Ripples in the Ether

I’ve noted with quite a bit of interest the recent surge of comments on QRP-L favoring a QRP exodus up from 7030/7040 kHz to [part of] the old Novice watering hole of 7100 to 7125 kHz. The esteemed Arnie Coro, CO2KK seems to have ignited the fire with this post to the reflector:

Dear amigos :
The 40 meters band changed last year … when the worldwide assignment for ITU Regions I, II and III was finally made totally compatible for the first 200 kiloHertz. According to what we have learned here, this was a difficult to work out agreement, but at the end
thanks to the presence of radio amateurs sitting as members of many of
the nation’s delegations attending the ITU WARC… it became a reality…
So, now we have the 7100 to 7200 segment for radio amateurs exclusive use. My understanding is that the US FCC decided to expand the 40 meter phone band down to 7125 kiloHertz…
That leaves the segment from 7100 to 7125 kiloHertz quite useable for CW…
My suggestion is to start using 7105 or 7110 kiloHertz as the QRP
meeting frequency, replacing 7030 and 7040 kiloHertz that are under so much QRM, especially from digital modes. I agree that many stations have already equipment with crystals for either 7030 or
7040 kHz… but for those of us with VFO capability, enjoying the much
more clear channels between 7105 and 7110 kHz opens up the possibility of many more QRM free QSO’s…
My observations carried on during the past several days confirm that
that segment of 40 meters right next to 7100 is clear much of the time  !
Let’s give it a try !!!

73 and DX
Arnie Coro
CO2KK

The positive response to Arnie’s call to action was immensely gratifying to me. In addition to all of the reflector replies, there have also been some ham bloggers taking up the topic. I’ve long been a fan of this little slice of bandwidth, but at times it has been hard to scare up contacts there. In the last couple of years, SKCC has probably been making the most extensive use of the sub-band, which has increased the traffic there a fair amount and has brought more attention to the frequencies as a place to have a nice, relaxed CW QSO.

Not to long ago, I dreamed about ways to help increase the use of these frequencies, and even started chatting with a few other hams about ways to spark some interest. However, like a whole lot of my ideas, they never get off the launchpad since I just don’t have the time to invest in all of them. After having a few unpleasant encounters with RTTY contesters running me off 40 meter frequencies last weekend, I’m even more determined to help promote 7100-7125 as a QRP (and general CW) safe spot.

I’ve become inspired enough that I’ve decided to take a new design for a minimalistic superhet rig that I’m working on and adapt it to operate on these frequencies. If there’s any interest in it, I might even take a crack at offering it as a kit for purchase. Long live 40 meter QRP!

This weekend, I’ve been participating in the SKCC Weekend Sprint when I get the opportunity in between other obligations. At about 0900 local, I heard F6HKA on 20 meters coming in pretty well with a very fluttery signal. As you can see on the azimuth map for my QTH, the path to France goes right over Greenland, so it’s not a huge stretch to assume that the unique signal quality is due to auroral effects from the increasingly active Sun.

After about an hour of trying, I finally managed to snag a QSO with Bert using 5 watts! A great day for QRP!

F6HKA-1811-14-Feb-2010-14046.mp3

Take a listen to this QSO which was recorded a bit before I made my contact with F6HKA. You can definitely hear the watery, fluttery sound of his signal.

I got a bit of cash for my birthday last month and it was burning a hole in my pocket for a few weeks. I decided I needed a good set of CW paddles for my station, since the only keying devices that I have (that work) are all straight keys. It was a bit of a toss-up to decide what brand of key to get until I saw the Begali name mentioned; then I remembered lots of hams saying good stuff about their keys. There was enough goodwill on the Internet that I figured I would take the plunge and give the base model Simplex (with a palladium finish) a try. It took about 3 weeks for the paddles to get here, but it was well worth it. Here’s a little visual tour of my Begali unboxing experience.

Yes, I know, an “unboxing” blog post makes me an even greater geek. I’m at peace with that. Anyway, on with the show…

Let’s open the box…

Now to open it up

Some extras included

Christmas wishes

Two different sets of aluminum finger pieces sent along, although I only ordered one. A nice extra!

