Hi everyone. 20 and 15meters were really jumping this weekend. The California QSO party was going this weekend and I made 10 ssb CA contacts on 20meters Saturday. I was very surprised to hear so much activity on 15 meters. So I made another 10 ssb CA contacts on Sunday.
Also on Saturday and Sunday I made a few contacts using psk31, psk63. Man that was a blast.
Come down to the station and join us. I can be contacted at my call (K8ELR) at arrl dot net.
73!!!!!
Jim K8ELR
WA2HOM won the Feld-Hell monthly Sprint for July 2010. This is the first and only thing I ever won in Amatuer Radio. I was very surprised when I ( I was operating WA2HOM) received word that I won. 73! Jim K8ELR
We have had great success running digital modes with the SignaLink hooked up to the Ten Tech Omni VII.
We have made Feld Hell, SSTV, RTTY, PSK and Olivia contacts. We use HRD/DM780 and it works well. Although we use DM780 and I have no complaints I would like to try other software. ROS sounds cool too but is not legal in the USA due to it using spread spectrum.
Unfortunately the tower and beam are not up yet. It was going to be installed in May and here it is July and we are still waiting. So we are still using our inverted V dipoles at about 30 feet.
If you are in the area or just want to visit email me Jim k8elr or Dan kb6nu and we would be glad to give you a demo and let you operate the station.
Later and 73!
Jim K8ELR
This Saturday, we operated the MI QSO Party—I operated on Saturday down at the Hands-On Museum. To avoid any confusion, we used the W8CWN callsign.
I got to the museum around 10 am, and the contest didn’t start until noon, so I fiddled around a bit, trying to figure out how the bands were. I made three contacts on 40m and a couple of contacts on 20m, so it looked like band conditions were going to cooperate.
When noon hit, I was off and running. Switching back and forth between 40m and 20m, I made a total of 90 contacts in the next two hours, including three DX contacts. Not stellar, but not bad, either.
Having my WinKeyer certainly helped. As I’ve mentioned, the Omni VII doesn’t have a built-in memory keyer, meaning that in previous contests, I had to bang out the CQs myself. The WinKeyer improved the process immensely.
On Sunday, Jim, K8ELR, opened the station up around 12:30. I joined him about 2:15.
Unfortunately, the band conditions weren’t so good on Sunday. We managed to eke out only one CW contact on Sunday.
Coming Up
Next Saturday, April 24, we’ll be conducting another One-Day Tech Class. There’s still room, so if you know someone that would like to attend, have them e-mail me at cwgeek@kb6nu.com.
Yesterday, it was just me down at the museum. I made a couple of great contacts, though.
The first was with Fred, KI4XH. Fred was operating his Collins S-Line gear, and keying it with a bug. About halfway through the QSO, he switched over to a VibroKeyer single-lever paddle, keying a Hallicrafters HA-1 keyer.
The HA-1, or T.O. Keyer, was a commercialization of the vaccum-tube keyer designed by W9TO. in the 1950s. It occurred to me that maybe building one of these things is something that I could do with al the tubes that I have. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the schematic on the Net.
There is an an article in the May 1959 issue of QST by W9TO, but this is for the first transistor keyer. If any of you have a schematic and can scan it for me, or can point me to where I can find it, I would appreciate it.
Titanic Duo
After making a couple of CW contacts, I thought I’d try making a phone contact. Tuning to 7220 kHz, I found our favorite frequency occupied by W0S, a special event station commemorating the sinking of the Titanic. W0S was operating from the Titanic Museum in Branson, MO. According to their website, “This event will commemorate the heroic efforts of Harold McBride and John ‘Jack’ Phillips as they sat at the Marconi radio in the Titanic sending the first ever SOS.” They’ll be on the air until 2200 UTC Sunday, April 11.
My last QSO was with W1T, a station that was also commemorating the sinking of the Titanic. I made the contact on 14.050 MHz. W1T was operating from somewhere in Maine. At first, I thought that perhaps this was a CW operation from W0S, but it was a completely separate operation. I was unable to find any information on the Net about this station.
What I did find, however, was a third special event station commemorating the Titanic. This is an operation of the Titanic Historical Society, which is located in the Springfield, MA area. If I’d known about this, I bet that I could have worked them. Maybe next year.
Yesterday, was another busy day at WA2HOM. Hams who showed up included:
Susan and Richard were two of the students in our latest One-Day Tech Class. They’re planning to take a six-month cruise down to the Caribbean soon, and are planning to use ham radio to keep in touch with folks back home.
