Cyde Weys Musings

On Saturday this past weekend I did so many ham radio activities I had to split them across two blog posts. Yesterday I wrote about the 17 foot antenna I installed on top of my house. Today, I’ll regale you with tales from Field Day 2008.

Field Day is an annual 24-hour North American amateur radio event running from 2pm on Saturday to 2pm on Sunday. Amateur radio clubs and operators all across the nation set up stations off the grid as an emergency preparedness exercise and public outreach event. Contesting is a large part of it, with the goal being to make confirmed contacts with as many other Field Day stations as possible. So after finishing setting up our own antenna, and after grabbing a quick bite for dinner, my dad and I headed over to Montgomery Amateur Radio Club’s (W3EXP) Field Day location at the Montgomery College campus in Germantown, Maryland.

The Field Day setup was quite impressive. Antennas were everywhere. Many temporary masts, some guyed, some not, filled two different parking lots, a gravel area, and a field. Longwire antennas were strung between trees and in giant inverted-Vs off masts. Altogether the setup had eight separate antenna systems and at least fifteen towers/masts. Two gasoline generators provided electricity for all of the equipment. Three separate rental vans were set up as operating stations, with the radio stations inside of them shielded from the weather (they had a bad experience last year with the weather).

When we arrived, W3TDH was still working on setting up a 20m Yagi on a 50′ crank-up military mast made of aircraft-grade aluminum left over from the Korean War. Unfortunately, we never got that antenna up, because about an hour before dark a vicious thunderstorm blew in. Luckily, being at a ham radio station is about the best place to be when inclement weather is coming in, because everyone was kept apprised with up-to-the-minute weather information using the club’s repeater (it seemed like everyone there had a handheld VHF radio). I was also getting weather reports off the National Weather Service’s channels and the Blumont, Virginia ham radio repeater (147.300), which runs a SkyWarn net during inclement weather. As the storm came in, we shut off the transceivers and most of us headed into the nearest building on Montgomery College’s campus.

However, before I started to go inside, I had the immense “pleasure” of watching two guyed masts come down in the gale-force winds just forty feet away from me. Apparently they had been put up with only two guyed tiers (against W3TDH’s recommendation to use all three), and they came down quite quickly in the high-speed winds. It was a sight to see. The bottom sections of the masts, which were not secured to the ground, blew sideways, either coming undone from their locking joints or snapping right off. Then the entire masts toppled over sideways, straining against their guy anchors, many of which came ripping right out of the ground. Guy wires flew menacingly across the darkening sky. I was very fortunate not to be downwind of the masts when they blew over, because I was closer to them than they were tall. After this, I dithered no further outside.

After weathering out the storm inside the Science Building at Montgomery College until it was merely raining, we emerged to survey the extent of the damage. Those two masts were the only things that were damaged by the storm. Everything else survived just fine. Unfortunately in the meantime darkness had descended, and making progress on putting up that 20m Yagi became nearly impossible.

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This weekend was pretty awesome. Saturday was jam-packed with ham radio activities, from morning until midnight (and beyond). That’s right, an entire day of ham radio! I started off by installing the 17-foot antenna I bought awhile back on top of our house. That took a good four to five hours, many of them spent on top of a burning-hot roof forty feet in the air. But it was worth it! Here’s a close-up look at the antenna.

Don’t be fooled by the upwards-looking perspective; this antenna is a full 17′ tall. The mount also adds about two feet to the overall height. Altogether, the antenna is about 30′ in the air. That’s not bad considering we didn’t have to put up a tower or anything. The three spokes sticking out of the bottom of the antenna are the radials, which create the ground plane for the radio signals. And I should point out that this antenna is a marked improvement over my previous antenna, which was a 44-incher at ground level.

