Ripples in the Ether

It’s hard to believe that the summer is pretty much over. Here in Oregon, it felt like we only had about 6 weeks of summer due to the very late winter and spring. We didn’t even get a chance to go camping once this year, which was a real bummer, but we sacrificed it for a very good cause. You can believe that we’ll be dragging Noah out to the woods for plenty of camping and other outdoor activities by next summer.

I’m a bit regretful that things have been so slow on the blog lately. As you can imagine, my spare time has been reduced pretty drastically. Now that Noah is a month old, we are all starting to settle into some semblance of a routine, so life is slowly getting to a new “normal”. The radio hasn’t even been on since we brought Noah home, but it looks like there’s a chance I’ll be back on the air soon. I actually do have a pretty big ham radio project bubbling on the back burner right now. I can’t quite tell you about it yet, but it will be forthcoming when the time is right. I have a feeling that I will need some assistance with this one, so stay tuned for it. I’m also trying to clear up some time for the OpenQRP project, which is supposed to be shipping pretty soon. I’m excited to see this one get off the ground.

I did add a new podcast to the sidebar today. This one is called The Amp Hour (get it?) and it’s hosted by Dave Jones of EEV Blog fame and Chris Gammell. It’s quite entertaining, especially Dave’s no-BS approach to the topics. They really had me hooked in the latest episode when they gave a shout-out to SolderSmoke. Give them a try, I think most of you will like it.

Noah Milldrum

Born August 2, 2010

9 lb 7 oz

21.5 in

A very quick update for those of you wondering what’s going on at the Milldrum residence. The baby’s due date was 22 July, but that’s come and gone and he still hasn’t shown up yet. Apparently he likes his current accommodations and is reluctant to change. The OB/GYN has decided that he’s had enough time, so she’s going to induce if Jennifer is not in labor by 1 August. So stay tuned, you’ll see some news very soon regardless of which way he comes.

Finally, a brief message courtesy of my manager’s whiteboard:

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating Wikipedia page that just might describe a phenomena that I bet just about every one of us CW ops have experienced at times. You’ve just finished off a marathon CW effort such as a contest or Field Day and finally get a chance to lay down, close your eyes, and try to get some sleep in a nice quiet room. Almost too quiet. You’re drifting to sleep…and then you hear it. Strains of CW, just on the edge of your hearing. You can almost make out some meaning, but it’s not quite coherent. It’s just your mind playing tricks on you.

The article which I found describes a condition known as Pareidolia, as Wikipedia sums up quite succinctly:

Pareidolia (pronounced /pærɪˈdoʊliə/ pa-ri-DOE-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Long story short, our brains are supremely attuned to pattern matching, probably as a survival mechanism. At times, it is likely that it leads us to perceive meaningful patterns where in reality there are none. An extreme example would be those people who see images of Jesus in their grilled cheese sandwich or that nutty Reverse Speech guy, but we’ve all experienced minor versions of it at some times in our lives.

It seems that there must be some aspect of immersing yourself in CW that makes you even more susceptible to the phenomena for some time afterward. In my experience, sometimes it’s taken an hour or two to shake it from my head. Even when I haven’t been recently working CW, there are times where some random squeaks or beeps perk up my ears and get me in the CW copying mind frame. It’s a funny and peculiar thing, to be sure.

Hamvention Balloon Launch

Once again, I owe you an apology for the great delay in getting my Dayton/FDIM posts published. It has been over a month since the event, which is far too long. Preparing for the arrival of the baby has taken up all of my spare time. This will be my final Dayton/FDIM post. Thanks for your patience.

Saturday started off with me hanging out at the Hamvention flea market. On Friday, I had seen approximately half of the flea market stalls, so I made it my goal to visit the rest of them on Saturday. It took me most of the morning to see the rest of the incredibly huge flea market. My feet could attest to the amount of travel it took to visit all of the flea market vendors. I didn’t score anything particularly earth shattering, but then I wasn’t really on the lookout for any equipment like I would be at a local hamfest. After getting an appropriate amount of blisters, I decided to take it easy by parking my butt at N8ZM’s flea market spot and reading my newly acquired copy of The Complete DXer (signed by W9KNI, no less). Between reading stints, I wandered the halls of Hamvention a bit, not looking for anything in particular, just taking more time to examine the things that I breezed through on the first day.

No lids, no kids, no...

