Ham Radio – A contact sport

As I write this, it’s the middle of a fairly nasty winter. We have had near record snowfall and the temperature is currently 5°F (-15° C). What better time to reflect upon a warm/sunny Field Day 2009?

The Story County Amateur Radio Club (SCARC) and Iowa State University Cyclone Amateur Radio Club (CARC) joined forces once again on the ISU campus to stage a class 2F (2 transmitter, emergency operations center) effort.

Yeah, that’s me – late at night on 20m CW. Nice posture, eh?

Our 2009 score improved dramatically over 2008.

The station featured a tri-band beam mounted on a tower, a couple verticals, and a few wire antennas. We use (mostly) Icom IC-746s which are reliable, easy to learn and plentiful in our club.

The facility is great. Air-conditioning, bug-free, indoor plumbing – it’s got all we need.

In 2009, we tried a few new things. For example, about 20 Boy Scouts were on site working on their radio badge, WA0ROI gave a demonstration of building a J-Pole antenna, and we made an attempt to work a satellite. Great fun.

If you’d like to see our full presentation (including a lot of nice summer time, central Iowa photos of the club in action by yours truly), see the full report.

It’s been far too long since I’ve updated the blog.  I hadn’t intended to go so long without a post, but the chaos of life simply got in the way.

I’m now planning to get back into the routine of posting from time to time on this blog. I’m going to keep the focus on ham radio, antennas, DXing, contesting, towers, radios, ham radio software, SDR, … basically the facets of the hobby that I love. I don’t know if anyone has noticed my absence from the ham radio blog landscape, but I tend to post for my own benefit anyway.

Here’s a short snapshot of what I’ve been up to over the past year or so…

• Career changes
  • New company – Adapt Data Solutions
    Just about 12 months ago, my job as Director of Quality at a Fortune 500 company was “restructured”. I know many have gone through the same thing. I can tell you that such an event will shift your priorities… as a result, my time and energy went into starting a CRM/issue tracking software sales/consulting company (Adapt Data Solutions).   The company continues to grow even in this business environment.
  • New employer – PowerFilm Solar
    In September, I began to work as VP of Quality & Process Improvement for PowerFilm Solar, a thin film solar products company. PowerFilm Solar makes solar products for military and consumer markets including large tents with flexible solar panels integrated into the fabric to small devices to charge AA batteries, portable electronics (including USB charging) and much more. It’s an exciting company in the middle of the “Silicon Prairie” and I’m looking forward to watching it grow.
• New radio – Icom IC-7600
  After reading a lot of reviews, analysis and hand wringing, I purchased a new rig: the Icom IC-7600.  It was a tough decision – but long overdue. The old IC-746 was simply outmatched in contests and DX pileups. I was leaning towards the Flex-5000, and still may pursue a Flex rig in the future. However, I just kept envisioning a PC crash/reboot in the middle of a contest run. I’m glad to see guys like W9OY having fun with the Flex platform, and I still look forward to adding SDR to my shack someday.
• Software & N0HR website updates
  • Moving this website to a new hosting company is a bigger challenge than I’d anticipated. My site has a lot of gotchas – custom scripts/code (Propstats, DXpedition Map, etc.) that will not move without some effort.
  • The N0HR DXpedition Map had a “Y2010″ problem. When I wrote the software long ago, I hardcoded a date search that went through the list of dxpeditions chronologically, but it would only work through 12-31-2009 as it tried to parse the year by looking for “200X”. I’ve updated that code so it will be good for another 10 years or so
  • I revised the popular Propfire plugin for Firefox today to support FF v3.6.  When a new rev of FF arrives, I get a lot of email asking to update Propfire to support the new version. I’m glad it’s so widely used.
  • The HamLinks Ham Radio Toolbar still has a few thousand loyal fans according to the statistics. In fact, during the recent contest season I had more than one guy stop me to ask if I was the toolbar guy (or the Propfire guy).
• On-the-air activities
  • Field Day 2009 was a lot of fun. I’ll post some pics in the coming days to give those of us in the upper midwest a reminder of summer (”You mean there’s grass under all this snow?”)
  • Contesting: CQWW-CW, CQWW-SSB, ARRL SS-SSB, ARRL RTTY Roundup. Still getting acquainted with the new rig. Lots to learn.
  • DXing
  • Kid’s Day 2010 was a lot of fun with our 7 year old daughter.

