AA8IA Amateur Radio

Had a little time so I fired up the radio and checked on vhfdx.info. Looked like some activity to the south, but none spotted from an Ohio station. I turned the Moxon south and managed to get:

PV8ADI and 9Y4VU on CW as well as KP4EIT and KP4BJD on SSB

KP4BJD, Gabriel, was interesting in that he was about 51/52 when he heard me call him, and then once I repeated my call a couple times he realized I was a stateside station and he turned the beam from Europe to me. Then of course he was 59+. He said I should be happy in that I broke a European DX pileup that he was working. He thought I was a PP station. At any rate, he turned his beam towards Ohio and we talked for a minute. Helluva nice guy. You don’t run across too many people working pileups who take the time out to swing the beam away from the action to work a wimpy stateside station. Thanks, Gabriel. You made my day, brother.

Here in the Ohio Valley we’ve been plagued by a lot of storms since April. Many of them brought mostly rain, but some have been quite severe with lightning acccompanying them.

This weekend is no exception. There has been near constant rain with periods of really nasty thunderstorms. Not only is it very difficult to work a contest with ever-present lightning crashes, but it’s always a risk to do so.

In addition, there has been no decent Sporadic-E on 6m for days — so much for the VHF Sprint tonight. Today there has been pisspoor propogation on the HF bands (at least 10-20), which didn’t bode well for CQ-M, the FOC QSO Party or the Volta RTTY contest.

To add insult to injury, the damned grass is growing ever taller while the forecast indicates no hope for abatement of the rain for a few more days.

This is definitely a weekend I could do without.

On another note, I’m hoping [and planning] to get a decent ground system in, the generator tied into the AC mains, and some lightning protection for my antennas so that I don’t have to take every damned antenna down when there is a threat of a storm. Of course, nothing can guarantee protection from direct lightning strikes, but as it stands right now I have no protection and have to take all sorts of precautionary measures in the event of storms. That’s really a buzzkill for ham radio. A lot of ham radio ops couldn’t care less about lightning strikes, but I’m not one of them. It makes no difference if I have $1000 or $100,000 worth of equipment, and it makes no difference if insurance would cover a strike or not. The bottom line is that lightning is an extreme nuisance, at minimum, and a killer if you’re unlucky. I prefer not to take any chances.

I’ve played around with EZNEC briefly before, but not enough to have really learned anything useful. But, yesterday I decided I’d install it again and attempt to do some really basic modelling of my current primary antenna.

A few things of note:

1. Primary antenna is a 105′ long inverted V with the apex at 37′ and the ends at 0′. Yes, you read that correctly — ends at 0′. There is an approximately 39′ section of 450-ohm ladderline feeding this, which then runs into a DX Engineering 4:1 current balun and then into my LDG AT100Pro tuner. The center support is at ground level of the basement of our ranch home. The antenna wires are parallel with the back of the house and are approximately 13′ from the back of the house. The length of this wire is oriented nearly N-S (about 10-12 degrees W of N. Broadside would be nearly E-W (about 10-12 degrees S of W
2. Secondary antenna is an Alpha Delta DX-EE, which is a shortened [using a coil] 40m dipole with separate parallel dipoles for 15 and 10m. This is about 11′ off the ground on one end and 35′ off the ground at the other end, with a slight droop in the middle due to having no center support and the weight of the LMR400 that is attached to it. This ends of this dipole are oriented NW-SE. Broadside to this antenna would be SW-NE.

My first antenna was the DX-EE. It worked well enough for being so low, but only on 20m through 10m. It would tune on 80m but lacked any efficiency. It tuned fine on 40m, but it’s shortened and really didn’t perform like I wanted it to. Because I primarily like domestic contests, I wanted/needed to have 40m/80m performance. That is why I decided to put up the Vee.

Obviously these are both compromise antennas because they are shortened antennas for the lowest bands I want to use them on. Besides, they are way to low to the ground.

