My first real QSOs. Very fine business.

I made some more of my first real QSOs where you either call CQ or you answer someone's CQ.  I've now made a few on 20 meters, 40 meters, and one on 15 meters.   I've talked to a couple folks in Bulgaria, a couple in Russia, one guy in Guam, and a couple around North America.

Tonight I talked to two nice guys from Texas, one near Dallas/Fort Worth, and one near Santa Fe.  I really enjoyed talking to these guys because they weren't just "59, thanks for the QSO, 73s", we actually chatted a bit, and talked for a few minutes.  The second one was over half an hour.  I quite like longer QSOs, rather than the short hurried ones. I like it if someone asks a question or two and if I ask a question or two, and we can politely get to know a bit about each other's interests, lives, and activities, either within or outside of the hobby.

Part of the "Amateur Code" that I like very much and intend very much to honor is that I don't think that On The Air QSOs are a good place for "ranting", or intemperate or intolerant behaviour.  Courtesy rules.   I like getting on the air and engaging in a courteous QSO.   It may seem like a remnant of a by-gone era.  Courtesy still rules, around here, and I'm glad it's popular in the hobby.

ITAR: International Traffice in Arms Regulations (US) that threatens US Amateurs who engage in Satellite design projects, may be relaxed

Did you know that until now, satellites were weapons, under an important US law, and that Amateurs working with other Amateurs around the world could go to jail or face six figure fines for working collaboratively with other Amateurs on Amateur Satellite projects?

I only heard about this because of an article on www.southgatearc.org which mentions the easing of these restrictions.

The American law International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) classified all satellites, even amateur radio ones, as being in effect, a weapon.   

The fear that this kind of law is built upon is not hard to understand. Remember sputnik? The USSR launched a tiny radio beacon into space, and the space-race was on.   America lost the "first satellite" and "first astronaut in orbit" races, but I'd say they have lots of later victories to salve the wound. It's odd that in 2014, as a law that seems rather touched by a cold-war mentality may now be relaxed, and yet, as we watch the world around us, and the aggressive expansion by the Russian Federation into Crimea is also in the news, and Putin seems committed to reviving the USSR, a bit at a time, I wonder if the cold war may be coming back our way.

It's a strange, strange world we live in.

Happy 100th Birthday to the ARRL.

Today is exactly the 100th birthday of the ARRL, the world's first national level organization dedicated to advancing the art, science, hobby, and public service aspects of Amateur Radio, founded on this day, 100 years ago.  It was not the first local amateur radio club, or even probably the first regional amateur radio association, but it was certainly an important force in the creation and preservation of what we today know as the Amateur Radio hobby, and its early executive members were pretty important in the formation of the international IARU, and in representing Amateur interests at the ITU, and before the FCC.  If there were no Amateur Bands in the USA, there wouldn't be the hobby that the rest of us, out here in Canada, and in Europe, and around the world, enjoy today.

Now I know not everybody is a big fan of the ARRL. The late Wayne Green, founder and editor of "73" magazine was a famous provocateur in his editorial columns, often coming out against the ARRL whenever he could, at any angle he could manage, most often, if my reading is correct, in the 1960s and 1970s, when, according to many old-time Hams I've conversed with, the ARRL was in a bit of a rut.  You could say, that a kick in the pants is still a step forward, and that the ARRL's critics have helped make the ARRL a better place.  So thanks, Wayne, for your little part in that.

I joined the ARRL when I got my license, even though I'm a Canadian, 90% because I like the QST magazine.  I also subscribe to CQ magazine, which is the other major Ham magazine. I read both magazines online.   I got a free membership in RAC when I got my license for one year, and I'll probably renew that membership too. I think organizations like RAC (in Canada) and ARRL (in the USA) are an important part of keeping the hobby ticking over well, fighting against RFI and spectrum licensing encroachments on ham bands,  and representing amateur opinions and ideas at the legislative table.   We live in a society governed by laws, and shared resources like the RF spectrum are not going to be carved up endlessly in our favor if we don't organize ourselves and represent ourselves and put our best foot forward. No matter how much you like or don't like the ARRL, consider that a healthy ARRL is the most powerful organization of hams in the world, and that by in-fighting, bickering, and complaining, you're only shooting yourself in your own foot.  So enough of considering the critics.  Be off with ye.  Back to the Happy Birthday bit.

