2m record - almost

Best 2m WSPR I've had for ever, today. G8MCU bidirectionally (a distance of 137 miles) and G4SMX/FCD (what *does* FCD mean?) one way - he wasn't transmitting.203 miles. He heard me.

And decent antenna systems. I'm now using a 3 element delta, horizontally polarised about 18 feet up, with a reasonably good take-off to the south-east. That's about as good as it's going to get round here.

I distinctly remember, in SOTA days, a session from the High Willhays, Dartmoor. In those days, we drove down overnight. I'd left the family sleeping in the car to go for a walk with the dog:

Date:31/Jul/2004 Summit:G/DC-001 (High Willhays) Call Used:M0DEV/P Points: 4 Bonus: 0   

Time	Call	Band	Mode	Notes
07:10z	G0FGW	144MHZ	FM	Chippenham
07:12z	G4NRG	144MHZ	FM	Wayne, Kidderminster
07:20z	M3GLF	144MHZ	FM	Burnham on Crouch
07:25z	M3RBU	144MHZ	FM	Winchester
07:27z	G7RRQ	144MHZ	FM	Salisbury
07:28z	M3PBS	144MHZ	FM	Weymouth
07:30z	G0IMM	144MHZ	FM	IOW
07:31z	G4TKF	144MHZ	FM	Devizes
07:35z	GW1MCD	144MHZ	FM	Cwmbran
07:39z	G0DUQ	144MHZ	FM	Cannock
07:42z	MW0AIE	144MHZ	FM	Pembrokeshire
07:43z	M3FHI	144MHZ	FM	Essex
07:45z	M3RSF	144MHZ	FM	Dudley, W Mids
07:50z	M3VXR	144MHZ	FM	Northampton

 

At least one of these (I can't remember who) nearly lost his eggs and B in his rush to get to the mic. I was on a handheld. Ah, the power of lifts.

So, I'm expecting rather better than this, sometime.

This is what happens when...

...I let a half decent long wire play with my 756proIII for the day on 30m.

Unfortunately, again, all of the tasty dx hears me but I can't hear them. I think the best reciprocal contact (i.e. close to proper QSO) here is Israel.

This is 30m, 5 watts, long wire. More than I normally use with the 817. But there isn't THAT much difference with the an 817 on 2.5W with no preamp, is there? That's 817,2.5W, poor LW, this one is a considerably more expensive Icom 756ProIII, sloghtly better LW and 5W

And a Happy Christmas to All

DX-ing

One of the more annoying features of propagation is that our signals get weaker the further they travel. This adds to the general frisson of working DX and nowhere is this more apparent than with JT65 and the "weak" modes.

Let's talk hypothetically. I see a nice tasty piece of DX pop up on the decode list - let's say it's Hawaii or somewhere quite difficult to get from the UK. I'm running about 10W which, as far as I am concerned is about the reasonable limit (I might occasionally go up to 20W on 160m when it's silent and I know I am not getting out). What almost invariably happens is that a station nearer to the "dx" will call at the same time, and our friend only gets one decode - the stronger one. So I wait till next time. And so on

This makes working pile-ups in JT65 (an odd concept, I know, but it does happen) almost impossible. I've watched one or two and, what happens often is an arms race. The combatants are blissfully unaware of each others existence. All they know is that they are on frequency and the guy isn't responding. So it's a little tweak on the power. After two or three goes the power is quite clearly, shall we say, large, and neither party has got through. Progress is only made when one of the pair gives up.

Compare this with CW, where one can work split, and the callers can (and do...) smear out along a portion of spectrum so that the DX can pick them off one by one.

Now I have a low boredom threshold. I listen to CW pileups and maybe have a halfhearted go, but I don't stand much chance with 50W and a LW. I *can* work DX in JT65, but it's frustrating because there are unscrupulous players with large power knobs.

So, make it your New Year Resolution to support the DX Code of Conduct

The DX Code of Conduct

And, if you want a sad and slightly different tale, try reading Randy Johnson's piece here

30m by accident

I ended up on 30m by accident. The 817 on 80m and the 756 on 160m didn't get on - desensing wasn't the word. The antennas were "coupled" in every sense of the word. So I stuck the 817 on 30m and 5W and left it to it.

This is a couple of hours this evening on my usual unsophisticated antenna system ( a bit of wire).

I must get a real mode out on 30m in the evening.

The interesting thing here is that this particular piece of wire runs pretty much east-west. So how does this work?

