I could certainly see using my IC-7600 remotely from my couch or some other location.  Come on Icom – let’s give this a whirl.

Some of my earliest ham radio memories are going with my dad to the hamfest in Cedar Rapids in the 1970s.  In those days, the hamfest was a huge event… I vaguely recall table after table of boat anchors and Art Collins sightings. Art, founder of Collins Radio, was one of the local ham celebs that Iowa hams would easily recognize.

In the 1980s and 1990s, PCs began to invade the local hamfests.  Even though I’m a bit of PC nut, I was never drawn to PC stuff at hamfests. I figured that I could always buy PCs elsewhere – I was there to buy ham stuff. Maybe that sounds hypocritical coming from a guy who sold a lot of solar panels at Dayton. Oh well.

Anyway, I picked up a few goodies (antenna mount, patch cables, and a barrel connector). I also got to catch up a bit with some Iowa hams I don’t see often.  Good times.

Is the local hamfest what it used to be now that the internet is here? No – but it’s still worth the trip in my opinion.

This year I offered to provide the solar power for field day.  Not many ham radio clubs have access to a 190 Watt military roll-up solar panel, so this was something new for the guys.  The PowerFilm 190W Solar Quad is folded and rolled into a package that is roughly the size and weight of a sleeping bag. Unrolled, it’s a flat mat that is staked and plugged into a battery system.

The  solar panel and its BOS performed quite well and several QSOs were made with a 100W IC-746 using this system. The BOS is a DC-AC power inverter, pair of deep cycle batteries and a charge controller in a box.

The SCARC group had a great time and worked more QSOs than any previous year.  The score is not final, but I think we were a bit behind in our bonus points. Anyway, great fun was had by all.

My pictures from this outing are included with the DMRAA effort in a single Solar Powered Field Day 2010 photo album.  See you next FD!

At PowerFilm Solar, we’ve put an effort into supporting ham radio & EMCOMM groups. To this end, this year we loaned about $30,000 worth of solar panels designed for the military to DMRAA and SCARC.

A crew of 5 deployed a 1 kW Solar PowerShade (a solar field shelter) for the DMRAA. Setup went well and we really didn’t have any issues.

While we did have a few clouds and an overnight storm with high winds, the shelter performed well – but functionally and electrically.

A full set of PowerShade solar shelter setup photos from Field Day 2010 can be found by clicking on the image. I’ve posted pics from both clubs including setup of the 1kw PowerShade and 190W roll-out solar quadrant at SCARC.

At the Dayton Hamvention we displayed a scale model of the PowerShade Field Shelter – the 2KW version. That model drew a lot of attention and comments such as “Hey Bob, look at this…. this is just what we need for our field day outing.”  We knew that this shelter would be a hit for DMRAA.

The DMRAA group has posted a writeup and video of their Field Day experience this year.

Last fall, I joined PowerFilm Solar. At PowerFilm Solar we make thin film solar panel products for a wide variety of products. PowerFilm products include:

• Ruggedized/weatherproof rollable solar chargers
• Solar powered military tents
• Custom solar products
• Solar panels for electric carts and other unique applications
• A variety of foldable solar chargers
  • A small USB port/AA battery solar chargers
  • Digicam and black foldable solar panels (up to 90 watts)

Anyway, since joining PowerFilm, I’ve wondered how well these products would do in the ham radio market. Many of our products were designed for military use, but are deployed where Emcomm service is required (for example, Haiti).

So, we’re going to give it a shot – we’ll have our first booth at the Hamvention at Dayton this year. We’ll be selling and displaying everything from small solar panels to larger panels. Still locking in the details – but we’ll be there.

I’m looking forward to returning to Dayton – this time, from the other side of the booth.

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.

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.

. .

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!" â„¢

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.

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 “playâ€? the files. Do I need the VAC thingy?

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