Summits on the Air Activation. SOTA G/SE-011

 

Last Saturday I activated Wilmington Hill, SOTA G/SE-011. My equipment was very similar to my activation of Firle Beacon (SOTA G/SE-010 http://m0bgr.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/summits-on-air-sota-firle-beacon.html) a few weeks ago, except this time I carried a bit more water as it was much hotter. I took the train to Eastbourne, but thankfully this time we were free of the dreaded engineering works.

On arrival at Eastbourne, I walked through the town, a rather tedious trek through boring suburbs, with little of interest, to access the South Downs Way long-distance footpath. The Downs, above Eastbourne are crisscrossed with many footpaths and it did not take me long to set off on the wrong one, having ignored my map and some obvious cues about which way I was going.  In that situation I should have retraced my steps and got on the right path, but I decided to go for a ‘quicker’ route back, which lead me further astray. In all, I probably lost a good half hour of valuable operating time through multiple navigational mistakes. If I do this route again, I think I will take the Brighton bus, or even a cab, to Eastbourne Downs golf club, from where the route is fairly straight forward, thereby missing the delights of Eastbourne’s suburbs and saving perhaps an hour.

Not the Way to Wilmington Hill

 

The walk from there is much more pleasant but the path climbs up to 200m before dropping into Jevington village, at just 50m ASL, before climbing back up to Wilimington Hill 214m above sea level. This makes this summit rather hard work for just one SOTA point.  I stopped at the ‘Eight Bells’ pub in Jevington to top up my water bottles and was greeted by very friendly bar staff who were happy to fulfil my request. Unfortunately they only have a very limited snacks suitable for walkers. Feeling hot and frustrated by my earlier errors, it was very tempting to abandon my activation and to spend the afternoon in this delightful hostelry, but I pressed on, reaching my destination in the early afternoon.

En route, to and from the summit, I called CQ on 2m and 4m FM but was not rewarded with any replies.

The summit is well worth the climb and commands great views of the coast and southern England. Setup was quicker than the previous activation as I did not want to lose any more time and I have made new radials for my Super Stick HF antenna, which are much less prone to tangling. They are also white so visible even in long grass. I worked Mike, 2E0ZXW, on 40m first. He was quite close by but had trouble reading me so I guess he was on the edge of my ground wave. Thanks for persisting Mike.  Most of my 13 QSOs were on 20m or 17m, both CW and SSB. Unfortunately 12m and 10m were dead. I tried a few CQ calls, but no one replied. I called CQ several times on 2m and 4m FM, but the only reply came on 4m from Frank, G3VPS, who I worked previously on the Firle Beacon activation.   

M0BGR/P on Wilmington Hill G/SE-011

I packed up at 1630 GMT as I wanted to leave plenty of time for getting lost on the way back. Fortunately this did not happen and I made it back to Eastbourne station in a little over two hours. My equipment worked well. The band conditions were not great; 10 and 12 closed. There was long skip on 15m so I heard K6YRA in California and W4AZB in Tennessee but they did not hear me and I did not work anyone on that band. VHF/FM was again disappointing with the lack of activity (apart from Frank, G3VPS) and I am wondering if it’s worth taking the kilogram or so of radio, spare batteries etc. for these bands on these trips. I had wanted to do a comparison test the new home-made radials for the Super Stick antenna. Time precluded this so I will do it in my back garden where conditions should be more controlled.  

 

Roberts Unologic Radio, DAB and DAB+ (DAB Plus)

As you know from previous posting, I really like the Roberts Unologic DAB radio (see 13 July 2012, http://m0bgr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/roberts-dab-radios.html). So much so that I recently bought another as a gift for someone.

 

Roberts Unologic DAB / DAB+ Radio

I was surprised, when I opened it, to see a label on the front saying DAB+ (DAB Plus, a more advanced digital broadcasting system).

Label on New Roberts Unologic Radio

 

Regular readers will know I have written previously about DAB vs DAB+ (see July 2012 http://m0bgr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/fm-switch-off-ofcom-response.html and July 2011 http://m0bgr.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/fm-radio-switch-off.html ) I strongly believe UK, by being an early adopter of digital radio, has chosen the wrong system.  With its proposals to drop FM broadcasting (and so free up the spectrum for sale) UK Government is trying to force us to all use the unsatisfactory and obsolete DAB broadcast standard when a much better DAB+ system is widely used in other parts of the world.

I emailed Roberts to ask them what was going on and here is their reply:

“All our new production will have the combination of DAB/DAB+

If the box and the information states DAB/DAB+/FM then it does have all these functions.

The UK uses DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) mode and other countries such as Australia, Switzerland, Germany use the DAB+ mode.

As we now supply these countries it was necessary to add DAB+ to the formats although there are no written in stone plans to change to DAB+ in the UK in the near future.

The operation of the set would be the same with either DAB or DAB+”

It is good to see that at least one manufacturer, Roberts, has seen sense and is now including DAB+ capability in its new radio production. Taking this reply at face value, it seems that the user does not need to do anything to tune these radios to DAB+ broadcasts when they become available.

