Burnout?

After several years of quite a lot of HF operating, I'm beginning to show signs of burnout!

Not that I'm going off radio altogether, but the logbook is getting sparser in entries than it used to.

Part of the burnout sensation is down to having gained a load of basic awards under the various programmes.  I'm not interested in chasing operators on each and every band, or building up ever-more niche awards that seem to keep award programmes, rather than participants, happiest.

I'm happy to have proven I could do what I wanted to do - make good QSOs across the planet with a £275 second-hand rig, less than 100W and nothing more complex, at least initially, than a delta loop or GP.  Things have moved on a bit since the TS50, but this remains firmly a cheap, cheerful and efficient station.

This might alleviate the burnout sensation!

Ragchewing with the Old Colonies is of course always very enjoyable, as it is with anyone, anywhere who happens to have time and a lighthearted take on life.  Recently, I've spoken to a very senior US lawyer, a nuclear submariner, several Vietnam veterans, and a priest.  These people make for fascinating QSOs, even if some of them are tired of the curiosity!

I've never developed the VHF side of the hobby beyond a Chinese 2W or 5W handie, although my homebrew 5-ele quad has worked absolute wonders.  I think it's time to get a multimode transceiver and a more weather-resistant antenna.  The multimode VHF tcvr is not an easy beast to find.  Older ones usually have limited power and no CTCSS tones on FM.  It seems I'm doomed to spend money on something complex, new and expensive!

Living on an elevated site, I'd love to get into microwaves, and even nanowaves (I can see higher parts of NI and most of the IoM from here.) But, not being very technically adept, and with few apparently interested in showing newcomers the ropes, it seems I may take a very, very long time to achieve this.

Then there's EME with relatively simple antennas, and more work on meteor scatter at 6m.  I've even been wondering about 4m and 70cm.

Hey!  There's plenty to do!  All I need now is time and money!

Solar Eclipse 20th March 2015

On the morning of 20th March, about 90% and more of the Sun will appear to be swallowed-up by the Moon as a partial eclipse covers the north Atlantic.  Totality is out to sea, passing through the Faroes, but all of the UK will see a very good partial eclipse - weather permitting!

The eclipse will be about this good from northern Britain.

The RSGB's G0KYA has a great experiment for the general public to participate in, which involves listening to a chosen medium wave broadcast station a few hundred km away, to see if the temporary darkness brought on by the eclipse leads to stronger signals due to much reduced ionising sunlight.

G0YKA's take on it is to use a simple transistor radio and just report the times when the signal is stronger and weaker.  Hams can use their rigs, which generally cover the MW bands on RX, and software can be used to record the proceedings for later analysis.

One avenue that isn't mentioned, and that might encourage involvement, is the use of software-defined radios available freely on the internet.  Choose one not too far away, and then listen to, say RUV 1 in Iceland (207kHz), which has a nice line across the shadow to the UK.

Degrees of darkness for March 20th, 2015.

 
One big advantage of the web SDR applet is that you can record .WAV files of the received signals directly onto your PC, so the whole listening experiment during the eclipse needs nothing more than a PC.

Having checked out RUV 1 during the day, it's only weakly detectable, but enough to confirm it's the station in question.  At night, I've confirmed it's obviously much stronger.

The web SDR sites, not all of which cover MW, are spread over the globe.  The best MW coverage receiver in the UK is sadly blighted by quite a lot of local noise, and hits RUV 1 quite badly.

So, instead, I'm using a very fine Dutch web SDR which has no nosie at all, found here:  http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ 

At least for this UK astronomical event, bad weather won't prevent some form of enjoyment of it going ahead!

RadCom, ha ha ha!

Well, I've heard it all now!

This month's RadCom is hot off the doorstep, wherein we have a lovely article about constructing a 'mini-quad' for, erm, 40m.

Now, 'mini quad' is clearly a relative term, because this thing still has sides of over 7.6m each!  That requires a pretty decent tower to get the bottom of the quad at a reasonable electrical height over ground.  Hardly something you could stick on a push-up aluminium pole in more than zero wind conditions.

IK1MNJ shows what a full sized 40m 2-ele quad looks like.  The 'mini' version is not vastly smaller.

So, I really had to laugh when I read the author's view that this reduced, 'mini' size was "very useful for typical suburban situations"!

Ha ha!  What?

The bloody thing is so big that the photographer struggled to fit it in the frame, even with a wide-angle lens!

If you think it's not actually that bad in the IK1MNJ photo, cast your eye away from comparison with the house to comparison with the bloke standing on the bottom right, in front of the fruit netting. 

Hands up if you have a plot big enough - and neighbours tolerant enough - to put up a quad of over 7.6m per side.  Come to think of it, hands up if you think that your resulting 'mini 'quad' would survive the next 70mph gales.

Sure, there must be a few folks who could stick something like this up.  But certainly not enough to make it of any real interest to the wider readership of RadCom.

Is it really very surprising that newcomers look at this kind of thing and decide amateur radio's not for them?

What's in a Signal Report?

I've never been one to hang on signal reports, being constantly rather bemused by the anachronistic obsession with issuing them.

So far as I'm concerned, signal reports are unnecessary if the bloke on the other end doesn't tell me he's having difficulty hearing what I'm saying.


It's also true that, for reasons of habit and 'just being nice', signal reports are typically unreliable, and often exaggerated.  The classic case of someone who asks for you to repeat the suffix about eight times, only to then give you a '59' is well-known and rather funny.

Similarly with the digitial modes, where PSK and RTTY, largely as a result of stored macro 'overs', simply spew out the '599' that someone entered into the macro years ago, when your name is coming out on the other guy's screen as '7&di;mir' and the real report is more like '359'

Now, a lot of store and column inches is given over to signal reports, despite the clear problems highlighted above.  Until things like WSPR arrived a few years ago, a signal report was one of the principal ways of assessing antenna performance.  Reading some of that stuff today seems, well, very dated, not least because trying to derive statistically-valid conclusions from signal reports must have been more like guessing than science.

Yes, I can hear you...

A number of simple wire and vertical users across the pond have been my unwitting test subjects over the past year or so.  Pointing a 3-ele monobander their way, and with lots of ground gain to assist me, I've been handing out nice 57s, 58s and 59s.  All genuine reports, and no pre-amp switched in.

Usually, those same operators will give me, the one with the Yagi, a significantly worse report back - maybe 55 when they are 57 with me.

Now, simplistically speaking, you'd think they're just being spiteful and want to give me a report that makes them feel better.  For sure, that does sometimes happen.  But it isn't what's generally going on.

No, the fact that the wire user is getting a good signal report - or any report - is down to the ability of my antenna (and the ground gain) to concentrate the RF from that omnidirectional or zero-gain antenna.  Without my 14dBi (check out my QRZ.com page as to how that is achieved), that wire user may well remain undetectable.

Similarly, when I transmit, my beam and reflections are concentrating the puny 60W into something more akin to a kW, but the guy on the other end has no gain, or very little, so he can't concentrate what I am sending to him, like another Yagi user could.  Consequently, I get a lower signal report.

So, those people who worry their signal reports are "consistently 2 'S' points below those given out", you shouldn't necessarily feel bad, as much angst on the internet chat forums tends to suggest they do.  As more sensible people will comment, maybe it's "your antenna that's doing most of the work."  Quite.