Camping + radio ..

Posted on 2011-07-18 by James

I am excited to get out into the woods and enjoy some time away from the city. I’ll be camping with my wife and her extended family which is something we look forward to every year. This year we will be spending a little more time up at the campsite, which will give me a chance to play radio for a bit while we are there. This will be my first camp-site portable operation so I am sure I will have lots of things to improve upon for future outings – however, I think that I am reasonably well prepared.

With any luck, the solar weather will cooperate – I have no good way of checking the conditions outside of keying-up on a local repeater and asking anybody who is monitoring. Fingers crossed.

I will be trying mostly digital stuff on 20m though I may try other bands as well (using my G5RV jr).

Posted in Operating | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Visit to RAC HQ

Posted on 2011-07-14 by James

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by RAC HQ in Ottawa to drop off my membership application in person (due to a few minor issues with the online registration for new members).
While I was there I had an opportunity to meet a few fellow Radio Amateurs and listen in on some very interesting conversation about the 500kHz testing being done.
I took the opportunity to mention that I am looking for people to give talks for the OVMRC and I think that I may have a great lead on a radio-related talk, though I won’t give any details out at this point 😉

In any event, it was nice to stop by the RAC office to see the folks who run the place.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

First (portable) HF contacts as VE3BUX

Posted on 2011-06-16 by James

Success!

I headed out this afternoon (with my patient wife in-tow) to a quiet parking lot on Davidson Rd to give the antennas another shot in another part of town. After stringing up the G5RV lite, I managed to tune the SWR down on 20m and dialed in 14.070 with success. The Ft-857D was pulling far-off signals out of the air nicely. I connected my little netbook to the radio via the auxiliary sound output and fired up Fldigi. After some levels adjustments, etc, I was decoding PSK-31 traffic. There was still a lot of noise in general, though I suspect that is a result of using a dipole and not a more directional antenna system.

After lots of fiddling and so forth, I managed to make a PSK-31 contact in a very low-tech, red-neck kind of way: I simply held the microphone a few inches away from the netbook speakers, held the PTT and clicked “transmit”. I admit it is far from elegant, however, it did net me a very brief QSO with SM6UQL in Sweden, representing a contact of approximately 5700km. Going forward, I think I will make an isolating sound-card interface cable since my likely choices of radio lie between the FT-857D and the FT-897D. I am still not sure which radio best represents what I am looking for, though I am getting used to the ergonomics of the FT-857D and its menu-driven system.

After some more playing, the bands appeared to be suffering from QRN. I switched over to JT65 and “listened” for a while. The signals did appear to fade in and out quite badly, but despite adverse conditions, I made contact with G8BKE on 14.076 at 1836UTC.

Things are looking up for me! I hope to have another chance to try out the radio setup again soon – this hands-on opportunity is something I really should try to take full advantage of (thanks Bob!). Perhaps I’ll have another couple of quality time with the air-waves soon.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

If you can’t hear them … then what?

Posted on 2011-06-14 by James

So as the saying goes: “if you can’t hear them, you can’t work them!” More on that in a moment …

Back from the honeymoon and getting settled in to our routines again has given me an opportunity to play radio.
A few days ago I met with Bob Sharp (VA3QV) who generously offered to let me test-drive a perfectly functional Yaesu FT-857D that he owns.
I have a couple of weeks to test the rig out to see if it is what I am comfortable using as my first modern HF rig (I own a FT-101EE in rather rough shape).

So today I managed to get out and string up my G5RV lite antenna that I purchased a couple of months ago, and hooked it up to the radio.
I pulled a fully-charged battery from my 1985 Suzuki Samurai off-road rig to power the radio whilst sitting blissfully in the shade, ready to make contacts left and right. Or so I thought.

So with everything hooked up, all levels checked and at appropriate values, I was not amused when all I heard was noise (S5-S7).
With my MFJ antenna tuner tweaked for maximum noise, I tuned around the 20m band looking to hear something, anything! Alas, radio silence.
Knowing full well that Bob tested the radio before loaning it out, I knew that the problem was after the SO-239 connector on the back of the radio.
I double checked all the cables and they were are secured as they should have been. Another quick listen and there was a faint signal!
Being a technician by trade, I thought – that’s odd … must be an intermittent problem, which suggests it is a cabling issue.
A quick check of my cables revealed that one end of my 50′ coaxial cable was not properly terminated in the PL-259 connection – this is a custom cable I purchased from a local retailer which is a pity. So with the antenna pig-tail just off the ground, I moved my whole setup closer to eliminate the length of defective coax (I did not have a replacement PL-259 to solder on).

Good news: I was hearing some extremely faint radio traffic!
Bad news: 1. what I did hear as intelligence was extremely weak, 2. the background noise was still very high as reported by the radio

I double checked all other patch-cables and everything was just fine, much to my chagrin.
After confirming that the antenna was in fact tuned for maximum noise / minimum SWR with an AM carrier, I felt defeated.

It looks like I will be making/buying a 4:1 balun to string up a purpose-cut 20m dipole to test with in the hopes that I just have a bum antenna.

.. so much for playing radio today. I was really hoping to make a few contacts before having to move on to other tasks. Maybe another day soon!

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 3 Comments