Weekly Links

Here’s another set of interesting links from the reflectors and my own research.

NN4ZZ sells the Tilt Plate accessory for tilt-over towers allowing working on the antennas at ground level.

Good information on using the Falling Derrick method of raising a tilt over tower can be found on N6RK’s website.

Ever wonder who has how many DXCC Entities on RTTY confirmed via LOTW? If you do, check out this page by Andrei, EW1AR/NP3D. All the information seems to be self reported, so check your LOTW RTTY standing and enter your information!

K1IR has a revamped website to a blog style site. His first post is a review of the Dayton Hamfest through his eyes.

The Bolt Depot has been recommended on TowerTalk as an online source for hard to find bolts, u-bolts, etc.

ARRL announced a new Contest Branch Blog today. Might be worth keeping tabs on!

Need slashed zero fonts for WriteLog or other Amateur Radio purposes? Here’s 8.

Here’s a helpful website by AB5K about using a “trolley” system to get an antenna up to the top of a tower.

Morse Code in the news

ทท –/-ท — -/-ทท ท ท- -ทท/-ท– ท – *
Stephen Moss
The Guardian,
Wednesday May 21 2008

About this article
This article appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday May 21 2008 on p3 of the
Comment & features section. It was last updated at 11:42 on May 21 2008.

One had assumed that Morse code’s last hurrah (that’s ทททท ทท- ท-ท … oh,
life’s just too short) had been in about 1944. But one had assumed wrong.
The writer Alan Sillitoe, who trained as a wireless operator in the second
world war, this week revealed that he still practises taking Morse every
day, listening to chatter across the airwaves, including a French station
that broadcasts poetry in Morse.

So how much Morse, in iambic pentameters or otherwise, is out there? “Radio
amateurs are still using Morse code worldwide,” says Carlos Eavis, amateur
radio manager at the Radio Society of Great Britain. “It’s something that
every radio amateur needs to learn.” Eavis points to several advantages
Morse, which has been around since the 1840s, has over its modern rivals.
There is no language barrier – the dots and dashes are the Esperanto of the
airwaves; you don’t need an expensive computer, so the four-fifths of the
world that doesn’t have internet access can still communicate; the
simplicity of the signal means it can be easily picked up, even when
reception is poor; and only the most rudimentary transmitter is needed to
send messages.

Morse can’t compete with computer-based systems in sending long messages -
though tests have proved it is faster than text messaging on mobile phones -
and most military services have abandoned it. But the SAS is still believed
to teach Morse, in case its solders need to rig up a simple transmitter in a
remote location and send a distress call. It also comes in useful in
prisons, where prisoners can tap out messages to each other on pipes. “Morse
will continue to be used,” says Eavis, “because of its simplicity. You don’t
need anything hi-tech – it will just work.” Samuel Morse’s name will live
on, which, says Eavis, is unfair on Alfred Vail, who actually invented the
code. Morse just financed it. Dash it!

Weekly Links

Here’s a collection of links that I’ve seen over the last week on one of the ham radio e-mail reflectors or I found through surfing and thought they were interesting.

Penninger radio is an interesting source for aluminum masts and mast hardware.

K1ZM.com has updates this week. Lots of great pictures radio information, including audio recordings of KC1F (SK) operating.

K6NR has several pages showing the instillation of a US Tower Crankup. This is one of the few well documented instillations I’ve see online.

Radio Manuals back several generations are available from the manufacturer websites:

Kenwood – scroll down the page and use the pulldown menu to find your radio – lots of older rigs as well (as old as ts-120, ts-930, etc.)

Icom – scroll down to the amateur radio list and pick your radio out of the list

Yeasu – the manuals are in with the product list. For the current line of HF transcievers, just scroll left or right, then select the files tab below and find the link to the manual. For the previous generation, click on “General HF Transceivers/Amplifiers” then scroll as above. Only seems to be the current and one previous generation available through their site.

Alinco – Use the pulldown menus to search for a manual, service manual, etc.

K7LXC on crankup cables

QUESTION: US Tower recommends replacing the cable every 2-3 years, which may be overkill but is definitely erring on the side of safety. Since my tower is 7 years old I’d like to start out with fresh cabling.

ANSWER: The UST recommendation is known as a “weasel clause”; that is, if something happens to your tower and you hadn’t changed the cables, they can weasel out of any liability. Tower manufacturers are insurance-driven enterprises so it’s no surprise they are reluctant to provide any helpful information.

The other gotcha is that there isn’t anyone around who can do the cable change anyway. I spent a couple of days at the factory to learn how to do it and what I found out is that it’s an involved and semi-complicated
endeavor. It’s not something I would try myself.