First peek at the key

The key together with the dust cover

Here it is unwrapped and with the stock finger pieces installed

Now to add the nice blue aluminum finger pieces…

I’m blinded! The palladium finish with gold accents is incredible.

A macro shot of the engraved logo

Finally, here’s the key with my cable installed, sitting next to the AA0ZZ EZKeyer

I hope you got a little vicarious enjoyment out of that! I haven’t made a QSO with it yet, but just from using it on the keyer with sidetone, I can tell that it has an incredible feel. This one will be a keeper for the rest of my ham radio days.

The January 2010 issue of Linux Journal is hitting the newsstands, and this one has the theme of Amateur Radio and Linux. One of the featured articles was written by none other than the local Linux guru, KK7DS. I haven’t purchased the issue yet, but I got a sneak peak at this particular article, and I know that Dan does a nice overview of the ways in which you can integrate Linux into your ham radio activities. There’s also a podcast that the magazine has launched with this issue. The hosts talk about the ham radio stuff, although they are not hams, so they have a bit of a difficult time doing a good job of describing what’s going on with the ham radio stuff. It would have been nice if they would have brought Dan or another ham on as a guest. But it’s worth a listen if you are curious about what’s in the magazine, and it’s only about 20 minutes of program. Check it out if you currently use Linux in your shack or might be interested in doing so.

DXing is something that has never really been a part of my ham career. Not because I haven’t had any interest in it, but mainly because I haven’t had much of station to speak of. Being restricted to compromise antennas and low power does a lot to dissuade you from seriously pursuing DX (especially during these sunspot-lean years). Yes, I know it’s possible to make DX contacts with such a station, but it takes a lot of time and dedication. Frankly, I just didn’t have the attention span to sit at a pileup for hours trying to get lucky.

Now that I’ve got a decent, permanent multiband antenna up in the air, it seems like a good time to give DXing a more serious try. When I heard about the K4M DXpedition to Midway Island, I figured that would be as good of a chance as any to get my feet wet. It’s not very difficult to make trans-Pacific contacts from my QTH, and with thousands of miles of salt water between us and very little land, I knew I had a decent chance.

The first few days were a bust (thanks frequency cops and jammers), but by the time the operation was starting to wind down, I managed to get 3 QSOs with K4M, all on 19 October. Right around dawn (the best time I’ve found to hear trans-Pacific DX from here), I snagged them on 40 meters CW then QSYed a bit up the band to get them on phone. Neither attempt took a ton of effort, although I found the SSB contact to be particularly easy…although it shouldn’t be that tough with 100 watts. A few hours later, I saw them spotted on 17 meters, so I gave that a try as well, and got them in the log after about 15 minutes. Pretty cool!

I’m sure this isn’t very impressive to most of you old timers, but it was fun for me. I watched eagerly for the next logbook update to make sure I made it in the log. Sure enough, all three QSOs were up there by the end of the day. I was so happy that I made the donation so I could get the QSL sent direct to me. I feel like I’m doing everything backwards in ham radio, but it’s great fun to finally experience what just about everyone else already knows.

I found something sitting on my USB thumbdrive from a year ago that I completely forgot about. A paper log file that I created in OO.org so I could log when I didn’t have access to a PC. I’m not sure why I never did anything with it, so I figured I would turn it loose on the world for the last pitiful few of you who might need such a thing. The log is a PDF file that is completely free. Download it and print as many copies as you need for your notebook. Not exactly cloud computing, but maybe it will come in handy for someone.

Disclaimer: For those who don’t know, I’m an employee of Buddipole, and I do speak quite a bit of my positive experiences with some Buddipole products in this post.

Yes hams, it’s that time of the year again. Field Day, the Super Bowl of the ham radio world. I haven’t had the best track record of participating in Field Day over the years, due to a few different factors. The largest stumbling block is the nasty allergies that I get during late spring, which usually end up peaking in intensity right around the end of June. The other problem is that I’ve never been a big fan of the big-time organized local clubs. I won’t go in to the reasons for that (you can dig back in the blog if you are really interested), other than to say that in my experience they are not the kind of places that I find interesting.

Now that I own a house with a proper backyard, I feel like I now have the option to participate in Field Day by setting up out back, so that I can duck inside if my allergies get too out of control. It also helped that I recently started taking some new meds, which have helped to control the allergies quite a bit better than anything else so far. So I was more than happy to give FD a go this year, even though it wasn’t going to be more than a backyard adventure.