At any rate, when I got the 80m wire up I was pleasantly surprised at the performance. I was having great fun in the domestic contests and considered this antenna to be a great success. I was hearing and working stations very well that I couldn’t even hear on the DX-EE. Life was good.

I then participated in the ARRL International DX contest this year (CW) and realized how poor even this antenna is for non-domestic contests. So far I haven’t found a way to really improve upon that as far as antenna design / height goes. But I decided to do some modeling in EZNEC of the basic 80m Vee itself, as it is erected in my yard.

What I saw in EZNEC shed some serious light on things.

3.525 Mhz 3D plot with ends at 0′. Mostly omnidirectional with some favorability in the direction parallel to the dipole.

3.525 Mhz 2D plot with the ends at 0′. Max gain -0.5 dbi (-2.65 dbd).

3.525 Mhz 3D plot with the ends at 8′. Omnidirectional.

3.525 Mhz 2D plot with the ends at 8′. Max gain 5.07 dbi (2.92 dbd).

Lifting the ends off of the ground 8′ results in not only a more omnidirectional pattern but a remarkable improvement in maximum gain to 5.07 dbi (2.92 dbd).

Certainly this reveals that what the experts tell you is true — GET THOSE ENDS OFF OF THE GROUND! In my case, it looks like I would gain 5.5 db by simply elevating the ends of the dipole. This has to be the cheapest and easiest 5 db that I’d ever gain.

Similar remarkable results can be seen on the 40m (7.025 Mhz) plots for this same antenna, visible below.

7.025 Mhz 3D plot with ends at 0′. Pattern fairly omnidirectional but favors 45 degrees broadside to the wire.

7.025 Mhz 2D plot with ends at 0′. Max gain -0.11 dbi (-2.26 dbd).

7.025 Mhz 3D plot with ends at 8′. Omnidirectional pattern.

7.025 Mhz 2D plot with ends at 8′. Max gain 5.97 dbi (3.82 dbd).

NAQP RTTY contest is this weekend. I’m hoping to get the ends elevated up off the ground before the end of the day today.

I’ll be off the air for the Christmas season. Not much going on in the contesting world, and more importantly there is a lot going on at this time of year that takes precedence.

I’ve resumed my winter scanner monitoring hobby and will return to amateur radio sometime early in the New Year. I’ve still got a shortened 40m wire up, just in case. But the main antenna is down and much cabling and eyesore have been removed.

It’s been a really enjoyable year for me with regard to contests and QSO parties. I’ve improved upon the station. I’ve worked quite a few new DXCC. I’ve got Basic WAS and am very close to WAS on two or three bands. I’ve learned quit a bit. I’ve regained my CW code copy abilities. I’ve had the privilege of working many decent amateur radio ops. All in all a great year!

Let me start off by saying that I wasn’t sure I wanted to put a significant effort into this contest. Thursday night we get a call to say we are invited to dinner at my niece’s places on Saturday. She is an hour away and the dinner was set for 4 PM. That put the icing on the cake. I not only couldn’t refuse the generous invitation, but I wouldn’t want to. It’s always a pleasant time up in beautiful Carroll Co. I also knew that Sunday the family would be gathering here, which is what happens most Sundays. Between those two events, that’s 8 hours of daylight missed.

I also didn’t want to force myself to wake up nice and early Sat/Sun just to work the contest. In order to work any DX for mults and to pass QTCs, I needed to work 10/15/20m for the most part. My 80m doublet doesn’t do much DX on 40/80 in contest pileups. Of course, it’s not actually a “performer” on 20-10m either. I do have an Alpha Delta DX-EE that I switch in and out on those bands, and i use whichever one provides the best receive signal on the station I’m wanting to work. However, the DX-EE is even lower (average 20′), which doesn’t cut it for DX.

Because of all of the above, I knew I wasn’t going to get much DX nor pass much QTC traffic. One great thing about WAE DX RTTY is that any station can work any station and QTCs can be passed between any two continents. This provides much more competition since there are many more participants than there would be if you could only work European stations.