I’ll bet you a nickel that you don’t have to do anything other than lube the cables and you’ll be good to go. The actual circumstances that would require cable replacement are:

1) Excessive broken strands. Industry standards allow you to have six broken strands before replacement is necessary.

2) Excessive rust – not surface rust but real cancerous into the strands rust.

3) Damaged cable. This would be kinks or flat spots in the cable. I doubt that your cables meet any of the above criteria.

OTOH you should lubricate the cables annually at a minimum. Champion Radio products sells PreLube 6 which is recommended by the wire rope manufacturers.

You should exercise the tower a couple of times a month by running it up and down. You should also park it at different heights rather than just at the limit switches all the time. The cables can take a permanent set by sitting on the pulleys at the same spot for years. By doing these 3 things, you will prolong the service life of your cables.

BTW I have never personally seen a ham tower that the cables were so bad that they had to be replaced. Some were pretty grungy but didn’t meet the aforementioned criteria.

Lube it and enjoy it and don’t worry about replacing the cables.

Cheers,
Steve K7LXC
TOWER TECH -
Professional tower services for hams

Grounding & lightning/surge protection e-mail reflector

Interesting resource posted to the TowerTalk reflector today:

Grounding and lightning/surges questions answered:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LightningProtection

Technical references:
http://www.polyphaser.com/technical_notes.aspx
http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lhm.html

73 de Al, KE1FO

A Ham’s Guide to RFI, Ferrites, Baluns, and Audio Interfacing

At the Visalia International DX Convention,  Jim Brown, K9YC, hosted
an excellent presentation on “Coaxial Transmitting Chokes” as they
apply to Amateur Radio. In his professional life Jim is a consultant
in the audio systems industry. He has many years experience in
designing audio systems and resolving RFI problems in all types of
audio systems.

His presentation included some interesting data on commonly used
commercial chokes and baluns available to hams. He also describes how
to easily build chokes that far exceed the performance of those
commercially available units, at a lower cost.

The presentation is available here.

Enjoy.

73 de Al, KE1FO

Remote Station Listserve

This appeared on the TowerTalk reflector today.

I have set up a new reflector for those of us that are interested in
remote stations, operating, contesting, etc. It is called remoteoperating.
It is my hope that those currently using remote stations, or are thinking
about it, please subscribe and help kick this new reflector off.
There are many of us that have a lot of experience, technical know how and
have been there and are doing it now. I know I have had a lot of successes
and failures in my endeavor to get the remote station operational. I want to
share, and I still have a lot of what if and how do I do this type of
questions.
Hopefully this list will be where we can get together and help each other.
If you know of others who are interested, or other lists that we can get the
word out about this new reflector, please let them know. The more we get the
word out, the more we will enjoy each others comments.
Thanks in advance, and I hope to see you on the new list.

General information and subscription info on the mailing list is at:

http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/remoteoperating

73 and thanks,

Paul K2DB – K2NNY

Paul, thanks for setting this up. I’m not going to join right now, but I’ve thought about remote operating in the past, and probably will again in the future. Hopefully when I’m thinking of it again, this new listserve will be a wonderful resource.

73 de Al, KE1FO

Tower and Shack Pictures

Here’s a few tower & Shack pictures taken today.

This is a picture of the current tower location. After a family conversation this afternoon, we’ve determined that the new location should be next to the pool, about 10 feet to the left and towards the back fence from the current location.

Here’s a picture of one repaired element tip on my C3S. The element was weakened because of the use of steel rivets instead of aluminum ones. When moving the element around at some point, it planted in the ground and bent some. When trying to straighten things out, the element cracked where the first rivet hole was. The repair consists of lots of electrical tape and a rigid 1/8″ aluminum rod that is taped across the joint. It held through the winter and a mild ice storm. We’ll see if I get to replacing these element tips this year or not.

In this picture, you can see my tower on the left, and on the right is a mast holding a TV antenna, the end of my 40M dipole and anemometer. This mast will end up holding my modified MA5B once that project is complete. The TV antenna will move down the mast slightly to make room for an old TV rotor at the top. This will hold a very short mast to which the MA5B will be attached. This picture is facing roughly 100 degrees, and the beam is pointed at southern Europe. The beams will be roughly end to end towards Europe and the US. It will be interesting to see how they interact with each other.

