6 m Antenna Inspiration

It's nice to see that my antenna article in Amatørradio no. 3 this year has inspired others. In no. 4, LA1AEA, Alfred, has written about how he made his own. It helped him try the 6 meter band this summer. Given his location in the very far North of Norway (Finnmark), I'm impressed by contacts that he had all the way to Greece, 3500 km away.

He writes: "LA3ZA Sverre Holm wrote an interesting article in no 3, 2019 with title "A Moxon summer antenna for 6 meter." I was inspired to try myself with some simple materials that I had available. For a long time I have considered the 6 m band to be unusable from here way up North. But this shows how wrong one can be."

This blog post first appeared on the LA3ZA blog.

QRPGuys LA3ZA Zero Beat Indicator

Image: QRPGuys.com

Some time ago QRPGuys approached me and asked if they could make the low-power zero-beat indicator that I made many years ago available as a kit. I was surprised and very honored by this request. It's been available from them for a while now and here is a description from their page:

The QRPGuys LA3ZA Zero Beat Indicator gives you a visual indication when you are tuned to the callers frequency, based on the tone of the received signal you hear on your transceiver. The theory is simple. The device takes into account the amount of built-in offset your transceiver has, usually around 300-800Hz, and illuminates an led when it detects that specific tone you hear when you are tuned to transmit on the callers specific frequency.

FT8 From My Garden With Chrome Remote Desktop

W3RW, J. Robert Wittmer wrote "Enjoy FT8 From Almost Anywhere" in the September issue of QST. He used Teamviewer for remote operation. I tried that and found what the article also said, that if the host PC's session was terminated one needed to get a new password in order for an Ipad to log on again. I also found that multiple screens was a bit cumbersome to access.

Then I read the blog of DM5HF, Christoph Steinert, and saw that Google's Chrome Remote Desktop could be a good alternative.

You have probably worked an FT8 robot

I was following the presentation of Joe Taylor, K1JT, from the recent German ham radio meeting in Friedrichshafen this year. He showed this slide of stations suspected of being robotic ones, due to them being seen on PSKReporter 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. His list is this:

I have worked many of these and most of them on multiple bands:
A41ZZ, A45XR, CN2MA, ES6DO
EW8W, HA1RB, HA7TM, IK4LZH
OG0C, OO6O
OO7B, RA9H, SQ9IWA, SV1EDY
SV5DKL

I only miss IK4LZH, KA1AQP, KW4SP, OO6O, OO7B, RA9H, SV1EDY, and W1KE.

In addition it wouldn't surprise me if MM0HVU also runs automatically from time to time judging from how often that call sign is seen on the bands.

Have you worked any of these stations? And are there others who are active on an almost 24/7 basis?

By the way, the presentation has title "WSJT-X FT8 and Beyond" and can be downloaded (images and sound) here. It is well worth listening too.



This blog post first appeared on the LA3ZA Radio & Electronics Blog.

A Moxon for 6 meter

My new 6 m antenna is in the Norwegian ham radio magazine Amatørradio this month and the two first pages are shown below. The title is "A Moxon summer antenna for 6 meter". A very short version is here.

The antenna builds on the design of L. B. Cebik, W4RNL in QST June 2000 - "Having a Field Day with the Moxon Rectangle". That design can be found in the moxgen program which may be downloaded from AC6LA. My design frequency was 50.2 MHz - in order to cover the CW band and FT8 at 50.313 MHz.

The design with crossed glassfiber rods was inspired by that of Anthony Good, K3NG - "Homebrew Lightweight 6 Meter Moxon".

Port sharing for WSJT-X

The program for FT8 and other digital modes, WSJT-X, requires control over the communications port of a rig like the Elecraft K3. But so does the log program. Fortunately there is a solution for sharing ports. I use LP_Bridge and DXLab Commander which are both freeware.

LP_Bridge works OK, although it does abort for mysterious reasons from time to time. The setup is here:

The active ports are COM16 which connects to the radio, COM14 which connects to Commander, and COM13 which is used for the logging program.

50 MHz Doppler shift from planes

This is the first time I have observed Doppler shift in the 6 meter band. It is not so hard to see on the waterfall display of FT8.

The two stations are LA9PJA (1415 Hz) and LB6D (2477 Hz). Both of them are located in the same square as me (JO59). The other weaker signals are British and French. One can see the direct signal which has a constant frequency, and then a time-varying frequency on top of that.

Morserino now supports Single Paddle Emulation

Picture credit Morserino-32

I was happy to see the other day that the nice-looking Morserino keyer with its modern display in its latest firmware, version 1.3, now supports a new mode. It is described as follows:

A new mode in addition to Iambic A, Iambic B and Ultimatic: Non-Squeeze. This "simulates" the behavior of a single lever paddle when using a dual lever paddle. 

Operators used to single lever paddles tend to have difficulties using dual-lever paddles, as they sometimes inadvertently squeeze the paddles, especially at higher speeds. The non-squeeze mode just ignores squeezing, making it easier for these operators to use a dual lever paddle.

More spurs than I had hoped for

My Just good enough 10 MHz reference based on the direct output of a Neo-7 GPS module, described in detail before on this blog, is good in keeping long-term frequency stability. Short-term stability and phase noise is as expected not so good. When connected to the reference input of my Elecraft K3 and listening to an outdoor antenna, I get quite a substantial amount of spurs around 10 MHz radiating from the GPS module. But since the K3 itself does averaging over a second or so, this is fine from the point of view of keeping accurate frequency.

Book rather than Blog

My blog has suffered in recent years and here is the reason. For three years now I have been writing a book entitled "Waves with Power-Law Attenuation". It is now in Springer's catalogue under classical and continuum physics and I'm also very happy that it is published in the Acoustical Society of America Press series.

The emphasis is on models for waves that experience attenuation that follows a power-law in frequency. Topic-wise it is more about mechanical than electromagnetic waves, but analogies are drawn between the two fields as many of the models are the same. Power-law models in electromagnetics are in particular useful for waves in biological tissue, which is indeed also the case for acoustic and elastic waves.

The Ultimate WSPR Spot - part 2

Being spotted by the designer of my WSPR transmitter must be the ultimate WSPR spot! Perhaps only surpassed by being spotted by the designer of the mode himself, K1JT, Joe as I was four years ago.

It is Hans, G0UPL, of QRPLabs who is the designer of both my U3 to the left (turned off) and the U3S to the right. The latter was the active transmitter at the time of the spot below.

By the way, this is a line from VK2TPM, Peter's excellent WSPR Watch app for Ipod.