Sometime around noon, a high altitude balloon was launched on the back side of Hara, right around the corner from the N8ZM flea market spot. When I arrived the launch team was just finishing filling up the balloon in the loading dock on the back of Hara (to quite a large audience). Once that was done, they got the payload hooked up fairly quickly, then a team of guys holding various portions of the payload line maneuvered the balloon outside and let ‘er rip. We even had our own cosplay astronaut to bless the voyage. I don’t recall how high the balloon ended up getting, but it sounds like the mission was fairly successful. I believe that they payload was recovered somewhere near Columbus.

After a fairly relaxed day at Hamvention, it was time for the big FDIM banquet back in Fairborn. Fortunately, I managed to avoid the previous day’s SNAFU by securing transportation in a timely fashion (many thanks to N8ZM for allowing a near stranger to borrow his pickup!). I arrived fairly early and picked a table near the back of the room like a true introvert. The tables were slowly occupied until the banquet room was nearly full, which was quite impressive. My table ended up being filled mostly with hams who were strangers to each other. I had the opportunity to meet some nice gentlemen and have some pleasant talk about this and that. Somehow I also got lucky and found my name on the pre-drawn door prize list for a shiny new 2010 ARRL Handbook. That was a bit of a shock, as I very rarely win anything by chance (except perhaps poker).

Dinner was served, and we had the pretty standard hotel banquet dinner. It wasn’t too bad…nothing to write home about, but I’ve had much worse. After dessert, the awards ceremony was started in short order. I won’t bore you with the tedium of all of the details, but there were some incredible moments that I won’t forget. The first was when Rex Harper, W1REX accepted the QRP Hall of Fame induction on behalf of his silent key friend Dave Ingram, K4TWJ. Poor Rex was choked up through most of his acceptance speech. You could tell how hard he was impacted by the emotions of the whole things. I certainly can’t blame him, I doubt I could have kept it together under the same circumstances. A bigger shock came even later, when QRP ARCI announced that Rex himself would also be inducted in the Hall of Fame. Rex came backup to the podium and gave a very touching, heartfelt acceptance speech.

After announcing the winners of the various homebrew contest winners, they finally got around to announcing the winner of the 72 Part Challenge. After seeing the competition I was up against two days previously, I knew I wasn’t going to win but that didn’t really matter to me. It turned out that the big winner was Harold Smith, KE6TI, with an 80 meter transceiver with a very wide tuning range. An amazing bit of work and a well deserved victory! The rest of the competitors (NM0S, NC9H, KD1JV, and myself) all got very nice framed honorable mention certificates, along with a modest bit of prize money. Certainly more than I expected. The judges (W4QO, G3RJV, and W1RFI) stated that it was a very difficult decision for them and they thought that all of the competitors brought worthy radios. There’s no doubt that it’s an honor to stand as an equal amongst such notable QRPers. The whole contest was an incredible experience in which to participate.

The banquet, and FDIM itself, wound down with some after dinner talk with some of the folks who stuck around in the banquet room. We had a nice bluegrass jam as our background music while we got to shoot the BS with new and old friends. I stuck around for an hour or so, then made back for N8ZM’s house with his truck before I made him too nervous! Another 18 hour day of ham radio insanity under my belt.

Sunday was the day for me to lick my wounds and do my last little bit of wandering around Hamvention. I stuck around the N8ZM flea market spot for a good portion of the day, and made multiple trips to the wonderful smelling pizza stand placed strategically placed 20 feet away from the our flea market spot. Of course, I also had to partake one last time in the bratwurst that the cowgirl roping team was selling just a few rows away. There was a bit more browsing through Hamvention, but I felt like I had already seen most of what I wanted to see. By the end of the day (really 2 PM or so), I was ready to go. Truly, I had reached my saturation point.

When I got back to N8ZM’s house, I managed to snag a real bed, as some of his other guests had already left. My head hit that pillow and I was out cold for about 12 hours or so. I woke up hungry at some point in the middle of the night because I had slept right through dinner, so I raided the fridge, then proceeded to hibernate some more. I think that N8ZM and W8NF were getting a little bit concerned, but I needed the sleep badly!

Our flight out was on Monday evening, so I got to spend most of the day on Monday just relaxing at N8ZM’s house until it was time for our flight. I won’t bore you with the details of my uncomfortable flight back; all that matters is that we all made it back home in one piece.