The two flanges of the mount are located off-center on the pressure-treated wood blocks. This was not intentional, but rather, a consequence of bad measurement and trying to get the darn thing straight up in the air. But don’t let its looks fool you: the mount itself is rock-solid. You could throw a grappling hook through the mount and ascend to the roof from the ground. Each wooden block is secured with four 4.5″ bolts to blocks of wood on the interior of the house that are screwed directly into the house’s frame.

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I know what you’re thinking — as if GNU/Linux and ham radio couldn’t possibly be nerdy enough when separate, let’s put them together! But let’s take a step back …

I started getting involved with ham radio just three months ago with VHF/UHF voice FM, and already I’m hungering for more. I don’t have an HF rig yet, and might actually not have one for awhile, but since I know it’s something I’ll want to do eventually, I figure I should just start learning Morse code now. As for why I want to learn Morse code, I couldn’t exactly tell you — there’s just a certain romance to it, and pounding away on a key is such a delightfully different method of communicating than just speaking into a microphone. But ignoring why I want to learn it, here’s how I’m going about doing it, in GNU/Linux no less.

Learning Morse code on the computer is actually harder than it should be. I couldn’t find any Flash or Java applets that do something as simple as generate Morse code. Seriously. I found some really old Java applets that no longer function in current JDKs, but they don’t count. I found lots of DOS programs, many of which are pushing two decades old, but I wasn’t having much luck with them even under Windows. And since I’m running GNU/Linux as my primary desktop now, these programs weren’t helpful at all. Luckily, there’s a simple up-to-date command-line utility for GNU/Linux that does all the basics with a minimum of fuss.

First, you’ll want the morse program. In Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux, you can do the following:

sudo apt-get install morse

If you’re not using Ubuntu or Debian, you should be able to find it using the package manager in your distro of choice.

Now, learning Morse is as simple as passing in the right command-line parameters to morse. Here’s what I’ve started with:

morse -rC 'ETAOINSHRDLU' -w 5 -Ts

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It’s been awhile since I’ve discussed non-computer-related construction projects on this blog, so to break the drought, here are some details on a shortly upcoming antenna project.

The Amateur Radio Relay League’s annual Field Day is coming up next weekend. Field Day is the largest weekend of the year for amateur radio operators. It includes of all sorts of outreach activities, as well as heavy contesting (racing to see who can make the most radio contacts over the weekend). Since I only became involved with amateur radio recently, it’ll be my first Field Day. Unfortunately, the only antenna I’m operational on right now is a 44″ magnetic mount 70cm/2m dual-band whip antenna. It’s decent for operating mobile, but its performance isn’t anything to write home about.

Luckily, I bought a 17-foot 70m/2m dual-band base station antenna at a hamfest in March. A 201.5″ antenna is a bit more impressive than a 44″ antenna, don’t you think? I haven’t actually gotten around to installing the antenna yet, but Field Day is as good a reason as any to finally get it done. I’ve already done all the prep work and assembled the mount, which you can see in the picture. The domestic house cat is for scale.

I bought all the parts from Home Depot at not-too-ridiculous prices. All of it is galvanized steel (and thus rustproof), except for the tee-junction, which this particular Home Depot seemed to be out of in galvi. I do have a can of clear gloss waterproofing spray paint laying around though — hopefully a couple layers should be enough to keep the tee-junction safe from the weather. Most of the piping is 1″ interior diameter.

As for how the mount works, it will be installed vertically just below the peak of the roof on the side of the house. The two flanges will be secured to the side of the house using four-inch-long bolt screws. The screws will, of course, be going into studs accessible from inside the attic. The aluminum tube you see attached to the top of the mounting assembly is the base of the antenna; the antenna itself simply drops right into it once the mount is attached to the house. As for the decision of the overall placement, I’m putting the mount on the side of the house instead of on top of it so I don’t have to drill any holes through the roof, which could potentially cause some leaking.

