An amazing day out, thanks to all stations who worked us. QSL cards will be posted to all 200 contacts. Chris (G0EYO) said, “I counted 18, G0EYO, M0MCX, M3PMP, Syd (G4?) M6AUL, 2E0WTH, M0NYP, M0JMM, 2E0BLP, M1JSS, M0IDR &XYL, G7DDN, G7IBO, M3RSC, M0YOM, G0MTN, and M0COK. Who have I missed out”? Speak up if your callsign isn’t listed. What a great day team!
Photos courtesy of James Thresher, M0YOM
Elsewhere on this website, you can read a tribute to Lew Williams, former President of Wythall Radio Club and our original CW tutor. Many current members took their first steps in Morse Code with Lew.
Some time ago, after Lew sadly passed away, it was thought appropriate to honour his memory in a suitable manner and so the Lew Williams Sheild was born!
In order to win this trophy, Wythall Club members are being asked to view the 31 days of the month of May as a “Morse Code Activity Month”. The shield will be awarded to the club member who has shown the biggest contribution to the event, and/or shown the greatest improvement in Morse Code skills. Certificates may be also awarded for various levels of achievement.
Morse Code Activity Month
The quantity of contacts will not be the most important factor. Log submissions and personal statements will be equally important in the judging process. The sort of things the judges will look for include… “First live CW QSOs on HF”, or “First CW QSOs not using an automatic reader”, “First ever CW QSOs, but did use receive assistance”, ”Log shows 20 Wythall club members contacted using CW”, “Log shows 30 countries worked during the month.”
As a fun, friendly event, it is hoped that members will recognize improvement in their fellow club members and submit feedback and nominations for them. Like the Oscars, the Lew Williams Shield can be largely decided by your peers!
So it may be time to dust off that key and finally see what you can do with the code!
A few years ago, I decided it was time I had a go at a Morse Code (CW) contest. Having picked a short evening event in the UK, I was surprised (perhaps I shouldn’t have been!) at how simple and formulaic the exchanges were. Plucking up some courage and dusting off the straight key, I managed to complete my first faltering contacts using little more than my callsign and a few numbers!
With Wythall Radio Club’s “Morse Month” coming up this May, it seemed a good time for Lee G0MTN, one of our resident CW experts, to pop along and give us a short presentation, about how feasible it really is to make some excellent contacts on CW without actually knowing much more than how to read a callsign and send a few numbers!
There can of course, be much more to it that this, but nonetheless, it makes a jolly intriguing title for a talk, so why not pop along next Tuesday 17th April and hear for yourself how easy it can be to make contacts with just an initial limited knowledge of the code?
Who knows? You might even be tempted to take it further!
This time next week, Easter will be almost upon us, and while the young-at-heart among us will doubtless be tucking into our chocolate eggs, members of Wythall Radio Club will also be busy on the airwaves.
Thursday sees the start of our Easter Contest, a shorter version of our Christmas Contest. While members will be busy from 1000 local time trying to work each other across the holiday period, everyone is welcome to call in and say hello. The contest ends on Easter Monday at 2200 and members will be submitting their best 3 days to see if they can win an extra Easter Egg or two!
But there’s more! The club is also putting on a Special Event Station this weekend at the Hanbury Vintage Steam Fair. Look out for the club station on the field on both Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday with keen members making contacts on both VHF and HF. The fact there is a good flow of real ale on site plays only a little part in our interest! ;-)
Wythall Radio Club wishes you and your families a very happy Easter Holiday.
I happened to be talking to Chris, G3VNA on the internet in the MyDel Yahoo Group Reflector. Chris has recently bought an SG3000, Auto Antena Tuner. We were discussing the technique of joining antenna wire together and I recalled a long debate years ago on eHam. The general conclusion was that you can join antenna wire but try not to use solder. Apparently the solder breaks down over time and you can end up with a worse problem due to the solder joint starting to behave as a component.
Over the last couple of years, I have experimented with jointing aerial wire and have had great succes with what they call the AT&T Wireman’s Joint (or similar). Somewhere on the internet is a PDF document showing this join which happens to be about the most natural join you can make with wire anyway. As it happens, that’s the same join as I have been making since I can remember. Indeed, it seems as strong as the wire itself.
The photograph shown here is of enamelled hard drawn wire. For the benefit of the photo, I have not scraped the varnish off the copper. This would certainly NOT work as a join if you left the varnish all shiny like this, you’d have to get your pen-knife out and scrape it all off. But the then the photo would be ruined :)
If you are using stranded wire, you can still use a similar join but I would recommend taping up the joint so that it didn’t unravel over time.
