NCS Tom VA3TS

VHF Checkins
VE3FGG Jamie, KO4DXQ Bob , VE3OZW Richard, VA3KOT John, VE3FP Adam, VE3RWY Rob, VE3DGY Doug, VE3NX Jim, VE3RQY Greg, VE3FAS Phil

HF Checkins
VE3KOT, John, VE3RWY Rob, VE3RQY Greg, VE3NX Jim, VE3DGY Doug

I know several members (incl. yours truly) are using the IC-7300.  Here's a link to a review by Adam Farson VE7OJ/AB4OJ.  He's published a lot of reviews on his website.  His reviews are very comprehensive (i.e. long, this one is 45 pages), so you might not read it cover to cover.  But there might be some useful info in it to help get the most out of your 7300.   He published this one a few years ago but recently updated it.

https://www.ab4oj.com/icom/ic7300/7300notes.pdf

73
Dave, VE3WI

PS:  I have a copy of the Radio Today Guide to the IC-7300, by Andrew Barron, ZL3DW.  It's a useful book, written as a set of "how-to"s.  I'd be happy to loan it - just ask.

FCC takes action against marketing of unauthorized transceivers

On November 24 FCC Enforcement Bureau (EB) issued a citation and order concerning the illegal marketing of unauthorized radio frequency devices

The citation says:

This CITATION AND ORDER (Citation), notifies Rugged Race Products, Inc. d/b/a
Rugged Radios (Rugged Radios or Company) that it unlawfully marketed six models of radio frequency devices that (a) operated outside the scope of their respective equipment authorization, or without any equipment authorization; (b) permitted any operator to program and transmit on new frequencies using the device’s external operation controls; and © lacked the appropriate labeling. Specifically, Rugged Radios marketed models RH5R-V2, RM25R, RM25R-WP, RM50R, RM60-V, and RM100 in violation of section 302(b) of the Communications Act, as amended (Act), and sections 2.803(b), 2.925(a)(1), 80.203(a), 90.203(a), 90.203(e), 95.361(a), and 95.391 of the Commission’s rules.

Read the Citation and Order at
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-20-1395A1.pdf

Source FCC Enforcement Bureau
https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement

VHF VE3OSR:
VA3KOT John, NCS
KO4DXQ Bob, Soddy Daisy, TN Echolink
VE3GIO Larry, Woodstock Echolink
VE3IJD Gene, Honey Harbour Echolink
VE3DGY Doug
VA3TS Tom
VE3RQY Greg
VE3BQM Bernie
VA3GUF Frank
VE3NX Jim
VE3FP Adam

HF 3.783MHz
VA3KOT John, NCS
VA3TS Tom
VE3BQM Bernie
VE3RQY Greg
VE3DGY Doug

Sometimes, a project sits idle because we can't find any suitable wire. I have found a good source and it is usually tossed out as being unusable. I speak of the lowly vga cable.

   

This picture shows a piece of this cable, the covering stripped off, to reveal a nice braided shield

   

Inside of the braid is where the useful wires exist. I ground wire, then a foil shield, inside that, 3 shielded conductors plus 3 more individual wires.

   

A ham can find many uses for this, even if you don't use every conductor, this picture below is an 8 pin microphone extension cable, nicely shielded. Other uses are hookups for digital modes etc. This vga cable has built in ferrites, another plus.  Have fun building 

   

When we are out operating in the field it is usually a good idea to be able to quickly and easily deploy our wire antennas - and to take them down when the operating session is finished. It is also a good idea to store the wire in a manner that makes it easy to stash away in a backpack without letting it get tangled. The solution is simple and easy to make; it's called a winder.
   
The picture shows two types of winder. The one on the right was popularized by Sotabeams (who also sell a commercial version). The wire is wound in figure of eight fashion around the two "horns" and can be unwound by simply pulling the end of the wire. The winder rocks back and forth as it releases the wire.

I had been using the Sotabeams style winders for some time, but I found that very long wires didn't fit on these winders very well. So, I designed a new winder with four "horns" on which it is easy to wind very long field antenna wires like the 132ft 80m End-Fed-Half-Wave shown. The wire is wound around two of the horns. If it begins to fill the winder, simply rotate the winder by 90 degrees and start winding around the other two horns. To unwind the wire, pull on the end while supporting the winder with a finger through the centre hole. The winder spins as it releases the wire.