Station Setup

Field Day 2009 - Backyard

Given the recent development of my employment with Buddipole, and the demise of my main station random wire antenna in a recent spring storm, it only made sense to deploy the Buddipole. I could have dragged out the IC-718 sitting idle in the shack and paired it with my very heavy 35 Ah gel cell, but I was feeling up for a bit of a challenge. I settled on using the FT-817, and considered pairing it with my recently constructed 20 watt linear amp, but I realized that running 20 watts would give me the same power multiplier as running 100 watts would. So I figured, why not take the dive and go QRP for the entire event? Not only that, but why not make SSB the main mode of operation? This was appealing to me not only because I am a QRPer at heart, but also because it would push my limits, and give me something new to try.

I’ve run into my share of hams who think that QRP is the devil’s handiwork, and that anyone running less than 100 watts is inflicting undue hardship on the poor receiving station. While I know that a QRP signal does have a more difficult time being heard (especially SSB), I also know that there have been plenty of times when the receiving station would have had no idea that I was running QRP unless I told them (and many times, I won’t tell them). The fact is, if you can hear me well enough, you’ll answer me. If not, you won’t. Yes, I get less contacts running QRP. But if the conditions are too painful for the other station, they will just not answer me or will politely cut it short. I especially feel absolved of any guilt running QRP SSB on Field Day because of the whole nature of the event. The concept is to test how well we do under less-than-ideal conditions. Quoth the rules (emphasis mine):

2. Object: To work as many stations as possible on any and all amateur bands (excluding the 60, 30, 17, and 12-meter bands) and in doing so to learn to operate in abnormal situations in less than optimal conditions. A premium is placed on developing skills to meet the challenges of emergency preparedness as well as to acquaint the general public with the capabilities of Amateur Radio.

Field Day 2009 - Buddipole

The great thing about using the Buddipole was the ability for me to use it in conjunction with the frequency agility of the FT-817 to hop around the bands. Yes, it does take a bit of time to change bands, which is not quite as fast as using a multiband doublet with a tuner. However, with just a bit of practice, you get to know what setting sare needed to resonate your antenna on any band and can reconfigure and tune it in a matter of a few minutes. Given that I decided to run QRP SSB, I needed every bit of power I could get, so I was glad to not have a lossy tuner in the way.

Given the somewhat last minute nature of my decision to play in Field Day, I didn’t have a way to power a notebook PC with a battery, so I settled on the old standby of paper logging. Since I decided to stay strictly search & pounce, it wasn’t a big deal to paper log. The biggest pain is in dealing with dupe avoidance, but I figured that I wouldn’t have to worry about that too much since I would be racking up huge QSO counts.

Field Day 2009 - A123 Battery Pack

The only thing left to nail down at this point was power. I knew that I wanted to try out our brand new A123 lithium nanophospate battery technology that we are ramping up at Buddipole. If you don’t know about this battery technology yet, prepare to be blown away when we officially roll these out. This technology has been used in the R/C hobby for a few years, and is just now making it’s way into amateur radio use. It also happens to be the same technology used in the upcoming(?) Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid vehicle. It would take too long to list all of the advantages of this technology here, but the amazing flat discharge curve, long life, very quick charge time, and incredible safety are all reasons why I’m confident that this will be the dominant battery technology in the portable/pedestrian mobile ham circles within the next few years. The particular pack that I was using is a 3S1P configuration, which means 3 cells in series, one parallel set (we also have 4S1P and 4S2P packs). Each cell is 3.3 V nominal, so this pack is rated at 9.9 volts, which is perfect for use with the FT-817. A **1P pack has a capacity of 2.3 Ah, which I figured would give me at least a few hours of operating time.

Field Day 2009 - Solar Power

Being at a bit of a disadvantage in the “contest”, I wanted to pick up some extra bonus points, so I remembered the 5 watt Harbor Freight solar panel that I had gathering dust in the closet. Using that in conjunction with my half-depleted 7 Ah gel-cell, my power strategy was fully formed in my mind. During the sunny part of the day (my backyard is on the north side of the house and is fairly narrow, so it doesn’t get a ton of sunlight) I would use the solar panel/gel cell combo, then switch to the A123 pack when there wasn’t anymore sunlight to be had at the station.