Being as ill-prepared as I am, I did not test the QTC system in N1MM prior to the contest, which means that some non-NA station was going to be my guinea pig. That just happened to be DQ4W, who was extremely strong. They sent me 10 QTCs. I copied/pasted them into the RQTC window. I then sent them ALL OK and closed the QSO. After the fact I realized that N1MM would not save the QTCs because one of the callsigns didn’t appear legit [because it didn't have a number]. I didn’t know at the time that I could hold down CTRL and click Save to save the QTCs, and so I put in a fake call and saved it. But, by that time I was already done with the DQ4W QSO and wasn’t going to contact them again to try and ask for a resend of QTC 8 out of batch ##/##. I don’t like creating undue hardship for other stations who are actually trying to win the contest.

I accepted QTCs four more times, and everything went well each time. I did not get a chance to send any QTCs [although I had many to send]. I didn’t think any DX signals on 10/15/20m were strong enough at the time for me to judge that they would hear my signal adequately to copy 10 QTCs without a lot of fills, so I did not nag any DX to accept any from me.

I have to wonder if conditions just weren’t great this weekend on 15/20m. Certainly there were stations, but they were always the same stations and rarely were S9+20. Of course, I didn’t expect 10m to be booming. I did figure I’d see stronger signals on 15m though.

To be honest, I’m sure a lot of it had to do with the times I was attempting to operate on 10/15/20m. As mentioned before, I didn’t wake up bright and early to work the contest, and I missed many afternoon hours on both days that would have been good hours for working 10/15/20m.

I was ill-prepared for this contest, which is unfortunate since I really love the WAE rules and format, especially the QTC activity. I’m sorry that I missed out on so much.

To be fair to myself, I worked less than 8 hours in this contest [out of a possible 36 hour total]. But even so, I should have been able to do another 50-100 Qs and passed a significantly larger number of QTCs than I did. So, I’m disappointed in myself. I guess everyone has their bad days :)

My Results:

WAE DX Contest, RTTY

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: Toronto OH EN90QL
Operating Time (hrs):

Summary:
Band QSOs Pts QTCs Mults
——————————
80: 11 11 0 36
40: 34 34 0 39
20: 5 25 20 10
15: 68 108 40 66
10: 14 14 0 14
——————————
Total: 132 192 60 165 Total Score = 31,680

Club: Mad River Radio Club

Not much to say except that I really cannot stand to operate in SSB contests. In a CW contest I can be competitive. Hell, even in a RTTY contest I don’t do too bad if I put the time into it. But, with SSB your power has to push out a much wider signal and you can’t filter out adjacent activity. The bands are a mess. I don’t have power; my dipoles are low; I don’t have directional antennas and thus cannot direct my signal to a particular area or relieve some QRM since I have no front-to-back. In an SSB contest one needs directional antennas, power, and last but not least a great headset with good audio output and a footswitch. Also, one needs to make SSB audio files to use with their log for the mundane task of calling CQ or throwing out your call. Your voice goes south very early on in the contest if you don’t.

Anyway, I’m making Qs — slowly and with difficulty. But my heart won’t ever be in an SSB contest unless I am set up for it.

So much easier to work CW or RTTY.

Before I forget, 10m has been totally shut down here in the states — no propogation. I’m hoping that we get an opening to work some 10m, but I’m not counting on it.

There were a lot of contests / QSO Parties this weekend, including NyQP, IlQP, IaQP I think, JARTS RTTY WW. I had to decide which ones I was going to work. Since JARTS started first and since I was jonesing to make some Qs, I started out with JARTS.

I managed a few nice little runs on the different bands. 15m was a really nice band for the contest this weekend. Interestingly, 10m opened up on Sunday and I worked some Qs there. Of course, with activity seen on 15m/10m, I can’t help but to try to make every Q I can on those bands. And JARTS was no exception. Unfortunately, it caused me to get a pretty low score.