Here are my top five favorite ARRL things;

1. QST, my favorite place to find project ideas, product reviews, and other stuff like that.

2. The 2014 edition of the Amateur Handbook, is a special centennial edition, and is perhaps the best (and heaviest) edition I've seen yet. It's getting to be more an Encyclopaedia than a Handbook, but that's a nice problem to have, in my opinion.

3. The Antenna book.   I've only read a loaned copy, haven't bought my own yet, but this is next on my to-acquire list of cool things that I've seen from the ARRL.

4. The large membership base gives it a voice at the table not just in the USA but around the world.  This benefits me (here in Canada) and you, wherever you are, if you care about this hobby.

5. It's been a long, strange trip. I'm a History buff, I'm interested in the History of Everything and I like the historical record that the ARRL has provided. An Elmer (mentor) loaned me a bound volume of QST magazines from 1976, which I have been enjoying looking through.  In 1976 people were buying channelized 2 meter FM rigs with plug-in crystals.   Collins was still around as a brand-name belonging to Rockwell, which was in turn acquired by Motorola.  There was very little evidence in 1976 that the microcomputer revolution was having any effect on the ham radio world, other than that HAL Communications Company would sell you an Intel 8080 single-board computer, if you wanted one.  I like the old ads for Collins transceivers,because this is an ad for a rig that has the very finest 1950s tech slightly warmed over for 1976, but with zero effort to even be up to date for 1976.  Did Collins ever fit an internal LCD frequency display to one of their rigs? I'd like to see it, if they did.  


Happy birthday, ARRL!

Heathkit tube powered multimeter

I got a heathkit two tube multimeter, which has a lovely simpson analog meter and two tubes inside. It tickles me to no end that this thing is still ticking over beautifully but that the five or so multimeters I have owned until now, digital no-name units one and all, have died various ignominious deaths.

Here is an internal view of the tubular goodness inside....

That Duracell just went in there today replacing a Mallory cell from the 70s.

The sticker on the battery says someone paid 35 cents for this at Eatons.  

A network of resistors on a multiplanar rotary dial switch forms the heart of the instrument. I imagine a father and son building this in a basment in East York circa 1965 then going to the corner store for a cold bottle of Coca Cola in the original glass bottles.

A sense of accomplishment, a father son bonding moment. A feeling that you have in your hands an instrument, a means of measurement, a suitable trusty bit of kit for any radio or TV repairman.

Building an SDR Kit Project: The Lil Pup build, by PARC Homebrew

One of the reasons why I was interested in the Ham Radio Hobby is because of the strong "homebrew" contingent within the hobby. I just like it when people will fire up their brains, and their soldering irons, and build stuff.  And I want to learn how to do that too.  A good step towards that goal is to start doing kit builds, and to practice and improve my soldering skills, along with my ability to read and understand some fairly simple circuit schematics, and test and diagnose problems if my build goes awry.

I signed up for a BuildAThon day with the Peel Amateur Radio Club (PARC), who are a really fun bunch of folks. I joined the PARC club, paid my dues, and signed up for a slot at the buildathon day. I obtained a soldering station, two actually, used, at a low price.  I bought all the items on the "suggested things to bring" list, and I showed up at the buildathon day.

I have to take a moment to express my gratitude to the wonderful folks who put this build together. Here is a quick list of the kind of jobs that go into this kind of build:

* Select a project that is interesting enough, but not too difficult for your group (They hit this one out of the park in my opinion: Build an HF SDR? How cool is that!)