Given the set up that I described, it looked like I would fall into the 1E class for the event. Given a very strict reading of the rules, it seemed like I might have been able to claim 1B Battery, but in the spirit of the event, 1E was the appropriate choice.

Operating

I wasn’t able to start operating right at 1800 UTC due to some chores that needed to be completed first before play time. When I did get going, I started on 20 meters with the Buddipole in vertical dipole configuration and quickly started to get QSOs in the log. As I mentioned earlier, my strategy was strictly search & pounce, choosing only the loudest stations to try to work. For the most part, it was a successful strategy. I was able to work just about everyone that I heard at a S5 – S7 signal level or better.

Once the afternoon wore on and 20 meters started heating up, the pileups started to heat up as well. I found that it was getting harder and harder to be heard as I was the little fish in the big pileup. So by mid-afternoon, I started working my way up the bands. By jumping to 15 meters (then 10, and eventually 6) was the band was starting to open, I was able to stay ahead of the really competitive pileups. One of the coolest things about the operating was the feeling of riding the QSB like a wave up and down; waiting for a crest in the propagation to strike fast with my callsign. It could have all been in my mind, but it did seem to help to operate like this.

As the sun started to set behind the neighborhood houses, a good sporadic E opening hit the West Coast and I was able to get some nice 6 meter and 10 meter QSOs out to about 1000 miles or so. I had big plans for staying up late after dark to operate, but by the time that dusk fell on Beaverton, I was totally exhausted. So I laid down on the sofa and set the alarm on my iPhone to wake me in a few hours. Not surprisingly, I must have turned off the alarm in my sleep, because the next thing I remember is that it was 5 AM the next morning.

A bit disappointed, but feeling renewed, I put on a pot of coffee and decided on my strategy for the morning. It seemed obvious to give the lower bands a shot, since the propagation was bound to be best there and I hadn’t worked them the day before. So the Buddipole was reconfigured as a Versatee Vertical with the low band coil, and the power was supplied by the A123 pack. Once I got going again around 7 AM, I was shocked at how well I was doing on 75 meters. The puny 5 watt signal from the FT-817 into the Buddipole had some good mojo, as I got multiple unsolicited “great signal” reports from the stations that I contacted (many of them VE7s). In my QSOs on the previous day, it was obvious that I was a QRP station, often needing multiple calls to bust a small pileup and sometimes needing a repeat or two. But both 75 meters and 40 meters were working remarkably well for me. The call got through on the first try nearly every time, and almost no fills were necessary. It truly felt like I was running 100 watts.

After a morning of fun, I had to go QRT for the day in order to complete some other chores that I had put off for far too long. It was a bit tough to tear myself from the station, but responsibility trumps fun, even if you try to put it off for as long as you can.

Results

Before I started operating, I thought that 50 QSOs would probably be a reasonable goal to shoot for as a QRP SSB station. As it turns out, I got really close; with a final tally of 49 QSOs, all of them SSB. Twelve of those QSOs were on solar power, so I qualified for the 100 point alternate power bonus. Since I was on emergency power the entire time, I also got 100 points for that. Given my 5 watt power limit and 100% emergency power status, I qualified for a power multiplier of 5. I also managed to copy the special W1AW bulletin for 100 points, and plan to submit my log via the web for another 50 points. If I did the arithmetic correctly, that should give me a final score of 595 points.

I also want to make note of the performance of the A123 battery pack. I started the event by charging the pack to a full charge with my Cellpro Multi4 charger. Although I did the majority of my operation timewise on the solar panel, by far I had the most QSOs with the A123 pack. According to my rough log calculations, I used the A123 pack for over 3 hours of operating time and logged 37 QSOs with it. When I returned the pack to the charger after Field Day, the charger reported 19% of the charge was left (the voltage display of the FT-817 never dipped below 9.6 V the entire time I was operating with the A123 pack). The next charge only took 38 minutes to get me back to 100%, and ready to go again. The 3S1P pack only weighs about 8 oz. and gave me a ton of operation time, much more than I expected. It sure blows away the much heavier and bulkier 5 Ah gel cell that I usually use with the FT-817. Ask the Goathiker, he’ll tell you how great these things are.