I don’t have any profound wisdom for my conclusion. The experience had many wonderful moments and a few that left me gritting my teeth and wanting to pull my hair out (if I had any left up top). I’m really happy that I managed to make it work out, regardless of any bumps in the road that I encountered. Next time (which will probably be many years from now), I think I’m going to focus on FDIM even more and stay in the FDIM hotel. That’s where I had the most fun. Not that Hamvention wasn’t great as well, but for me it was more about connecting with my fellow QRPers and homebrewers, not checking out all of the shiny new stuff at the booths. And perhaps next time, I’ll have a little budding homebrewer in tow.

Perhaps that’s a bit melodramatic, but my time for operating and homebrewing is going to be severely curtailed very soon. Baby Boy Milldrum will be arriving any day now (the estimated due date is July 22) and we’re in full-blown panic mode as we finish the last minute preparations to get the baby’s room ready, make sure we have all of the assorted baby stuff that’s needed, and take care of those homeowner chores that need to be done for the summer. So I figured that I should take some free moments to enjoy the hobby while I can. Sometimes I feel like every blog post here should have some really meaty and meaningful content, but perhaps that inhibits me from posting more than a few times a month. So prepare for this post and many of my future posts to cater a bit more to the short attention span crowd. I’ll have to get my ham radio in small doses whenever I can, so expect a bit of ADD to set into the blog for a while.

Anyway, my inbox has been blowing up with DX Sherlock alerts telling me that 6 meters has been open most evenings over the last few weeks. I finally broke down and dug out the Buddipole components on Friday so I could try to snag a few QSOs on 50 MHz. I managed to grab a few SSB QRP QSOs with the FT-817 into VE4 and VE6-land on Friday night using the Buddipole in a simple dipole configuration. The band was in great shape that night, as I could hear a lot of East Coast stations coming in quite strong via multihop Es. On Saturday, I tried to work CW QRP on 50.096 MHz but had zero success even after calling CQ many, many times. The band was open and there was still plenty of activity on the SSB portion of the band, but CW was a bust. Come on CW ops, we’ve got to do better than this.

I still managed to make it a interesting ham radio night. After packing in the gear from the back deck, I went into the shack, flipped on the HF rig, and checked 20 meters (just around sunset local time). Very soon I stumbled upon the legendary Martti, OH2BH calling US West Coast stations. After a quick tune-up, I was able to snag him within about 4 calls. He was absolutely booming into Beaverton (by the sounds of it, he was booming into the entire western portion of the US). This was my first QSO with Martti and was memorable to be sure.

Moving on to a more unpleasant topic, am I the only one who things that most of the ham mailing lists are dying of a creeping mediocrity and groupthink mentality? The big two QRP-Ls are mostly a joke as far as getting an interesting, topical discussion going. On the other hand, start bitching about computers or some other off-topic old fart rant, and you’ll get 30 messages a day. The SKCC group made me sick with its virtual pitchforks-and-torches assault on the new owner of Vibroplex because he had the audacity to replace the stamped brass identification plates with a silkscreened version. The way that a few prominent members of that group (including one who is affiliated with a competing key manufacturer I might add) character assassinated the owner was quite disgusting.

This provides a nice segue into another topic people love to hate: Twitter. I quit tweeting a few months ago due to the large jackass/decent person ratio that I was experiencing. I thought I would miss it quite a bit, but once I got over the DTs in a few days I didn’t really miss it much at all. I still debate whether I should go active on Twitter again, because I see some utility in it; but even when you remove the jerk factor, it still feels like drinking from a firehose most of the time. Not to mention that huge time sink that results from checking your account all of the time make sure you are up-to-the-minute on the latest crap. What to do?

Finally, a plea. Some of you may know of qrpedia.com, which I tried (and failed miserably) to turn into a QRP/homebrewer aggregated blog and knowledge repository. It’s already in sad shape, but with the new kid coming, I know I’ll have no time to devote to it, so I need to let it go. I don’t want to nuke the site because there are a handful of people who put a lot of hard work into posting content there. I would like to sell the site for a nominal price and have it go to someone who could give it another chance. Please contact me if this interests you at all. Prices and terms are very negotiable.