Here’s a close up of the winch and pulley’s on my tower raising fixture. The 4×4 on the right of the picture is the “falling boom”. This is hinged with the 2×6 below it right at the base of the tower. The pulleys are garage door type and provide some mechanical advantage for the falling boom. There is a cable that attaches at the top of the tower that connects to the eye bolt on the top of the 4×4. This arrangement works very well for raising the tower, except that the pound in base I’m currently using allows the tower to torque too much to raise all by myself. I’m hoping the new cement base will fix this problem. When raising the tower, I kneel on the 2×6 to the left of the winch. This allows my weight to hold down 2×6 against the weight of the tower, and puts me in an optimal position for cranking the winch. I do need to invest in a new winch, because the one currently in use has no brake, so lowering the tower will not be safe with this (and raising the tower is a little tricky too with no brake).

Speaking of the new base, here’s a picture of it. Four 12″ long bolts will go through the 4 holes in the base and be embedded in the new concrete footing. This base is almost identical to the one I’m using now, except the one in use now has four 12″ long spikes welded in the place of the 4 bolt holes. This allows the base to be pounded into the ground (or pressed in my case, my weight easily set the base in the ground), and it stays in place very well, even while raising the tower using the aforementioned raising fixture.

While I had the camera out, I figured I’d take a shack picture. There’s more in the album linked at the top, but this is a good overall shot. The radios to the left are my second radio for SO2R, the radios on the right are the primary setup. Before next contest season I’m going to swap the amps, as the AL-80 can only do about 800 watts, while the SB-200 gets to 1200 easily. Also the AL-80 has a lot more hours on it, so I’ll move it to 2nd fiddle for a while. However, with the 2nd beam, I may find that I’m running on the second setup much more often.

Outside the doors to my shack is where I hang my wallpaper. The inside of the shack is an unfinished room, so there’s not really any place to hang plaques and certificates. The picture above shows my recently acquired WAS and DXCC awards along with my Massachusetts CQP win certificate and a cool plaque for being the first station to work all 58 California Counties in the 1997 CQP. The album referenced at the top of the post also shows my three plaques from North American wins in the CQWW RTTY contest when I operated with a team in the Multi Operator Single Transmitter Low Power category from K1TTT.

I’ll keep updating more as the antenna projects continue.

73 de Al, KE1FO

2007 ARRL November Sweepstakes Results

I checked the ARRL website this morning, and the 2007 ARRL November Sweepstakes Phone results are up in the members section. I was very happy to see that I would be receiving some wallpaper for first place in Vermont for the Single Operator Unassisted High Power category. I had entered this class because Ron (KK1L) had told me he’d not be on this year, and he usually enters the High Power category. Mitch (WB1GQR/W1SJ) is always Unlimited, and W1ECH always seems to beat me out in the Low Power category (which on phone with my low antennas is worse than sticking a needle in your eye). So High Power it was, and I’m glad I did! Here’s the Vermont results from the ARRL website:

Call	Score	QSOs	Mult	Class	Check	Hours	160	80	40	20	15	10
KE1FO	83916	567	74	B	93	17	0	88	309	156	14	0
N1BCL	80896	512	79	B	57	19	0	205	49	245	13	0
KB1ODO	20412	162	63	B	6	16	13	71	23	52	3	0
KK1L	11726	143	41	B	93	2	0	89	54	0	0	0

My claimed score was:

————
160: 0
80: 91
40: 326
20: 166
15: 14
10: 0
————
Total: 597 Sections = 74 Total Score = 88,356

My total score went from 597 qsos, 74 mults and 88,356 points to 567 qsos, 74 mults and 83,916 points. I’ll be interested to see the Log Checking Report to see what I screwed up. Losing 30 qsos is a 5% error rate and score reduction. At least I didn’t loose any mults in the process!

See you all this upcoming November.

73 de Al, KE1FO

World Contest Station Database

Several months ago, Pete (N4ZR) announced on the CQ-Contest reflector that the World Contest Station Database was no more.  There had been a server crash, and much of the “front end” of the database was lost.  Gerry (W1VE), grabbed the baton, and said that the database could be hosted on the getscores.org server that has been provided by Dave (KY1V/6Y1V).

I had been interested in enhancing the WCSD for some time, but it never rose to the top of the wish list.  When I saw that the database was in limbo, I contacted W1VE and let him know I’d be interested in working on enhancing the database and getting it back up and running.  Gerry and I played a lot of phone and e-mail tag, and finally this week connected and got things set up so I could start working.

My initial plan is to put the old data back up on the web, and then work on developing a new database and website with enhanced features.  I’m hoping to have the initial data back up this week, and then the enhanced web site will be rolled out over the next few months.

Keep checking back for updates often.

73 de Al, KE1FO