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This right here is the definition of want:

Yes, that’s right, it’s a 4X Yagi antenna array on an electronically controlled alt-azimuth mount. Oh man, what I wouldn’t do to have one of those. It’s amazing. It has four times the antennae of a simple Yagi beam, thus four times the gain (an increase of 6 dB). And the alt-azimuth mount gives you two full degrees of freedom, allowing you to track satellites. The one problem I see is that it looks like the Yagis are horizontally polarized (although it’s hard to tell from the YouTube video), whereas for space contact you’d want them to be cross-polarized to account for spinning satellites. It’s still an impressive show all around though.

Plus, you can’t deny how cool it is. It reminds me of a Death Star laser turret, only it’s used for peace, not war. You can’t claim to be a nerd if, after seeing a video of a 4X Yagi array on an electronically controlled alt-azimuth mouth, you have any thought other than “I want one of those”.

I bought a fused power cable at the hamfest in Maryland this weekend so I could install my mobile ham radio in my 1996 Ford Taurus. There was just one problem: getting the cable from the battery in the engine compartment to the passenger compartment. In between these two sections is the firewall, and the firewall on the Ford Taurus is notoriously hard to get through. Many other vehicles have unused or underused grommets that a cable can be passed through, but preliminary investigations on the web revealed only one unused grommet in the Ford Taurus, but I couldn’t even locate it. I’m writing this blog post so that anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation will know what to do, whether they’re powering a ham radio, subwoofer, amp, whatever.

Since I couldn’t find a grommet to pass the cable through, I ended up drilling a hole through the firewall near where the gas pedal wire goes through the firewall. I chose this location to drill because it was one of the few spots that was relatively unobstructed on both sides of the firewall. I was worried about the wires potentially interfering with the movement of the gas pedal in the passenger compartment, but I came up with a solution (more on that later).

The place you want to drill through is directly to the left of the circular metal pad surrounding where the throttle wire passes through the firewall. Drill from the inside of the vehicle; the engine compartment is way too cramped. The foot well is cramped too, but doable. You’ll have to lie with your back on the lip of the doorway and your feet on the ground. I recommend using a power drill plugged into 120VAC from an extension cord. Battery-powered drills are more bulky and might not fit in the cramped space inside the foot well, and you’re going to need a lot of power to get through that firewall (you are drilling through fireproof metal, after all).

Fig. 1: The hole in the firewall where the cable passes through. The two black cylinders contain the fuses. The hole in the insulation is a bit bigger than the hole in the metal firewall underneath, which is just big enough to fit the cable.

My power cable consisted of a red and a black wire joined together, so it was significantly larger in one dimension. Thus, I had to cut out a tall hole that would allow the wire to pass through. A neat trick is to drill two separate close-by holes with a smaller drill bit, then keep drilling with larger drill bits until the two holes merge. Then you’ll be able to fit your non-circular wire through. Also, I definitely recommend wearing a heavy duty leather glove on the hand that’s holding the drill. I wasn’t, and I left a good bit of skin on the sharp steel vent when I scraped my finger against it after the drill abruptly pierced through to the other side of the firewall.

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Earlier today I attended my first hamfest (amateur radio convention), the Greater Baltimore Hamboree and Computerfest in Timonium, Maryland. Having just started with ham radio less than a month ago, I’m definitely getting into it pretty quickly. The rate at which I’m blowing through money will attest to that.

Overall, I give the hamfest mixed reviews. I’ll start with the negatives first so we can end on a positive note. Most of the negatives stem from my misconceptions of what this hamfest was. I was expecting a convention where the main activity is chatting up fellow hams and checking out cool rigs, but this hamfest turned out to be basically a large flea market, with a good mix of professional and not-so-professional vendors. It had a $10 per head admission charge.

