To all readers of this website: all the best for 2010 for you and your family. I hope I’ll be able to keep you interested with new articles on this blog in the next year and years to come. Of course I hope to hear you on the airwaves someday

A few weeks ago I decided to join DARES (Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Services). I always liked the idea of doing something very useful with our hobby. Last 14th of november was my first meeting with the crew. After driving around for a while to find the address I met the guys from DARES.

I must say, I’m impressed how well they are organized! All the new member did get a pager so the board can reach us anytime. Also we’ve got two portables (2m and 70cm) which we can use for peer communication when we are practicing or in case of a real emergency.

This meeting was about getting to know each other and getting the right mindset. I’m looking forward to the next exercise!

A while ago (somewere end 2008) I started practicing morsecode. Every day I practiced for about half an hour and ones a week I joined my fellow HAM’s on the air and practice with a teacher. For many weeks that kind of worked. But then the teacher had a major lightning strike in his antenna and many of his stuff was blown to pieces. From then on I told myself I would practice every night except the weekends.
Of course that wasn’t the case. In the meantime I picked up a very nice morse training program pointed out by G4ILO.
Some nights I was able to put myself behind the computer for a minute or 10/15 and train a little. But it was not enough to catch the drift. Last weekend I’ve got a new idea for a good training moment!
Every day I have to travel 1,5 hours to work and back. Because I have to travel in rush hours and in the busiest area in the Netherlands, I travel by train. That gives me 3 hours per day to kill some time. Mostly I spend it reading, listening podcastst or just sleeping. But it would be the perfect moment to practice morse code!
So I called a friend who owns a unused netbook and asked him if I could use it for a few months. No problem, he answered. I picked it up last night and this morning I’ve practice morse code for about 45 minutes! Maybe this evening when I travel home, more training minutes will be added. I hope this will lead to a much faster progress.

After reading about WSPR 2.0 getting out, it did grab my attention. I still like the whole WSPR idea so I looked around in the shack to give it a try. The idea was to set-up my blown-final FT-817 and connect it to my Antron 99 vertical for 10m. It wouldn’t be possible to tx with the Yaesu, but at least the WSPRnet would have another listen station on 10m. I already picked up a nice signal from Asia one time, but on average it is really quiet on 10m.

I think I leave the setup running for a few weeks. See what happen when the propagation will be better on 10.

My mind is spinning off, wouldn’t it be nice to have more ‘beacon’-like WSPR kit? Something very small, no interface required, just a little box with an antenna and UTP connection. Dedicated to WSPR 24/7 and just sitting in the corner of the shack. Hmmm, interesting idea. Let me know if someones already come up with this idea!

Two weeks ago I switched on the transceiver on saturday and listen around on the bands. I couldn’t believe my ears! There where incredible conditions. 40, 20 15 and 10 where completely open! It wasn’t hard to hear there was a big contest going on. I wasn’t into the contesting lately so I had to pull out the contest calender to check which one was on. It turn out to be the CQ WW SSB contest. After I read the contest rules I started to make some contacts. I was even able to make a qso with South Africa on 10 meters! Finally I’ve got a change to test out my Antron 99 which I installed for 10 meters. It worked very nicely!
At the end of the weekend I’ve made 77 contacts in the contest. Not extremely much, but okay for me. Especially if you bare in mind that I was totally unprepared.
If these conditions are a sign of what is possible in a high sunspot cyclus, I’m gonna have a very nice 6 years to come!

I seem to be unable to convert my HRD-ADIF-log into the needed Cabrillo-format for the contestmanager. I send him the file anyway. A few days later I received an email that my log was processed! Now that’s what I call service… Thanks Bob, K3EST.

As I am a Mac user for many years now, The Unofficial Apple Website is one of my favorite blogs to read almost every day. The other day I read in this blog about 5 Mac applications for ham radio fans. Cool! Two hobbies in one article…

Hi all! We’re back in town from two weeks of holiday! It was very nice. We did a lot of hiking, site seeing, enjoying meals etc. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to set up my portable radio kit in Italy at all. The chalets where so tight packet together, it was impossible to throw a wire over something. And if I was able to do that, I would have interfered with at least 10 satellite receivers. So I kept the goodies in the trunk for the first week of the holiday.
In France of course I had more possibilities to setup a nice configuration. I did bring a 1:6 balun with me to experiment with. Two wires of 13,8m and 27,7m where attached to it and hung up between two tree’s. It worked kind of nice but of course only on the lower bands (40 and 80). And there was not much of interesting activity on those bands that week. Then I’ve tried to work my open dipole for 20m and my long wire (16m) that are already installed at the house. But not much luck either. Lots of static (at least I think, or even there are appearing noise generators) and very little signals. All in all I’ve made 4 QSO’s. Not enough to even bring the stuff with me. I consider to buy a dedicated (old) radio for that location to leave. Then I don’t have to bring the heavy stuff with me all the time and I’m able to use a good radio with all filters and stuff even on holidays.

So when someone has good suggestions for a good (second hand) transceiver with (kind of) modern filter methods but isn’t too expensive (I’ll only use it for maybe one week a year), leave me a comment or a message!

Still one week of work and then I’m two weeks off on holiday. The first week I’ll be in northern Italy (JN46NA) in a small village Porlezza near the lake of Lugano as I/PA1JIM/P (26th September – 3th October) and the next week I’ll be at JN24XM (Hautes Alpes, France) as F/PA1JIM/P. I’ve read in propagation for the end of this month that there will appear a lot of sunspots. So that’s just perfect for me on my holiday spot! I’ll drag along my TS-50, AT-50, a WiMo Magnetic Balun (or actually an UnUn) and a piece of 15 meter wire. Hopefully enough to be on all the active bands.

Hope to work you!

73′s PA1JIM

Nick, SV3DJG mailed me a very good link the other day for TS-850 related subjects. Thanks Nick!

When I posted the message last month that I bought my Kenwood TS-850, I’ve got a mail from Joerg, DL6IB from Germany.
Joerg did offer me something nice. He bought 2 pieces of the Kenwood TCXO-SO2 in the USA. The first one he had used to build in his own Kenwood TS-870 and the second one he did offer me for a good price. You know I’m a sucker for
accessories. I already did manage to find a voice synthesizer (VS-2), a digital recording unit (DRU-2) and several filters for my precious TS-850 . The only thing that was missing was the temperature compensated cristal oscillator (TCXO-SO2). So it was a very good timing of Joerg to contact me!
But I find it always a little bit scary to just send money over the internet and hope the other end will deliver what he promised.
But yesterday the package arrived and there was my “little bug”. Maybe I’ll mount it this weekend. Then my TS-850 is fully loaded and even more capable of operating so nicely, the way I want it.

Thank you Joerg! Thanks for the offer and it was great doing business with you! Hope to hear you on the bands sometime.