GBARC Builder Group members can build their own winders by cutting the shape from a plastic kitchen chopping board (Dollar Stores, Walmart). I have a pattern I can send on request to anybody needing one.

Good news - we are moving out of the solar cycle minimum. Sunspots are back and the Solar Flux Index is rising. We have a long way to go before we hit the solar cycle peak again (around 2025) but propagation conditions are improving.

During the solar cycle peak we are able to make DX contacts with simpler antennas and less power. With that in mind I decided to revisit an old project for pedestrian mobile HF operations. The project involves what is commonly called a buddistick antenna. It is basically one half of the popular Buddipole antenna. A Buddipole antenna is a horizontal portable HF dipole. A buddistick is a vertically oriented monopole that is electrically one quarter wave long. A full length monopole would be too long to be easily portable, but it can be shortened with a loading coil. That makes it an ideal candidate for pedestrian mobile operations.

I have previously used a home-made centre loaded buddistick and made a QRP contact with Italy from the southern shore of Georgian Bay. The design involved separate coils for each band and that made it a little inconvenient to use. I propose to redesign the buddistick with a bottom loading coil that is tunable for multiband operation. And yes, bottom loading is supposedly less efficient than centre loading but it has other advantages like stability that make it more suitable for pedestrian mobile.

Building the coil poses a challenge. There are online calculators for determining the required inductance for each band. Other builder groups, such as Barrie ARC's WAX group 3D-printed a grooved coil former and used zinc-coated steel wire for the coil. A shorting lead allows them to select the required inductance tap for each band. VK3YE in Melbourne, Australia has experimented with concentric coils that can be overlapped to vary the inductance. The commercially available Wolf River coils use a shorting collar that can be slid along the coil to select inductance.

I had a different idea that will be easier to build. In fact, I have built it already. Some time ago I published a post on these forums concerning a Ground Tuning Unit (GTU). It comprises a series L-C tuner for resonating a ground connection. A series L-C circuit is an acceptor circuit; i.e. it will pass signals at the resonant frequency and reject others. If we turn a GTU upside down and use it to resonate an antenna instead of ground it will serve our purpose here.

But, we have one more problem to solve yet. A monopole cannot be used alone. It needs another monopole for the ground side. We could simply use two series L-C circuits; one for the antenna and another for the ground, but that gets cumbersome. The HFPack group of pedestrian mobile operators favour trailing counterpoise wires. I don't personally like that idea because a dragged counterpoise wire is detuned randomly depending on the terrain on which it is laid. In any event, I prefer to operate from a fixed location and even then it is difficult and time-consuming to select the correct counterpoise length.

An alternative is to use a raised counterpoise. A raised counterpoise is less susceptible to detuning by variations in the terrain. On the other hand, on 40-metres we would need a 33ft wire stretched out above ground, fixed to a tree or some other support. That seems perverse to me; the buddipole occupies very little space but it needs a long counterpoise wire? No, that makes it impractical in a public space like a park or a beach.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Yes, we need about about 33ft of wire for a counterpoise on 40 metres, but it does not have to be stretched out straight. It can be wound into a shape called a Petlowany coil. The wire is wound concentrically with each turn spaced from the next to reduce mutual L, C effects. A Petlowany coil is a flat, 2-dimensional counterpoise that is only a couple of feet in diameter for 40 metres. It can be hung on a mounting pole below the antenna. Sounds strange? yes, but I have tried it and QSOd with it.

Over the winter I will work on the detailed design and in the spring I will demonstrate it to the club with a recommendation that the project be adopted by the GBARC Builder Group. It will be a useful project for those of us who like to set up a station while camping, or during a trip to the beach.

Anybody wishing to join the GBARC Builder Group can add a comment or email me at va3kot@gmail.com. No experience necessary.

If you haven't looked at NVIS operation recently, forget nearly everything you thought you knew about it. As Bob Dylan used to sing: "the times they are a-changing". Actually, what has changed is the solar cycle.

Near Vertical Incidence Skywave (NVIS) is the technique of using a horizonal antenna that is intentionally low to the ground in order to send a signal straight up into space. The signal - if the correct frequency is chosen - will be reflected back down to the ground by the F2 layer of the Earth's ionosphere. NVIS is used where it is necessary to communicate with another station within a radius of about 400km from the transmitting station. A NVIS antenna will usually be quite useless for longer distance communication (an exception to that will be discussed later).

The US military developed a rapid deployment field antenna called the AS2259 for NVIS operation. It comprises a vertical centre support pole with four wire elements stretching down towards the ground at 90 degrees with respect to each other. The four wires form two inverted-V dipoles - one for a daytime band and another for a night-time band. A popular ham version of the AS2259 employs 40 metres as the daytime band and 80 metres as the night-time band. It used to function very well, but not anymore; here is why:

There is a critical frequency above which signals will pass right through the ionosphere and be lost in space. For NVIS operation the critical frequency is referred to as foF2. The critical frequency is constantly changing for every location but it also varies based on the sending station's latitude and the time-of-day. The critical frequency is measured by a device called an ionosonde. To determine the foF2 for your location you must refer to the plot of foF2 from an ionosonde near your station. For GBARC, the nearest ionosonde is located at Alpena, Michigan on the US side of Lake Huron. Here is a sample plot from 13th November 2020.
   
As you can see from the Alpena plot, foF2 is never high enough to use the 40 metre band at our latitude. In fact, the 80 metre band - previously used as a night-time band - is the only usable band during the day. At night it would be necessary to use the "gentlemans' band", 160m, to achieve NVIS propagation. This will change as the solar cycle heads back towards its peak, but for now the old AS2259 ham-special antennas will not do a very good job.

Anybody using an AS2259 style ham antenna may protest that they are still making contacts on 40m with it. That is possibly quite true but the contacts are using regular skywave propagation, not NVIS. The propagation pattern for a NVIS antenna has the strongest signals going straight up. But the pattern also sends weaker signals off at lower angles. The -3dB points in the pattern are typically at about 60 degrees from horizontal. The -6dB points are even lower and will transmit a signal to maybe 1500km away that is only 1 S-unit (-6dB) weaker.

So if it "kinda works" why do we care about the critical frequency anyway? Maybe we don't ... unless we want to get a signal into an adjacent valley on the other side of a mountain. I was camping at Craigleith Provincial Park on the shore of Georgian Bay a couple of years ago. I wanted to check in to a net in Shelburne, Ontario on 80m. In between my station and the net control station was the Blue Mountains and the Dufferin Highlands. I strung an 80m monopole only 8 feet high, worked against ground through a Ground Tuning Unit (GTU) and keyed up with only 5 watts. My signal was copied perfectly by the other stations due to NVIS propagation.

For NVIS to work efficiently BOTH transmitting and receiving stations MUST use a NVIS antenna. In the example just given, my simple NVIS antenna's signal was received on a Beverage antenna (a very long, very low wire used for receive only). If the receiving antenna is for example a vertical, the received signal may be very weak or non-existent. A vertical antenna's "ears" are pointed down, close to the horizon with a huge null in the direction from which a NVIS signal is coming. The same is true even for a dipole mounted high above ground.

How is this relevant to GBARC? Let us imagine a situation in which we have no repeater coverage but we need to communicate anywhere within Grey County. NVIS is the answer. A NVIS net control station in, say, Owen Sound could reliably communicate all the way from Manitoulin down to Toronto, irrespective of the terrain in the region.

NVIS antennas are particularly easy to erect. A simple dipole 8 to 12 feet above ground will suffice. Actually, an antenna laid directly on the ground (a "Grasswire") can also sometimes work. It doesn't matter whether the dipole is fed in the middle, the end or off-centre, it will still radiate towards the sky. A QRP signal is sometimes desirable because the ground wave signal may otherwise interfere with the F2 reflected signal if the transmitted signal is too strong (turn off those amps!). There is some degree of D-layer absorption so it may be necessary to adjust transmitted power accordingly for best receive signal.

If anybody would like to join me in experimenting with NVIS please leave a comment to this post.

I had a flight stopover in Iceland a few years ago. I was on my way to the UK and took advantage of a cheap fare offer from Icelandair. It was a welcome break during an otherwise tedious transatlantic journey. One of the things I noticed during my brief stop at the small, overcrowded Keflavik airport near the capital city of Reykjavik was the time.

Every ham should take note of the time in Reykjavik, Iceland for one very simple reason. Iceland is on Universal Coordinated Time - all year. They do not observe Daylight Saving Time. My mobile devices do not have a setting for UTC but I can select a second city on the World Clock widget displayed on the screen. And I choose Reykjavik.

Now I can see UTC time at a glance and never miss an HF net again.