Friday 6M opening into Europe

This past Friday, the 22nd of June, there was a fantastic opening into Europe during the evening hours. It seemed to be favoring the British Isles, as I have never worked so many G's in my life! A fair amount of them were CW, as sloppy as my skill are.

Here is the final tally:


PA2M - CW
PA7MM - SSB
CT8/K0RUI - SSB
VO1NM - SSB
EI4KF - SSB
G4WJS - CW
ON7GB - CW
PA0RDY - CW
EI9E - CW
G4FGK - SSB
G4WJS - SSB
G0LGS - SSB
GN7GB - CW
G4RGK - CW
G4IFX - SSB
G4RRA - CW
GM3YTS - CW
G0JHC - CW

I also heard an F8 towards the end, but never managed to work him. The Eu openings seem to favor EA and CT from this location, so it was quite a nice surprise to hear that far north.

K4MHZ 2M beacon heard in FN42la

At around 10pm local time, I started hearing the K4MHZ/B in FM25 in Hatteras, NC on 144.300. This is somewhat of an amazing feat for me, since I have such a relatively small antenna system. I'm only running 12 elements up around 25 feet. This beacon is nearly 800km from my location in FN42la.

Here is a short Youtube video that I took of the audio.

This is what the APRS propagation logger looked like at the time. The beacon is basically at the very tip of the large red lobe.

June VHF Contest 2012

This past weekend I operated up at K1WHS in FN43mj. We decided that it would be a laid back weekend and we would do a few repair jobs and take it easy operating. The weather was absolutely perfect the whole weekend and we had a great time. We several cocktail hours and did some pretty good damage on a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. It was a small crew, just 4-5 of us. Dave, KM3T, came up for his first time on Saturday and had a lot of fun working 2m and a big part of the 6m opening. 6 was open for a long period on Saturday and we were working guys all over. We called it quits early (11pm) and some of them started back up around 6am. I decided to sleep it and didn't wake up 'till 8am. We started right back into relaxation mode, only sitting in front of the 222 and 432 positions for 20-30 minutes at a time. 6 would open up for a little bit here and there, and then we ended up working a really nice opening to Europe. Art, K1BX, worked over 60 stations and numerous grids well into eastern europe. When that died down, 6 was really slow, so we decided to go out to lunch. We got back around 2:30pm and 6 was still dead, but soon opened up in a big way.

At the end of the day we had 1200+ Q's and 305 grids on 6m alone. Our score was somewhere north of 750k.

The only downer for the weekend was that we didn't have any microwaves. The rotor for the microwave stack self-destructed sometime last year and Dave had to take it down off the tower on Saturday. He thinks it can be rebuilt, we'll be back on the microwaves for September.

Dayton 2012

I just got back from my annual pilgrimage to Dayton, Ohio, for Hamvention 2012. I flew in on Thursday and spent the afternoon with a few friends at the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB. If you have never been, this museum is fantastic and never gets old. This year they added some recently declassified spy satellites!

We were blessed with good weather this year, if not almost too hot! Not a single cloud either Friday or Saturday, both days were in the upper 80's.

There was lots of good junk for sale, but the only major purchase I made was a Tektronix 2465 scope. I happen to be hanging out with a scope aficionado and he gave me the pros and cons of the 2465. It sounded well within my level of risk and I managed to find one for fairly short money. I have to give a lot of credit to Alan, W2AEW, for influencing me on making this purchase. I've been watching his Youtube channel, he has some really great videos on how to use your scope. He has a 2465 and I've fallen in love with it while watching his demos.  

Stay tuned for another update on my PCB design.

A new project is born

In 2011 I bought a new Elecraft K3 HF/6m rig. I had a great time using it on 6m last year during the Sporadic E season. Over the course of the last year I started thinking about interfacing transverters for 2m and above to the K3. I noticed that Elecraft sold an external switching box that would allow me to control an IF relay for switching the transverters per-band. The issue with using this box (KRC-2) is that you end up having to sacrifice the ability to switch external relays for the HF bands. I thought it would be interesting to to see if I could use 1 HF radio for all bands, 160m-10GHz.

