|
After a few weeks of off-and-on dorking around with themes for the Cape Lookout Expeditions website, I think I finally found one I really like. So its going to turn up here soon too. Right now the hold-ups are desired customizations to the theme. Unless I find a widget closer to what I’d like to see, getting the sidebars to display links ordered the way I’d like them is problematic. I like the expedition photo banners, but there are a lot of shots I can add from around the KazShack. After building the 80m/160m splitter, it seemed like the signal levels from the K9AY were down a bit, probably from losses in the filters. So after looking around at pre-amps, and procrastinating on buying the Ar2 preamp, I again landed on the W7IUV site. W7IUV has updated his preamp schematic, and it looked easy enough. Building the project was simple after gathering some suitable parts. Trying the pre-amp out seemed to show that it was more or less filling the desired role quite well. With the preamp engaged, levels from the K9AY were now on par with signal levels from the transmit antennas on both 160m and 80m. The preamp is installed in the shack just ahead of the band splitter. Noise levels on the RX system were down about two to three S units from the TX antenna in these moderate noise conditions. During the 160m contest this weekend, the RX system got its chance to proove itself. Noise levels here were moderate – not as quiet as good winter conditions, but not S9+ summertime noise either. The RX antenna with the preamp turned on was always the best choice on weak signals in these conditions. It also necessary to switch the K9AY around a lot – signals were not always best in the expected direction because of higher noise to the north. The southeast direction was dead quiet, but from here in central NC there isn’t much to listen to on 160m to the SSE. The actual compass direction on the SE leg is about 10 degrees south of southeast. So the short version is that the preamp is an improvement when splitting the RX antenna for two radios. Future projects/curiosities:
Spent a few hours tugging with the WordPress database. It seemed like a good time to move the database into a more recent version of MySQL. It should have been pretty easy. Create the new table space, define, and load the tables. Tell WP where to look for the data base, and done. A snap, right? Not so fast SQL-breath! All of the data appeared to load properly, and WP came up as it should. The problem was some junk data interspersed within the text of most every post. Here was the tricky part. I generally use Notepad++ for general plain test editing. It is a really nice programmer’s text editor. But it wasn’t displaying the junk characters embedded within the text. Grrrrr. But Notepad++ can also convert the text files code type from ASCII to UTF, etc, etc. From one platform to another, sometimes “plain text” turns out to be not so plain. But by using the various different text encoding formats, I was finally able to display the junk data. And get rid of it. After that, everything looks pretty good now. Also settled on the google translation widget. Folks seemed to use it more often, and I’ve been told it gives the more useful translations. Once again N1LN and N1YXU hosted the January NAQP’s at their home, and I was happy to be part of the SSB team. This year’s crew was N1LN, N1YXU, AA4FU, and myself, W4KAZ, operating under the NC4KW call sign. It was a lot of fun. Given the poor high band conditions over the NAQP CW weekend, there was a general agreement that the best initial plan might be to start on 20m and 40m, with the intent of keeping an eye on 15m and 10m in case of any possible openings. That proved to be a worthwhile strategy. We once again turned up a big ‘goose egg’ on 10m, not logging a single qso on the band. N1LN was able to improve last year’s 15m qso count with a short run and some S&P on 15m during his first shift and in between 40m runs. 20m was never great, but we brought our 20m qso count up to a more reasonable level, a big improvement over Jan 2009 contest. Conditions on 20m seemed really long right at the start of the contest. The upper antenna at 100 ft seemed to always be the best choice, and there seemed to be a narrow patch of good propagation into the upper midwest. Logged a bunch of Minnesota stations, and picked up a few other odds-n-ends from Minnesota westward. The western gulf coast from Louisianathru Texas were also being heard, but their signals were only half as good as Minnesotans. At the end of the first shift n 20m, there was not a single qso from sections 1, 2, 3 or 4. A somewhat lackluster result on 20m, at least for my own time in the chair on that band. The other bands were also all improved over the 2009 totals, with better qso counts on each band. The multiplier counts were also better. The 80m mult count was tied with our 2009 efforts, but we improved our mults on 160m, 40m, 20m and 15m. By coincidence, I wound up taking over the chair for 80m, and later 160m atjust the right time to begin trying to start runs on those bands. The first hours on each of those bands was interesting, with decent rates. For whatever reason, the beverages were showing a high noise level in the north and northeast directions. That made working the high population areas to our northeast more difficult, especially since so many stations calling were down at the noise floor. The 8’s, 9’s, and 0’s made up some of the slack, as they were easier to copy on the west and northwest beverage directions. The noise level began to decrease after local midnight, but rates had slowed by that time. Some of the operating highlights were opening on 80m and 160m, and seeing the 60 minute rate meter[both stations combined] over 150, working with N1LN to get the 10 minute rate meter over 200, and then trying to keep it there. Later in the contest, 1400 Q’s became the short term goal, but N1LN caught a late burst of Q’s on 80m that put us over 1450 by the end of the contest. In hindsight the total of 1469 qso’s logged is a new personal milestone. It is the first time I’ve been part of an operation that averaged over 60/hr for the duration of the event. [1469/(2*12)=61.2/hr] Sweeeeet! Nothing great, but not too shabby. 