I could wax poetic about the event, but I think you get my feelings about the thing by now. I’ll just end by saying that this was my best Field Day by far, and that I had more fun with QRP SSB than I thought possible. I have a great appreciation for the excellent ops that put up with my peanut whistle, and learned a lot more about how capable a QRP SSB station can be.

20 Watt Broadband Linear Amplifier

QRP is tons of fun on CW, but it gets a bit rough trying to work other stations on SSB with 5W, especially when you are using antennas that are low to the ground. I had been eyeballing the nice RF MOSFETs from Mitsubishi for a while, and since I got a hankering to get a bit more active on SSB, I took the plunge and ordered five of the RD15HVF1 devices. At a current price of $5.25 at RF Parts, they are a bit more expensive than the IRF510 that you see in a lot of 20-40 watt range linears, but these devices have a few advantages over the IRF5xx series. One of the biggest, in my opinion, is that these RF transistors are designed to run off of a 12 volt drain voltage, unlike the IRF510 amps which don’t really work well until they get around 24 volts on the drain. These things can also take quite a beating from poor mismatches, and have the convienice of having the source connected to the metal tab on the case, making for a nice solid ground connection.

20 Watt Broadband Linear Amp - Inside

Having the appropriate parts in hand and some designs on the internet to steal from, I set out to build my own linear. There isn’t a ton of creativity to be used when designing a linear of this class (Push-pull Class-AB). Every design that I’ve seen looks nearly the same. Not surprisingly, the real focus of the design is in optimising the input and output networks. Feeling lazy and anxious to just get on the air, I pretty much did “cut and paste” from some different circuits to find out what works best. I know, not the best method, but sometimes the desire to just put out some RF trumps proper procedure. I don’t have a scehematic to post at the moment, but if you click through on the photo to the right, you can see a close-up with descriptions of major circuit blocks. Below, I’ve posted links to the two circuit resources that I used the most for this design. I’ll have more details about the designs to comment on at a later date, when I can pull some proper notes together.

• HPSDR Pennywhistle
• TF3LJ SoftRock Amplifier

One of my weakest homebrewing areas is in the mechanical engineering, but now that I have a bit of a real “shop” in my garage, things have been getting better. A bit of scrounging at the surplus stores around town led me to some cheap heat sinks that looked like they might be suitable for this project. After attacking them with an angle grinder to get a lip off of the bottom side, I was able to bolt two of them to the lid of an aluminum Hammond enclosure. I nibbled a nice square area right out of the middle of the copper clad I used to build on, soldered the RD15HVF1 devices to some pads etched out with a Dremel, then bolted the MOSFETs and copper clad directly to the lid of the enclosure. Drilling the holes for the BNCs and the LED was a piece of cake with the aluminium box material.

Without getting into too many details at this point, I was able to get the amplifier working right off the bat. I didn’t get quite as much output power as I initially liked (only got about 10 watts), but the amp was working correctly. More troubling was the fact that output on 6 meters was only 2.8 watts. Not too great when you are putting in 2.5 watts. I figured it had to be something with the input or output network. The input return loss measured quite good; -15 to -20 dB across all the bands. So I figured that left the output network. My initial iteration of the amp used a transformer similar to the one in the Pennywhistle amp (this is a configuration that I’ve also successfully used before in a push-pull class-C CW amp). Without doing any actual measurements and calculations, I dropped in the broadband transformer pair used in the TF3LJ amp, and immediately improved my output power by a few watts. But I was still a bit low on 6 meters. A bit more searching showed that I might need another compensation cap on the output, so I experimented a bit more until I found that a 1200 pF silver mica in series with the drain transformer outputs worked wonders and boosted my power on 6 meters to nearly 15 watts CW. I haven’t done any analysis to see why this helped. I know, sloppy…but sometimes expedience wins.

Since there’s no output filtering built into the amplifier enclosure, I had to assemble some outboard filters in order to get this thing on the air. I was going to use 7-pole low-pass filters until I realized that everybody else uses 5-pole filters because push-pull amps already suppress the even-ordered harmonics by at least -30 dBc. A bit of work with the new LADPAC software in EMRFD enabled me to crank out a table of filters for all of the bands (160 m – 6 m) using the silver mica caps in my junkbox plus T68-6 toroids. If you click through the photo below, you can get a glimpse of the copper clad enclosure sticking off the output of the amp.