So, for purchasers of new Robert’s products there is apparently an upgrade path when UK government is forced to abandon DAB and go over to DAB+. I am not sure about other manufacturers or older radios, but please post any information you have here. I also wonder how many people have been conned into buying radios that will become obsolete by the ‘I love DAB’ publicity campaigns over the last few years.  

Summits on the Air (SOTA), Firle Beacon

I have been off the air for a while. Building works at home meant I had to dismantle my station and it has taken me a while to get it back together again. I have also not done much portable operation for while so I decided last weekend that I would activate a Summits On the Air (SOTA http://www.sota.org.uk/) summit, Firle Beacon, SOTA reference G/SE-010 (WAB TQ40, JO00BU) on the South Downs Way south of London.

When doing portable operations, I do not believe in driving to a car park, walking 50m or worse still operating out of the back of a car. For me portable is  public transport and boots. So, first thing on Saturday morning saw me at my local station en route to Firle. Unfortunate it was a week of ‘Engineering Works’ so the journey took longer than usual. My train pulled into Southease station at 10:30am. After a quick trip to the near-by YHA café (http://www.yha.org.uk/hostel/south-downs) to top up food stocks it was time to hit the trail. The walk to Firle is about 8km. The first part is quite steep with a 200m climb up onto the downs. 90 minutes later I arrived at Firle. On the way, I put out occasional CQs on 2m and 4m, but no one responded.

For this expedition I took a Yaesu FT-817, two hand-helds (Yaesu VX-5R for 2m and a Wouxun KG-699E for 4m, which I review elsewhere in this blog). The antenna was a Super Stick and the power was provided by a 7Ah SL AB. That, plus a small tool kit, First-aid pouch, food ‘n’ drink took my pack up to my self-imposed limit of 10kg.

Set up took about 40 minutes and I started with CQ on 40m. This did not produce any response, but I heard M0SIY/P, Simon, so I called him and got a 3-3 report from him. The Super Stick does not produce great results on 40m, but considering its overall length, this is not surprising.  I switched to 20m SSB and rapidly logged another five QSOs – enough to ‘qualify’ the activation for SOTA. I tried 17m and 15m with little success.

M0BGR/P at Firle Beacon, Easter Weekend

The early part of the day was bitterly cold and dull, with a northerly wind, and I considered moving on to another summit, or even retiring to a local pub especially when rain threatened, but I decided to stay put and do some more operating. By mid-afternoon the sun came out and the wind veered little which made everything more pleasant (except for a radio-controlled glider pilot who lost his lift!).  Later in the afternoon, 17m became a lot more active and I was able to work a few stations on CW and by 5pm, when I needed to pack up, I had 17 QSOs in the log. Best DX was UT7IA on 12m SSB at 2255km – not bad for 5W and a small vertical. You have good ears Uri!

A real disappointment was VHF/FM. I took along a couple of hand-helds to cover 2m and 4m. I broke off operating HF about every half hour to call CQ and did the same while hiking to and from the railway station. From the top of the South Downs I should have been easy to hear up to 100km away, which means most of SE England and parts of France, but I got only one response for my troubles, G3VPS on 4m – thanks Peter. VHF FM is the entry level for many newly qualified hams, but they will soon be put off if no one comes back to their early calls. Can I ask that you monitor FM whenever you can and reply to any calls you hear?

My equipment worked well during this expedition. I had a minor fault with the FT-817, the narrow CW filter stopped working, but as I could live with this I decided not to dismantle the radio on top of the hill. I was very impressed with the Super Stick antenna on 20m and above. A nice thing about operating on top of a hill is how quiet the HF bands sound, compared with my usual urban location.  It was also nice to take some time to chat to other walkers who were on the South Downs Way and explain why I was doing amateur radio on such a cold windy day.

5 MHz NoV

I decided to apply for my 5 MHz (60m) Notice of Variation so I can operate on that band. The process for Full licence holders here in UK was very easy and all I had to do was to fill out an on-line form on the RSGB (www.rsgb.org) web site and the NoV was emailed straight back to me.

I have not been on the air yet but spent some time listening This is a complicated band so I thought I had better get to know it before transmitting.

Sked anyone?

73 Dave

Software Defined Radio (SDR) - First Steps

I have often seen adverts in the amateur radio press for Software Defined Radios (SDR) and wondered why they are so expensive. During a discussion at my radio club (Cray Valley - www.cvrs.org), I learned that a TV/Radio Dongle receiver can provide the hardware for SDR. I found a suitable dongle (RTL2832 plus either R820 or E4000 chip set) on Ebay; ten UK Pounds from Hong Kong so, being the last of the big spenders, I went ahead and ordered. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I downloaded a copy of SDR Sharp  (SDR#) and the installation instructions (http://www.sdrsharp.com ).
 