That’s a snapshot. I hope to post more frequently and get into some of these topics soon.

. .

Nasa reported today that the sun isn’t broken after all. Whew!

I learned a few things about the inner workings of the sun by reading this article:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/17jun_jetstream.htm?list1061202

The sun has an internal “jet stream” that shifts latitude with the solar cycle. It’s been sluggish, but they’ve now seen it move back to where it should be headed (albeit a year or so late).

Look for sunspots and better HF radio propagation in the days ahead.

I’ve made some headway on the new website. Lots of work to be done yet, but it’s good to tackle some of the major challenges prior to the big cutover.

If you would like to get a sneak peek at the new N0HR.com website – just be warned that it’s only partially done. There’s still stuff that’s not functioning as expected – I know that and am working when I can to make the changes.

I think the Ham Radio Links system will be the next to move. That thing is massive and it would be a shame to lose it in the move. Next will be the Ham Radio Product Reviews section. Again, there’s a lot of effort that’s been spent to build the reviews system that I don’t want to lose.

Some things might have to wait until the new server is live. The propagation updates are from a thorny script that I created (which provide feeds to Propstats and the propagation numbers in the HamLinks Ham Radio Toolbar).

The Ham Radio Forums are low traffic and should be relatively easy to move (famous last words).

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new look & feel.

73

Pat N0HR

. .

I’m moving to a new web hosting provider. While this should be good for N0HR.com in the long run, there will be some pain associated with the move. As you may know, there are a lot of moving parts to this little corner of the internet:

• scripts I’ve created to provide propagation information to the ham radio toolbar, Propfire for firefox and PropStats
• the ham radio blog
• Ham Radio Reviews product review system
• Forums
• Ham Radio Links

There’s a lot of complexity behind some of these – and moving them will not be trivial. I fully expect some (all) of these to flat out crash in the days to come. Let me apologize in advance for the inconvenience. Believe me, it pains me to do it.

Once the move has been made, you should see improved reliability & performance of the site and a new look/feel that should be easier to navigate. I’m not sure how long it will take to complete the move (hopefully it will be  less than a week for the bulk of the changes).

I first setup N0HR.com in 2001 and have been using ICDSoft since the beginning. This month, I’m moving to HostGator – a few more features and a better hosting rate drove the move. The site was ready for a new look anyway. My web based CRM & online issue tracking business, Adapt Data Solutions, has been using HostGator and we’ve been pleased with the results to-date. 

Thanks for bearing with me through this move.

Dudley (WA5QPZ) from Flex sent me this follow-up note to my post about the FlexRadio CW contest demo. Just for clarification, I’ve included his comments here.

Pat,
Read your Blog and very good..  Wish good old MS had not made the changes, but I am sure they were trying to fix some other issue with the sound handling of Vista..    Have fun with the I/Q recordings,  and actually that is a recording of the IF,  so the SW thinks (outside of no radio control)  that it is decoding real time IF signals,  so within that 192K of bandwidth,  that is the radio,  but I am with you it is still pretty cool.. 
–

73,
Dudley

WA5QPZ
FlexRadio Systems

(512) 250-8595
Email: dudley@flex-radio.com
Web: www.flex-radio.com

"Tune in excitement!" ™

A few days ago the demo CD from the folks at FlexRadio arrived. Unfortunately, the CD was corrupt and missing some key files. After some emails with their support folks and a lot of experimenting, I was able to accomplish my goal: demo the PowerSDR/FlexRadio system in a CW contest environment (without actually buying the radio).

Here’s what I did:

1. Download & Install PowerSDR. The latest rev I could find was v1.18.0.
2. Setup the PowerSDR software to use “demo” as the system and for the soundcard choose unsupported.
3. Download the very large (270 MB) I/Q audio wave file from WA5QPZ. This is a I/Q recording of the CW band during Field Day apparently recorded at 192 kHz.  It can be found here:
   http://www.wa5qpz.com/_mgxroot/page_10729.html
4. Launch PowerSDR. (You may have to wait for it to initialize on the first go).
5. Under the Setup menu, choose Audio. Make sure that the primary sound card setup driver is set to Windows DirectSound and the sound card support is set to Unsupported Card. Click the Expert button. I had to experiment with some settings to get it to work… Apparently, there were some recent problems induced by Microsoft with the sound driver that can cause headaches with the demo mode (simulating the FlexRadio). On this screen, here’s what I used:
   
6. Next, load the Wave file. Choose Wave from the main screen, and add the downloaded CW Field Day file. Click Play and Loop (to have it run continuously).
7. Finally, click the Start button to launch the system.