Backyard Linear Test

Last Monday, after a bit of checking of the signal purity with my dummy load and scope, I was satisfied that everything was working OK and took the amp out for a spin on the back porch. I set up the Buddipole in Versatee Vertical configuration with the Low Band Coil. It tuned right up on the upper end of 75 meters, and I had no problems at all checking into the Oregon Emergency Net. One watt out of the 817 gave me about 25 watts out of the linear on 75 meters. I was too busy to do much else with the amplifier until today (the following Sunday), but I was excited to give the amp a try on 6 meters, since that was one of my biggest motiviations for building the thing. The Buddipole was set up in a simple 6 meter dipole configuration about 10 feet above the ground and I parked the 817 on 50.125 MHz. It didn’t take long before I heard N6OR booming into Beaverton from Southern California (grid DM12). I snagged him on the first call, getting a 57 signal report in return and a report of good, clean audio when asked. He was running 100 watts into a quad, which you can see on his QRZ page. I was really thrilled since this was not only a victory for my mad homebrewing skillz, but was also my first 6 meter QSO!

I’ve been parked on 50.125 for most of the afternoon here at the NT7S shack and have picked up a few more QSOs. So far, all reports of the audio quality of the linear have been FB, so I’m satisfied that it (and the LPF) are working as they should be. I think I’ve about worn out my keys on this post, so I’ll wrap it up for today (I always start with modest ambitions on these posts, they they grow exponentially). I’m having way more fun than I should be, and I’m very pleased to be back out of my ham radio funk.

…to let you know that I’m still alive. I actually have been doing some ham radio related activities, but haven’t had much time to blog about that. More about that in a moment…

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the 7th Area QSO Party. In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I not only operated SSB exclusively, but that I also did so running at 100 W. Hopefully I won’t be shunned and cast out from the QRP community for such a transgression. I think I’ll be OK, since most QRPers are forgiving folks.

Actually, it felt good to switch gears a bit and get back to one of the basic ham radio activities. My mic had been gathering dust for quite some time, and I don’t want to be too one-dimensional in my approach to the hobby. I didn’t take the contest too seriously, only operating for a handful of two-hour stretches at a time.

The shack PC is loaded with Ubuntu Linux, and I struggled for a very long time to find a decent contest logger written to natively run in a Linux environment. In the end, I gave up and settled on running SD in a Wine console shell. I was actually quite surprised at how well it worked; which was flawlessly.

Since I did not have my headset mic/footswitch combo dug out of the remaining moving boxes in our garage, I was stuck with the hand mic. Given this, and my unfamiliarity with SD, I decided that I would stay strictly search & pounce for the duration of the contest. There was no way I could run even a small pile-up without screwing up massively. That decision made for a nice leisurely contest. I only bagged 31 QSOs, spread out pretty much evenly amongst 20, 40, and 80 meters. Not exactly a world-class showing, but lots of fun nonetheless. Next year, I’ll try to have my station in better shape so I can mount a more serious effort.

A more sigificant event has also happened to me in the last few weeks. Through a bit of networking, I managed to land a second job as a part-time technician at Buddipole Antennas! To be honest, I didn’t even realized that Buddipole HQ was just a few miles from my house in neighboring Hillsboro until I heard of this opportunity. I’ll be learning the product lines so that I can assist with customer support, as well as a variety of other job duties as needed. So if you are a Buddipole customer, don’t be shocked if I end up answering your phone call or e-mail one of these days. So now you know why I’ve been a bit busy the last few weeks and haven’t had much free time.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with different configurations of the Buddipole system in my backyard. I’m sure you’ll hear a bit more about my efforts in this area in the future. I’m hoping to get out in the field with the Buddipole in the near future to do some true portable operation, especially if I can get the antenna out to the coast sometime soon for some nice low takeoff angle DXing to the other side of the Pacific. Stay tuned for further details…

Being such a long time since our last breakfast get-together, W8NF and I decided it was time for another gathering of the Portland Eggs & Coffee. The call went out far and wide, via the pQRP reflector and the ARRL Oregon section website. This time we had a great turnout, a total of seven participants: Carl WS7L, Dave W8NF, Dan KK7DS, Stewart KE7LKW & Cathy KE7QBI (who made the drive from White Salmon!), Paul (sorry, somehow I missed your callsign in my notes), and me.

