HAMming it Up

On Saturday I felt in need of a change of scene Ham radio wise. I had been working on VHF and above for quite a while and decided to go back to HF working. Looking at activity reports on the 'net it was obvious VHF conditions were poor but HF was alive with contacts. I retrieved my HF transmitter from its resting place in the utility room. I really must get my aerial cables identified as to which goes to what aerial. It took at least an hour to find the correct one. The transmitter is the bottom one in this photo.



There should have been lots of activity on the 10 metre band but I was receiving a fat zero so I changed to 30m - the magic band. Lots of signals received and plenty of contacts made using the digital mode FT8. I even managed to contact a country I had never worked before. I had received signals from an operator in China but initially couldn't make contact. About half an hour after that he called me and a two way contact was made. That made my day.

I use a web site (pskreporter) to see who is receiving my signals and my 70-75 Watts of RF seemed to be travelling well.



At one stage a Radio Amateur in Ghana reported receiving my signals but so far that is another country I have yet to make a two way contact with.

More Ham (of the amateur radio variety)

Towards the end of last month I invested in a new transmitter.



This one works on three different amateur radio bands and has more power that the ones I had been using. Last Sunday I spent the day re-erecting most of the yagi beam aerials I used to have on the mast.



The radio and the aerials allow me to work on the 2m, 73cm and 23cm bands. The latter is one of the microwave bands. The 55 element aerial for that is at the very top of the mast. Using 23cm depends very much on atmospheric conditions. They were nearly right for me to work a Danish station last night but alas conditions changed before we could make a full exchange of information.

Winding Down

Or should I say winding over?
Yesterday, having finally finished giving the lawn a short back and sides, I decided to change the 2m yagi beam for a more sensitive one. This is the mast once it has been tilted over:



The old beam can be seen still attached to the top of the mast and the replacement is leaning up against the mast. Time will tell whether it has been worth the effort.

 

As conditions for radio contact are changing rapidly it will take a few days, or maybe weeks, to judge whether it is an improvement.

Meteor Scatter

We are entering the annual Geminid meteor shower.
Instead of pretending to be a brass monkey standing outside watching for them I decided to try using them to communicate using amateur radio.

This is done with a special computer program which repeatedly sends bursts of very short signals for fifteen seconds and then listens for any signals for fifteen seconds. The transmissions are sent out in all directions. With luck a small portion will be scattered from the ionised trails left behind each meteor as it burns up in the atmosphere and picked up by another amateur radio station. Hence the mode of communication is known as meteor scatter.

I had installed the latest version of the software I use and gave it a try out.
Many amateurs link the software to automatically report any signals it decoded to a web site so I could see that my signals were being picked up in France, Germany, Denmark and Sweden as well as the UK.

Last night I made my first ever two way contact using meteor scatter with a station in Wales.
The program looks like this.



The top section shows a visual representation of any signals received.
On the left are the decoded signals.
On the right is what I send and what is sent to me.
M1BTR is my callsign. JO03 indicates approximately where I am in the country.
CQ means a general call for anyone to reply.
R, or sometimes RR, means message received.
73 is the code used for Best Wishes. Usually used as a Good Bye at the end of a contact.
Other numbers can refer to the strength of the received signal, time, and the frequency being used.

Many colours are used to make it easier to see what is what.
Red for messages transmitted to me.
Yellow for messages I transmit.
Green for any station I have made a successful two way contact with.
White for a message that is being sent between two other amateur radio operators.
Pink for a general call from a station I have not contacted yet.
A dark mauve would be used for a country I have not contacted at all.

Going Round to America

One of the things I enjoy with my Amateur Radio activities is experimenting with simple aerials to see which works best for me. For the past week or so I have been building and experimenting with what is called a magnetic loop aerial. Something which has been on my 'round tuit' list for several years:



The small black 'loop' connects to the transmitter / receiver. That picks up the signals received by the larger copper loop which is about 1 meter in diameter. Just above the copper loop is the tuning mechanism which has to be designed to handle high voltages. It might be low power being transmitted but in excess of 1000 volts can be generated at the top section. These aerials seem to need little power to send signals a fair old distance. I use just 10W which is one tenth of the full power of my transmitter and one fortieth of the power I am licenced to use. Best contact to date has been 4177 miles to a station in the US using a digital mode called FT8 on the 17m band.

With most aerials the higher up they are the better they work but the magnetic loop seems to work miracles when close to the ground.

My Halo

Spent some time setting things up for my amateur radio activities.
First job was to install a new transceiver. An Icom IC-7410 (new to me that is, s/h actually though to look at it you wouldn't think it had ever been used and saved me £500 on a new one) It is taking some experimentation learning to drive it:



For most of the bands (frequencies) my aerial is a 14.5m length of wire:



which is made to match the transmitter with an auto tuner: (the black box on the wall)



At the side of the blog is a list of my latest contacts.
This is taken from the logbook I am keeping on QRZ . com which is one of the ham radio sites where I can look up details about any of the people I talk to:



M1BTR is my amateur radio call sign.

What about that halo? Well, I haven't been particularly good or godly.
It is the name given to aerials which are, usually, rectangular.
This is the one I put on the mast today for working one particular band (6m) as my tuner doesn't work on those frequencies;