Eugene

A good way to get volunteered

A good way to get volunteered to do something is to mention that something needs attention or doing. The radio club I’m a member of (CARS) is no exception.

At the last meeting, I mentioned that searching the ARRL website for clubs didn’t bring up CARS, or any of the CARS VE test sessions, to which the club president replied (paraphrasing here) “So does that mean you want to look into it?”

Sure, what the heck. I figure it will be a good chance to find out al little more about the club and get my feet wet with helping out with the club.

CC1 completed

Got the last of the toroids wound and put onto the board. Now CC1 is complete!

The BNC connector was put on after I snapped these photos.

Everything sounds like it works when I apply power. I need to get a BNC/SO-239 adapter so that I can connect it to the antenna to test the receiving and then try to make myself a dummy load to test the transmit. After testing everything out, (haven’t worked out yet how I’ll test the power output, but I’ll think of something), it will be time to work on drilling holes for the end plates of the enclosure.

CC1 almost complete

The CC1 kit is getting closer to being completed. All the tiny bits are soldered on, and now there’s just the toroids left to wind. I put T1 and L4/L5 on last night and now there are just 8 inductors left to wind. No lost pieces, only one extra part (which was extra to begin with) and only two fried components.

I discovered when I went to install R50 that I had accidentally installed it in the R26 position. They’re both the same resistance, but R50 is a larger resistor. In my haste, I must have just grabbed the first 100 ohm resistor that I saw and put it on. Fortunately I was able to get it off the board without too much fuss and put it where it belonged.

I also found that installing U2 and Q9 is a whole lot easier with lots and lots of flux on the board. Wish I had known that when I installed U1 and U5.

I better get cracking on learning Morse code!

Ham meetup? Ham-up?

Ham radio clubs can be a great place to meet other hams and to find out what’s going on in the local ham community. In the Charleston area, there are two formal clubs that I’m aware of. I’ve been a member of the Charleston Amateur Radio Society (CARS) since I got licensed, and recently learned about the Trident Amateur Radio Club (TARC).

CARS has their regular meetings on the second Monday of each month, and while the meetings are a good source of info for what’s happening in the area, they’re rather business-like and can be kind of boring. TARC meetings are on the third Monday of the month. I haven’t made it to a TARC meeting yet but from what I’ve seen on their website, their meetings seem a little more casual.

Outside of regular club meetings, I haven’t come across many other gatherings of local radio people. There’s a Monday/Wednesday/Friday breakfast meetup at the Bojangles on Ashley Phosphate. It’s a nice little meetup that I’ve had a couple of opportunities to get to when I have an excuse to be in that area for work. It’s not something I can get to on a regular basis though.

It got me thinking that it would be nice to have a regular evening or weekend gathering where local radio people can get together. There are numerous possibilities for things to do:

talk about radio
get on the air and play radio
check out the newest rig
make things
share/collaborate on projects
code practice
study group for getting/upgrading your amateur radio license
sharing radio know-how
just hang out for some face-to-face rag chewing.

As for meeting places, it could really be anywhere. Coffee shop, someone’s garage, out in a park or field somewhere.

Anybody interested?

CQ WPX Contesting

Spent some time yesterday and today playing on the radio during the CQ WPX SSB contest. It’s a 48 hour long contest with an exchange of RS(T) and incremental contact number and multipliers for the number of unique prefixes worked.

Instead of using paper logs this time, I installed the N1MM contest logger on the laptop and logged everything there. It conveniently has a list of different contests, including CQ WPX and does all the scoring for you. N1MM is clearly designed to have a connection to the radio to get frequency info, which I don’t have yet so each contact I had to edit the log entry and change the frequency. Slightly inconvenient, but after a while I got used to it.

I spent about 4 hours on the radio Friday night after the contest started (000Z 30-Mar-2013) and didn’t get back to it until this morning. One of the things that I thought was interesting was seeing the contest activity march down the bands as the day went on. Friday night, almost all the activity I heard was on 40m, but this morning, there wasn’t any contest activity that I could hear on 40m. Most of the contest activity was happening on 15m. As the day went on, contest activity on 15m faded away and 20m started becoming more active during the late afternoon hours. Then activity on 40m started picking up during the early evening up until I decided to call it quits around 1930.

Not entirely sure if it’s all related to how band conditions change through the day. There’s a lot about propagation that I’m interested in learning about and I’m pretty sure I was seeing some of that changing propagation through the day.

I worked a total of about 12 hours on and off during the contest and tallied up 82 contacts. It’s the longest stretch of contesting I’ve done so far. Don’t know what my farthest contact was, but I worked a lot of European stations. One of the nice things N1MM does is calculate the contest score for you. Mine came out to 17901 with 81 unique prefixes worked.

It was fun playing in this contest, more so for listening and observing the band activity than the contacts (although that’s always nice). Looking forward to seeing how the overall results look.