Radio Is Odd

I'm perpetually surprised by what keeps me coming back to this curious pastime of ours. I've blown hot and cold about it for years, but today has been an interesting day. Not because of the log - five or so entries, and no great DX - a CW with G3SES in Chester on 80m being memorably because we had a chat. And an attempt at 70cm WSPR with G4VXE being memorably because we didn't.

Working with cheap wires means what whilst I'm playing with CW on 80 and WSPR on 70cm I can leave the 817 (ex-SOTA, battered...) with the Very Long Wire Across End Of Garden running on 160m.

I had thought that 10m would be interesting today. It looked that way about 09:40z, when the continent had an opening to VK land. That didn't metamorphose over to the UK and, byt he time I got home from work at 1PM, 10m was dead.

160m yielded this this afternoon:

I've been on my usual 500mW, and the two DX contacts are "heard me" and, in the case of OZ7IT, it worked both ways - almost a QSO.

What's really interesting is that I have started to use WSPR to look at propagation. Instead of the International Beacon Project. It looks to me as if 10m prop, for example, is much more granular. The opening to VK this morning was quite a small footprint on the map. And the key thing was, there were enough of the WSPR dummies doing all the legwork to produce the map.

Utterly brilliant. Thanks Joe! And the JT9-1 QSO on 17m with OM5NA was a nice catch. He was buried under QRO RTTY. Didn't stop JT9-1 working.

And today's log contains 6 entries. Content!

JT9-1 success

I downloaded v0.5 of the JT9-1 experience from Joe Taylor's Website - you want WSJT-X - and it's a MUCH better experience. It all seems to work nicely.

I've tried it relatively low power (around 10W) on 160 metres, and have worked my way up to middle europe on it. The QSOs are reliable, it tunes well, and it's acquired some of the enhancements that HT65-HF has - the red and green bars, the click to continue the QSO. And it is MUCH more spectrum frugal than JT65 - and yes, it even gives positive reports sometimes

All good. I look forward to working you :-)

More distance stats

Back to statistics. This time, I've just looked at the distance. This looks pretty Poisson-like, and I need to think why.

(Click the chart to make it bigger) Each column is a 1000km slice. There are obvious reasons for the steps in it. The second column being bigger than the first is skip. Sub-1000km QSOs are rarer because of skip. The first step at 5000 km is the Eastern seaboard of the United States coming in. To the left of that, there's a gentle fall off as we progress over Europe (bear in mind I've popped all the bands into one pot here).

The second step is as we cross the relatively barren and difficult lands of India and China to Japan, thence to Australia and New Zealand, who lurk off on the right hand end. 20,000 km is about as far as you can do until SETI makes some discoveries.

So, clearly it gets more difficult with increasing distance (no surprises there). But it's also influenced by the difficulty of working DX in certain countries because of the lack of amateur activity there. There are, for example, only an estimated 800 hams in PR China - whereas there are 1.3 million in Japan.

But then, 800 is more than the total number of us involved in WSPR (about 500).

Sources:

• http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_ama_rad_ope-lifestyle-amateur-radio-operators
• http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/stats

Footnote - where is Australia on that data about ham operators? New Zealand? Anyone know a better source?

Why WSPR is so interesting

I'm beginning to realise why a lot of us post WSPR screenshots. Basically, WSPR breaks all the rules that you and I have been taught about dx, antenna systems and power.

When I read the received wisdom about "DXing", it tells me that I need to have a Very High Antenna. My RF-oriented friends will tell me that I need to use Power

I know we're on the top of a sunspot cycle, but regular readers will realise that I am deliberately hobbling myself here: my WSPR 10m setup is an 817 running 500 mW, and a bit (I mean a bit) of wire, draped carelessly over a shed end, with a few metres in free space. It gets up about 2.5m at the highest point.

Hence my surprise this morning to discover, after its first TX cycle, that VK2UB is hearing me. I am, well, gobsmacked. VK2UB is on the eastern edge of Australia, 16,800 km from M0DEV.

One of the things WSPR is teaching me is that propagation matters far more than I ever thought before. When a band is "open", there is absolutely no need for Power. QRM apart, the connections just work, like VK2UB above, and a session on 2m with G4VXE a few days ago, when milliwatts did 140km on 2m. When it's closed, it's closed.

I'm almost thinking of "Power" as trying to force something that isn't going to go. It's not really a solution.