I’m very disappointed. Why? Well, although I did enjoy working 10/15m so much, and although I did enjoy sitting for extended periods on one frequency calling CQ when nobody was answering, I completely failed to pay any attention to 20m. Hell, 20m is always open during the daylight hours into late evening, sometimes even longer. But I got so carried away with other bands that I pretty much totally overlooked 20m. Where others with equal stations have 125-150 Qs on 20m, I have 32 or so. And, of course, a lot of the 20m activity would be DX [and thus new mults]. So not only did I miss out on at least 100 Qs on 20m, I also missed out on quite possibly 30-50 new mults.

I compete against myself and a few others that I watch who run wires and LP here in the states. I should have been much closer in score to some of those guys, but I wasn’t. And I feel this was a direct result of me overlooking 20 for the mults and Qs. I remember many times where I sat calling CQ into the great abyss with nobody answering. Once in a while somebody would reply and then another immediately after, and this wouldd keep me going calling CQ for another 15 minutes with no productivity. I need to learn that if I’m going to call CQ, I need to abort very quickly if I am not seeing results. Had I managed to do that I most definitely would have ended up on 20m S&Ping and then throwing out some CQs.

All I can say is that the more I think about it, the more pissed off I am at myself for not paying attention to bread and butter bands to get mults. Even if I dont’ stick around to make 150 Qs, I at least need to chase all the mults I need when they are freely available to me on a DX band like 20m.

Weather was great… cool with a little rain, but no thunderstorms. And thunderstorms dictate my operating activities. I was feeling pretty good Saturday, but felt like I had a bug on Sunday with some dizziness and nausea. I did operate on Sunday, but not as much as I would have liked…. and specifically did not operate at a time when 20m would have been rocking. Go figure.

Radio ran perfectly. FSK was working great. Not a single crash or problem with N1MM or the computer. I was feverishly switching between my two wires on 10/15m as there definitely was a difference depending upon the direction I was trying to work.

All in all a great contest. I had no idea it was so popular. Once I realized it was a WW contest I knew it would be popular, but the bands were packed with RTTY. This one will be high on my list next year. Congrats to KB3LIX and K2DSL for their nice LP/Wires scores. I keep an eye on them in RTTY contests. Bill thoroughly whipped my ass this time around.

I worked the PJs quite a few times on RTTY [and SSB]. They were all over, and if you were smart enough to realize they were running split [it wasn't hard - they would tell you UP or UP 500-1000] you could pick them off in short order. Good signals from PJ-land into the states all weekend on all bands.

My Results:

JARTS WW RTTY Contest

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: EN90QL
Operating Time (hrs): 13

Summary:
Band QSOs Pts Mults
————————
80: 57 114 14
40: 93 191 25
20: 32 67 12
15: 64 136 25
10: 22 46 11
————————
Total: 268 554 87 Total Score = 48,198

Club: Mad River Radio Club

There’s too much going on. My goal is to put a lot of effort into the Pennsylvania QSO Party, but there are too many other contests enticing me to test the waters.

http://www.hornucopia.com/contestcal/weeklycont.php

Pennsylvania QSO Party – I’m hoping to keep this one as a priority. However, I’m too close to do anything useful on 20m/15m. 40m to EPA will be alright and 80m to WPA.

Arizona QSO Party – I’m not sure about activity in this one, but I am much more likely to be able to make contacts on 80m/40m/20m and even 15m/10m if one or both of those bands are open. I wish this didn’t fall on the same weekend as the PaQP. I might end up working this contest as a priority, not only because I’ll find contacts on more bands but also because the big QSO party participants around the East Coast and PA will probably be focusing on the PaQP. And if this were true, I’d probably end up ranking higher in the AzQP than the PaQP.

Oceania DX, CW – Now, this might be interesting. Again, more DX from places I don’t usually hear from. If I hear em I’ll try and work em.

CQ SA SSB – No way. They spammed me with about 50 “invites” to participate. That annoyed the hell out of me. Besides, I seem to have a pathway to SA any time I want it.

North American Sprint, RTTY – Short deal. I’d like to jump in this one, but it’ll interfere with the PaQP and AzQP.

Worked All Britain, Phone – If I hear em I might give em a Q, but I have no interest in actually entering any British contest because the rules in the UK area contests are way too much for me to deal with. K.I.S.S.

Makrothen RTTY Contest – I have no clue about this one. Maybe there’ll be a bit of activity, or maybe it’s just one guy sitting back hoping he can generate interest. Who knows. I’m not ambitious enough to look up further details. With that said, if I happen to hear RTTY while I’m tuning the bands I’ll try and throw out my call.

SAC, SSB – I’m not much for SSB contests, but if I’m becoming too confused with all of the QPs I’m trying to operate in, I might throw out my call. The bonus here is that it’s DX.

YLRL DX/NA – This one doesn’t even belong on my list, but it’s here so that I could comment on it. The last thing I want to do is participate in a contest where the goal is for women to work the radio. Why? Because every guy [with the exception of me of course] seems to melt at the sound of a woman’s [donald duck] SSB voice. Totally pathetic. If one thinks about the average ham, this isn’t all that suprising. At any rate, in any other contest that I hear women operating, they always have huge [undeserved] pileups just because there are so many lonely, horny, homely ham guys out there who fantasize about a day when they may actually be able to talk to a woman on the air. I’ll let those guys and gals have their little cyberaffairs :)

This info might seem off-topic for a ham blog, but (1) this is my blog and isn’t restricted to ham radio just because it bears my callsign and (2) there is relevance in my presented data.

For those of you who want to use a USB-to-Serial adapter to work FSK RTTY, this article is for you. To operate FSK RTTY, your serial interface must support 5-bit data and low baud rates [45.5 / 75 baud]. Well, I’ve got bad news for you — many USB-to-Serial adapters fail on one or both counts.

USB-to-Serial adapters generally rely upon a chip provided by FTDI ( http://www.ftdichip.com ) or Prolific ( http://www.prolific.com.tw ). You may find one using a Cypress programmable chip. I haven’t found the specs on what the Cypress option can or cannot do, but below is some information regarding the FTDI and Prolific products.

Current generation FTDI products

None of the current FTDI products will support direct-keyed FSK on USB-to-Serial adapters that employ these chips. FTDI products do not support 5-bit data and do not support baud rates below 300 baud.

FT2232D / FT232R

• 7-bit and 8-bit data
• 300 bps to 3 Mbps

FT2232H / FT4232H

• 7-bit and 8-bit data
• 183 bps to 12 Mbps

FT232B(L)

• 7-bit and 8-bit data
• 300 bps to 1 Mbps

Current generation Prolific products

USB-to-Serial interfaces utilizing the Prolific PL-2303 series do support 5-bit data, but according to product literature they are limited to a low of 75 baud.

PL-2303HX / PL-2303HX-Edition(Rev D)

• 5-bit, 6-bit,7-bit and 8-bit
• 75 bps to 6 Mbps (12 Mbps or the -Edition(Rev D))

There are rumors [and I say this because I can't verify the claim] that Belkin sells a USB-to-Serial adapter F5U103EA that some RTTY folks claim work for FSK. The data sheet provided by Belkin matches, almost verbatim that of a PL-2303HX, which leads me to believe that the Belkin adapter uses the Prolific PL-2303HX or some older Prolific chip for which they don’t have product information on their website.

Summary

Based upon specs provided by these two manufacturers, I have come to the conclusion that you’ll never get a USB-to-Serial adapter based upon one of the FTDI chips above to support FSK RTTY. But, you may very well get an adapter employing a Prolific chip to do FSK RTTY. I will attempt to test this.