More to come...

Almost a whole year....

I just noticed that it's been close to a year since I last made a post, and the last post was noting that I hadn't made any posts in a long time :)

I'll aim to correct that in 2012. I'm working on a workshop/shack rebuild, I should have lots of pictures to post soon.

Yaesu Vertex FTL-7011 information

(This post is really for the archive, for anyone searching for info on the FTL-7011 FTL-2011 and FTL-1011)

Recently I dug up an old FTL-7011 UHF commercial radio to use with a ClearCom Radio interface box. This allows the UHF handhelds we use on productions shoots to talk to the production intercom. Anyone on the Intercom system just needs to hit the call button to key the external radio.

I started looking for information on the pinout of the microphone jack and found a forum posting that ended up being false information. I think I know how it happened. There is a schematic floating around the internet for an FTL-2011. One of the main board connectors had 8 pins, and looked to be like RJ-45 mic pinout. It wasn't, that was just a main board connector. Here is what I found:

Pin 8 is the hook indicator line, attached to the metal mic hook.
Pin 6 is 5v
Pin 5 is the Mic+
Pin 4 is the Mic-
Pin 3 is 9v, presumably for the pre-amp circuit for the desk mic (it wasn't connected on my hand mic)

Pins 6 and 4 need to be shorted to PTT.

For power adjustments I found that the schematic was also wrong for the FTL-7011. The low power adjustment ended up being VR2002 and the high power adjustment was VR2003.

I set low to 5w and high to 10w. The radio measured a max of 21W, but it's old and most likely abused.

Back from a long dark winter

I haven't posted anything in a very long time. This winter I haven't done much with technology, my time has been spent working on the house and other related projects. I did some demolition in the basement that created a giant mess, it's taken me months to get it cleared up.

Another issue I had was I accidentally deleted most of the source code for my web connected receiver during a server migration. That was a serious de-motivator, but I'm back in the saddle again. I've got a start on re-creating the code, we should be back in business shortly.

So, it's spring time and antenna work is in the air! AB1II have been making plans to put up some antennas at his QTH and I plan on putting back up at least 6m and 2m antennas on the chimney, especially before Spuradic E season begins in May.

Stay tuned, I'll be posting more frequently...

Learning CSS, the hard way...

All of the web pages that I've built look like they were written in 1994; the year I learned to use HTML. As part of the remote receiver project I decided it was high time that I learn a bit more about modern web authoring, and using new techniques like CSS. The very basics of CSS are, of course, easy to understand. Where things get a little tricky is positioning things on the screen. i've been struggling with that.

I found a nice web tutorial that illustrates the point quite well, it's located here.

This, of course, doesn't give me design skills, it just let's me re-implement my 1994-looking-html in a more modern manner ;)

A long time ago......

In a basement not too far away.....

My friend Dave, KM3T, runs a very cool website called Liveatc.net. Dave has volunteers all over the world with VHF aircraft band receivers that stream live air traffic control traffic to his website. You can select any number of frequencies to listen to. In addition to the normal VHF traffic, Dave has an aircraft HF audio feed. The receiver is a Yaesu FT-817, which I am a proud owner of two. He mentioned to me casually that he changes frequency throughout the course of the day to follow propagation. Now, that intrigued me; how did he change the frequency remotely? Well, it turns out that the Yaesu rig supports CAT commands which is an rs-232 control protocol to change frequency  and modes, etc. Dave used hamlib, which is a set of libraries for linux to provide a common programming interface to various receivers and transceivers.

The concept of having a remotely controlled receiver really caught my attention, and shortly afterwards I started to talk with Jay, AB1II, about how we could do something similar. I quickly set up the streaming audio server on my home linux server and began listening to it remotely from work. The issue of changing frequency and mode was going to take some work, so I asked Jay if he could take a look at hamlib and see if we could come up with some basic utilities to change freq and mode. Jay is a programmer by trade, and within a short period of time he wrote the  utilities to control the receiver remotely via command line!