The computer part of the show was just outright crap. Most of the computers on sale looked like they were acquired by the pallet-load from public auction, and simply weren’t worth buying even at the low asking price of $100-$200. I swear, some of those computers were pushing ten years old. If you wanted cheap and/or used peripherals though, this was your place (yay for $5 three generation old non-scroll-wheel optical mice). And if you want to risk all of the rest of your expensive computer components on shady unmarked power supplies, this was your opportunity! In the end, I just couldn’t justify spending any money on the computer stuff, so I didn’t. I’ll take NewEgg any day of the year. The tailgating part was especially depressing; a bunch of people (some of them hucksters) were selling miscellaneous computer and electronics junk set up on cheap tables out in the parking lot. I saw electronics equipment that was decades old. Who wants this stuff?!

There were lots of vendors selling vacuum tubes of all shapes and sizes, tens of thousands of them. The average price was about $1.00 per tube, which my dad says is less than they used to cost decades ago when they were still widely used (and that’s not taking inflation into account). None of the tubes were manufactured in the past few decades either. It’s like the transistor exploded onto the electronics scene so quickly and so completely that the inventory of tubes the manufacturers happened to have on-hand at the time was more than enough to satisfy the entire lingering tube market in perpetuity.

A lot of the vendors were, and there’s no other way to put it, shady. I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse them of having outright stolen what they were selling, but a lot of it wasn’t on the level, starting with the fact that most people weren’t charging sales tax and probably weren’t even reporting their sales to the IRS. There was no way to verify if a lot of things that were on sale were actually working, and presumably no way to return them if they weren’t. I’m also not intimately familiar with most of the kinds of things that were on sale, and I would have no idea if I was getting a good deal or a bad deal.

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My friend Greg and I spent several nights this past week attempting to listen to amateur radio signals from the International Space Station (he’s been using Gpredict to find time windows of orbits close to us). Not only is one of the crew members on the station a ham, but they also have a fully functioning repeater on the station as well. The uplink frequency is 437.800 MHz and the downlink frequency is 145.800 MHz. I had my squelch turned to minimum and my volume set high, but I never heard anything but white noise. Oh sure, I fleetingly thought that I had a variety of contacts, but that was just my brain playing tricks on me. It’s a well-known psychological quirk that people can fool themselves into hearing meaningful noises in pure static, or seeing patterns in random shapes.

I spent twenty minutes on each of several different nights listening to white noise, straining with all my mental might to hear something amidst the cacophony. But we never heard anything. None of the orbits brought the ISS closer than 800 miles. It was simply too far for our receiving equipment. We both have 44-inch magnetic mount dual-band whip antennae, the kind that can be affixed to the top of a vehicle. They’re good for ground-based mobile operations, but not for trying to receive signals from space! For that, you really want a cross-polarized Yagi antenna on an altitude-azimuth mount (imagine how large ground-based telescopes are pointed and you’ve got it). And that represented a far larger investment in the hobby than either of us has made so far. Are receiving transmissions from space limited only to the upper echelons of the hobby? Is attempting it with entry-level equipment as foolish as someone with a cheap telescope from Wal-Mart searching for a new planet? I would soon find out.

After another annoyingly silent ISS pass last night, gpredict showed that the biological research satellite GeneSat-1 (see picture above) was passing almost directly overhead in another twenty minutes. It also happens to be equipped with a beacon operating in the 70cm amateur radio band. I was skeptical, and it was getting late, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity. This would be four times closer than any pass of the ISS so far (and thus sixteen times the signal strength, thank you inverse-square law), so I was hopeful. The frequency of GeneSat-1’s beacon is 437.067 MHz. I can only tune my radio in 5 KHz increments, but the Doppler shift of the orbit spreads the signal out enough that it would be heard on the frequency I tuned my radio to, 437.065 MHz, if indeed the signal was strong enough to be heard at all.

So again I turn the squelch all the way down and the volume up to almost painful levels (if you’re a fan of overblown metaphors, imagine a fighter pilot setting his afterburners to maximum, his plane roaring and rumbling around him). I listened intently as the minutes slowly ticked away. GeneSat-1 crested the horizon; nothing. It began rising higher and higher in the sky; still nothing, though my mind was now alerting on fake signals at an alarming rate, only for each to be rejected after a moment’s consideration.

