Summits on the Air (SOTA) is where amateurs will venture to the top of regional high spots and operate with portable equipment.  This started in the UK and has grown across Europe and is now being established in North America. Ottawa amateur Martin, VA3SIE, will be activating Mont Ste. Marie, QC and Jean-Pierre, VA2SG, will be activating Apica, in the Saguenay, QC on the 14th November.  Martin will be using his KX1 for HF/CW and VX8R for VHF/UHF operation with APRS.  Martin’s new blog has links for tracking him on APRS.

I noticed an old friend of mine Tom, M1EYP will be activating Pendle Hill in Lancashire, UK. (Pendle is infamous for a group of alleged witches who in the 17th Century were put on trial at Lancaster – the local city to where I grew up). Tom is a friend from my active short wave listening days when we formed, with Chrissie Brand,  a regular meeting of Manchester members of the British DX Club.  Tom has some great details of his radio activities on his website including an excellent diary describing his walking of the Pennine Way with his eldest son,  including their radio operations (check the left hand frame on his homepage). Tom has an incredible interest in radio that extends from SWLing, to pirate radio and amateur radio.  He has an extensive QSL collection from broadcast stations around the world (again see the left hand frame of his homepage). (Good to see Tom, Chrissie and myself are all still active in the hobby of radio and writing about it on the web.)

Good luck to all the SOTA activations and listen for them if you are on the air on the 14th November.

Image by Mysid from Wikimedia Commons

Here is a nice website to find the location of a grid square on a map.  Beside being able to locate 2, 4 or  6 character Maidenhead grid squares, it can locate distances between squares. Left click on the map and you will be given the latitude and longitude, sixcharacter grid square and the option to select this as the start point for distance calculations.  So set the start point of your QTH and then see the distance come up when you left click on other grid squares.  Grid squares can be located by entering the grid characters in the box at the bottom of that site’s web page.

Thanks to Laurent, F6FVYfor providing this online tool that works with Google Maps.

Last week I fired back up the 30m QRSS beacon.  This has been in storage for quite a while and I was curious to see if it was still within the 100Hz QRSS band on 30m.  As you can see from the pictures below it still is and it was reaching the ‘local’ grabbers of Vernon, VE1VDM (598miles away)and Bruce, W1BW (285miles away).  Power from the beacon is 160mW on the frequency of 10.14003MHz and it is looking nice and stable.  In case your interested the frequency shift keying has a pull of 6Hz.   Yes, that is Hertz! It still amazes me how stable this is.  Details of the build can be found on a previous post.  I will add the circuit diagrams of this homebrew design, once I get time to move my hand-drawn circuits to the computer.

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VA3STL 160mW QRSS beacon received at VE1VDM on 24/1009

VA3STL 160mW QRSS beacon received by W1BW on 24/10/09

Besides the QRSS beacon, I have also been running a D-RATS D-STAR beacon on 145.670MHz.  So if you have D-STAR capabilities in the Ottawa area, try and see if you can hear my signal and send me a message.  I usually post details of when the beacon is running on the OARDG group message board.

After setting the HF station back up, it was time to update the K3’s firmware.  I used the production version (which is currently MCU 3.14/DSP 2.16), not wanting to try the beta release yet (MCU 3.44/DSP 2.38).  If anyone is trying the beta version I would be interested to hear about the performance.

Running Xubuntu so I use the Linux version of the utility. This has always worked well for me, as can be seen below.

K3 Linux Firmware Utility

Well the basement has been finished off apart from a few small touches.  Last weekend I moved the HF equipment back into the shack and ran cable through the access point.  The map to the right shows I have been making contacts again. The HF setup is not complete, but good enough to get back on PSK.

As for the computer, I have concentrated everything onto one machine, the old Athlon (Thunderbird processor I believe) and using Xubuntu 9.04.  To get three serial ports I have to use a USB to serial cable, but this allows me to use the Icom IC-2200H with D-STAR, my TNC-X and the K3 with the computer.

Contacts so far have been mostly on 80m.  I returned to plotting HF contacts using Platial and was surprised to see a pattern forming with my North American contacts made over four days; take a look.

Nine North American contacts forming a pattern

You can see of the nine contacts, eight fall closely on two lines (one contact was in Ottawa, near to where my station is located).  The one outlier was W4/KL7GLLlocated in Reston, VA and he was a weak signal to me.  My doublet is running approximately North-South, so you could view that this is showing the major lobes of radiation, as well as the density of amateur operators (with few in Northern Ontario and Quebec).  Well, that is a theory, but it is an interesting pattern to see emerge nevertheless and I am sure it will break soon with more contacts.  By the way, most of these contacts were on 80m except for the Oklahoma one which was on 17m.  If you look wider on the Platial map you will see I have made contacts in the Netherlands and Russia, too.

It is good to be back on HF!

Morecambe Bay at sunset

I recently stumbled across the blog of the Sands Contest Group.  This seems to be an active UK amateur radio contest group who run special events, use Elecraft transceivers and experiment with antennas (or aerials!).  This is a good blog, but it is all the more interesting for me as the group is located where I grew up. The pictures of the Kent estuary, near Arnside, remind me of when I would go there to fish for flounder.

Pity I had not found this blog last year when I returned with my family to spend a vacation with my mother.  Next time I head back to the Morecambe area I will be trying to meet up with this group.

Besides the blog (which is now on my blogroll) the group also has a website at http://www.m0scg.org.uk/.