RSGB Web Revamp

As part of its now long-running efforts to modernise and govern itself properly, the RSGB has now got a new web front page, beta style.

Fair play, they've got one bit right: limiting the choices on offer to just three; it's important not to overload people hitting the page for the first time yet getting them sufficiently interested to find out more.  I think they've hit the mark with this, so well done.

But things fall apart quickly from here on in.  I clicked on the bit where I might be slightly interested in becoming a radio amateur but have confused ideas about what it's all about.

I dunno.  A nice shot like this might attract me to amateur radio.  Gets me outdoors, type of thing...

What do I get?  Text.  Lots of it.  I'm afraid it's an instant turn off.  There are no images of exciting equipment, happy operators or anything else.  It's a big disappointment, frankly.

Erm, no.  Not that kind of image.

It needs more work, and plenty of it.  Urgently.  And the current lack of interest amongst the web page content is probably not down to poor web creators; it's much more likely them doing what they're told to, which is the wrong thing in my estimation.

How about some satellite or ISS images?  Might be attractive to some...

 
Come on lads.  There is plenty of technical and outdoors excitement in amateur radio.  Put some images on there, for God's sake!

SSTV - And a Trip Back to the 1970s

I started playing with SSTV the other day.  Far from being anything like TV, the whole mode seems to be more like analogue file transfer, mediated by digital computers.

Within minutes, I was receiving admirably good quality images from across the EU, with the odd one from south America.  There's something undeniably interesting about SSTV and its digital (and more error-free) counterpart.  But there's one thing I found really unappealing.

One of the more tasteful female images on SSTV.  Others are a bit more, well, revealing...

Images of naked women.  Lots of them!

SSTV indeed seems to be the amateur radio equivalent, for the most part, of a private top shelf channel.  Naked women, scantily-clad ones, fully dressed attractive ones, and ones draped over cars.  They're all here in abundance.

Lord knows what kick anyone gets out of sending such images to one another over radio, and maybe that's why there only seems to be a small, if you'll pardon the pun, hardcore of SSTV operators.  Some do reciprocate my own interests in non-female imagery, and send a sexy picture of a helicopter or aircraft.  But they're not common.

This kind of thing harks back well into the dark ages of 1970s Britain, where sexism was rampant.  It tells us of the ageing population of the radio community, reflects on some rather slow-to-change nations and their attitudes to women and, of course, entirely lacks any female input for lack of any female operators. 

Time and again people wring their hands and wonder why so few people are taking up an interest in the hobby.  Here's yet another glaringly-obvious reason, especially if you happened to be a younger operator, or a woman, or both - none of which seems to bother any of the senders of daily red-top newspaper images that ply their way across the airwaves.

The Future of Amateur Radio - Are Magazines and Societies Just Missing the Point?

It's been another windy period over here for the past few days.  When it's gusting 60, 70 or more miles per hour, it's not time to have complex, expensive antennas up in the air.

Instead, it's time to deploy simple, robust wires like my trusty G-Whip end-feds, a surprisingly effective antenna for the price, easy to deploy in seconds and yielding a near-perfect match across the 20m band.

G-Whip matched end-fed for 20m.  Up in seconds, low cost, global DX.  So why are we bombarded with super-expensive images of amateur radio?

But it's a constant source of irritation for me that, when amateur radio is in a crisis of so few taking up the hobby, far too much emphasis is going on expensive equipment that only the rich can afford.

This is a huge shame, because this evening, with only a 10m-long piece of wire, a matching circuit at the base and a rig, I'm using the latest free digital mode software to get signals into really rather remote parts of the world - all on 30W or much less.  If, sadly, like so many, you live in an urban setting and have intolerant neighbours, such an antenna is unlikely to need planning permission, and if someone really likes complaining, then it can go up and down on a fishing pole in seconds, or be attached to a chimney or such like.

So, if global DX can be pulled in with such simple equipment, shouldn't amateur radio societies, DX clubs and magazines be pushing this stuff instead?  Sellers who want to push £3000 rigs and equally expensive antennas on top of mile-high towers are only going to get away with that sort of marketing strategy for so long; give it about 10 years, and there will be few with that kind of money and the passion in the hobby left.

In other words, those selling advertising space - and those buying it - are simply rushing headlong into amateur radio oblivion in a few years' time.

It's fine to build up your station and work towards towers, yagis and so on - if you really do need them as opposed to never bothering to find out if something simpler might work as well or even better (keep low angle radiation in mind!) But I fear that for a very long time, the hobby has been dominated by the most accomplished, most complex and most expensive operators and those that furnish them with their materialistic wants.  That really is no good at all.