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First of all, accept my apology for the groan-inducing title of this post. It popped into my head and I couldn’t not run with it.

Last night I was idly chatting away on a 2 meter band repeater in Rockville, MD (frequency 146.955 MHz) when someone by the name of Fred (callsign K3CSX) broke in at the end of the conversation and said he had a radiogram for KB3QNZ, aka me. He proceeded to read off a message, which I copied. Here it is:

Greetings via amateur radio. Congratulations on your new callsign, a most worthy and deserved achievement. Welcome to the amateur radio world. We are glad to have you with us and hope you will enjoy the fun and fellowship of the organization.

The message came from Gil (callsign W1GMF) out of Massachusetts. Of course, I immediately had some questions, such as: What is a radiogram? Who is Gil? How did this message get to me from Massachusetts? Luckily, Fred stuck around long enough to answer my questions.

My radiogram was transmitted using the National Traffic System, a nationwide, hierarchical message-passing system relying solely on amateur radio links, and thus not dependent on the phone system, the Internet, or any other communications infrastructure. The nodes in the traffic net have backup generators for use in emergencies, so the National Traffic System isn’t even dependent on the power grid. If everything else goes down, it will still be there. Think of it as a safety net for society, silently chugging away unnoticed in the background of everyday life, ready and waiting for a mega-disaster to spring into action at full speed and save many lives when all other means of transmitting emergency communications go down.

However, the NTS just isn’t used all that much in non-emergency situations (it used to be, but then email came along), so people like Gil routinely put messages into the system just to keep everyone in practice. And what better messages to send than greetings to new hams? He tracks down the new hams to send messages to by looking for recently published callsigns in the FCC’s database of licensed ham radio operators.

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I got my dual-band transceiver earlier today (a Yaesu FT-7800R, if you must know) and I just spent several hours tonight playing with it. I made my first contact in short order after listening in on some local repeater bands and getting the hang of how a typical ham radio conversation works. The nice thing about being a ham in the Washington D.C. metropolitan region is that there’s no shortage of people to talk to, even at weird hours of the night. As I type this it’s just before midnight and I’m listening to three people out of Virginia talking about guns and the military (yeah, stereotypical, eh?).

As I listened to a conversation earlier in the evening I heard one guy identify himself as KB3QNY. I immediately had to break in and point out the coincidence, because my callsign is KB3QNZ! How often do you meet one of the two people who’s off your callsign by a single character? And what were the odds of running into said person within my first hour of ham radio? He was talking with a ham veteran trying to get his antenna set up correctly (apparently setting a bacon pan underneath the antenna indoors helped to establish a ground plane). Callsigns are handed out sequentially, so I know he got his license on the same day I did.

Then I called up my friend Greg, who I took the ham radio exam with, and within very short order we were talking to each other on a 2 meter band repeater out of Bluemont, Virginia. We needed the repeater because he only has a handheld radio, so while he might be able to hear me in simplex mode, it’s unlikely I would be able to hear him back. And then, as we were talking, a young woman named Stephanie broke into the conversation. She was transmitting mobile from a car her grandmother was driving. She has a bit more experience than us, so she got us into a simple round robin order after Greg and I accidentally transmitted over one another.

Thus, one of the most important distinctions between ham radio and Internet chat was immediately made clear to me: with ham radio, at least on the UHF/VHF bands, you’re only talking with people in the nearby area. Even if you never end up meeting those people in person, it’s still significant that they’re nearby. You can talk about the same places, the same local events, even that old standby of boring conversations, the weather. You simply don’t get anything like that in global Internet chat rooms (be they text or voice chat). The Internet has brought the entire world together, but at the expense of so many of the meaningful realities of place. I’m told that ham radio has a much similar feel to the local BBSes of yore than to today’s Internet. I believe it. There’s something pretty unique in this hobby that I’m only just discovering. I can see why so many people like it.