Make sure that your panadapter is set to the 20 meter CW band. You should be able to tune around hear the Field Day CW action. Cool!

This is were I was finally able to experiment with the FlexRadio/PowerSDR setup in a contest environment. I found a spot that had a very strong CW signal and a relatively weak signal nearby. I was able to knock out the strong signal and easily copy the weak one within seconds.

I also found that I could visually scan the panadapter to “see” the action and quickly get to new ones as they appeared on the screen.

Although this was all obviously simulated, I did get a feel for the operation of the software. Of course, without a real unit it would be hard to get a good feeling for how reliable and functional this would be in a contest environment. I still have some questions: What is SO2R like with a Flex-5000? Is SO2R on the FlexRadio idiot-proof? Can spots and CW Skimmer data be shown on the panadapter so I know what I’ve worked?

There was a bit of pain involved… namely the issue of the demo installation not playing well with Windows Vista 64-bit (which does not seem to be a problem when connected to a real radio as I understand it). I also found that the PowerSDR program would simply close/crash if I did not choose a good setup.

All that said, this is a blast. I’m sure it’s not for everyone, but I’m a convert. SDR is changing the face of ham radio contesting.

Sunspot #1016 was just identified – it’s interesting for several reasons:

1. It’s a Cycle 23 spot… this means that Solar Cycle 23 has now lasted roughly 13 years.
2. It’s May 1st and we’ve already had 104 days without sunspots. 88% of 2009 has been without sunspots and now we get one but it’s from the last solar cycle? Odd.
3. Some (N4ZO) on the internet have claimed this could be the start of another Dalton Minimum (a period of drastic global cooling that could last 20+ years). OK – that could be a bit alarmist.

One thing is for certain… there is a lot to be learned about the sun. We haven’t even scratched the surface (so to speak) of solar propagation forecasting.

Since posting that the FlexRadio 3000 has been released to the masses a few days ago, I’ve been wondering if SDR & the Flex Radio platform is ready for contesting/DXing prime time.

For example, could the FlexRadio 5000 be used as an SO2R machine in a single box? (SO2R in a box) The literature claims that it can if you throw in their second receiver (RX2). I’d imagine that you’d also need bandpass filters… and a way to control them… and, while you’re at it, a really good amp with a way to control it (or not). OK, maybe I’m getting carried away.

Question 1: SO2R With a FlexRadio 5000A (& RX2 + ATU), plus some bandpass filter system, could I go SO2R? If yes, how painful is it?

I’d love to try the FlexRadio, but don’t have one in my area. They are sending me a demo CD.

Question 2: FlexRadio 5000 Demo Mode. Can I simply download the PowerSDR software and install it to try the Flex-5000 (demo mode)?  I understand that I need to feed it some I/Q file. How do I do that? I’ve installed the software and downloaded a couple I/Q files, but I’m not sure how to “play” the files. Do I need the VAC thingy?

I guess I’ll wait for the demo CD. Any FlexRadio experts out there?

I’ve been following the development of the latest SDR HF transceiver… the Flex-3000. This radio began shipping last week – so we should start to read real world reviews and hear them on-the-air.  FlexRadio Systems is famous for their pc-driven ham radios without knobs and their high marks in the NC0B (Sherwood Engineering) Dynamic Range Narrow Spaced receiver scores.

The Flex 3000 is the little brother to the FlexRadio 5000 series. It currently lists for under $1600 with a built-in ATU… which seems to me to be a very attractive price.

Unlike its "big brother" (the Flex 5000 SDR HF transceiver), the Flex 3000:

• Has 1 BNC connector rather than 3 SO-239s for TX
• Does not offer a RX antenna jacks
• Is only 1.7 inches tall
• Uses a different front-end filter configuration. 5^th order band pass filters for 80-6m.  7^th order band pass filter for 160m. Low pass filter for BCB band.
• Uses a 96 kHz wide panadapter display (rather than the 192 kHz found in the Flex 5000)
• Does not allow cross band/cross mode operation
• Does not offer an optional second receiver (RX2)

The question remains… is ham radio ready to go knobless?