The radio amateurs are coming! Oslo Mini Maker Faire

"Have you dreamt about sending radio signals via the ionosphere? Or what about studying moon bounced echoes? Visit the radio amateurs and you can learn about analog and digital radio communications, antennas and electronics. There are 5-6000 radio amateurs in Norway, and they probably represent the oldest maker hobby.”

This was the enthusiastic introduction that we were given on the web pages of Oslo Mini Maker Faire. It was arranged at Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology on April 6-7, 2013 in collaboration with the University of Oslo. There were close to 4000 visitors during the weekend and about 100 exhibitors. Our joint stand between the radio amateurs of the Asker/Bærum and Oslo clubs also had a constant stream of visitors.

Young operators in All Asian contest

The All Asian DX Contest is one of the more fun ones to participate in. One thing is the DX aspect of it, but I like it also because of the exchange of the age of the operators. In other contests one exchanges boring stuff like serial number 1, 2, 3, ... ; the CQ or IARU zone (14 and 18 for me); or the power output. But exchanging the age of the operators gives a little glimpse of the person behind the radio on the other side.

It also makes it possible to make a graph of the distribution of age. I had 62 contacts this weekend, of which 55 were unique. They were mainly in Asiatic Russia and Japan. The average age of the operators was 51.6 years - 7 years younger than me - and the graph shows the distribution. The bar for e.g. 54 is the percentage, 20 in this case, of operators in the bracket 50-54 years and so on.

The graph actually makes me quite optimistic concerning the future of ham radio. There are many young contest operators out there, at least in Asia. This resonates well with what others are saying also. Never before has there been so large activity on the bands as during contests these days.

Cosmetic K2 Upgrade

My Elecraft K2 which is now more than 11 years old (serial #2198) has served me well, even earning me QRP DXCC (100 countries with 5 Watts) some years ago. It is still cosmetically in mint condition, except for that single item which sticks out like a sore thumb: The tuning knob.

This became very clear to me a couple of months ago when LA8OKA's and my K2 were displayed side by side at our stand at Oslo Maker Faire. His is less than two years old, serial #7224, and they were similar except for the scratches in the faceplate of my tuning knob. If I am allowed to generalize from my knob only, it seems as if the faceplate had poor quality paint and has been replaced by a better quality version over the years.

Anyway I ordered a new one and paid the price which at present is $30.37 plus shipping. The difference is really striking and I feel like I have a new K2 now, well worth the price! The K2 now serves as my second rig, and I think it has many years of good service still to come.

Related posts:

• Elecraft K2 do's and don'ts
• Five LEDs in buttons for the Elecraft K2
• My Elecraft K2 Modifications

The advantage of the single-lever paddle

My single-lever PCB keyer.

It may seem like a bad idea to downgrade from a dual-lever paddle and iambic keyer to a single-lever paddle. It must be inefficient since each individual dash and dot has to be generated by a right or left movement of the paddle. Despite this, many of the champions in the High Speed Telegraphy competitions use single-lever paddles, often home-made ones. How can that be?

K7QO, Chuck Adams, wrote "Using an Iambic Paddle" and compared the dual-lever paddle with the single-lever with respect to number of movements. If all 26 letters of the English alphabet and the numbers from 0 to 9 are sent, the single-lever paddle requires 73 strokes while a dual-lever and an iambic keyer requires 65. This is 11% less.

But when N1FN, Marshall G. Emm, wrote "Iambic Keying - Debunking the Myth" he analyzed the 7 letters that are faster to send with an iambic keyer - C, F, K, L, Y, Q, and R - and found that only one of them, the L, is among the 12 most frequent ones in English reducing the gain in efficiency to only 5%. He illustrated it this way:

Guess what't wrong with this figure? He didn't see the R and forgot that it is also among the most frequent letters.

The radio amateur who felt compelled to abandon his own call sign

If you mention that you are a radio amateur to any Norwegian who was old enough to watch TV in the mid 70's then he is bound to respond with LA8PV. This was the callsign of the fictious figure Marve Fleksnes in the comedy the "Radiot". To bad for the poor guy who actually was given that callsign some years later. I had contact with him on CW (= morse) in 2002 just after I got my license and I just couldn't believe that anybody actually was using that particular callsign.

It was in 1976 that Rolv Wesenlund (1936 - 2013) one of Norway's most popular comedians, played Marve Fleksnes. As radio amateur LA8PV he talks with his friend JA1NQ in Japan. He also speaks with TF3XU on Iceland in a mixed Icelandic/Norwegian dialect which is always a hit with a Norwegian audience. He then converses with Norwegian/American WONBF (no zero) in Minnesota. He has to handle his angry neighbor who suffers from interference (RFI) and finally LA8PV gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he hears the emergency call, Mayday, in the 15 meter band.

Is the ultimatic Morse keyer really that efficient?

Vintage Ten-Tec Ultramatic Keyer KR50. Nice name but the
similarity to ultimatic seems to be coincidental.

Iambic keying with a dual-lever paddle is by far the most popular form for Morse keying. But in recent years an old alternative has reemerged. This is the Ultimatic mode which goes back to W6SRY in the 1950's.

The experience seems to be that it needs less timing precision than the iambic mode for letters like A, N, R, and K (· —, — ·, · — ·, — · —). When both paddles are squeezed, the last one to be pressed takes control. So when right-left is pressed one gets a dah followed by dits, not the dah-di-dah-dit of the iambic keyer.

It is very simple to add code for an ultimatic keyer to an iambic one. In recent years this has led to an ultimatic option in some stand-alone keyers, such as:

JT9 and 100 Hz ghosts

Multiple decodes at 100 Hz spacing of K1JT
on 30 m on 28 April 2013, 0101 UTC

From time to time I receive duplicate 'ghost' decodes at 100 Hz intervals on either side of the main signal. Last night I saw the phenomenon on 30 m. You will notice here that I have decoded the message: "TNX 73 GL" four times (press image for better readability):

• -24 dB, 1063 Hz
• -19 dB, 1163 Hz
• -8 dB, 1263 Hz
• -18 dB, 1363 Hz

The actual contact took place at the frequency of the strongest one, 1263 Hz. The station is only moderately strong at -8 dB and at +/- 100 Hz the first sidebands are 10-11 dB down and at -200 Hz the second one is 16 dB down.

Which non-English Morse characters are the most important ones?

The Morse code for the 26 letters of the English language and the digits, you can find everywhere, e.g. here on Wikipedia. All one-, two-, and three-symbol combinations are in use.

In the international alphabet all but four of the four-symbol combinations are used. They are:

Morse	German ++	Norwegian/ Danish	Spanish	Esperanto	Polish 16.3.2014	Greek	Russian	Arabic
·-·-	Ä	Æ	-	-	Ą	-	Я	ع
---·	Ö	Ø	-	-	Ó	-	Ч	ز
··--	Ü	-	-	Ŭ	-	-	Ю	-
----	Ch	-	Ch	Ĥ	-	Χ	Ш	ش

The two or three first German letters are used in many other languages also, e.g. Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, Hungarian etc.

Note that the Ö/Ø Morse code is an O (---) followed by an E (·), usually written as OE. OE also happens to be how the letter is written if the proper symbol isn't available. That also shows the relationship with the French Œ, but that's a digression that has little to do with Morse code. Likewise, the Morse symbols for both the Ä/Æ and the Ü start with the non-accented letter and are AA and UT respectively.