After answering a bunch of questions about ham radio in general, and trying to figure out how they could use the marine radio that they currently have on their boat on the ham bands, I got Susan to sit down and make a couple of contacts. I wrote out a simple script for her to read to call CQ, and on the second try, she got a reply! So, now, we have another new ham with her first contact under her belt.
We also had quite a bit of visitor activity. We had a group of kids come in, and four different adults signed up to be on our mailing list for the next one-day class.
We were so busy that I wasn’t able to actually get to the “hands-on” activity that I’d planned. Make: Magazine recently posted a new video by Diana Eng, KC2UHB, that shows a very simple way to visualize radio waves. Rather than describe this more fully, you can just watch the video:
Cool, isn’t it? Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this next week.
It was busy down at the Hands-On Museum yesterday. I goto there a little after 10am, and Eugene, KD8HSU was waiting for me. Eugene, who is an on-again, off-again resident of Ann Arbor hadn’t seen the new rig, so I gave him a quick demo. Fortunately, 20m was open, and we were able to work YT40E (Serbia) on CW right off the bat.
Shortly after, Jim, K8ELR, and Ovide, K8EV, showed up. Then, Quentin, KD8IPF, and his kids arrived. A little later, Ralph, AA8RK, came for a visit, and Mike, one of the students from last week’s class arrived.
K8ELR, who is now our “digital modes specialist,” got all set up to do Hellschreiber. He called CQ a couple of times, and got a few responses, but apparently the band was a little up and down, and was never actually able to complete a contact.
At about 3 pm, I sat down to demonstrate CW for Mike. After QSYing to 40m and calling CQ a couple of times, we connected with Roger, W1OJ. After a nice QSO with Roger, we got a call from Lynn, NG9D. I think I appropriately impressed Mike with my CW skills.
We also were visited by a couple of museum visitors who turned out to be hams. So, overall it was a great day down at the museum.
New Year’s Day weekend was pretty busy down at the museum:
On Saturday, January 9, Les, W8LDS, and I met for breakfast before heading over to the museum. There, we met Jim, K8ELR. After turning on the rig, we heard Tom, K5IRH, Shreveport, LA calling CQ on 40m CW and quickly established our first contact. When we mentioned that we were at a local science museum, he quickly told us about Sci-Port, a science museum there in Shreveport. I told him that every science museum should have a ham radio station and have e-mailed him information on our operations.
Emboldened by our success with SSTV the previous week, Jim and I decided to give RTTY a whack. Fortunately, there was an RTTY contest last weekend–the Mongolian RTTY DX Contest, no less! Again, band conditions weren’t the best on 20m, but we managed one contact apiece. Mine was with P4OYL in Aruba, Jim’s with EA5FL in Spain.
After that, we decided to pad our QSO statistics a bit, so made a bunch of CW contacts in the North American QSO Party. That was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, so we quit pretty quickly and wrapped up ops at about 1:30 pm.
On Saturday, December 27, 2008, we contacted the Space Station from the Hands-On Museum. This is not news, but we didn’t have this website up and running then. To view the six-minute video, click on the image at right.
What’s not shown in this video are the number of calls made before the contact was made. We must have called a dozen times, and it didn’t look it was going to happen. Then, all of a sudden, the ISS came booming in!
Today, Jim, K8ELR; Ovide, K8EV, and I were at the museum.
The first thing I did today was to upgrade the firmware in the TenTec Omni VII. I thought this was going to be a lot more difficult than it turned out to be. All I had to do was download the package and run it. Worked like a charm.
I don’t recall what version we were running, but I can say that the new version does make the rig work differently. What’s most noticeable is that the filtering seems sharper. The TenTec website has a complete list of all the modifications they’ve made to the firmware, and it’s quite extensive. It makes me wonder how much better my IC-746PRO would be if its firmware was upgradeable.
Ovide then arrived and we were able to put a couple of kids on the air. Jeff, W2FFQ, was gracious enough to allow us to put junior operator Eve on the air. Eve, as it turns out, was in junior kindergarten, and Jeff has a daughter who is also in kindergarten. He got her to come into the shack and the two kids talked to one another. That was cool.
Finally, we tried installing EasyPAL on our computer so that we could try some SSTV. I say “tried” because the anti-virus software said that it detected something and wouldn’t let the install proceed. Consulting the EasyPAL website, it said that this sometimes happens and to disable the anti-virus software during the install. We did that, and it looked like the software was installed, but the program never got copied to the disk. We tried this a couple of times with the same result. By that time, we both were ready to close up shop, so we just gave up on that for now.