I have a couple USB-to-Serial cables with a Prolific chip. One of them definitely “gets farther” when I try to run FSK RTTY with it, as compared to an FTDI-based adapter that i have. With the FTDI-based adapter that I have, when I try to do FSK RTTY my software claims to not even be able to find the comport. With the Prolific-based adapters the software I’m using sees the serial port, keys, and I can hear the RTTY data. The FSK signal doesn’t sound the same as if I were running AFSK RTTY or FSK RTTY through a bonafide serial port, and when I try to actual send data [vs just diddling], it locks up the computer. Further testing is needed.

I tested the Prolific-based adapter on 45.5 baud RTTY. Based upon product documentation for the Prolific chip, it would only go down to 75 baud. So I’ll test and see if I am successful at running 75 baud.

NOTE: I’ve been able to get every USB-to-Serial adapter I have tried to run FSK RTTY when using EXTFSK in MMTTY. EXTFSK is a DLL that is loaded by MMTTY to perform software-generated FSK. It’s very nice to have this available. However, EXTFSK only support 45.5 baud RTTY, not 75 baud. BUT, if my tests bear out that the Prolific-based adapters will run 75 baud FSK RTTY, then you can run FSK RTTY direct from within your RTTY software using a USB-to-Serial adapter and then, if you want to run 45.5 baud FSK you can just use EXTFSK inside MTTY. I don’t use any other FSK RTTY software, so I can’t comment on what other software may be able to do. Ham Radio Deluxe doesn’t support FSK RTTY, and when I want to run RTTY outside of a contest I simply use HRD for AFSK RTTY. When I contest, I use N1MM / MMTTY and run FSK when possible, AFSK when not.

ADDENDUM: I have tested my Prolific-based USB-to-Serial adapter with an FSK keying circuit and was able to operate 75 baud FSK RTTY. I also tested 45.5 baud FSK, but I didn’t test it thoroughly and it seemed kind of “iffy” — meaning that sometimes it would lock my computer up. Prolific documentation states that the low limit for baud rates is 75, so if people are actually using a Belkin and the Belkin uses a Prolific chip, then I would question if they actually have reliable 45.5 baud FSK RTTY comms. Outside of contests I do not do much RTTY, and at the times I’m available to try it out there usually isn’t anybody on RTTY 20m to test with. But, this test is positive nonetheless.

With a Prolific-based adapter, you should be able to do 75 baud FSK RTTY with a certain degree of confidence. For 45.5 baud FSK RTTY using a Prolific-based adapter, your mileage may vary. Give it a try, but be prepared for trouble because you may experience some.

These are good findings though. At least with the Prolific-based USB-to-Serial adapter that I’m using, I can operate 75 baud FSK RTTY and 45.5 baud FSK RTTY (with EXTFSK for sure, possibly without EXTFSK). So I can run FSK for both baud rates on my FT-950 and take advantage of the better RTTY mode filtering on the radio.

Here is a link to the exact Prolific-based USB-to-Serial adapters I have been using and testing with:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000K069AK/ref=oss_product

Today I received an odd package. It’s some sort of electronic device. It has an RS-232 out on one end and a 6-pin miniDIN and a 1/4″ phono jack on the other. It appears to have some resistors and an IC.

It is not in an enclosure, contains no cabling, and contains absolutely no documentation / instructions as to its purpose / intended use or what it is supposed to be connected to.

Whatever it is, it appears to be of quality workmanship; however, looks can be deceiving and I am certainly not a qualified IEEE cardholder.

The only written information contained in the package is basically a one-page disclaimer. At the top of the page I see:

THIS IS A HIGH PERFORMANCE PRODUCT USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

A linear accelerator on a chip perhaps? Could it be a miniature bomb? A cure for cancer?

All I know is that the company that sent it to me disclaims any liability whatsoever and provides no warranty. Furthermore, I am supposed to return it, promptly, in new and unused condition, if I do not agree to the the agreement.

I’d post the name of the supposed company, but I believe they are likely a litigious bunch and I don’t feel like making a court appearance.

What should I do? Comments anyone?