* Obtain all the parts and put together the kits (This was done very very well)

* Write the documentation  (This part was done amazingly well)

* Obtain the necessary shared equipment, in this case, a reflow oven, a drill press, test equipment, and extra soldering stations.

This is all done by volunteers. This is why Amateur Radio Clubs are so great.  I'm so impressed by the HomeBrew group within the club, and with the PARC club all around. Well done, gentlemen, well done.

Anyways,  here's a picture of me, and a picture of My Thing Which I Built, and I Think Is Really Neat-O:

Here is a close up of the board, which is populated with surface mount coils, resistors, capacitors, one RF mixer IC, a 155 mhz oscillator, a voltage regulator, and a couple of diodes:

Underneath the board you can see is a small pre-made assembly which is the inside of an "RTL-SDR dongle", the 50 mhz to 1.2 ghz SDR "brains" of the operation. The green board on top is an upconverter that slides a segment of the RF spectrum from 1 to 80 mhz up to 125 mhz where the Realtek RTL-SDR chip can 'see' it.

The upconverter design is an open hardware design from opendous.org, and the design was modified, and placed in a cool "Altoids tin" which, when closed up, makes a nice little enclosure.   I am a big fan of ersatz kit enclosures, whether they be mint tins, or tuna tins, or what have you.

I don't think I could have built this kind of kit, even if I purchased the board and the components in a big bag of stuff. I had a little trouble with the reflow, the oven didn't really get hot enough and there wasn't enough solder/paste on the right side of the board, so I needed a bit of help from a more experienced solderer to rework the right side of the board. You can see there is more solder over there because it was hand-soldered, whereas the left side seems to have reflowed properly.


This is big fun, people, I highly recommend kit building, especially "kit building as a team sport". This was a really fun day, and I am now highly motivated to go try building a few kits on my own time, now that I've had a taste of kit-building success.  The best part? My little radio works. There will be a post or two later when I've figured out enough software stuff to be able to show something new. I have some ideas, and since I'm a pretty able software developer, I think I might be able to do some nifty stuff with this little rig.

Hobby Metric: Big Grins Per Day (BGPD)

I'm sitting here listening in and chiming in now and then, on 40 meters.  I have a big grin on my face, and a microphone in my hand, and an HF rig warming up the room.  This is really big fun. This is why I got into this hobby in the first place.  I like radios. I like people.  Bingo.

I went to another hamfest today, and got a Signalink (Sound card interface) and tonight I made my first PSK (digital) contact, using PSK63, which is similar to PSK31 but wider bandwidth, using FLDIGI.
If you don't know what those are, and you're interested, Google it.   There are some great youtube videos introducing Signalink, PSK modes, and the FLDIGI program.

This is REALLY awesome. I'm grinning from ear to ear.

Cheap Crap, and the Zen of Personal Responsibility

Preamble: I beg your indulgence as I go off on a not-very-ham-radio-related tangent.  I will bring this back to relevance to the ham radio hobby, though. Some readers will immediately see the relevance to the Amateur Radio hobby, though, because they are smart people.


I am 44 and I think I might be turning into Allie Fox, the character from Paul Theroux novel The Mosquito Coast. If you have not seen the movie, you have at least definitely run into Allie Fox at HamFests, or on the air on 40 meter rag-chewing on a Saturday night. He's the one complaining about how America has let herself get run down, and let everyone else get the better of her.  He drives a 1950s Ford Pickup truck, he could repair that truck even if the whole world went away and he was left to his own devices, and he's a bit of a stickler for buying Made in America, and prone to ranting about the cheap crap we have everywhere.

Today,  I was trying to fix some dining room chairs that had been given to us for free, that were made at least partially of hardwood, probably walnut. They date from the mid 1970s, I’m guessing, and are constructed of parts that laminate a quarter inch of solid wood onto some kind of engineered substance, that once was sawdust and glue.  Particleboard.    Did you shudder as I used that word?

