HamCation 2015 Orlando

Its that time of year again.   The Orlando HamCation is being held at the Central Florida Fairgrounds on February 13, 14 and 15th.

What is it:  It is one of the largest hamfests in the US.    It is also the ARRL Southeastern Division Convention.

I went last year and and can not recommend it highly enough.    If you can, you need to go.  I am not sure you really need to go all 3 days but going all day Saturday is advisable.

If you have never been,  it is a huge ham flea market.   Several buildings full of new gear,  several buildings full of tables of people selling used gear and acres (and I do mean acres) of people selling gear from their tailgates.    If you need it, they have it here.  

Last year it rained all day Friday and Saturday.   Sort of killed the outdoor portion of the sales, but there was enough stuff for sale inside to cause my head to spin.    You really need to go with a list of what you are looking for and what it would normally cost.  There are some bargains, some not bargains, and some products that you have never seen before and will just have to have.  Things that will give you ideas and need more research.

People are willing to bargain so come with cash and a full credit card.  The normal ham dealers such as HRO and AES are there as well and  manufacturers such as MFJ have booths and things to show and sell.

Information is at http://www.hamcation.com .  Put it on your schedule.  It is the largest Hamfest in the Southeast.

Baofeng Pofung BF-F8HP

A christmas present arrived a little early, but I did not get a chance to play with it until the break.   I got a F8HP 8w VHF/UHF HT.  

 I have had the UV5R for a while and I have been very happy with it.   Some people hate them but for $30 dollars the UV-5R has been the best little HT for the money.  Seems to work as well as my Kenwood and I don't worry about loosing or breaking it.    Well I saw that a newer version in the for form of the F8HP was out and it was christmas so I figured I would give it a try.   I read the reviews and saw where there were some early software issues but then saw that they were mostly solved.   The reviews looked good, even better than the UV-5R so I ordered it from Amazon.

I have been running it for the last three weeks and it has been great.  The antenna that comes with it is much better than the older unit so you do not need to get a replacement antenna to begin with.   All of the old accessories work with it so I was off and running.

I got it and programmed with the Chirp software (daily build) .   Copied the normal repeaters out of the old Baofeng and dropped them into the new Baofeng and was on the air.  

What I have noticed so far:
     Receive -  Receive is better,  MUCH MUCH better.   I swapped antennas and in all cases the
             F8HP is more sensitive than the UV-5R
     Transmit -  Cant tell if there is any difference at least with the repeaters in Tallahassee.
             It works with full quieting, but that was the same on the UV5R.  5 vs 8 watts, can't
             tell the difference so I leave it on medium power.
      It actually came with a decent manual, but you could download a decent manual for the UV5R

So I guess the main question is it worth the difference in price.  I paid $30.00 for the UV5R + a little for the better antenna,  Lets call it $40.00.    I paid $63.00 for the F8HP.

So is it worth $20.00 extra.  If I was starting out, I would say yes.
Would I replace the UV5R if I was happy with it, No.   If you want the latest and greatest and want a new toy,  (like me) I would go for it.

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: