It Lives! .....but it limps....

In a group buy sponsored by W8ISS, I bought the PCBs and parts for LO/transverter boards to build W1GHZ transverters for 902, 1296, 2403, and 3456 MHZ. I have stuffed the LO and transverter boards for 902 and 1296 MHz, but had no way to check them out. I was recently able to borrow a spectrum analyzer for a few weeks, so now I'm scrambling to get as many of these boards up as I can. I've just applied power to the first piece in the line-up, the 756 MHz LO board for the 902 MHz transverter. It's definitely oscillating at 756 MHZ, but unfortunately the signal is at about -28 dBm. The docs for the W1GHZ design say I should be seeing about +5 dBm. Well, I guess that's why they call it troubleshooting. Still, this is extremely cool. I never thought I would be into VHF-UHF-SHF operating, let alone building my own gear for these freqs!

Paul Wade, W1GHZ, has done the amateur community a real service in these simple transverter designs. If you have to buy all the parts outright, you can expect to pay about $70-80 per band which is still darn cheap. But if you can get in on a group buy, that price will drop to sub-$50, which is really incredible. What a fantastic way to experiment with SHF. I have already learned a ton of good stuff and I'm sure both learning and fun have just begun.

73 de W9HQ

January 2010 VHF-UHF Sweepstakes

Okay, time to update this blog more often. My problem—both in blogdom and in other parts of my life—is that I let the best become the enemy of the good. In this case, I always want photos and details all lined up so that the blog posting is as complete and interesting as possible. But then I never quite get around to blogging at all. Enough of that.

My son Christopher (KC9JTL) and I had a great time in the January 2010 ARRL VHF-UHF sweepstakes. One really cool aspect of this contest was hearing so many locals on the air, on both FM and SSB.

As for locals on FM we worked KB9TPG, KC9LBO, K9ALT, KC9OYG, KC9NHQ, KC9KVJ, W9ET, KC9MRV, WX9EP, and N9UNW.

Local contacts on SSB came from WV9E, WV9S, KA9FOX, W9UUM, W9GM, W9RPM, N9ETD, KB9BGN, and AB9HW. (I hope I'm not forgetting anybody.)

I think that's just great, so thanks again for everybody who got on the air!

Christopher and I made a total of 93 contacts. Here's the breakdown:

Freq QSOs Grids

50 27 9

144 52 14

222 9 6

440 5 1


That's almost twice as many contacts as we got last January, which was our first VHF-UHF contest. And conditions were pretty poor this weekend. Hope to do better in June.

W9HQ operates BY4DX from Shanghai

Late last year, during my annual trip to China, I had the privilege to operate the amateur radio club station BY4DX.

China does not have a reciprocal operating agreement with the U.S., so you have to get special permission to operate there and can only do so at a club station. During my first trip to China, the license didn't come through from Beijing in time. And during the second trip, I was just too busy!

This time, though, my work colleagues helped me get in touch with the members of the BY4DX club and so I met them on Saturday morning, October 17, 2009 for a trek outside of Shanghai to their temporary club station. They were getting ready for the inaugaural kick-off of the club station the next day, but they were kind enough to let me have an early crack at operating the station.

I was happy to hear that this was only a temporary location for them. Unfortunately (and they had told me about this ahead of time) there was a huge amount of RFI across the spectrum. The noise was S9 on all of 20 meters, making it very difficult to operate. I began calling CQ on that band and did make a few contacts, but soon stopped because I could tell that there were people calling me whom I just could not hear. Didn't seem quite fair to them. So I tuned around the band listening for really loud stations and called them instead.

Finally I switched to 15 meters, where the noise level was only S6 or so. There I called CQ and, after a while, got on the other end of an honest to goodness pile-up. The band was open to the west and so most of the stations calling me were from Russia, the Ukraine, etc.

During my afternoon at BY4DX I was able to contact Guam, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, several provinces in China, Russia, Ukraine, Muldova, and Austria. Pretty cool. Hopefully, by the time I return, they will have moved into their permanent location in Shanghai itself and the conditions will be better.

These are great guys and I had a great time.

KC9JTL-R in the ARRL 2009 September VHF Sweepstakes

Christopher (KC9JTL) and I had a great time roving to the EN42-52-43-53 grid convergence by Dodgeville, WI for this contest. We got a bit of a late start, but the beautiful drive down there was shorter than I expected, so we arrived more or less as planned, but initial set-up took a bit longer than planned so we got on the air from EN42 about 5:15 pm on Saturday evening.

Our antenna lash-up was as follows. I have a hitch carrier for the back of the Suburban, so we built a platform to which we bolted a roof tripod for a mast. Thanks to a donation by KC9IWE we had a push-up mast mounted on the tripod. On that I put a 6 element WA5VJB "cheap yagi" for 222 MHz, then a 4 element beam for 2 meters, then a 10 element beam for 432 Mhz. On top of it all I put a rotatable dipole for 6 meters that Christopher and I made out of an old fiberglass puptent pole covered with aluminum foil. Rotation was via an "armstrong" rotor.

Our plan was to try and get some 2 meter FM activity going—we even brought a separate 3 element beam for vertically polarized work on 2 meters—but unfortunately FM was a bust. We CQed all the way down and beamed back toward the north but never heard a peep (except N9WU/R who was already down at the grid convergence and heard us right off.)

When we set up on an old airport runway just outside of Dodgeville, we found right off that the feedline was hosed on 432. So we had to settle for QRP FM into a handheld "cheap yagi" from EN42 until we could replace the feedline when we stopped in EN52. And the other glitch is that we found that my FT-897D was almost totally deaf on 6 meters—we had at least half a dozen guys tell us that they could hear us just fine, but we could either not hear them at all or just barely. Still trying to figure out whether that's a hardware problem or some software setting. So we left some 50 MHz Qs on the table.

The really pleasant surprise was 222, on which we had just 1.5 watts from a Yaesu VX-6R into a 6 element WA5VJB "cheap yagi" (I now have an Elecraft XV-222 transverter on that band, thanks for KC9BQA, but I didn't have time to build the needed interface with the FT-897). As you can see below, we made as many Qs on 222 as we did on 432 with 20 watts into a 10 element yagi. So that's a very inexpensive way to get a real footprint on that band.

The whole antenna set-up worked out pretty well. We even moved the vehicle with everything up and in place to transition from EN52 to EN53 (granted, it was only about 1/4 mile on a back-country road).

Despite the inevitable obstacles and limited operating time, we made 75 QSOs. Headed back home much too late, but Christopher kept me awake by filling me in on all sorts of arcane Bionicle lore. It was a lot of fun and we'll definitely be doing it again.

QSOs Multipliers
50 10 10
144 39 26
222 13 13
432 13 13

2009 ARRL June VHF QSO Party

My son Christopher (KC9JTL) and I had a blast in this, our second VHF contest (see Christopher in the July 2008 issue of QST magazine as part of the write-up of the January contest).

We had some antenna upgrades from that January contest. I homebrewed a 2 element coax beam for 6 meters and it worked better than I had any reason to expect. I also got the beams up on the roof this year, so we had much better coverage from our ridgetop location.

6 meters was a blast and Christopher really enjoyed being able to work station after station on that band. It was really cool to see the opening move from the southeast on Saturday afternoon up into the east and northeast, including French Canada on Saturday evening. Then on Sunday it opened to our west and northwest, but some to the south as well later that day. So we literally worked all over the country.

We added 222 MHz to our line-up late in the game after horsing around with the transverter throughout the contest. Once we got the transverter working, we did a quick antenna lash-up, with the coax soldered directly to the feedpoint of a WA5VJB "cheap yagi" up about 15 feet. In the end, we were able to make about five QSOs in four grids on 222 MHZ. That was pretty cool and a good learning time for KC9JTL.

We also had a dinky 6 element yagi on 432 MHz -- all that I had time for -- but in the end we actually worked 7 grids with that dude using only the 20 watts from the Yaesu FT-897D. Of course, the guys on the other end with umpty-ump element stacked yagis at a hundred and some-odd feet were doing all of the heavy lifting. But still, a QSO is a QSO.

The action opened up on 2 meters at the very end of the contest and we were running contacts right up until the curtain closed. Very exciting. When it was all done and we had a chance to catch our breath, Christopher said, "Do they have another one in the Fall?" I think he's hooked. I know I am.

Our station and antennas are modest, but the fun factor was huge.

Adventures in EchoLink

In my ongoing quest to upgrade our family communication network (and avoid the cell phone trap) I have recently gotten an EchoLink node going at my QTH. This will allow me to call back to the house when I'm out on the road, especially when I take business trips up to the Twin Cities.

For hardware, I'm using a garbage-picked Toshiba laptop; most of the keycaps are popped off of it, so somebody dropped it into the dumpster. I got it up and going using an external keyboard, but now I don't really need the keyboard at all. More on that later. A homebrewed sound card interface and 2 meter transceiver completes the package.

I've set up the node in my shack for the moment, running to a simple copper pipe J-pole up on my roof. This has let me play around with different hardware and software configurations without too much stress. The Linksys router you see there is a WRT54G-TM running the extremely cool Tomato firmware (actually, it's running the Tomato VPN firmware because I hope to have a personal VPN connection going soon.) This was the result of one more excellent bit of advice from Chris, KF9OP. I was going to buy a dedicated wireless card for the laptop, but he suggested spending just a bit more and getting a router that can be flashed with new software to do any number of sophisticated wireless tasks. Great idea. I picked up a few of them for pretty cheap off of EBay. One is configured as my main Internet wireless access point, with gain antennas on it so the signal is available throughout the whole house. But then I've connected another, configured to operate as part of a Wireless Distribution System (WDS), to the computer running EchoLink.

It needs to be wireless because ultimately, when I have all the bugs worked out, the whole shebang is going up on my silo. The rig, computer, router, and power supply will sit just under the dome and I'll extend a mast above the dome with a nice 2 meter gain vertical on top. Then I should really get out like gangbusters. I've also got a gain vertical for 2.4 GHz that will be connected to the router, to boost the wireless path back to the house.