352 Qsos total. Conditions and observations: Early in the contest conditions seemed poor to me, but perhaps I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the start, I tried to get a run going on 20m and use the second radio for S&P, but neither was working well. The run radio was slow on the 20m dipole. I guess all of those tri-banders out there have the advantage. 20m seemed long from the start, as I was called by a strong AL9A. Alaska is unusual so early in the afternoon on my dipole. The S&P on 15m was none too productive either. There were a few stations there, but lots of QSB. Most seemed to give up calling on 15m pretty quickly[or vanished due to changes in propagation]. Nothing heard on 10m, but not a lot of time listening there either. It is also obvious that I’ll need to become a much better operator before using the second radio during a run is practical. Even a slow run. But the NAQP’s are the perfect contests to use as a test platform for learning SO2R techniques. On the other hand, S&P with two radios was a lot more productive than S&P with a single radio. Better than using a single radio and loading the band map. With two radios, the utility of the second band map also comes into effect. The rate went up as soon as I switched from running to all S&P. I didn’t hit my goal of 60/hr while S&Ping, but it is a goal within reason, and it was easy to keepa 40 to 50 rate with two radios without much stress. Thats the first couple of hours. The late afternoon was broken up into S&P fragments, capped with a hour long 40m run from 2220z to2320z. Then another gap peppered with a handful of quick S&P Q’s and a break for a sandwich. Shifting down to 80m, I S&P’d my way to a mostly clear frequency at 3563.75, and thenheld a two hour run there from 0100z to 0300z. While the rates were meager for somebody like Bigg Gunn Kontester over at the Fi-Ni Report, both those hours on 80m were over 60/hr. I gave it up soon after W4HSA called me, and I just could not get his call correct, even when he resorted to sending his call suffix at about 5wpm. Such is life in LidVille. Duh-OH! Still short of 300 Q’s. Tuning around 40m was discouraging, as the band sounded really long and there were not a lot of stations calling. 80m seemed like mostly dupes, so on a whim it seemed time to check conditions down on 160m. The 160m antenna was playing well again. There were only three stations that were called with no answer. Soon enough stations were S&P’d to get to 340 Q’s in the log. A few more passes on 80m and 160m, and the plug was pulled at around 0400z withjust over 350 logged. The total time on the clock was about 9 hours, but a lot of that was spent away from the radio in increments more than 5 minutes, but less than 30. The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Summary: Band QSOs Mults ------------------- 160: 40 19 80: 167 36 40: 89 31 20: 45 19 15: 11 3 10: ------------------- Total: 352 108 Total Score = 38,016 * Close call. The end of December was a maelstromof new sunspots when compared to the previous 24 months. Hope springs eternal. The activity in the last couple of weeks of the year were enough to preserve 2008’s second place ranking in the list of “most spot free” years. But 2009 is in firm grip as number three on the list. If the spot trend were to continue unabated, that would put the minimum somwhere around January 2009 – though without more research, I can’t recall if that iswhen the first cycle 24 mini-spots appeared. Seems about right. The 3 month moving average is also going up, another bit of good news for the radio geeks. Plots of cycles 1 through 23 indicate the numbers ramp up at a higher rate than they drop off, but that is more pronounced in the cycles with high peak numbers. Given how poorly the prognosticators did with predicting the minimum, I suspect the next peak will also be hard to predict. My own W.A.G. is a peak of around 90 sometimes in 2013. O’course, a Wild Guess ain’t none too scientific. But there ain’t a whole lot of data gathered on a system as complex as the ginormous fusion bomb going off 24/7/365 over the last four billion or so years, only “one AU” away. So I stand by the guestimate proudly, without hesitation. O’course, I must admit to being distracted byWired’s link to nerdeye candy over on their web site. Yikes. Or in nerd-speak, “OMG!”. Sometimes procrastination pays off. On W7IUV’s web site, he has a link to his “W7IUV preamp”. The document was revised a few months ago, and it includes schematics and parts lists for both versions, as well as a general discussion on the preamp. It appears that no suitable surface mount parts were found to replace the transistor. Not like I want to play with surface mount components anyway. Some suitable and inexpensive parts for future projects. A continuing aggregated list of Stuff I Use To Play Radio.
Finally figured out what to do with burnt out strands of Christmas lights. Scavenged about 100 ft of wire in 20-25 foot long hunks and used it to augment the radial system on the K9AY. The K9AY RX antenna itself is in need of replacement. It is constructed of 18ga wire, and has had several breaks in the past couple of years. Right now it has five or six splices where repairs were made. Probably time to replace it with 14ga THHN, now that copper prices are down again. A 500ft spool of 14ga stranded THHN housing wire was $35.00USD yesterday at the local BigBox retailer. Time to stockpile before hyperinflation kicks in? These items washed ashore on the most recent web surf. Not really related to anything I generallylog regarding the KazShack activities, but some of it caught my interest enough to save the links here rather than get lost in the BookMarkMultiverse. A useful chart of the evolution of storage. It unfortunately omits Hollerith punch cards,cassette storage, the 8 inch floppy, tape drives, or the old mainframe removable spindle drives. Gotta draw the line somewhere. This is just plain cool, and its available as a kit. The LED Bulbdial Shadow Clock from EvilMadScience. Way cool. These would just be fun to slap on a jewel case of any program. Originally issued for Vista I suppose, but fun to slap on the kid’s PC games – just to see if they react. Be great back on the floor of tech weenie cubicals too. DAMN! Somebody stole another one of my ideas. Well, OK, I suppose they arrived at the same mental junction independently, but if I still had access to a welder, I’d have made some already. |
||
|
Copyright © 2010 W4KAZ - All Rights Reserved |
||
