amateur-radio

Hi all,

I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve been absent from my usual online presence since Sunday afternoon.

Sunday we were at Montville (near the Glasshouse Mountains) doing a bushwalk through Kondalilla National Park on part of the Sunshine Coast Great Walk. On the way back home after stopping with the group for a drink at Landsborough, we drive along the Bruce Highway towards Brisbane when we noticed the huge storm front.

This storm front looked like it had tinges of green in it — which suggested mother nature might make lots of ice cubes and drop them on my father’s 18-month old car. The rain started pelting down as we got in to Carseldine, and eventually we decided to take refuge at Chermside shopping centre and have dinner while the storm passed.

Everything was uneventful on the trip home for the most part, one set of lights were on the flash… also some localised flooding… until we got through to Keperra. We had planned that evening to drop in on some friends (former next door neighbours, husband & wife, the husband dying of terminal cancer). As we drove passed the Mitchelton State School (I think that’s it), we saw that Dawson Parade was blocked off by a fallen tree, and the traffic was crawling. We inched our way towards home along Samford Road to see trees uprooted (not small ones either), massive flooding in parts. The horror story got worse as we headed over the hill from Keperra to our home suburb of The Gap.

Power lines down, trees over the road… we had to park the car some 400m away and walk the remaining distance due to blocked roads. It was about 20 minutes before we could get it home. Apparently our street had about 1m of water down it when the storm was at its peak.

Our house was undamaged, although a couple of trees copped a battering in the storm and had to be pulled down, and the G5RV antenna I had set up for my HF radio was damaged (still is… I’ll get around to it eventually).

We had no power (except for a 2.5kW petrol generator we own that we ran for a few hours yesterday) from when that storm hit, through to about 5PM Tuesday Evening. One UPS is a write-off on the count of knackered batteries, but otherwise, we’re okay. During the outage, mobile phone services were up and down like a yo-yo… my handheld dual-band transceiver, tuned to the Mt. Cotton (VK4RAX 147.075MHz) and Mt. Coot-tha (VK4RBC 438.525MHz) prooved to be more reliable. (Unfortunately though, I was one of the few amateurs in my street).

A few houses copped about 40cm water through their house, destroying carpets and ruining furniture. One house, that was for sale, wound up with a tree landing on its roof, piercing the awning and the roof in a couple of places. A number of fences also were written off.

Damage was worse around Payne Road. I suspect this is where most of the pictures of damage were taken. It appears the storm first came over Mt. Coot-Tha, hit Payne Road, bounced, hit Waterworks Road, rolled down the hill ploughing through The Gap State School and St. Peter Chanel School (this is where I began my schooling) and up Fish Creek (including the bottom end of our street). From there it continued up Settlement road, ploughing through trees along the road, and decimating the tree-line along the ridge between Keperra and The Gap.

Thanks to the help of everyone in our street and the numerous volunteers, we’ve now mostly got our street back into reasonable shape. The following is not an exhaustive list, I’ve possibly overlooked numerous groups and organisations that have helped in some manner. Some of the organisations that have assisted those in The Gap and therefore I’d like to thank (in no particular order):

• State Emergency Services (some units came from as far away as North Queensland)
• Queensland Police
• RoadTek (Department of Main Roads)
• Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service
• Skilled Engineering
• Energex, Ergon Energy, numerous other companies, some from interstate
• Rural Fire Brigade (some from as far away as Gatton and beyond)
• Brisbance City Council

… any other organisations who assisted… and of course the neighbours who pitched in and helped clean up.

I uploaded my pictures here (taken the morning after). Some more pictures of the storm are available from the Triple M Cage (Brisbane) website.

The other day I commented on my recent purchase of a new headset, and my intention to use it on air. The following are some very rough notes on how to set it all up.

There a couple of things I’ve discovered… one being, if you’re not careful with muting the microphone, it’ll generate a DC offset back to the computer… which with Qtel, is mistaken for a signal, so it’ll transmit a carrier indefinitely.  I submitted a hack around that issue, which is now included in the latest SVN release of svxlink… but needless to say, it caused some embarrasment earlier this week.

The other reason why I bought it… was for use with the HF station.  This set gives me the freedom to walk around the house which simply is not possible with a HF rig as big as the TS-120S attached to a full-size G5RV.  The solution?  Use JACK to patch the audio from the onboard sound card, through to the headset, and vice versa… using the VOX function on the HF set to key it up.  Another bonus is the ability to use tools such as FreqTweak for realtime DSP filtering.

Physical wiring: You’ve got a number of options here.  Usually to interface the radio to the computer, one hooks the “Mic” port to an output port on the sound card, and the “Phones” port to the Line-In on the sound card.

In my case, I had a TAD (Telephony Answering Device) port spare — this port normally hooks to a modem.  Since all I need is a mono input/output… I decided to hook to this port instead.  I found the ferrite beads were needed on each end of the cable… without these, I got lots of RF feedback when I tried to transmit.

Audio Routing within the system… well for basic functionality, everything can be achieved using qjackctl and jackd… however, I wanted the ability to use DSP filtering in both directions.  There is a catch however.  jackd will only talk to one sound card input, and one sound card output at a time.

Now… you can muck around with ALSA’s pcm_multi and pcm_route plugins to make a virtual multi-channel sound card.  But there’s a little known option that is a lot easier.  Enable the netjack USE flag and install jack-audio-connection-kit.  This will install two utilities alongside JACK, alsa_in and alsa_out. Also install qjackctl and freqtweak if you have not done so already.

Fire up qjackctl and adjust the properties to suit your setup.  Choose one of the sound cards as your primary device… the other will be hooked up using the alsa_in/alsa_out tools.  In my case, I have the settings shown in the screenshot below.  The exact settings to use will be dependant on your hardware.  In this case, I chose to use the headset as the primary device, specifying plughw:Headset and hw:Headset as the input and output devices.

Once you have that configured… start the JACK sound server. Now open up a couple of terminal windows and type the following… each line in a different window:
$ alsa_in -D hw:YourOtherSoundInterface
$ alsa_out -D hw:YourOtherSoundInterface

In my case, they were named AudioPCI. Go back to qjackctl and bring up the connections. You should see the alsa_in and alsa_out ports as well as the system ports corresponding to your two sound cards. Fire up freqtweak, set it up for two-channel filtering… then set up your connections as shown:

If it’s not clear… the audio feeds should be:

• alsa_in:capture -> freqtweak:in_1
• freqtweak:out_1-> system:playback_1 + system:playback_2
• system:capture -> freqtweak:in_2
• freqtweak:out_2 -> alsa_out:playback_1

As for keying up the transceiver.  The Kenwood TS-120S features VOX built in, but you’ll find that as you speak, the audio sent to the transceiver gets fed back to the headset — delayed, which throws one’s speech processes.  The workaround here, is to use the mixer mute features to keep the audio going one direction at a time.

Most headsets have two volume up/down buttons… I found it was convenient to bind one of these in KDE to execute the following command:
amixer -q -D hw:AudioPCI sset 'Master Mono' toggle ; amixer -q -D hw:AudioPCI sset 'Capture' toggle

This effectively switches between transmit and receive. Press the button once, you’re transmitting, press again, you’re receiving. Simple. For transceivers that lack a VOX feature… you can also add commands for rig control software that will turn the PTT on and off for you. Alternatively, one can capture the KeyPress/KeyUp using XGrabKey, and thus it behaves like a regular PTT.

This is left as an exercise for the reader — I found the xhkeys source code a help for figuring this out… combining this with hamlib and alsa-lib should allow a decent and usable interface when away from the rig itself.

I’ve had a 40m inverted-V dipole set up along the side of our house for as long as I’ve had the HF set.  Prior to getting the ATU, I was restricted to 40m and 15m which are the resonant frequency bands.

Once I acquired an ATU, I found I was able to tune up 80m… albeit with some limitations in signal radiation.

The 40m dipole consisted of two 10m lengths of speaker wire running from the antenna mast on the house, running down to two plastic tent pegs hammered into the ground.  I suppose the wire was no steeper than about 40 degrees from the horizontal.  This worked okay, but it had some annoying nulls, a notable one towards Ipswich… I tried a purely horizontal configuration, but found the nulls to be even worse.

The proper dimensions for a G5RV, is about 16m each leg, and about 8m of balanced feeder to form a “matching section”.  Well, I couldn’t do much about the length of the matching section, but I figured I might as well try extending the legs of the antenna a bit — nothing ventured nothing gained.  I added the extra 6m to each leg, moved the legs out as far apart as I can.  I tried tuning it up that afternoon, and things seemed to be okay… so I left the set on 3.600MHz LSB and switched it off ready for the AWNOI net.

On calling in, I asked about my signal strength after explaining the changes made.  Well, apparently my signal was a vast improvement on last week’s signal.  A S8~S9 signal (with the transceiver momentarily cutting back power) is now a S9+20dB to many stations.

I haven’t tried other bands yet… but this is a promising start. 🙂

Update: Tried tuning it up on the other bands… the results:

Band__Test_Frequency__Power__SWR__Notes______________________________________________
80m   3.599MHz        50W    2.5  High SWR is expected for a non-resonant antenna.
40m   7.074MHz        50W    1.2
20m   14.165MHz       50W    1.9  Heard a station at 14.170MHz just as I was going
                                  to tune up, which is promising also.
15m   21.190MHz       15W    1.9  This set does not like these bands (15m & 10m)!
10m   28.450MHz       25W    1.6  Might need to consider using the CB whip for these.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Well… this week for me has been a week of firsts for me.

