6M opening to Newfoundland

I worked VO1NM up in Newfoundland this evening. There was a larger opening to Europe earlier in the day, but by the time I got home from work it was already starting to fade. I heard an HA3 (Hungary), but he was very weak.

I took a quick video of my QSO with VO1NM, he was S9+20 at times. He sounded as loud as a local. After me, you can barely hear WZ1V work him as well. Ron was off the back of the beam, so not as loud as he normally would have been.

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 ;)