20m antenna and remote listening

I´ve been having some fun during last couple of days. I live in an apartment where I don't have that much of space for antennas and regular radio activity. But at a relatives house where a lot of trees is available I´ve been playing around a bit. I have been here some year ago and at that time I was laying out BOGs (Beverage on ground) antennas and I was DXing for AM stations in South America, but this time I wanted to focus on the amateur radio bands and in this case the 20m band. One easy antenna to build is a vertical using stubs to get a good match that I learnt about from SE5X. The radiator element was around 10 meters that I throw up in a tree.

If you would like to build this antenna, this PDF from SM0JZT describes the lengths of each segment. It´s in Swedish but I think you will understand if you are interested. Otherwise let me know via the comments.

When everything was installed last Monday it had went dark so 20m started to close and I never got a QSO. Instead I setup the QS1R and prepared for remote listening via LogMeIn Pro.

Below is a capture taken on my home computer. I have connected to the LogMeIn server via the web browser so this is the experience I got. The connection is a quite slow ADSL so I set the update rate of the waterfall to a slow setting. As this was done late when 20m was dead, this is 40m.




I went back on Thursday lunch last week and had one QSO with M3GFQ on 20m. I got 59 and I think that was a true report. :-)

Hopefully soon the new software for QS1R will be available. This will make it possible to run the server part remote and the GUI at home and be able to record RF to disk. I actually don´t feel so good about paying for this remote solution from LogMeIn, but as this opportunity to have the remote QS1R came up and I didn´t have time to setup streaming audio (open ports in firewall etc.) the Logmein solution is really working well. With new QS1R software I can hopefully use Linux instead of Windows. Remote QTH saga will continue...

SDR-Widget

I just preordered the BETA version of the upcoming SDR-Widget. This is basically a sound card designed by a group of radio amateurs specifcally to be used in Software Defined Radios based on the quadrature sampling detector scheme, i.e. a souncard is needed in opposite of the Digital Down Conversion scheme where an special ADC chip is doing the analog to digital conversion. I am excited about this and hope this will be a great success!

An early alpha version of the SDR-Widget

Hardware Features:

• Compact 3" x 2.5", 2 board stack. 3.5mm audio connections.
• Powered from the USB port, no external power supply needed
• 24-bit AK5394A ADC - the premier audio ADC in commercial use today
• CS4344 24-bit DAC
• I2C control bus
• 16-bit LCD panel interface (configured for 4-bit) with drivers for HD44780 based 4-line displays
• Connector for quadrature rotary encoder input (with push switch)
• 3 optocoupler buffered inputs
• 3 mosfet 'contact' outputs
• Firmware update via USB port
• JTAG port (connector not mounted)

Software Features (either present or coming soon)

• USB composite device with audio I/O, control and CDC channels
• Supports USB Audio class 2 (480mbs) on the latest Linux kernel as well as the latest Mac OS
• Support 24-bit 48k/96k/192k sample rates on Linux and MacOS
• Support USB Audio class1 on Windows at 48k sample rate. NOTE: Windows does not support UAC2
• Has an integrated CDC, Communications Device Class, channel for debug messages
• A superset of the DG8SAQ control interface
• 4-line LCD message engine
• Menu system with selection control via external rotary encoder and switch.

Go here: http://groups.google.com/group/sdr-widget to get more details!

Active on the HF bands

During last week of August me and my second operator visited my parents and there was a Icom 707 for me to borrow, so why not try some QSOs on the shortwave bands for the first time ever. I operated as SA5BKE/4 and made around 15-20 QSOs around Europe on 80 m up to 17 meters. Great fun! I also promised to send out some QSLs but haven´t made any attempts yet. I am thinking about making some custom ones with this method.

Some week later I saw a Kenwood TS-450SAT for sale at a good price. As it was only 30 minutes drive from here I went there and took a look. Seemed to be a nice rig so I bought it! On 12 September I could try it with my 15,5 m longwire on 4 m height with my home made 9:1 unun. I only made 2 QSOs on 80 m and 17 m, but everything seemed to be fine business. I used a car battery but I now started to look for a power supply. Maybe I find a good one on the upcoming ham radio flea market here in Norrköping in a couple weeks or maybe try to convert a PC power supply?

Summer

Summer of 2010 has been one of the better ones. Very pleasant weather and  I have been home with my son for a couple of months. It has not been that much time for radio. I have done some listening and few times  been working on some test equipment, but that will be covered in a post within a few weeks. I have also had my HF band debut, but I give a report on that within in some day or so.

Here are some other points from the last months:

I have mentioned earlier some interference problem when using the QS1R SDR receiver. One easy solution that I tried and seemed to work was to solder a connector to the 5 V connection in the PC power supply. A lot cleaner than the switching power supply I used earlier. Old PC power supplies can be had for free so maybe I should take use of them more. I also plan to make a 12V->5V regulator to try to run the QS1R from batteries together with the laptop.

A 9:1 un:un for random longwires has been made. See image below. No transmitting with it yet.

Texas Instruments has released a micro controller development board called Launch Pad . It was available for $4, so I ordered one. Maybe they want to compete with Arduino ? The package came and below is a photo of the content. I have not played with it much yet.

I do some shopping on Ebay and mostly from far east. My understanding has been that when I order cheap stuff with low or no shipping cost I take the risk if it gets lost. I ordered some parts from Thai Shop Etc and when I hadn´t received it within a month I started to think I was "scammed". But when I contacted them they said they either will refund me or send the stuff again. I choose the latter and within a week I had it in my hands. Very good service! So I would say that I recommend them.

and last:


The Medium Wave DX season 2010-11 has started when I received some common stations from North American on the 21 August. 1130 WBBR, New York as always the strongest.

Shack update and OS choices

A shack is what someone interested in radio usually calls where they have their radios permanently installed and used. I´ve never had a shack like that as I live in an apartment and all radio use from here has been temporary and the serious DX chasing has been done at the DX listening club.

Now I start to have something that could be called a shack in my wifes parents summer house where I recently installed a 15,5 M longwire antenna. The receivers you see on the picture here is a borrowed Icom R-70 and the QS1R. I struggle with some interferances but I think I will be able to solve them very soon (more about that in later blog post).

I also got a computer on the bench. It´s actually one of my older main PC:s from a couple of years back. It´s an AMD Duron 1300 MHz with 768 MB RAM and 120 GB disk. It runs Windows XP and soon will have Kubuntu on it too. I actually have been a Linux user since the early days of Slackware, and then Debian (used when I and a friend set up the first email system at our school) via OpenSuse  (chosen because we use Novell Suse Enterprise at work for database servers) and now I think I will try Ubuntu (or actually Kubuntu to give it an european touch). I see Ubuntu being mentioned on the ham radio groups and mailing lists so it might be the best choice now.

I gave up with Linux and changed to Mac when I got the opportunity to be a Campus representative for Apple at my university a few years ago. I liked MacOS very much as it gave me both Unix and some fancy software like iLife. Something I learned during this period was that I will not work with sales in future careers!

I moved to Windows again and it was actually because of radio. My first SDR was the SDR-IQ from RfSpace and the software, SpectraVue, could only run on Windows. But I would like to go back to Linux and if recording capabilities in the new QS1R software arrives I might be able to do that.