The next build, used a dog-bone insulator, which supported the balun in the middle , and the two wires from each leg on the outside holes. This worked well, and allowed me to get it on the air in just a short amount of time. The downside was that there was no improvement to the wire tangle issues I was having. My next thought was that I needed to add another pair of spacers to keep the wires from getting too close to eachother. Had I solved it? Yeah, kinda. The spacers, located nearer the feedpoint, separated the wires well and kept it looking cleaner. The problem was that I had not really solved the issue, I had just made it more difficult for the wind to be able to spin the 40 wire around the 80 wire.

Next! So, one day as my wife, Sarah, was cleaning out the kitchen of unused items I spotted a cutting board which had been elected to be tossed. Faster than the constant C, I darted to the pile and adopted said plastic sheet for use in antenna projects. This plastic was perfect for building insulators from! I hauled out the jigsaw and made a series of incredibly poor cuts into this sheet and ended up coming out with a house-shaped lump of it that I would then line with copper on each side and drill a number of holes for rope and wires.

Thanks to the wonder of Imgur, here are a few photos I am happy to share! Check them out in their full HD glory here: http://imgur.com/a/qRQEI

Cheers,

VE7WNK

It’s been a while since I have updated this page and I wanted to take a few moments to thank all of you who have been following.

Today we are going to be talking about a beacon mode known as WSPR, from K1JT, the author of JT65. WSPR works by sending a two minute (in WSPR-2 mode) long tone which slowly sends out a station’s call sign, TX power in dBm, and Maidenhead Grid Square. WSPR stands for Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, and as the name suggests protocol is for determining where the band is open to. WSPR does not require the band to be wide open, and in fact it seems to show the band open when it really is slammed shut. Due to the way it’s designed, the protocol does not need a perfect reception on the other side, thus making it suitable as a weak signal mode. While I believe WSPR is designed to be used with low power it seems many are using roughly 100 watts at times.

I thought it would be a decent way to test to my 80 meter antennas. Currently I have  a North-South-broad 80 meter inverted-vee, an East-West-broad 80/40 fan-inverted-vee, and of course my 80 meter loop antenna. I set them up in an equal head to head to head.

The test was as follows:

• RX for 10 mins (5 cycles)
• TX for 2 mins (1 cycles)
• 10 watts TPO as measured at the rig.
• Repeated twice in a row A,B,C,A,B,C style so as to reduce the effects of band changes.

On the first test I was ‘spotted’ in Arizona and California on my North/South inverted-vee. I received stations in Texas, Oregon, and California. This did not really impress me as I can often hear guys in California on 80 at night. I blame my ridiculous noise floor for my failure to receive more stations. I will have a separate video and blog entry detailing my noise struggles.

Next, it was time to put the newest antenna to the test. I loaded up the East/West 80/40 inv-vee and it was stellar by comparison. The match on this antenna is poorer in the low band where WSPR operates, but has far superior free space around it. This antenna did not hear much better, same issue as before, but I did get a station from Nevada, somewhere in New England, and one in the Denver area. The second round on this antenna netted me more stations, but getting into W1 territory on 10 watts on 80 meters really had me on psyched up.

While still on a high from this very positive result I opted to test out the loop to see what kind of pattern it offered. After 15 minutes I had no new stations, and it seemed to mirror the N/S vee perfectly. A longer test may be required, but I had other plans for my evening. I hope to leave the radio on this antenna one night in the near future. It is worth mentioning that the night that I did this there was substantial aurora visible in my area and the scope showed no other stations on the band.

Now, this is where things got fun. 80 was a relatively soggy band last evening, so I played around on 40 meters. A few TX’s netted me Australia, Barbados, and the East Coast! This was a blast! That night I would leave the radio on while I slept and it would transmit about once an hour, but would spend most of the night receiving. When I woke up I nearly coated everything in coffee when I spotted Thailand had not only heard me, but I had heard them! I was shocked! THRILLLLED! You can see the live map at any time here.

Hawaii, Thailand, and the East Coast on 40 meter WSPR.

My next plan is to do the same on 20 meters. I have two antennas, a 20 meter monoband vertical that I made a few years back. Originally, this antenna was for 10 meters, however when I planted it here in Quesnel the radials doubled in length, quadrupled in number, and grew to 1/4 lambda on 20. This antenna is not ideal, but it loads up perfectly and might be suitable for this test. My second antenna on 20 is actually my 80 meter loop which loads up nicely on 20.