There are some hardware things that I needed to do while waiting for the dongle. The dongle has a tiny MCX antenna plug. Fortunately Maplin sells an adaptor cable to standard TV socket (part N59LN) and I had already made a TV-BNC cable for another project, so this was not a problem. These dongles are very vulnerable to high levels of RF, so if you transmit while receiving on the dongle it will fry. The solution is to solder a couple of reversed diodes into the adaptor cable to limit the maximum input voltage.

The dongle arrived. The package also contained a remote control (only useful if you want to use the dongle for its intended purpose, but being radio amateurs we don’t do that do we?), a whip antenna (which works surprisingly well) and a software disk. Do not install this software as this will conflict with SDR#. The only tricky bit was changing the dongle driver from the Windows default to RTL 2832. To do this, you need a piece of software called Zadig (link on the SDR# site) and I also had to temporarily disable Heuristic protection in Norton which took violent exception to what I was trying to do.

All set, and Norton back to full protection, I plugged in the dongle and fired up the software. Operation was quite intuitive, but I started with the FM broadcast band – all was well and all the expected stations showed up on the display any gave me some strong, predictable signals to set up and learn how to use the software.

 

 

The dongle, with the E4000 tuner, covers from about 24MHz up to 1.7GHz, so it is a broadband device covering all the amateur bands from 12m up to 23cm. That’s the good news; the bad news is that there is no front-end filtering. Also these dongles mix the RF signal down to a few tens of kilohertz, to input to computer sound cards, so spurious signals are a real problem, particularly on the lower bands. For example I get a strong ‘Classic FM’ signal in the middle of the 10m band. It is possible to manage these phantom signals by carefully choosing the ‘Centre’ frequency and adjusting the RF gain, which can be accessed through the ‘Configuration’ menu, but my next move will be to build some filters to clean up the input signals.

I have also experimented with receiving  some digital modes using this SDR receiver. It is possible to patch the microphone socket to the speaker socket on most PCs so the digital modes can be decoded with standard software. There are a couple of drawbacks: you can’t hear the audio signal and the signal gets converted from digital to audio then back to digital again. There is a better solution – a piece of software called Virtual Audio Cable (  http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm ), which does what the name suggests, but without the Digital/Audio conversions. With VAC, it is possible to ‘split’ the system so the audio output can be heard, recorded or shared with other programmes. I have successfully decoded RTTY, PSK-31 etc.

My Dongle SDR has several advantages: it is very small and everything is controlled from the keyboard so easy to configure. For example, filter bandwidth can be adjusted very precisely and easily.  The waterfall display, which can be adjusted, allows large segments of a band to be viewed at once and you can see when stations come and go then click on the ones you want to listen to. Combining the SDR with the VAC software provides a very flexible setup. For example, I can operate digi-modes while listening to my favourite music on the same computer. 

This SDR radio will never be as good as a full communications receiver, but it was definitely worth a tenner and I hope its performance will be even better with some front-end filtering. It has opened lots of opportunities for experimentation that were not available to me before and after this initial experiment, I may be tempted to invest in an SDR transceiver, but that is for another day.

10m (28 MHz) Activity

At long last the solar cycle has improved and the 10m (28 MHz) band has been 'open' during daylight hours recently.

Last weekend was the CQ World Wide (www.cqww.com) international amateur radio contest. This is a major event and as the weather was so bad over the weekend I was able to spend a bit of time operating. I decided to run just low power (5 Watts QRP, this is about the same power as a Christmas tree light!) and just one band - 10m. I was using my Yaesu FT-817 with a home-made vertical dipole in my loft. Conditons were quite good and I managed to work 116 other stations from the Middle East to USA East Coast.

Also on the 10m band, today I was able to pick up an amateur radio repeater, N2ACF/R, ( http://www.rra.net/ ) which is located in Rockland County north of New York City. This was carrying traffic for the amateur radio emergency net in preparation for the arrival of Tropical Storm Sandy, that is widely predicted to cause major damage in the New York area. I wish everyone in the path of the storm well and, while I hope the amateur radio support is not needed, I am pleased to see that the capability is available if needed.

Dave

6 Metre SMIRK Contest WInner

I am not a major amateur radio contester, but if I hear a contest in progress I will sometimes join in to give away a few points and to keep up my skill level. Occasionally, I will even submit a log.

So it was last June that I heard stations calling CQ Contest on 6m. A quick check of the contest database, which I have on my iPhone, gave me the rules for this SMIRK contest (http://www.smirk.org.) Conditions were good so I worked a few stations, sent my log off to the organisers and thought no more about it.

To my surprise, this week I received an envelope postmarked Pennsylvania and inside was a certificate confirming I had won first place in England! I checked the web site and sure enough, there I was. Unfortunately, I was the only station from England to submit a log which rather took the gloss off my achievement, but this is the only time I have ever come anywhere near the top of any contest so I don’t feel too bad about the lack of competition.

My 6m station is very modest – FT-817 running just 5 Watts and a home-made non-rotatable dipole, fabricated from some old  22mm copper pipe in the loft. But even with this, I can work all over Europe and occasionally beyond when there is a good E-opening.

So, it is worth entering contests even with a very modest score, and thanks to the SMIRK 6m club for running this event.

Dave M0BGR