I just heard on the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast that special event station K7G will be QRV this weekend from Astoria, Oregon to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Goonies. Man, does this bring back some fond memories. The Goonies was one of those pop culture memes that really impacted me as a kid. Here was a movie about a bunch of ordinary kids from a small town (in Oregon no less…my stomping grounds!) who stumble upon the clues to an improbable treasure, go alone on a fantastic adventure because they believe in this crazy idea, dodge doom and destruction numerous times, seemingly fail but then manage to save the day at the end. Not to mention that it had pirates, hidden treasure, mobsters, and a mutant. How could I, a boy just a few years younger than the main characters, not like this movie? Being the chubby kid in my group of friends, I certainly could relate to Chunk, but I also envied Data and all of the cool gadgets he brought along for their quest. No doubt that wise-ass Mouth also reminded me of a few of my close friends. I still enjoy watching the movie when I catch it on TV, although it’s funny that I don’t remember it being quite as cheesy when I first viewed it as a kid.

The Goonies still seems to be very popular, with fans making the trip to Astoria to visit many of the familiar settings from the film. If you ever come to my neck of the woods, you should take some time to visit Astoria, even if you don’t care for The Goonies. It’s a neat little small town with quite a bit of charm and is only a few miles from one of my favorite locations in the entire world, the Oregon Coast. I’m going to give a listen to 40 meters to see if I can snag them this weekend. It’s pretty close to Beaverton, but my antenna is low enough that I’m sure I have some energy going straight up and down on 40. I bet they’re going to have a great QSL for this one.

Hans Summers Presenting at FDIM 2010

Please accept my apologies for the long delay in posting my impressions of Hamvention and FDIM. I was literally on the move every waking hour of my time in Dayton on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Up about 6 AM to shower, at Hamvention all day, then FDIM at night. Back to N8ZM’s house around 11 PM to crash in the easy chair. I’ve never worked so hard to have fun. My writeup is going to focus mostly on FDIM, since that was the main reason that I was in Dayton. I probably can’t give you much information about Hamvention that you haven’t already heard thousands of times from other hams. Besides, the muse has taken leave from me again, so I don’t want to butcher this recap any more than is necessary.

My adventure in Dayton got off to a proper start on Thursday, which was seminar day at FDIM in Fairborn. I arrived around 7 AM, which was a bit early, but I got a chance to get a seat pretty close to the front of the room. By the start of festivities at 8 AM, the room was pretty much full. There had to be more than 200 attendees (I unofficially heard that this was the best attendance at FDIM in a few years).

There were a total of six presentations for the day. I’ll give you a brief rundown of my impressions of each one.

• K8ZT – The morning started off with a presentation by Anthony Luscre, K8ZT about strategies for being successfull in QRP contesting. The PowerPoint deck for this talk came in a over 140 slides, which meant that Anthony had to rip though the slides at a lightning pace. He gave some good inspiration to those of us who have not yet taken the QRP contesting plunge.
• G0UPL – Next up was world-class homebrewer Hans Summers, G0UPL. His presentation was about his QRSS efforts. About half of his talk covered information that is already on his website, but he did get into some areas that I haven’t seen him cover before. I especially enjoyed seeing his natural power battery experiments. At the end of his talk he announced the sale of a kit version of his latest QRSS transmitter, which I’ll cover later on. He came with the stereotypical dry British humour (LOL), which I enjoyed immensely.
• G3RJV – My favorite talk of the day was given by the legendary Rev. George Dobbs, G3RJV. He did a masterful job of combining a grand tour of simple receiver designs with more philosophical aspects of our hobby. You can tell that Rev. Dobbs has honed his public speaking skills quite well from his years in church.
• NE1RD – After lunch break we were treated to a great talk by B. Scott Andersen, NE1RD on the topic of his 100 Pound DXpedition. While the 100 Pound DXpedition is not a QRP-specific topic, NE1RD put a QRP spin on the talk by focusing on his recent CQ WPX QRP efforts on St. Thomas.
• K8IKE & K4ZLE – Jim Everly, K8IKE, and Jay Slough, K4ZLE brought a power-packed presentation about  acquiring a set of “good enough” test gear for the homebrewer and how to use this gear to perform a useful subset of the ARRL lab procedures for RX and TX performance. We also had a bit of good-natured sarcastic side commentary from Ed Hare, W1RFI from the League’s lab. This was extremely useful stuff and I wish that they had a little more time to delve into this topic.
• K9AY – The final talk of the day was from prolific FDIM speaker Gary Breed, K9AY. He covered low band QRP operating; mostly focusing on the challenges of deploying a useful DX antenna on these bands. Gary brought some good information, but unfortunately he had to compress the end of his speech quite a bit because he ran long in the first half. Fortunately, the proceedings had all of the information that was skimmed over.

