, my ten-year-old nephew Nicholas asked if he could go downstairs and look at the radios. I said sure and went down into the basement with him. Since it was nearly time for our club net on 2m, I fired up the 2m rig, and asked if anyone was on frequency a bit early. Mike, WA3THT, came right back to me.

After exchanging a few words with Mike, I gave the microphone to Nicholas. Nicholas is not shy when it comes to talking, so unlike most kids, he was not hesitant at all about talking on the radio. He peppered Mike with a bunch of questions about amateur radio before the net actually got under way. Mike was great, patiently answering all of Nicholas’s questions.

After the net started, I showed Nicholas some of the other stuff I had in the shack. We listened to some CW contacts as well as some SSB contacts. After listening to some CW, I demonstrated how my keyer works and let him play around a little with it.

After that, I showed him some of my QSL cards and discussed how call signs are assigned. I also showed him on my world map where some of the stations whose QSLs I had were located.

Overall, I think he was quite interested in the whole deal. He asked me how he could listen to amateurs on his shortwave radio at home, so I wrote down the frequencies for the 40, 20, and 15 meter bands on my QSL card and gave that to him. I also gave him and his father a few tips on how to get better shortwave reception once they get home.

Who knows? We may have another ham in the family before long.

There are already many good ham radio applications for the Palm. Probably the most comprehensive list is the VA3PKH Palm Ham Page. It looks like there are quite a few good logging programs, and even several good Morse code training programs. There’s certainly no need to reinvent those wheels.

Even so, I wanted to develop some kind of ham radio application for my Palm, so I began casting about for what I could do. It hit me that one of the things that the Palm is well suited for is supplying reference materials. Doctors, for example, use Palms to give them information about drugs before prescribing them.

So, that’s what my application–HamHandy–is going to do: supply reference information and perform simple calculations. Here’s the list of functions and information that I’ve targeted for version 0.1:

• Dipole Length Calculator
• Ohm’s Law Calculator
• Calculate resistance value from resistor markings
• Q Signals
• Phonetic Alphabet
• License Class Frequency Allocations
• DX Callsigns
• Local hams
• Coax cable characteristics

If you can think of other information that you’d like me to include, please let me know.