Sedan Network

Learning as I always strive to do, I was told about the SEDAN network -  The SouthEastern Digital Association Network.   This is a packet over radio network that allows amateur radio  operators with X.25 TNCs connected to their radios to connect to it for exchanging information.   Basically is supports texting and leaving of email through the BBS system.  The information I have claims over 200 nodes in 11 states.

Information on the network in Florida is available at:  http://www.fla-sedan.com.    Though it has large coverage throughout Florida, there are nodes located throughout the South East United States.

So in the interest of learning more, I decided to try and connect.  I have a TNC that is built into my TH-D72 aprs HT.  I know how to connect to it using putty from my PC.

Wanting to make sure I could get a good connection, I connected the HT to the VHF antenna in the yard so that problems I would expected to have would be computer related as opposed to radio related.

So if figured I would give it a try.  I tuned you to 145.770 FM with no tone, heard no other signals so I sent my first command:
     c KA4EOC-7
And low and behold I got a response from the local sedan node.

Then I connected to the BBS system so I could leave a message:
      bbs
and I connected to the messaging system and the following commands were available:
   l for list
   r to read
   s to send
   k to kill (delete message
   b (bye) to get out of bbs system

I sent a message to myself,  read the message and deleted the message.   I then exited the bbs system and typed by to get out of the entire system.

I expected a lot of hemming and hawing, but it was very straight forward.  It just worked.
I did not try connecting through the packet network to other nodes or doing anything interesting, but maybe later.   I was just impressed that it worked so easily.

If you have a local SEDAN node, give it a shot.

80m inverted V

I built an 80m inverted V dipole and have it set up.   It is cut for a 1:1.2 or better at 3.590.   Why 3.590?   That is the frequency we are using on our digital net on sunday nights.   I was unable to hear one of the participants on my 102' doublet that is oriented E-W so in hopes of hearing him this week I put up a new antenna oriented N-S.  that will put the station on the broadside of the antenna as opposed to the ends.

So the antenna vertex is at about 44'.   The balun is a 1:1 current balun and the way it is hanging I would guess the vertex of the wire is at 42'.    Each leg was cut before tuning to 66'    .  I got his from 80m * 3 to feet = 180'.   Divide 180 by 4 to get 1/4 wavelength for each leg.  This makes each leg 60'.  Add 10% for tuning and I got 66' per leg.     I put the antenna on the tuner and wound up cutting between 1 and 2 feet off the antenna so it is roughly 65' long.

I did the math and the angle on the legs is around 105 degrees.  That falls between the ideal measurement of 90 and 120 degrees of it should be pretty good.  I have been listening and sending this weekend and it is working pretty well.  Only problem is that it has pretty narrow bandwidth.  So it is below 2:1 without a tuner only between 3.4 and 3.7mhz.

I will eave it set up for a while to examine.  It is 7-8:1 on 40m so it is really a single band antenna.  Maybe next will be to add a fan element at 40m.

Power Usage Kenwood ™-V71

I was trying to figure out how long my V71 would run on battery now that hurricane season is coming up.   The battery not that large and the longest I have run to date has been about 4 hours.  In trying to figure out how long it should run, I need to know the power draw is.    It is not quite as simple as it sounds since it has different draws depending on what you are doing.  So this is the table I created:

Monitoring - No Fan         .54A   6.9w
Receiving traffic               .54A   6.9w
Transmit High Power        7.0A  90.0w
Transmit Medium Power   3.7A  50.0w
Transmit Low Power         2.7A  34.0w
Monitoring w/Fan on         .61A   7.7w

The Ghost and the touch lamp

I have a ghost in the house.   We have a touch lamp in the bedroom.  One of those lamps where you touch the top and the turns on and the more times you touch it, the brighter it gets.  Well the other day my wife said something was wrong with the lamp.  I walked into the bedroom and there it was cycling through the settings.  Pretty weird.  And then it just stopped.   Went back to playing with the radio and in a few min, she yells saying it was doing it again.

What in the work is going on.   Then I remembered I was playing with winmor (actually RMSexpress) and noticed every time I transmitted, the light cycled.   I am transmitting on 3.59150mhz.  The light likes that frequency.  

Interesting to me is that I am only transmitting at about 25watts.  Antenna is 50 feet away from the lamp.  Oh well,  new procedure,  Disconnect the lamp before I play with the radio.

10m Hamstick Dipole

I am still playing with  hamstick dipoles.  I ordered a pair of MFJ-1610T ham-tennas and they came in last week.   Got to try them out this morning.   They worked fine.  Got them tuned and throughout the 10m band the SWR was under 1.8:1.  The AA-54 chart shows exactly how flat it is:

So I got the antenna tuned.  The whips finally were set to be 39 inches.  Probably could lengthen them another inch and and get it a little better.

