DX for Pennies

The WARC bands are really underrated.  This weekend, it's been wild on the other bands, where as is often the case, middle aged men are shouting 'contest' endlessly in the hope of getting themselves a certificate.  Each to their own.

For those of us not remotely interested in sitting down shouting for days on end, the WARC bands become a safe haven of relative peace and opportunity to make some good DX contacts.

VP8LIZ - radio wave's view of the Lady Elizabeth lying aground in the Falklands.

Special event callsign VP8LIZ from the Falkland Islands found themselves on 12m, no doubt as a result of the contests elsewhere, but to very good effect because the pile up they were running was huge!  Propagation was pretty rubbish on the Saturday, but the following day, it picked up a little.  VP8LP, Bob, was running the show and although I've contacted him many times before, a QSO with one of our outlying (and disputed by some) islands is always a special thing.

I'm not really kitted-out for 12m, though my trusty 20m delta will match up nicely, with some respectable gain on that band.  But the pattern is a little distorted and becomes more like a figure of eight, which put Bob out of my line of fire.

Still, verticals do very well from this open, elevated and high-metal ground QTH of mine, so I pulled out some Flexweave, an antenna wire that is much too heavy and prone to entanglement to my mind, and put it to use as a 12m vertical dipole stuck to a well-used 9m total length fishing pole.  Feed was 300 Ohm twin to my ATU, with a homemade dipole centre (i.e. some wood and cable ties.)  Twin is really great because the losses, even at very high SWR values, is very low indeed, way way below even the best coax can manage and typically just a fraction of a decibel.  That's ideal for when you're in a hurry to make an antenna and don't want to spend an hour trimming.

There you go.  Low angle 12m DX antenna for peanuts made in minutes. 

So, the pile up to VP8LIZ was running wild.  Shouting, shouting and responding to callsigns not even remotely like the one being asked for continued.  Bob, being a stoical, windswept islander, kept his cool as though none of it was happening, the very model of how to operate professionally.  One trick most didn't understand was that Bob is strict on who he responds to.  One call, and he might get back to you.  Make three calls one after the other, you can forget it!  And so it should be.

I got through to the Falklands - that's 7890 miles - during appalling propagation conditions (all bands red 'poor' on QRZ!) in about three or four calls using nothing more than two pieces of approximately-cut wire running 100W SSB.  For those who want to make one, try two pieces 3m long each to start with, then snip down if you want.  Using a 10m fishing pole with the top section removed, you get a dipole for 12m with a base height of about 3.5m, allowing for a bit of upping of the pole in fixing it to a fence post or similar.)

So there you go.  Puts the lie to all those wild claims about "true aircraft alloys", "no radials needed" and "covers all bands" that seek to justify several hundred dollars for what is rarely anything much more complicated, at least in principle.   If you like going portable to the beach, vertical dipoles are the informed DXpeditioners antenna of choice, though for 20m and thereabouts, you will have to load one unless you have a stupidly tall pole and not a breath of wind.  You can find a good version of that in an earlier post here.

Go on.  Get yourself some wire and make an antenna for pennies (or cents!)

80m - And The Mystery of WSPRing There

You know how it goes.  You look out the window and wonder about life, the universe - and antennas!

I've never really tried anything below 40m, and I rarely go even there.  My life on 40m got a lot nicer when I installed a half delta loop, fed against what is admittedly excellent ground (being on top of a mineral deposit).  It's been working quite nicely on PSK and WSPR, and I can even hear VK clearly now that the vertical, low angle loop gives a quiet band.

I vacantly pressed the ATU button on my TS480, and surprisingly, it found a very good match on 80m in no time at all.  I decided to have a go at WSPR, see what would happen.

I was rather amazed to find my 5W was getting out to really very respectable distances - certainly on a par with the very few others operating this far down the bands.  My very first 80m contact was F1JRD/3, putting him at about 725 miles from me. 

But why so few on 80m?  Tonight, there's only a single station in the US on WSPR.  Maybe they are like me, thinking the waves are so darned big that it's just out the question to get a sensible antenna up.  Well, my half loop is pretty small, and is only 6m tall at one end.  An inverted L is pretty simple, too.  So there's really nothing other than preconception standing between most people and experimenting on 80m.

So there we are.  I learned that a half loop for 40m can operate pretty well on 80m, too - at least for WSPR.  We'll see what other modes bring in...

G3YKB: Saying What Needs to be Said

A big 'well said' to Mr. Brian Hodgson, G3YKB (unless the RSGB got the author wrong - they often make such mistakes), for highlighting the utterly silly way in which Morse code is shoved in front of all new amateurs for their Foundation Licence, even though the licence itself now has no such requirement, as used to be the case.