FDIM 2010 Thursday Vendor Night

After a long day of sitting and listening to speakers all day long, we had a few hours to get up, grab some dinner, and stretch our legs. By 8:00, the main ballroom was reconfigured for QRP vendor night. The room was not 100% filled with vendors (as you can see in the photo to the right, most of the tables in the middle of the room were empty), but there was still quite a bit to see. Hendricks QRP Kits had the largest display, but Diz from kitsandparts.com was probably a close second with his huge stock of ‘roids, components, and RF Toolkits. As I mentioned earlier, Hans Summers announced the sale of his latest QRSS transmitter as a kit with a PCB and a microcontroller that he would custom program with your callsign. This was the most popular item of the night. For nearly the entire two hours of Vendor Night, there was a large line of people waiting to purchase a kit and have it customized by G0UPL. I hope this sparks a lot more QRSS activity here in the States.

K3PG Sonic Tray Chassis Willamette

One very neat aspect of the night was getting to meet a bunch of the QRPers that I’ve known for years via the mailing lists but have never seen in person. Some of the highlights that stand out for me were my introductions to WA0ITP, K3PG, K8IQY, NM0S, KC2UHB, W8DIZ, and WB8ICN (sorry if I missed anyone!). It was a pleasure to finally be able to shake hands with my peers and mentors. I’d like to give a special shout-out to Diz for his salty greeting! That’s the way to make a guy feel like a part of the gang from the first minute! I loved it! It was also a treat to have a good, long conversation with K3PG, whose enthusiasm for the Willamette was truly humbling, as well as infectious. Chatting with WA0ITP seemed like two old friends talking. I’ve collaborated with him so much via e-mail that it seemed perfectly natural to pick up where the electronic communications left off.

I hate playing favorites, but I think the true highlight of the night was meeting Mikey, WB8ICN. I was sitting in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, working on my laptop and waiting for the Vendor Night festivities to start. I wasn’t paying much attention when a couple set down in the chairs opposite from me. They were having a lively conversation for quite a while, but I was engrossed in reading the FDIM Proceedings CD that I purchased earlier in the day. After a while, the gentleman sitting there was getting more and more animated in his conversation. At that point, my curiosity got the best of me so I had to check out what was going on. Something seemed vaguely familiar, but it took me a few moments before I saw the shirt with “WB8ICN” embroidered on the chest. Of course, I got up and introduced myself to Mikey and his wife Marybeth, which seemed to take him by surprise a bit! We had an awesome conversation and were probably getting a bit louder than we should have been. That was the only time we got to talk at Dayton and I wish I had more time to BS.

I’m only going to skim over Friday, since it was a bust regarding FDIM. Hamvention was as large and as crazy as everyone had said it would be, especially the flea market. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed in such huge venues, so I wasn’t really acclimated to what was going on until Saturday. I imagine that I looked like a lost puppy dog wandering around. Hara is pretty old and decrepit, but that certainly didn’t slow down any of the activity. The only thing that was really “offensive” to me about the place was the bathrooms. I never used them at Hara, but just walking within 30 feet of the entrance was enough to make me want to gag. I think I still have nightmares about the smell alone. God help anyone who actually had to use them

Due to a bit of a communication error on my part, I didn’t make it to Friday’s FDIM activities until the event was almost over for the night. So I’ll just skip right on past that and get to the good stuff about the Saturday night banquet in my next post.

Clackamas Schematic

Since FDIM 2010 is in the history books, it is my pleasure to finally publicly release my entry into the FDIM 2010 QRP Challenge: The Clackamas 40 Meter Transceiver.

The rig is a VXO-tuned superhet that operates around 7.030 MHz. The heart of the design is the BF998 dual-gate MOSFET (which was popularized by W7ZOI on his website and in EMRFD). The BF998 is used as the front-end mixer and as a combination product detector/BFO. My new favorite AF amp, the TDA7052, is my choice for the single allowed IC. The VXO signal is mixed with a carrier oscillator in a JFET mixer, which is then bandpass filtered and fed to a BS170 power amplifier.

Please download my contest writeup for full details of the design. I’ll dissect the design in further detail in future posts.

I wanted to post a quick update from my phone. Due to an unforseen level of busyness, I haven’t been able to even sit at my laptop for a few minutes to update the blog. I have been taking notes, so once I am able to I will write about my Dayton experience.