So it's time to ditch the glitzy, blingy, macho attitude and start coming down to earth in order to promote and save amateur radio for what it really is at the bone: self-education, experimentation and making your own stuff for little or no money.  The digital mode revolution has the capacity to catch the imagination of today's computer generation, so let's get that message out, instead of endlessly creating an image that hamming is only for the rich and retired.

ROS Mode

Having had very good, if rather slow-paced success with the JT65 digimode, I somehow found myself playing with ROS mode the other day.

I think it was because someone had spotted a ROSer on the 20m cluster, so I downloaded the free software, see what mess I could get myself into.

My kids love the look of ROS, with its many little clocks and musical notes!

As usual, it takes a little while to learn your way around the macros and the commands peculiar to the software.

In fact, once settled-in, I found the ROS software to be one of the most carefully thought-out pieces of code going.  It lets you resize the window within the software, so you can see everything that's going on.  It connects to the rig seamlessly and with few mouse clicks.  It brings up a link to the QRZ.com page of each callsign, and even a link to short and long path circuit reliability for the band in use.

ROS is not as immediate as PSK, for example.  But you can have a fairly rapid  real-time typed QSO at selectable speeds, and it's much more powerful in covering global distances with few or no decoding errors at QRP and slightly above QRP powers. Each halving of character sending speed effectively doubles your power, so tortoise and hare can apply if conditions aren't so hot.

After just two days of ROS working, I've added two new DX entitites to the log.  I also rather like ROS for the fact that it's so well thought-out, and has relatively few users on 20m, increasing the chances greatly of grabbing those rare DX calls.  ZL2AUB, who features in the above screengrab, has become a daily check-in, which is also very nice!

SteppIR Performance From Two Wires

If you spend any time on the bands these days, it won't be long before you hear the term "SteppIR" being used by enthusiastic aficionados of big, rather costly to buy antennas.

SteppIR antennas are indeed very nice antennas, and extremely popular in the more affluent parts of society.  They are also, of course, not the only 3-element yagis available, just, perhaps, the best.

A SteppIR 3-element yagi.

But can SteppIR-like performance be attained for a lot less than the current (March 2013) manufacturer's list price of $1826 (product number 00203)?  The answer is, surprisingly, an emphatic yes!

Now, I am not comparing like with like, obviously, so the comparison only holds for the 20m band for the moment.  SteppIR give their gain figure for the 3 element yagi as 7.4dBi at the 20m band.

But, what happens if I add a reflector element to my existing delta loop antenna?   The question is important because my delta consists of a sub-£100 system comprised of wire, a fishing pole and a 4:1 balun.  The second element costs less, because it's just a loop held up by another fishing pole with no need for any balun or cable to connect anything.  What's more, the base of the antenna is only at 2m above ground.

The modelled answer is a gain almost exactly the same as the 3-element SteppIR - I kid you not.  I ran WSPR tests to see how the as-yet imperfect set-up I have does really deliver.

Yours for very little money: a 2 -element delta, peak gain about 7.4dBi.

 
And it does!  The signal received stateside (direction of fire) increased by a mean of 5.5dB for that limited test, which you must remember is just adding another piece of wire that's a little longer than the driven element but not tuned yet, and a spacing that is only roughly worked out on normal formulae, and not optimised for peak gain yet.  A fair wind also led to some variation in performance due to a swaying fishing pole.

On limited SSB tests, a station in Tennessee was pushing a very respectable 54 using two elements, but was down to a miserly 3/1 on just one element.  Noise is dramatically down with two elements as well, indicating a respectable F/B ratio (probably about 10dB.)  I also had a nice session on 10m PSK into Latin America using the double delta.

So, whilst we are not quite at SteppIR-busting gain, we're pretty darned close without any optimisation at all.  For a few pounds/dollars, we've got a 20m beam that is easy to put up (and down!), doesn't need a tower and gives us about an extra 'S' point on the signal.  What you do need is a fairly reasonably-sized garden to accommodate the two elements for this band.  You will also need a means of moving things around if you want to change the direction of fire, in which case, the image above shows what must be by far the easiest way of doing it, though suspension from a decent tree is also possible if you have one tall enough.

Unfortunately for me on a wild hillside, I will now need to make a double delta, single support antenna that can also be easily retracted, redeployed and rotated - quite a tall order!

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...