Since it's going to be at the top of the silo, I don't really want to have to climb up there every time I want to tweak a setting on the computer. So I installed the TightVNC server on the laptop. It allows me quick and easy remote access to that PC from my shack. In fact, there's even a TightVNC client for Puppy Linux, so I can access the laptop running Windows and EchoLink from my Linux machines. Now how cool is that?

I have not used the EchoLink much for family communications, although I have a business trip in the near future that should be a nice time to try it out. But I have had some delightful QSOs from hams who have just decided to "drop in". One afternoon I chatted with a student at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, connecting through their W9HHX node. Then later that evening, Al (W6AAX) called from Simi Valley, CA. He has family in the area and was wondering about the ham radio activity here.

And about fifteen minutes after I signed off with Al, Daryl (N5SCA) called from Lampasas, TX. It turns out he grew up in the La Crosse, WI area and was, again, wondering about ham radio activity in the area prior to a trek to a family reunion here later this year. Again, we had a nice chat and hopefully will be able to meet when he visits the area.

Puppy Linux

I have long yearned to cut the umbilical cord with Micro$oft, forsaking their operating systems forever. Why? Basically, because the ever-increasing thirst for computer resources (CPU, RAM, hard drive space, etc.) in exchange for little or no significant benefit in what I'm actually able to do with the computer drives me nuts. Let's face it, if you don't play some of the more resource-intense games (which I don't) then you simply don't need the vast majority of the horsepower of our current PCs. The main reason we need to keep upgrading hardware all the time is because Micro$oft orphans its older OSs. And each new OS from Redmond hogs more and more hardware resources in order to keep from running glacially slow.

Several years ago I set about building two PCs for our home use. I was highly motivated to utilize one of the many available Linux distros for the operating system. I had read and had been told that Linux was ready for prime time and that installation was simple, as was maintenance. And that is precisely what I needed because, while I am fairly PC savvy, I do not have a lot of time to waste horsing around trying to get things to work. An operating system needs to find all my hardware and work, with no muss and no fuss. Period.

Well, I tried Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux, the Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xbuntu line-up, and Knoppix. Each time there was something wrong, at least one thing (and sometimes more than one thing) that just made it a no go. So, in the end, I held my nose and forked out the $$ for two licenses of Windows XP (which hands down is the best OS that Micro$oft has ever released.)

But the desire to cut that cord has stayed with me. And I think maybe I've found the knife that's going to let me do it in the form of Puppy Linux. Puppy is not the most capable release. It's not the flashiest release. I tried it because several hams have chosen it specifically for their amateur radio-related software. And guess what? It works.

I have installed Puppy on six computers so far, from a 300 MHz Celeron with 128 MB of RAM up through a 2.2 GHz multi-core something-or-other with 2 GB of RAM. So far, Puppy has found and installed everything as it should. It has even found and installed a couple of rather obscure wireless adapters. Each time, I've been able to get onto my home network and out onto the Internet, which makes finding and fixing any little glitches much easier.

Its ability to install on really minimal hardware is the thing that thrills me the most. Puppy installs itself completely into RAM, so its performance even on minimal computer hardware is impressive. How totally stupid is it to be sending perfectly good desktops and laptops to the dump, when at least a significant percentage of them are still perfectly useful if all you want to do is surf the Web, do a little word processing, maybe keep track of your finances? And there are tons of ham radio tasks that can still be handled readily by lower-end hardware like this. Michael Barnes captures my thoughts exactly:

Using Puppy Linux brings back many memories of my early years using computers. Seeing Puppy Linux perform so well as a desktop Linux and taking up only 60 MB storage, one is reminded of how elegant programming used to be when computing used to be fun and useful with very little RAM and very little storage.

While some will argue that disk and RAM are cheap, generations of computers are being orphaned and the end user isn't seeing any improvements in either the application or environment. Puppy Linux not only provides the means to bring older computers back to life, it also provides the tools to create dedicated devices that can operate without a hard disk. It is possible to create media players, web terminals, email terminals, thin clients, x-terminals, and even Skype VoIP stations with very minimal hardware.

Thanks to a small distribution like Puppy Linux, it is possible to set up a fully functional workstation with a motherboard, low-cost processor, power supply, case, 128 MB DRAM and either a 128 MB thumb drive or a CDROM drive, at a cost of about $150 (USD) without a monitor.

No, forget $150. How about free? There are computers capable of running Puppy being thrown away all the time. Monitors too.

I think I'm going to use Puppy to resurrect two lower-end laptops I have kicking around the place, so my kids can use them for their school work. In fact, since it is a snap to get Puppy to boot from an inexpensive USB stick, I think it might be a nice idea to snarf a higher-end laptop off of EBay that's selling cheap because it has no hard drive and no operating system, then give it new life by running Puppy off of an 8 or 16 GB flash drive.

Specific ham radio groups and individuals like the West Australian Repeater Group and the creators of the digital mode software package FLDigi seem to have glommed onto Puppy Linux as a particularly appropriate platform. As I said, that's what got me looking into it in the first place.

It may very well be that other Linux distros would now perform much better for me than they did a few years ago. But I'm hooked on Puppy.