Last Sunday, I managed to make contact with Jason ZL2FT on the North Island of New Zealand.  We were communicating using SSB on 40m — this is the first time I’ve successfully heard and contacted an overseas station.

Okay, New Zealand isn’t exactly a great distance away, but it’s a great start. 🙂

Tuesday, I was listening on 40m, when Rolf DK2MH came crackling in from Germany.  I didn’t try to make contact this time, but there was an abundance of stations trying to work him locally — mostly eastern VK.

Today, I made my first PSK31 contact … once again, on 40m.  I chatted with Laurie VK3AMA for a few minutes.  Nice to be able to put all the theory I had learned at uni regarding PSK to practical use.  I was using BPSK31, and transmitting up to 80W at one point.  (Overkill I know, I did trim it back a little.)

Guess now it’s time to actually get some work done. 😉

The WIA sent me a very welcome letter today.  As of today, I now have a Standard amateur radio license which entitles me to…

• Power: 100W PEP for SSB and CW (I’ll have to check for FM)
• Bands: 80m, 40m, 20m*, 15m, 10m, 6m*, 2m, 70cm, 23cm (* new bands)
• Digital Modes! (timely too … we’re studying various digital modes at university)

If you wish to catch up… the new callsign is VK4MSL.  And yes, it’s kinda hard now to not say FSJL when you’ve been so used to saying it the last few months. 😉

I’ve got some ideas that I’d like to try with digital modes, and also at some point I’d like to do some SSTV too… Priority at this time still is with my university studies, but I’ll be hitting up 20m and doing a bit of digital work in the coming months.

Well, yesterday I received my first QSL card. About a month ago, I was tuning around on 40m and noticed there was a station calling CQ. A station with what I thought was a rather unusual callsign, VI2AMW60.
I sat there for a moment racking my brain trying to think what country VI was… in the meantime I decided to respond. I soon realised okay, the contact wasn’t overseas — but it was a special event station.

We exchanged details briefly and the chap at the other end asked if I collected QSL cards. I normally don’t bother about QSL cards, but since this is a special event station — I figured why not. 😉 He directed me to QRZ.com where the address details were mentioned. I sat down and designed a QSL card to send off. The card I sent off is shown below.

My QSL card design (click to view enlarged in gallery)

I wasn’t expecting anything back… there was mention on the QRZ.com page about including a self-addressed stamped envelope or some such. I wasn’t sure whether that only applied to overseas or who that applied to. Much to my surprise however, I received the following card in the post yesterday (again click to enlarge).  This shows the front and back of the card I received.

My first ever QSL card (click to enlarge)

Well, I’m very happy to have received that card. For what it’s worth, this may be the first and last QSL card I receive under this callsign, since I hope to hear from a WIA assessor about upgrading my license to a Standard license — and with that, I’ll be getting a new callsign. Time will tell there. But to the people of the Illawarra Amateur Radio Society, I thank you for your QSL card. 🙂

Hi all…

I’ve been busy lately, thus haven’t had a lot of time to post on here… but I’ll save the full details of where I’ve been for another post.  People might recall my earlier attempt at a homebrew 2m/70cm whip antenna for a handheld radio.

At present, I’m out at Laidley (actually about 2km outside… near the Vaux and Lowe street intersection) and tried hitting a number of repeaters on 2m and 70cm.  Depending on where I stand, I seem to be reaching these repeaters in that, I get a response when I hit and release PTT:

• VK4RGC Mt. Tambourine 146.700MHz (-600kHz offset) — S7, have to stand in a specific spot
• VK4RDD Toowoomba 146.750MHz (-600kHz offset) — S9
• VK4RZD Mt. Perseverence 438.050MHz (-5MHz offset) — S2, too difficult for practical use (shame since it’s part of the WICEN/QDG network)

The ones I definitely can reach from here however…

• VK4RIL Laidley 147.100MHz (-600kHz offset) — S9, no surprises there
• VK4RAI Ipswich (The Knobby, Glenmorgan Vale) 146.900MHz (-600kHz offset) — S9, have to stand in specific points.

The big surprise however, was this one… VK4RAX.  I can reach it from The Gap no problems with a rooftop antenna and 5W.  Tonight however, I was receiving it S7~S9 (depending on where I stood) and managed to make contact with a few people.  Standing on tiptoe helped — as I haven’t as yet gotten around to building an extension lead that will make the on-hat antenna practical (the coax I’ve got is a little inflexible).

Apparently the signal was quite scratchy, but this is to be expected for a 5W handheld at this distance.  The image below (taken from Google Maps) shows the approximate direct path for the signal and the distance — click for an enlargement.

I’m hardly breaking any world records here, but this is by far my personal best on this handheld.