Is a Morse assessment justifiable for a licence that doesn't even require the skill?

The perpetuation of Morse is understandable.  But it must also be reasonable, proportionate and justified.  If we look at any of these terms, the arguments of the pro-Morse lobby instantly start to look very flaky indeed.

If a licence does not require you to know Morse (and I am living, operating proof that this is so), then there is no reason, proportion and therefore justification in shoving Morse in front of anyone trying to show their first nervous (and much sought-after) interest in our fine hobby.

Brian Hodgson is spot-on with his assessment that Morse is putting new members off the hobby.  It always did.  I decided I would be a class B licensee years ago, and just play with VHF and above.  But when I passed, I found all I wanted to do was do DX, which VHF isn't that suited to.  It meant I simply never transmitted until years later, when B licensees were finally permitted to join the 'upper class' on the lower bands without Morse.

Whilst digimodes have not rendered Morse useless, they have highlighted substantial progress in weak signal transmissions that at least makes Morse look much, much less defensible than it used to be.  You can no longer defend Morse on the basis that it is 11dB better than SSB, because digimodes can take you down way beyond that.  I daily make contact by PSK and JT65 with operators in their 80s and 90s, so it's not simply a generational thing.

I still think all amateurs - myself included - should make the effort and learn Morse, even if only at a slow speed.  But by far the more important view is that Morse needs to be removed from the confused imagination of those who think they might be interested in radio, but are too afraid to ask, and so never become involved at all.  That really is a tragedy.

RSGB: Where To Stick Your £88,000 Surplus

The April 2012 edition of RadCom, the RSGB's monthly magazine, carries breathless announcements of a surplus - yes, you read it right - of £88,000 this year.

I will be the first to say 'well done' to the Interim Board, who, though a bit slow on data protection issues last year, at least got a good grip on the crisis that had beset the society in earlier years.

What, then, should we do with £88,000?  The RSGB itself sees investing in member services important.  I don't agree.  You see, if you invest in member services when your membership is on the slide, then all you are doing is building a palace for a dying king. 

OK, I'm sure we could do with better services for our sub, but in all practical senses, most members just expect the magazine every month, and very little else.

I also suspect that, if you caught most members on a pensive moment whilst they had a quiet cup of coffee, they would agree with the notion of foregoing their own member benefits in aid of getting more youngsters into radio; the last thing any of us wants to see is amateur radio coming to an end.

So, RSGB, maybe give the present lot of members not much more than they expect for the time being, and spend the £88,000 on the future of amateur radio.  With commercial sponsors, who also have no interest in seeing their customer base dwindle, we could probably add a fair few thousand to that figure and look at a radios-in-schools programme; a simple top of head calculation shows you could immediately buy about 190 basic HF sets for schools, PSUs and antennas not accounted for, and hope that at least a few out of a couple of hundred pupils might eventually go on to become operators and members.

Now that would be a really good use of money!  If anything remotely like it actually happens, I shall do something spectacular for charity.

 

The Fall and Fall of Amateur Radio

Ah yes!  That old nut!  The contention that amateur radio is on the way out.

A more recent take on this undeniable phenomenon is the analysis of Google search trends.  This is not remotely as easy as it appears, not least because data is only available from 2004 onwards, and we have to know which part of the world is doing the searching - something I couldn't manage when I looked.

An analysis of the search term "amateur radio", or "radio amateur", or "ham radio" yields pretty much the same result: a decline of 88% or so since 2004.  It's much the same for things like "HF transceiver" (any indication people are buying radios?) and even the term "radio" itself.  Not even the onset of a new solar cycle, with its enhance propagation conditions seems to have made any difference to the decline.

All this seems worrying, condemning radio to the history books as soon as the current lot of coffin-dodgers finally kick the bucket in a few years' time.  If you happen to be non-white or non-male, then things have always been bleak in the hobby, and it doesn't seem to be getting better very quickly.  This is just as worrying.


Curiously, the search term "CB radio", whilst showing a clear decline, is nowhere near as bad as amateur radio, falling by only about 35% since 2004. Interestingly, CB also seems to be undergoing a very slow but definite revival (there is a less clear hint of this in amateur radio, also.)

So, it would appear that, if we want to attract more people to amateur radio, the likes of the RSGB should examine ways of appealing to CBers and, God help us, even promote CB itself.  But, although many of the current cohort of operators began life as CBers, there are still plenty of upstairs-downstairs attitudes towards the 'lower ranks'. It was always generally thus.

Whilst the RSGB do nod at trying to attract people with an interest in radio (well, they would have to, wouldn't they?) they don't seem to have realised the CB fraternity should get quite a lot of attention.