Particleboard is what us non-wood-tech people call it, and these days, it’s known as an engineered wood product by those who wish to avoid the negative connotations that the term particleboard gives.  The legs are fastened on using the same kind of dowels that everything from Ikea is constructed with, and with a daub of glue.  Guess what happens to those legs as soon as a tiny amount of sheer-angle force is applied? The glue lets go, and you have a wobbly leg, and eventually you break the dowels and the legs fall off, and the person, perhaps of above average girth, falls on the ground.   

So, after grumbling about what cheap crap the free chairs are, and trying for a while to fix them, breaking all my drills and screws,  I migrated to grumbling about what cheap crap the screws and drill bits I was using are.   Everything was cheap crap, even if it was free to me and owed me nothing, being 40 years old, and all. Everyone was at fault, everyone but me.

I heard myself ranting, and caught myself.  We have, as a nation, as a society, as the affluent segment of the modern world, chosen to favor the big-box stores over the mom and pop stores, which in turn leads to some economic processes, which leads inexorably to the death of the small businesses that carried products they were familiar with, and could tell you something about.  Instead, we have advanced chair substitutes, advanced substitutes for a 3 inch One-Eighth-inch diameter wood screw that look like a wood screw, but are made as cheaply as possible and which break off with the 5 pounds of torque it takes to turn a wood screw into a piece of laminate partial-hardwood-and-partial-particleboard.   

The thing is that if I had drilled proper guide and pilot holes before I began, the screw wouldn't have broken. If I had been more patient and set up a jig, the drill bit wouldn't have broken.  

But here I am on Good Friday with all the stores closed, and no cheap crap drill bits for sale, and what do I rant about?  About someone else's responsibilities,  not my own.  What's the one thing I can do something about? About me.  About how I live, about how I act, and about how I treat people.  If I am good, the world becomes better. If am not good, the world becomes worse.   I believe that this is at the heart of the Amateur hobby.  Do good, and have a bit of fun while doing good, and everybody wins.   


   I think that people should start taking personal responsibility for the quality of their wood, their hardware and basic supplies, and their food, the items they use for work and for hobbies, and the financial livelihoods. 

But it's more than that; I think that people, especially and only me,  should care even more about hearts and minds, and about taking good care of people, and being good people, even more than they care about the quality of the two-by-fours in their lumber yards. You see that lumber yard is run by a person, or a couple people. People who may have families, spouses, and children. People who are people just like you and me.   Even what you see as commercial, has a human side to it.    It is the human side to this economic situation that I think is the most important thing.

So, the part where Allie Fox is dead wrong is the part where he starts being a xenophobic racist jerk.    I think we can take personal responsibility for our financial and commercial behaviours and the resulting effects of those decisions on the world, without any xenophobia, racism, protectionism,  nor any of that "My Country Right or Wrong" crap. 

I heard someone who wanted to buy a radio, say, that they don’t want to buy any “cheap rice cracker brand” radios.  That was a jab at the Japanese, who with brands like Kenwood, Yaesu, and ICOM, basically own a huge amount of the radio transceiver market these days. 

 To these folks, perhaps, a Collins all-tube radio from the 1960s, a marvel of RF engineering for its time, and still a solid and fun device to use, and their first radio in high school, has a special place in their hearts. Fine. Good.  All praise to the Collins fans, but don’t go dumping on Kenwood, Yaesu, and Icom, please.  And please no racist insults about Asian people, products, or companies.   I happen to have immense respect for the big-three Japanese radio brands.  You want to know why they're so big? Because there are a lot of people in the amateur radio community in Japan.  Frankly I think that's awesome.  I hope to visit Japan some day, and maybe get to know a few Japanese hams on the air.  Maybe I'll learn some Japanese.   I am not one of those people who thinks that North American English Speaking People are Better than Everybody Else. I think Allie Fox thinks that though.  Allie Fox rips himself off when he refuses to be friends with the rest of the good people of the world.