Have fun with rf!
Callum.
I’m very pleased to report that I have just completed my first QSO on the HF bands using JT65-HF, a mode that was designed for very weak signal EME work but is now in use across the HF bands. If you have an RF isolated sound card you can be in business inside 10 minutes. You don’t even need a COM port for PTT, it will work with VOX. I downloaded my version here here but I believe there are other decoders out there.
In a nutshell, this is the most quirky and strange mode I have ever used but certainly fun. Calling CQ and answering CQ can only happen at the top of the minute. Each “over” takes 48 seconds and therefore you have 12 seconds to make up your mind what to do about the next over. On top of that, the protocol only allows for an exchange of 13 characters. However, it is highly tolerant of interference, fading and other nasties – ideal for EME as it seems (and also for bands that are apparently “closed”). There’s a fabulous paper written here which I recommend to all readers. Of interest, the character strings that are transmitted are not sent one at a time, like CW but as a scrunched up packet. Decoding these messages are a mathematician’s dream!
Click the thumbnail for a full-sized screenshot of my first QSO – and let me know if you have a go.
This morning, I was playing around with DM780, a package which is bundled with the Ham Radio Deluxe suite, when I stumbled across RU6YJ calling CQ on 15m. He was using MFSK-16 although it took me a while to work out what mode he was on. The trace looked like OLIVIA 250/8 or DominoEx16 but neither would decode his signal. Eventually, I worked out that he was using MFSK-16 and I replied with my call.
After the usual digital pleasantries, he asked me if I could send a picture. I was slightly taken aback because I had no idea that MFSK-16 could send pictures. I asked him to wait 10 minutes whilst I worked it all out. After some super-fast research, I discovered that a 200 x 200 picture in monochrome wouldn’t be too ostentatious and I managed to replace Simon Brown’s (author of HRD) default picture with my own and make a test send a few khz up from where Vlad was. 
In the meantime, he’d found another victim and was mid-QSO so when he called CQ again, we started down the path of exchanging photos.
What made this quite funny is that I lost the macro to send the pic, so I manually entered “<send pic>” which didn’t work, he just received the words “<SEND PIC>”. In the end, we both managed to hit the right buttons. I sent mine and he sent his. Afterwards, he asked that I email him the received picture. We exchanged via email and I have attached them to this post.
73 OM.
I never stop to be amazed with this hobby. Tonight I managed to send and receive emails via the WinLink 2000 Global Radio Email system (http://www.winlink.org/). The WinLink website states that “Winlink 2000 (WL2K) is a worldwide system of volunteer resources supporting e-mail by radio, with non-commercial links to internet e-mail”. I have been fascinated by the possibililty of sending and receiving email whilst out in the sticks for some time and wondered how complex it might be. Luckily, I already have a soundcard interface between my PC and my radio and also a software controlled PTT switch, so I found installing and configuring the software was fairly easy – although there was some trial and error. I positively love hardware user guides but I have a deep loathing of them for software which can get me into trouble, but not this time :)
Firstly, I created an email to myself with the supplied RMS Express email client and clicked the Open Session button, selecting “WinMore Wl2K” from the drop down menu. Once the WinLink 2000 Session started, I went to the Setup menu and followed the setup routines for my radio, these boiled down to 1) the radio you have in mind – and there was a large selection of radios including my target, an FT1000MP 2) the COM port to control the radio and baud speed (Com 4 for me at 4800 bps), 3) the PTT switch Com port (number 6 in my case) and finally 4) the audio selection for Audio In and Audio Out. I have a number of sound cards installed on my XP machine and it took some trial and error to get it to work using the TEST routine, supplied on one of the menus (Setup > Transmit Level test)
I was prompted to select an appropriate station to connect to and after some deliberation, I ended up listening to a blank frequency of apparently HB9QX-5 on my dial frequency 3.597.50, USB. Nothing but static.
Eventually, I plucked up the courage to hit the START button and away she went! My PC clicked and the FT1000MP sprang into life and sent an automated burst of data via RF out across the 80m band. I was amazed when I heard HB9QX-5 responding and off the two stations went, dancing around bytes, handshaking, Rcv Frames, Error correction and more. I was astonished as my data finally left my station and literally before the two stations agreed to terminate their session (it is fully automatic), an email had arrived in my inbox!
So there’s more to life than PSK31. Give WinLink a go and have a bit of fun with a practical slant! Good luck,
Callum, M0MCX.