Overall this may be my new favorite digital mode. I did have some challanges with getting the software running, but once I got those worked out I was able to get it working with the IC7600 without any additional hardware required. I found that I was getting better results with WSPR-X as it was better suited to the audio issues with the IC7600′s Texas Instruments PCM2901 and Windows 7. Yet another reason to move to Win 10? Maybe, maybe not…

For now, thanks again for reading and I wish you a brilliant holiday season and all the best for the New Year.

Last time I posted I didn’t know but my land lord wanted their condo back so that their daughter could move in. Since then I moved nearly 700km and am living in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. I adore my new home and land, a place that allows me to have antennas!

Here are all the things I have failed to blog about:

Radio Projects

• 80 meter loop around my back yard with ~270ft of copper-clad steel wire, fed with 450ohm window line.
• 40 meter delta loop, mounted vertically, fed with 1/4lamda of 75ohm coax, and then ~35ft of 50ohm RG213.
• 20 meter vertical (as seen in a previous post).
• 10 meter mobile whip mounted on a pole.
• 2 meter/70 centimeter Comet GP-6 antenna mounted on the roof, with LM400 snaked through the roof.
• Antenna grounding system. >3ft deep hole with a grounding plate and 2-gauge wire back to the shack.
• 6 meter portable Yagi temporarily installed.
• 8-port antenna pass-thru for coaxial lines into my ham-shack.
• Everything on radio bench has been grounded to a common bus.
• Fixed the VE7RQL Dragon Mountain Repeater in Quesnel (spares swapped in and tuned, a big thanks to VE7LAL, VE7GLS, VE7ANL, and others for parts, access, and accompaniment)
• Fixed the VE7RES Milburn Mountain Repater in Quesnel (Battery charger and string of 2V cells were hooped. Worked with VE7PW, VE7YY, VA7RC, and VE7EQU to get spares and then did the install with VE7YY)
• Installed APRS on Dragon Mtn. Donated a Comet GP-3 to the cause.
• Installed a BCWARN link from Dragon Mtn to Milburn Mtn, and a shot to an ISP who is letting trickle bandwidth for the APRS Digi on Dragon.
• Convinced two locals to get their amateur radio accreditation (no, they did it all on their own). Congrats to VE7EOL and VE7BNR.
• Installed a controller-managed “APRS reset feature” up at Milburn Mountain. VE7EQU, Andy, supplied a salvaged 12v relay, and VE7EOL and I went up there and wired it up and programmed the controller. The power uses the NC contacts, and when we send a DTMF code to the controller over the air it will run a macro to engage the relay (opening the NC path) and then disengage it after 3 seconds. This provides a power reset for the Tiny Trak TNC that keeps locking up.
• Wrote a Perl script to collect data from my weather station via the WeatherUnderground API (which I feed using the Acu-rite bridge) and send it out over APRS-IS where the Dragon Mtn I-Gate will beacon it (because it is within the programmed 25km radius for Internet-to-RF beaconing). All of this just so that I can look at pretty icons on my Kenwood D710g.
• Working on fixing a remote VHF base with UHF-uplink. POS….
• Collecting derelict repeater hardware from various places. The Two Sisters Mountain Repeater, the VE7ZOE Wells BC repeater, etc…

Tech Projects

• New Computer (Asus Sabertooth X97)
• New Firewall (pfSense in a VERY over-the-top build)
• New home network cabling (Cat6 everywhere)
• New NAS (FreeNAS with 4x1TB NAS-optimised drives)
• New VMWare ESXi home-lab. Sarah is using the Redmine application on it’s own VM to manage our wedding planning. She calls it Wedmine.
• Weather Station installation.

Home Projects

• Bought a new home, and moved into it…
• New roof.
• Replaced the “garberator” in the kitchen.

Life Projects

• Weightloss
• New role at work.
• Not much else…

It’s been an awesome year!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Parts:

• Case: Hammond, Rugged, die cast aluminum alloy enclosures. Two piece lap joint construction provides protection against dust accumulation and water. Also provides for improved EMI/RFI shielding.
  • More info
• Upconverter: A high-quality RF (MF, HF) converter for software defined radio devices like the RTL-SDR.
  • More info
• SDR Dongle: NooElec TV28T v2 SDR & DVB-T USB set including antenna and remote control. R820T tuner is guaranteed.
  • More info
• USB Hub: 7 port powered USB hub.
  • More Info
• The RF cables were from various sources. I would recommend just hunting around on EBay for more.

The radiating element is ~8ft4in of aluminum tubing fed directly from an SO239 connector. Two pieces were used so that I could telescope it in order to tune it for different parts of the band. This was done by cutting teeth into one of the tube and adding a hose clamp to keep it taught. The ground, at least in my build, is 6 radials of the same length. The radiating element and the earth are separated by PVC. The mount is from the feed point of an old yagi which was scrapped by the Coquitlam club. For some reason I spared the unit on clean up date and it has now become useful.

The antenna photo, taken at dusk, can be seen below. I will provide better snaps shots later on, but for now, this should do.

VE7WNK / KG0ZZ 10m Ground Plane

Dave’s article, and the aformentioned YouTube video are on his webpage at http://www.amateurradio.bz/10-11m_ground_plane_antenna.html

I set the unit up and plugged in a radio before even tuning it. I spun the dial around and was a little bit disappointed. As for band conditions, there was not a peep on the band other than a beacon which was barely there. I rolled the VFO over to 20 meters and found it was hopping with activity – a good sign. The antenna was not cut for 20 so I didn’t bother trying to raise a contact at the risk of the finals. With the radio back on 10 meters and the power backed off I tuned around the band. It was about 1.5:1 on the majority of the band with a preference for the lower portion where it dropped until I hit the band edge. I slid the inner tube down a few inches to bring the SWR to 1.1:1 and the beacon came up enough to move the S-meter. I brought the power back up and tested transmitting – pop – the radio rebooted. Not enough power. Resolving to just RX for now I swept the band and found activity at 28.690. It soon became apparent they were holding a net, and taking check ins. These guys were all local to me, within 30kms, so most where loud. I tried to call on the next call but the radio dropped out again, I had to start the truck and try again. About 9 S-Units of ignition noise greeted me at the radio.

The video is not great, but it shows the noise, the net, and the antenna (sort of), and my legs…The radio is borrowed courtesy of the Coquitlam radio club.

Thank you for reading this! Cheers,

Bob, VE7WNK

There are now 6 of these units burning in on my desk. Here is how I built all 6 of them:

Here are my steps for setting up the Pi once the TNC-Pi is built and mounted to the Pi. At this time it is not imperative that you have the radio interfaced to the TNC-Pi, but it will make it easier to test.

First step, prepping

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install vim

To use the serial port to connect the TNC-Pi to the Raspberry Pi, you will need to make a couple of changes to the Pi configuration. Edit the cmdline.txt file in the boot directory and make the following changes:
1. Remove the following: console=ttyAMA0, 115200
2. Remove the following: kgdboc=ttyAMA0, 115200

sudo vim /boot/cmdline.txt

Next, edit the inittab file in the /etc directory and remove the line that says:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty –L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100
You will find it at the very bottom of the config file, or at least I did in my Raspbian installs.

sudo vim /etc/inittab

Next, you can run the easy config script to set up your pi…

sudo raspi-config

The raspi-config is a script used to correct the time zone, remove the auto-desktop start, an update, and a few other small things as you may wish. I recommend changing the hostname (under advanced) in order to make it unique. In my case, I use the callsign used by the modem. Either now, or once complete, change the password for the user “pi” to something other than “raspberry”. Your changes are effective immediately. Exit the tool once you are comfortable with the settings, then reboot your pi, and continue.

sudo reboot now

sudo apt-get install subversion
svn co http://repo.ham.fi/svn/aprx src
cd src/trunk
./configure && make clean all
sudo make install

cd ~

Second step, config…

Move the config file to a new location.

sudo mv /etc/aprx.conf /etc/aprx.conf.orig

You will need to edit the APRX config to your liking. You can see my example config here. I highly suggest that you read up on all the very interesting things you can do. I am hoping to add a temperature sensor to the telemetry portion by creating packets with a perl script. These crafted KISS frames will be read and broadcast by the aprx application if configured correctly.