It seems to me that cheap, accessible radios like CB could well be analogues to hugely-successful ideas like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino gadgets that have taken the world by storm.  They are precisely opposite to the gadgets the IT, computing and amateur radio community are daily bombarded with as justification for continued high prices and feeding the 'look what I've got' fetishism.  Yet, they are rightly seen as essential and accessible ways to promote kids (and adults') interest in these subjects.

I suppose satellite dongles are in roughly this direction, though radio is so diverse I'm not sure they will be as much of a hit as a computer-in-a-matchbox.  And 'going simple, going cheap' really does go against the grain of most hams, who only ever seem to dream of how else they can spend their money.  For me, a £250, 10-year old Kenwood rig (still going years later) and two pieces of badly-sited wire were enough to get me hooked and work the planet.  I didn't need DSP, band scanning, a 20m tower or even an ATU. 

The cheapest, easiest way to be introduced to radio.  CB gave many amateurs their first feel of an antenna, coax and SWR meter - all directly relevant to their later radio careers.

When I decided to bite the bullet and study for my ticket back in the 1990s, the Morse/no Morse argument raged like a wild animal. Old-timers hell-bent on ensuring old ways prevailed, and others, like me, who really couldn't understand why the amateur community would rather see the hobby die than swallow their senseless opposition to allow people without Morse onto the lower HF bands.  And they, like me, were wholly blind to the digital and internet revolution that would in just a few years' time, profoundly change the nature of amateur radio, despite many of them being technology trailblazers in their time.

The point they were missing was that, if non-Morsers were allowed to operate at lower HF bands, they would almost certainly take an interest in Morse and perhaps use it.  Eventually, some sense prevailed and B licence holders were granted full privileges on all bands. It meant I became a real operator, whereas otherwise, limited to VHF only, I may well not have bothered at all. Morse wasn't something I wanted to do, but others insisted I had to.

In the end, I never really found any strong desire to learn Morse, but I do slowly keep trying, just as a nod to history.  With modes like JT65 and others giving CW-busting performance, I can't see that hand-sent code is any different from machine-sent code in any real terms, other than CW can no longer be defended on the basis of being '11dB better than SSB' when CW is that many times worse than the weak signal modes.

The NRC: amateur radio's saviour?  I doubt it.

The RSGB, undergoing profound convulsions of its own as a bogged-down organisation, recently came to the blindingly obvious conclusion that in ten years, its membership had aged 10 years. In other words, the number of youngsters joining the RSGB was, well, not far off zero.  Unlike the ARRL, though, it doesn't seem to be doing anything effective about it, such as having a well-publicised, high-profile Kids' Day.

The RSGB also makes the following assertion: "Without the RSGB, amateur radio will diminish in the UK."  The sad fact for them, of course, is that with the RSGB, amateur radio has massively diminished in the UK.  Interest in radio has little to do with the RSGB, though it certainly ought to have played a much greater part in slowing the decline, something I think it would agree it failed entirely to do until very recent times. You could equally say that, 'with something very different to the RSGB in place to promote radio, the hobby might be in much better shape.'

The 'New Order' for the RSGB centres a lot on the Bletchley Park set-up they paid dearly - at least £200,000 - for (and against much membership opposition and a ludicrously expensive affair over an antenna tower that failed to get planning permission.) This is undoubtedly a mistaken approach if its aim is to get sufficient numbers interested in radio such that national membership and interest is sustained. I can almost guarantee I will never visit BP, nor will my children. I suspect this will be the case for the vast majority of us. So why see it as the cure-all?  The answer is that the RSGB feels the need to vindicate itself for wasting its time and money on the BP escapade, something I suspect it will never actually achieve.  

Update: The RSGB Annual Report is just out, revealing that, expressed as an average visitors-per-day figure, only about 33 people a day drifted through their lovely National Radio Centre in the last 5 months of 2012.  How the hell is that going to promote and build up amateur radio, eh?

GB4FUN.  Now being disposed of by the RSGB.

 
GB4FUN, the mobile radio educational unit, is being disposed of. No doubt it could never cover enough ground to make any real difference. I did last year offer to do the leg work in getting some funding for GB4FUN visits to Wales, but I had no reply and it seems the decision to get rid had already been made during 2012.  But getting into schools is fundamental, and although part of the RSGB's plans, I'm not sure it will come off in practice.

The RSGB urgently - and I mean urgently - needs to get an attractive lesson pack ready for mass-mailing to schools about radio. But it will never work on its own. Kids will not become operators on the strength of a glossy pack alone. There needs to be an initiative to get stations set up within schools - the ARRL funds and promotes such things in the US. It's hard work, and it needs solid financial support. 

