AB4UG Radioblog

Special Event: USS Yorktown (CV10) Commissioning 75th Anniversary Day 0

Even though tomorrow is the actual day of the USS Yorktown’s commissioning, I thought I’d spend the afternoon in the club room activating WA4USN and get a few more contacts in for the special event. I was joined by two other hams for the afternoon.

Things didn’t quite go exactly as planned, but still went fairly well.

After spending some time figuring out the Yaesu FT-897 that was sitting where I expected the Kenwood 570 to be, I started calling CQ on 20 m. After a few calls, we (WA4USN) got a call over the repeater from a ham at a radio station set up at a nearby Boy Scout camp asking if he could put some Cub Scouts on the air with us for the special event.

Always a good thing to get on the air with Scouts, so we talked with a group of Cub Scouts (Webelos) and then got back to HF. Spent some time calling, and then another call on the repeater with another group of Scouts. Rinse and repeat.

After the third group or so, we decided to just give up on HF and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Cub Scouts (I was too lazy to break out the headphones).

So even though there were no HF contacts today, I still consider it to be a pretty good day on the radio. Talked to 21 Scouts in total, mostly Cub Scouts. Many weren’t terribly talkative, but a few were downright chatty. Some of them learned about the Yorktown. All got exposed to radio and it seemed to have generated some interested at the camp.

Tomorrow will be all HF though.

Dead oscilloscope

My oscilloscope died the other day. <sad trombone />

I was using it to look at the output of one of my Etherkit Si5351 breakout boards when it made a high pitched “pffft”, the waveform disappeared and a bunch of indicator lights came on.

Haven’t opened it up yet to see if I can spot anything wrong. The scope still turns on, but there’s no display. The indicator lights behave like the scope is working, but there’s nothing on the CRT. That could be a good sign.

Will be a while before I have some time to poke around the innards of the scope.

Special Event: USS Yorktown (CV10) Commissioning 75th Anniversary

Update: I’ll be running the special event activation for a few hours in the afternoon on April 14 starting around 1PM-ish (1700 UTC). Most of the activity will happen on April 15 where we’ll be starting around 9AM (1300 UTC) or so, and going until we run out of steam (maybe into the evening). We’ll probably be operating mainly on 20m and 40m, depending on band conditions and operator preference. There might also be some digital or CW thrown in as well, depending on whoever happens to be operating the radio at the time.

The 75th anniversary of the commissioning of the USS Yorktown (CV-10) is coming up on April 15, so I’m planning on doing a special event activation of WA4USN from the club radio room on board the ship, along with any other club members who want to join in the fun.

My current plan is to be on the air in the afternoon from about 1-5ish on April 14 and 15. Start times may change depending on who decides to join in the fun. I won’t be able to start much earlier than 1 on each day though.

South Carolina QSO Party 2018

This year, my plan for the South Carolina QSO party was to head on over to the club station on the USS Yorktown to activate WA4USN for a few hours, then come back home and finish off the rest of the day playing under my own call sign.

On the Yorktown, I was joined by Tom,AJ4UQ, and we operated WA4USN for about 5 hours (I was there for 4) and had a pretty good time making a bunch of QSO in the contest. The first couple of hours were pretty slow. On 20m, there were lots of rag chews, the French REF contest going on, but not much activity for the QSO party. Found some more activity down on 40m, but it wasn’t until after noon that things really picked up. Band conditions seemed pretty decent on 20m and 40m, with stations across the country in WA and CA coming in loud and clear. We ended up the day with 167 contacts and a score of 15088 points. A fun time operating on the ship.

After getting back home, I got the antenna and the radio set up outside on the back patio and started tuning around the bands. My first contact was on 40m with OM2VL in the Slovak Republic calling for SCQP. Happy I was able to give him a new multiplier for his day.

Found an open frequency on 40m and called for a while, making a few more contacts, then took a break to tend to the dogs. Noticed the house was feeling pretty cool, and found that the AC was running even though the Nest thermostat was saying it was Off. After futzing around with the Nest a while and resetting breakers, I decided the Nest was borked and set about switching it out with the original thermostat that came with the house. That pretty much derailed my plans for the rest of the QSO party.

So, I finished off the SC QSO party with 5 contacts. Didn’t get to play nearly as long as I was hoping to. Guess I’ll have to try again next year.

Not sure what caused the Nest to fail (actually, the base of the Nest). I’ve had a previous Nest base fail on me a few years ago so it could have been a coincidence. Can’t rule out the possibility that the Nest base got zapped by some RF while I was playing on the radio. It’s not the first time I’ve been on the air here though, and none of those times seemed to have bothered the Nest.

RCA Senior Voltohmyst

The RCA WV-98C Senior Voltohmyst (SN 201001 1104)I picked up at the hamfest yesterday looks to be in pretty good working order.

No smoke, popping or other unusual sounds/odours when I plugged it in. Some initial testing with batteries and some resistors suggests a bit of recalibration or maybe a bit of repair might be needed though.

Fortunately I was able to find a manual for it at the Boat Anchor Manual Archive.

Removing four screws from the back lets you take the back cover off (a fairly substantial chunk of cast aluminum) revealing the innards of the meter.

The blue adjustment screws are trim pots used for adjusting the meter calibration.

One thing that surprised me was the presence of a soldered in D cell.

Top part of the Voltohmyst. Badly corroded 1.5V D cell and transformer

No idea what vintage the battery is or what it’s used for (at the moment), but my multi-meter showed it still had 1.4 V across it. The battery has definitely seen better days. I think I’ll see about replacing the battery with a battery holder so it can be removed and replaced in the future. Fortunately it looks like the wires have enough slack to work with.

The rest of the meter looks to be in pretty decent shape, and pretty clean. Without taking off the face of the meter, it’s a little hard to get in there to check out the middle. There are two tubes in the unit, a 12AU7 and 6AL5.