I think that's an argument for QRP. Oh, and a nice email from eqsl to tell me that they have enabled JT9 as a mode :-)

500mW WSPR

I said to myself, when I started this blog, that i wasn't going to start posting WSPR (or PSKR) maps showing how well I'm doing. So I'm not going to post the map, or anything. For one thing, it's probably not very good in comparison to many

I am running a pretty minimal setup here. The 817 is on 500mW, as low as it will go without gadgetry. The "antenna" is a random piece of wire of unknown length I found coiled up in the garage. The only concession I made recently was to lift the wire out of the gutter and position it in the air, with the help of a pole at the far end. I'm running this sophisticated piece of wizardry through an Elecraft T1 automatic ATU. There is no balun. The other half is connected to an earth stake, part of the more sophisticated end of the shack. If you ask any radio-aware friends how good this setup would be for DX, I think they'd probably choke with laughter

So, it's been running since about 8AM this morning. I have heard VE3KYK (5400km), VA3ZLT (5500 km) and UT7GH (2600km). And I'm hearing AG0T at 6300km

But I award myself the DX prize for a two-way WSPR with K5CGM (7100 km, in Jenks, OK). Shame they can't be QSLd....

VHF JT65

Tim, G4VXE, and I had a short session this afternoon with JT65 on 2m, using the JT65-HF program, just because we both had it configured.

We started out on 144.165.000 using 10W each, into a collinear at each end. My collinear, just so you get the picture, is screwed to a shed wall. I can touch the bottom of it. The copy was, by HF standards, astoundingly easy - we exchanged -05 (him at my end) and -09. Tim dropped to 1W, and I still had very easy copy at this end, well above the noise floor.

A back of an envelope calculation suggested that we'd hit -24dB at 150mW. This is over 140 km, with "poor" aerials. I can't get that low with any of my kit - pout!

There is a lot of mileage to JT65 and its siblings on VHF. I'd like to try this on 23cm

VHF WSPR

During that interlude of "poor" propagation yesterday I decided to have a go at setting WSPR up on 2m.

The tricky bit was finding the agreed frequency. After a bit of searching, 144.489.000 seemed to be the agreed one (WSPR itself told me a dial of 144.488.000....)

Set it up and left it, and was very pleased to see G4VXE pop up, both ways

The intriguing thing here is that if you look at his screenshot of the same QSO here, you'll see that I am at the top of his passband, whereas Tim is at the bottom of mine. Somewhere or other, there's a discrepancy of around 100Hz (I was TXing around 500). I suppose that's not too bad for uncalibrated rigs at VHF, but it is a bit disconcerting. Mine is an almost new TS-2000. Wonder what Tim was using?

I will certainly be on 144.489 dial using WSPR again. Will you join me?

The Bear Garden: 20m JT65

I've continued to play with QRP on digital modes, and elected to try 20 metres JT65 this morning, whilst it was fairly quiet. Bear in mind this is QRP not qrp - I am using a piece of wire draped over a drainpipe, not low power to a beam antenna

Here's the picture after fifteen minutes of operating at 2.5W on the 817 - so about 2W, by the time it reaches the drainpipe.

- which is encouraging!

My 2.5W has made it to North and South America, Japan and most of Europe.

Completing a QSO was a little more involved - there was a QRO RTTY station right in the middle of the range of 14.076. I remembered that my 817 has a Collins filter for CW in which, fortuitously, works in DIG mode and, fortuitously, is almost exactly the right width for a JT65 signal to fit in it. Pop the NAR button, TX, and RU3VQ, just under 3000km away, completed with me. That, because of domestic issues, is the end of this morning's experiment.

JT65- the appeal

I've been trying to think what appeals to me about JT65. It's an odd mode to use - you're restricted to a formulaic exchange of position, signal reports and that's it. And a full QSO takes 7 (seven) minutes. PSK31 is positively sprinty after an hour of JT65. PSK31 got me back into radio about ten years ago. I blow hot and cold, and the really narrow bandwidth of PSK31, the technical appeal of the whole thing got me going again. I even sat down and learned CW to get onto HF (I was a G7 at the time - VHF only). But the rubber stamp QSOs - inevitable when I suspect most amateurs cannot type, and the inevitable RSQ 599 reports are irritating. So, PSK31 got me onto HF, and I migrated to CW. But JT65 has a number of appeals over CW and PSK. Firstly, the signal reports are genuine. You know you're being a LID (-03) or using your power justifiably (-24), and can adjust accordingly. You realise how fickle propagation is when you get a -03 from Italy, and a -20 from south east France five minutes later. Or how directional your antenna is, or how variable other amateur's rx performance is.....

The other really neat thing is that you can see, using pskreporter and to a certain extent, the RB (Reverse Beacon network), how successful you are being, even if no-one is prepared to talk to a lowly, common as muck M0.

So I keep coming back to it. I can work DX using 10W off a low LW hidden in the trees at the side of my garden. I can't do that in CW or PSK as easily.