One new thing this time is when I raised the antenna from 8 feet to 16 feet in height, the SWR changed dramatically.  Don't know if this was the antenna, the weather, or just me this morning.  On the 20m version it got better as we raised it.  On this one adding height made it get worse.  Really worse.  I had to lengthen the whips from 30 inches to the 39 inches and that is where I wound up at.

Contacts I made with the antenna were fairly quick and easy.  Easy to Lithuania and Estonia that is.  Had the broadside oriented NE/SW. So with this one I also claim success.

I checked the SWR on other bands:

• 40m - 7.250mhz  = 10.1
• 20m - 14.30mhz  =  6.5
• 15m - 21.35mhz  =  4.1
• 10m - 28.70mhz  =  1.37
• 6m   - 50.125mhz=  4.8

This is what it looked like out in the yard:

My first split contact

I made contact with W1AW-4 portable 4.  This is the ARRL centennial station going around the US.  Today it was in Kentucky.  I heard the station on 14.240 and he said who he was and he was listening "up 2".   Ah, he is running a split.  I have never done this before.  

Gerry,  our local club president had told me about splits when while we were talking (ok, while he was telling several of us new hams one day about contesting).   But because he was such a good teacher and I had tried to set up a split before for using the 6m repeater I had something new to try.

Hit the split button on the 590, the the A/B button and set the B frequency to 14.242, Hit the A/B again and called out.  Saw the transmit on 14.242 and he then responded on 14.240.

It worked!!!  :-)    One more thing to be happy about today.

To be honest, I would have been just as happy if he did not call back but I managed not to step on him.  But it working they way it should have makes it even better.

80m Hamstick Dipole

I had such good luck with the 20m hamstick dipole that I got back out the 80m hamsticks and tried playing with that again.  Still no luck.   Here is the graph from the Rigexpert AA-54:

It is extremely narrow in the bandwidth.  So narrow that the digital part of the band is not available if we have it tuned for voice, and I am not sure even he entire voice portion of the band would be real useful without changing the length every time you change frequency.  Did not make any contacts on the frequency since the band was dead (as it stays during the day) and was not going to wait until evening to play with it.   I will try again some other day but as I have read other places,  the hamstick dipole is really only usable at 20m and below and 40m is iffy.  My experiments so far seem to agree with this.

More experiments with the 20m hamstick dipole

Played some more today with the 20m hamstick dipole.  It still seems to work which was good to begin with.  Repeatable results always make me feel good.

I first set it up at 8 feet and did some listening.  Reception was fine.  I then raised he antenna up to 16 feet.  Immediately got an increase of 4 S-units on the channels I was listening to.  20m=60'/4=15' for the quarter wave.  Got it above the quarter wave and that probably got it out of the ground effects and flattened out the radiation pattern.I know that that is primarily for transmitting, but I can attest it helped noticeably.

I then tried a contact.  Exchanged info with W1AW-4-portable 4.  The ARRL centennial station operating in Kentucky this weekend.  I will take that.  A little more on this in another post since it was my first contact doing a split.

I also experimented with the 20m dipole on 6m.  Here is the graph:

Not a great graph since everything is around 3, but definitely workable and the 590 can tune that all day long.  Looked to contact someone on 6 with no luck since I always find the band dead, but I was able to activate the 6m repeater so I claim it works.

Why a hamstick dipole

Before I started this set of experiments I asked myself why.  I have played with regular dipoles for a while and they work.  I started asking myself, how do I put up something in a hurry that can work.  Maybe if I want to go mobile, maybe if I want to go to the bring my radio park, maybe just as a backup if my normal antenna falls down.

I also kept asking myself how do I get some directionality from my setup since my location and wife sort of dictate a long wire antenna to be oriented east/west.  It is quicker to put up than a wire antenna in the trees or even on the pole in an inverted V.

I friend showed me one and it looked interesting.   The price was right.  The bracket/adapter was $20.00 and the 2 hamsticks were $15.00 each.  So for around $50.00 I could start playing.

So here we go.   Questions I have at this point are:
How well does it work?
How easy is it to use?
How easy is it to set up?
How hard is it to tune?
Does the tuning of the hamsticks change depending on conditions?
Will the hamsticks work on other bands than the one it is tuned for?
      Will 10m work on the 20m hamsticks?
Since length is important, does a 80m setup work or is it a dummy load as others have said?

Based on the internet research I have done to date, the answers to these questions are all over the place. Based on my experience with the 20m setup yesterday, things look positive.  But time will tell.

The plan right now is to play with the 20m setup.  I have a pair of hamsticks for 75m/80m so we will try them out.  I want to do some more analyzer work to see if 6m on the 20m hamsticks really is an option.  And based on my findings, I may get several other sets for different bands.

Hamstick Dipole 20m

I have wanted to try a hamstick dipole for a while.  In doing the research the conventional wisdom was that 20m and less would work, 40m was iffy, and 80m was just a dummy load.   So I decided to start my project using on the 20m band.   I acquired the MFJ-347 dipole adapter and a pair of MFJ-1620 hamsticks.   I put it all together and mounted it to my portable mast (painters pole) and started tuning.

I tuned, tuned, tuned and tuned some more.  It took a while.  You adjust the hamsticks by shortening and lengthening the whip portion of the hamstick.   I thought it should be linear but it was not.  I would change the length, but if you went too far, the resonance point would always move below the band.  Eventually I found that the magic length was 38 inches. With the whips at 38 inches, SWR at 14.070 (the PSK frequency) was 1:1.37.   The SWR at 14.300 was 1:2.3.  At this point might still be able to get closer, but wanted to give it a try.

I put 100' of RG8x between the radio and the antenna, Extended the mast up to 16' and started trying to find some one to talk to.  The bands were busy, but immediately I found someone.  I responded to II9Ps CQ and he responded right back.  On 14.268 he was 5x9 in Tallahassee and was transmitting from Sicily.   Can't argue with this.   I claim success.

The chart from the rigexpert AA54 is below.   The hamsticks seem flat enough throughout the band.  definitely usable.

I was hoping that the antenna would also work on 10m, but no such luck.  SWR off of the charts.  On the other hand, the SWR was 1:3 on 6m.  I will have to explore this some more.

6 meters

I made my first 6m contact tonight.   A new local 6m net was started up on 50.150 usb.  It starts up right after the local ARES net at 8:00 on Sunday night.   I had great reception and everyone seemed to hear me.   I have been curious for a while about how well my antenna works on 6m.  The SWR is real close to 1.2-1.3 but I never could hear anyone on the band.  Net is being run by N4VHF for those curious.

Something new.  Hip Hip Hooray!

Snow Days

I have not seen snow in several years and then over two weeks I have had to deal with snow and ice twice.  

First time, I had a relative pass away and went to a funeral in Ohio and Southern Pennsylvania.  I was ready,  packed the heavy overcoat and was mentally prepared.  Started snowing during the services in Columbus and by the next morning there were several inches of snow on the ground.  They were prepared, roads were clear the next day as we went to the cemetery in Pennsylvania for the burial.  It snowed most of the way there.  Made me a little nervous driving (remember, I am from Florida) and then overnight after the burial, we got 3 inches there.  Getting up in the morning to 13 degrees is a little on the brisk side for me, but i survived.  It was a non-event fro the locals, but for me, an experience.  It was very pretty to look at however:

Second time was back home in Tallahassee.  We had a snow day.  Really an ice day, but things were closed.   As a matter of fact 200 miles of I-10 from the Alabama border to Jefferson county were closed to any traffic.  I can not remember if that ever happened before, but from what I saw, it was the right decision.  In the south, once it freezes, driving skills evaporate and everyone should be off the roads.

Index cards

This might sound like an obvious tip, but it took me a little to figure it out.  I keep trying to remember certain things, Frequencies for nets, etc. and have to flip through my logbook or other papers that I have on my desk.  To make it somewhat easier, I started writing the rings I always am looking for on index cards.  I have 3 or 4 of them with all of the things I keep going back to and it makes my life much easier.    I am sure everyone else already does things like this, or has things memorized, but as a new ham, anything I can do to make my operation more efficient is great.

A Solar Lesson

I worked at the GOTA station that our local radio club set up to celebrate the anniversary of Hernando DeSoto's first winter encampment in the new world.  I had a great time, but we were running the special event station and getting very few contacts.   The Club President, Jerry, a very knowledgable individual gave a short lesson on the sun and band conditions.  I am going to try and write down what I remember.  there was way more than this and I really need to learn more.



Ever see one of these charts before.  I have but really only looked at the right hand side.  For a new ham, maybe that is enough, but what do these numbers mean.
SFI - Solar Flux index -  The higher the better -  if is not 100+ propagation is dead.  Really want it
               to be 150+
A - A Index - 0 - 100 -Lower is better
K - K Index - 0 -9   -  Lower is better   -  Above 7 is S9 noise
    Generally the higher the K and the A the noisier the band
In general you want the SFI to be greater than 180
In general if A < 8 and K < 3  then E-W propagation should be working
In general if A < 8 and K > 3 then N-S propagation should be working

Now the X-Ray and Ptn (proton) and elc (electron)  Flux numbers.  This gives indications about noise as well and HF blackouts.   X-Ray number should be A, C, M for there to be a good band.  An X event means there is a good chance of a HF blackout.  (this is discussing solar flares).

This is where I start to draw a blank.   More research is needed, but this should wet some appetites.