KK7DS demos D-RATS

The E&C commenced with a leisurely breakfast meal and chat as folks trickled in. I brought along my new iPhone, so I managed to snap a few photos with my new toy. Although the meeting was called together under the auspices of the pQRP club, the topic often wandered off into other areas of ham radio. I invited Dan KK7DS to come along and give a quick demonstration of his D-RATS cross-platform software, which provides messaging, traffic handling, mapping, and file transfer capability across a D-STAR link. Not the traditional fare for a QRP meeting, but I’m really glad I was able to convince Dan to come along to the meeting to show off the capability of his software and give a lot of us our first introduction to D-STAR. I hope that he will continue to come back to our future E&C get-togethers, as I enjoy hearing about many diverse aspects of our hobby.

NT7S Digi Station

Since we were on a computer kick, I dragged out my Asus eeePC netbook so I could show off my new portable digimode setup. I’ve had the eeePC for a little while, and liked it OK, but I could never get fldigi to work properly on the stock Xandros OS distribution. The sound card input worked fine, but there was a horrible popping that would occur on the output which rendered the netbook useless for digimode transmission. So I just tucked the eeePC away and only took it out on occasions where I needed a very small and portable way to access the Internet. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a modified Ubuntu distribution customized for the eeePC that goes by the whimsical name of Easy Peasy. I’m already an Ubuntu fan, so it took no arm-twisting to get me to try this new distribution. The bottom line is that it works a whole lot better than the Xandros distro that comes with the eeePC, and better yet, the sound card drivers work perfectly. The newest version of fldigi (3.1 at this time) was able to run with absolutely no problems once I resolved the necessary dependencies. Couple this netbook with a Yaesu FT-817NB, a homebrew rig interface, and an EFHWA, and you have a complete portable QRP digimode station.

Stewart KE7LKW brought up the subject of local QRP nets, both CW and SSB. He participates in the local Monday night pQRP net (where most of the participants are our Washingtonian neighbors) but was curious if he was missing any from the Portland area. I tend to shy away from CW nets, since my code is only comfortable at about 15 WPM (I don’t even have a set of paddles, just straight keys). So I didn’t have any suggestions for him. Carl WS7L mentioned the local Oregon Section Net, which is on 3569 kHz daily at 1830 and 2200 local. Other than that, no one seemed to know of anything, so perhaps this is an opportunity for a future activity, especially the possibility of trying a QRP SSB net.

LogiKlipper Proto

LogiKlipper Guts

The final show-and-tell item was the prototype of the upcoming LogiKlipper SSB speech processor by Dave W8NF. He explained to us the theory of operation, then cracked open the top of the case so we could have a peek inside. The prototype consists of a variety of circuit boards stacked on top of each other. At the very bottom (you can barely see it in the photos below) is a printed circuit board (which is control circuitry if I remember correctly). The rest of the functional blocks are on other individual Manhattan constructed circuit boards. Dave is fairly new at Manhattan construction, and he was able to nicely demonstrate the evolution and improvement in his build methods over the various boards. All of them were very well-built and a wonder to behold, but you could see how there was incremental improvements in the confidence of the layout of each board. Unfortunately, time ran out before we were able to have a live demo of the LogiKlipper, but I hope to be able to link to some enlightening videos soon.

LogiKlipper Up Close

I believe that I can speak for everyone in saying that we had an enjoyable time. It seems like the 2+ hours went way too quick, as I could easily have stayed longer shootin’ the bull with the other folks. We’re going to have to do this a bit more often in the future, and perhaps try to branch out with some building activities some time. I don’t know if the locals will be interested in it, but maybe we can try our hand at a simple group build sometime this year. I’ve finally got my garage organized, and that might be a great place to set up some card tables and soldering irons for the build. If you happen to be in the Portland area this sounds interesting, shoot me an e-mail or a Tweet!