Anyways, back to my point about buying locally without being xenophobic or racist.
Let's look at the Ham Radio market.   Collins is gone. Heathkit is gone.  Hallicrafters is gone.  The remaining American brands have carved out some pretty respectable engineering accomplishments this century.  Elecraft, FlexRadio, and Ten-Tec come to mind as makers of some amazing radios that I would love to own.  But inside those radios are integrated circuits made in the same fabs that the radios from Kenwood, Yaesu, and ICOM are using.     You can wind your own coils, and you can wave-solder your own boards, and America still has some claim to fame in the engineering of ferrite materials, but the semiconductor business is totally global.  

We live in a world where the high-tech elements of our society are possible only through a global peaceful network of trade.   Xenophobia, and fear of “foreign made” stuff is so last century.   Let's be fans of American radio companies (and Canadian ones too) without being negative about anybody else's products.

So what am I suggesting? I’m suggesting that each and every person ask themselves the question, “what kind of world do I want to live in, and how do my decisions affect the creation or destruction of the things that I wish to see strengthened, or weakened?”.   I think it’s possible, for example, to live in a global trade ecosystem, without always choosing to go down the Big Box Store route.  By Big Box Stores I mean not only WalMart, but also Ebay, and Amazon.  One company or organization having a shocking amount of control over what I buy seems to me to be a bad thing.  I want diversity of options and choices about what to buy, and from whom.  I want to buy stuff locally when there are local knowledgeable suppliers.
A great example of what I mean, in the Ham Radio hobby, is that there are a few makers and distributors and retailers of antennas and other radio gear located right near me (within 100 kilometres).  If I always buy online and rely on cheap international shipping to obtain what I want, those stores, and those businesses will not survive.
A second example of what I mean, an attitude that I think is present in the Ham community, that the wider world needs to learn a bit more of, is the old-school Yankee Ingenuity, often present in non-Yankees like my Dad and (some day maybe) in me, the desire to know how things work, how to fix them when they break, and to be able to shift for yourself if you have to, because sometimes, you do.  Knowing how something works, and taking responsibility for fixing it, that is step one for me.  Step two is to do it without grumbling and complaining about “who designed this awful crap?”.   How about just saying, “well it looks like that would take this much force to break, and it got that, and it broke, so now what?”.  Pragmatic, kindly, and results-oriented. Forward looking, instead of whining.   Creative and curious and happy instead of resentful, and unhappy. 

Now that I own my own rig (a Kenwood TS-570D) I will soon return the borrowed Kenwood to the kind Ham who loaned it to me.  I bought myself a  Kenwood because I like how the radio is designed and controlled.  Kenwood makes some fantastic rigs, and if I could afford a new one, I would buy one, or a new Elecraft K3 or a TenTec Eagle, but I can't afford any of the big brand prices yet. But now that I have a rig, I need a lot of stuff to go with it, and I will frequent my local ham shops, and antenna makers.  I bought a G5RV from Maple Leaf Communications, and I heartily recommend them to anybody looking for antennas.  Bob is a great guy, and makes great stuff, and knows a lot about his products.  If you're reading this and you're in the Canada or the USA, check out your local dealers, makers, and sources. If you don't, they will eventually go out of business, and who are you going to ask for advice?  If that shiny new rig costs $100 less online, consider the loss to the community if the local dealer can't keep his rent paid anymore, and has to close up shop.  Keep the hobby fun, by keeping the hobby shops around.

As another aspect of personal responsibility (combined with fun), I will homebrew and learn maintenance and repair of the electronics I own. As another part of doing good and having fun while doing good; I will be part of a community.  I will try to whine a lot less, and be positive a lot more.  If something breaks that doesn't make it crap, or anybody a bad person. So it broke. Just fix it.

I will not turn into Allie Fox.   If you want to, go ahead. I'll just go QSY or flip my radio off, and ignore you.