This was great! Being able to listen to HF while at work was a big bonus, especially when you need to put your headphones on and dig into a project (Coding for Jay, a spreadsheet for me).

Now, at that point we could have been happy and just walked away, but I figured we should push forward and keep adding features. The first feature was fairly obvious; make a web interface so we didn't have to ssh into the machine and have to remember command line arguments. I had been looking for an opportunity to learn PHP programming, so I decided to take this task on. After beating my head against the wall for a bit I had an interface up and running that allowed you to change the frequency via a text input box, as well as change mode.

The original FT-817 interface with shortcuts to well known frequencies

Wow, this is cool!

Some time lapsed and a few new folks started to use the receiver. I had been very busy with other projects and let this project fall by the wayside. Pretty soon I started to get the itch to continue with the project, but I wasn't really sure which direction to move in. I was also thinking at the same time that a Yaesu FT-817 is an awfully nice radio to be relegated to just being just a receiver. I use my other FT-817 on my 10GHz microwave rig. I decided the FT-817 would be replaced with the very nice AOR AR-5000 receiver that I had picked up last year, and hardly used at all. The AR-5000 would receive everything from 10khz up to 2.6GHz.

The AOR AR5000+3 capable of all modes from 10k to 2.6GHz

Ok, that makes sense, it's a receiver that's been sitting on a shelf for over a year, lets give it some use! But what a waste it would be if it were to only be used for HF! Wouldn't it be great if we could switch back and forth between several different antennas and maybe take advantage of the VHF/UHF side of the receiver as well?

Over the years I've been collecting multi-position RF relays for microwave projects, or switching IF lines for my microwave transverters.

6 position RF relay, 28v coil and 5v TTL to switch position

These relays are fairly simple, most of them require +28v @300ma to close the coil and switch to one of the positions. The relay shown in the picture is slightly different, it takes +28v @300ma at the coil plus 5v TTL to switch the position. Now, what would I use to switch positions? I had been poking around on the web and had been seeing lots of information about an open-source micro-controller available called the Arduino. I started looking closer at it and it turns out that it would be fairly simple to get the Arduino to interface with the relay. The Arduino board that I used was called a Duemillenove which has 14 digital I/O pins (TTL), plus 6 analog I/O lines. But.....It would require some software to be written! Now, I didn't exactly write the most elegant PHP code when I did the web interface for the radio, I wasn't sure my programming skills were up to the task to take on this micro-controller.

The Arduino, thankfully, has an extremely easy to use programming language. So, I ordered one and took the plunge. To my extreme amazement, I was able to write a working program in about 30 minutes from knowing absolutely nothing about the language to finish! Ok, proof of concept partially complete.

The Arduino Duemillanove mounted in a Hammond aluminium enclosure

Next, how to send data from the linux machine over to the Arduino? The Arduino has a built in USB-serial chip that you use as the main programming interface, but it can also be used to communicate directly with the processor as well. There are some basic serial commands in the programming language that allow you to send and receive data. I found a little command line utility that let me send data over the USB-serial connection, and before long I could now switch antenna positions from the command line.

Next, I discovered there was actually a serial PHP class that would allow me to access the serial port from within my PHP script. Cool!

So, now the web interface allows you to change frequency, mode and now Antenna. Of course, I've been so busy getting the code working I now need to make up a number of cables to the receiver can have access to array of receive antennas on my roof.

Remote control app with antenna selection

In a future post I'll send a URL for my code, once it's been cleaned up.

In the end, I'm amazed at how easy it was to accomplish the task of interfacing a relay to the web interface. Working with the Arduino is very easy, and it's really opened a number of doors for me. Two other projects that I plan on doing are making a beacon keyer for my future 10m beacon, plus it should be simple to make a basic electronic keyer! I just read about a MP3 shield that is available now for not much money, so I could also think about building an external voice keyer.

The options are endless with this little board.....

System Schematic