Amateur radio - and the societies that try to represent it - are in such dire age profile straits that almost all available funds should and must now go into promoting a revival. Without it, there will be no hobby to represent.  When licensee numbers falls below a certain level, it will only be a matter of time before the bands will be farmed off for more lucrative, commercial purposes.

The only trouble is, I'm not sure that it is a bunch of retired white men, one of whom wears a silly chain around his neck, that are best-placed to figure out how to do it.

Here, for example, is the latest cryptic minutes of the Board's deliberations on matters radio.  It doesn't make for inspirational reading - at all.

 And before you ask: 'what have YOU done to promote the hobby?', the only reasonable answer for mere mortals like me is: 'joined the RSGB and expect them to work on my behalf, just like they have claimed to do for years.'  It's time they worked a lot harder and smarter, though.

Shooting Low

Ever since I decided to try a vertically polarised delta loop, my simple little station has been kept very busy sending signals across the world whenever conditions are anything above desperate.

Not exactly complicated.  But looks can be deceptive.

But why does my delta do so well?  Is it just my wishful thinking, forcing the thing to be good when in fact it isn't?  I don't think it is, and here's a little experiment to demonstrate why:

I set up a domestic laser level on a tripod and set it to be perfectly level, trained at the same height as the base wire of my 20m delta loop.  At night, the beam can be seen hundreds of metres away, so you can aim it at something that reflects a decent amount of light as a projected, extended level line.  I have a big garden, so I used a timber upright in a far corner (an unfinished project!) as the target for the beam.

I've already written about the simple RF meter I built, and I've now updated this with an adjustable current meter that gives some numbers to work with.

This is my station ground.  Metals are everywhere.

I set the rig to send WSPR signals at 5W, and held the RF meter aloft next to the target timber upright until it read a decent full swing of the meter - essentially reading the level of peak gain (as can be found by taking the meter much higher up into the pattern.)  I carefully noted, using another laser to mark the spot on the timber, where the top of the RF meter's antenna was when it reached full swing.

I then went back up the ridge and tilted the laser until it was trained on the point on the timber marked earlier, and used a simple spirit level and protractor arrangement to get a reasonable indication of the angle.  It was immediately obvious this was a negative, not a positive angle!

I've repeated this experiment on several nights now.  The result is strong radiation at 5 to 7 degrees below the horizontal.  That really must go a very long way, if not the whole hog, to explaining how such a simple wire antenna has worked the world on 100W SSB (and later, PSK), being of particular importance to long path DX working.

You can read an excellent article on the importance of low angle radiation from a DXpedition perspective on K2KW's site here.

So, from this QTH, which is a ridge situation with metal-laden ground (an old copper mine, no less!), the pattern is much less like this field typically claimed (and modelled) for delta loops, depicted in dark blue, and something more like the pale blue pattern (the inferred increase in gain is probably less, but concentrate on that difference in the lower part of the pattern.)  This tells me first of all what I already know - a copper mine is as good a ground as it's possible to get on land.  It also tells me that, because I live on a ridge, radiation occurs below the horizontal.

So, quite an interesting outcome, all told.  It's entirely consistent with my subjective experience of not really getting any more out of in-the-surf operating at the seaside with an identical delta loop.  It's also consistent with my being almost always the last man keeping TX contact with the eastern seaboard of the US on WSPR, other stations having been reduced to just hearing a handful maybe an hour or more earlier.  And, it's consistent with my experience of simple 2-element beams, which perform far more poorly than my delta, at least on long-haul DX.

Even at 1 wavelength, yagis don't put out much at low angles, probably explaining why the delta loop outperforms them at this QTH.

Antenna Shoot-Out: Mate Loop vs. I-AM

Huh? 

What the heck is a Mate Loop?

Simple: a figure of eight magnetic loop (link is to a similar version and not the one tested in this analysis) that yields a less critical tuning bandwidth than a single loop.

What's an I-AM?  

Simpler: It's one of these end loaded vertical dipoles that yields a dirt-cheap, effective antenna.

Results:

The end-loaded vertical dipole beat the loop by a relatively small but consistent margin, except for the long path VK contact, which was heavily against the loop.

Sample data, 20m band at about 09-10UT 2013 January 29:

To SV8QG: Loop = -24dB; dipole = -19dB
To EK6RSC: Loop = -11dB; dipole = -9dB
To 4X1RF: Loop = -20db; dipole = -12dB
To VK6PG: Loop = -24dB; dipole = -6dB

So, if you want performance, it seems the vertical dipole, which costs essentially nothing to throw together, is a winner in this particular quick test.  The advantage of the loop, of course, is that it can stay up in just about any wind, whereas my vertical dipole, even at 6m, does sometimes need to be brought down.