If you are planning to use this as a digi; When creating your config I plead with you, please use viscous-delay feature. This setting alone will greatly delay the over saturation on the 2 meter APRS frequency we use.  If you are just operating as a fill-in digipeater this setting is most powerful as it will listen for the delay period (say 5s) for any packets being digi’s that match the last one heard. If it hears another station has digi’d the packet, then it is dropped from the buffer and not sent to the radio, instead it is sent only to APRS-IS (if you have it configured to do so).

Read more about the power of APRX at http://wiki.ham.fi/Aprx.en and specifically about viscous delay here.

HELPFUL LINK: The password for the APRS-IS server was gathered here: http://apps.magicbug.co.uk/passcode/

Third step, Starting up on boot.

Create an aprx bash script to start and stop as desired…This will be used during bootup too.

sudo vim /etc/init.d/aprx
#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/aprx

case “$1″ in
start)
echo “Starting aprx”
/sbin/aprx
;;
stop)
echo “Stopping aprx”
killall aprx
;;
*)
echo “Usage: /etc/init.d/aprx {start|stop}”
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

I later modified mine with a restart option by separating a stop and a start with a 5sec sleep timer. NOTE: Be careful copying the script above as some browsers render the quotation marks as periods, so make sure that before you save the file you replace the periods with quotation marks as needed.

Then

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/aprx
sudo update-rc.d aprx defaults

Play, reboot, test…

To test APRX, it’s config, and to understand what is happening, I suggest this command

aprx -vvv -ddd -i

Things I learned…If you get this error when running the software, you may need to reboot or ensure that you have followed the two steps that involve cmdline.txt and inittab

1376738047 TTY /dev/ttyAMA0 OPEN – fd=-1 – errno=13 (Permission denied) – FAILED, WAITING 30 SECS

If you have any questions, Issues, or whichever let me know. I can be emailed at <mycallsign>@<mycallsign>.ca and will happily provide any feedback.

The next step is to interface your radio to your TNC-Pi. Good luck!

I am now prepping a spare old laptop (using this as it comes with a built in UPS). I am adding the APRX software as it is a nice light weight linux digi that interfaces nicely with KISS TNCs. Currently the TNC-X I am using has a X-Digi Daughter board which is controlling the TNC, and I am unsure if I will continue to use it, or have the APRX software do all the controlling for. At this point, I expect I will be removing the board.

Installing APRX is very simple, here’s how simple:

cd /tmp
sudo wget http://ham.zmailer.org/oh2mqk/aprx/aprx_2.07.539-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i aprx_2.07.539-1_i386.deb
cd /etc
sudo vim aprx.conf

From here, I edited a few lines of config to suit my install

mycall VE7WNK-2
myloc lat 5258.77N lon 12229.61W
server bc.aprs2.net
<interface>
..serial-device /dev/ttyS0 19200 8n1 KISS
..callsign $mycall # callsign defaults to $mycall
..tx-ok true # transmitter enable defaults to false
</interface>
<beacon>
..beacon symbol "I#" $myloc comment "VE7WNK Quesnel Bowl Digi"
</beacon>
<digipeater>
..transmitter $mycall
..<source>
....source $mycall
..</source>
</digipeater>

Next, I saved the config and restarted the process as follows:

/etc/init.d/aprx restart

Next, I checked ARPS.fi to ensure that it was there, and sure enough, after about 20 seconds it appeared.

arghhhhh

More to come…Headed from DO13 to CO82 in the morning… I hope to have an entry into the VHF contest this up coming weekend, however there is a wedding that will be in the way of my prime operating time…. -.-

This antenna is a simple 4 element beam that is relatively compact, the longest element is just over 9ft and the boom is only 8ft! I started off wanting to make this antenna portable, however after drawing up the design I visited my favorite metal retailer for some aluminum tubing and discovered that they did not carry the sizes that I needed to make the elements telescopic. I ended up settling on single lengths of 3/4inch aluminum tubing with 1/16th inch walls for the elements. The boom is an 8ft piece of 1inch square aluminum tubing. The elements are held to the beam using hydraulic hose clamps. The boom is mounted to a pole using a pair of pipe/exhaust clamps which are bolted to a 4inch square plate of 1/8th inch think aluminum.

I posted the pictures from the build and testing phase via Google+

Click here do download the PDF sketch of the visio drawing I did:

Visio mapping of the antenna. Click to download the PDF