Insonia - the inability to go to sleep' CAN be a ham radio operator's friend. This morning at a bit after 02:20 (2:30 a.m.) I tunred around 20 meter and found it devoid of all but one signal - a digital one, from who knows where.  Except during the lowest of sun numbers, mid-bands like 20m are rarely actually DEAD, but maybe just barely open to somewhere. I decided to call CQ at the bottom of the CW portion.  After a few minutes, loud and clear, I was answered from a Ham on the south Island of New Zealand.  His station?  A grounded loop for forty meters and ten Watts.  We had a delightful conversation, talking radio, immigration from England QRP on field trips  -v- getting older and etc. My rig is a dipole and borrowed 100 Watt rig.  With the signal reports both ways, there is no reason that I 'needed' 100 Watts, but the rig is multi-band and on loan - temporarily. It's probably going back into the box until I build my 20 Watt , class C, external amplifier for the upgraded Wilderness Radio Sierra QRP rig.

Lesson: get on the bands when they do NOT sound loaded and you'd be surprised who is out there and not wanting to be radio-assaulted in some grotesque pile-up, but also wishing for an enjoyable conversation.


>Ray

You know - a two way contact with Russia from the southern united States would be good enough with 100 Watts and a full sized dipole up 60 feet, but doing it with a home made 6 Watt transceiver into a home made magnetic loop, located inside of your home - that's excellent!

It also seems that the loop might have dramitically improved your signal to noise ratio on receive and that's critical - especially in an urban environment.


73 de RadioRay ..._ ._

and Frosty . . .

What you are doing today, you are more than likely able to do tomorrow.  However, what we cannot do today, have little or no chance of 'magically' being able to use tomorrow - post TSHTF.


Well done.



>de RadioRay ..._ ._

This is REALLY excellent news!

Congratulations
559 on forty into Kanses aith 14 Watts max, using an indoor, homebrew magnetic loop. . .   That is really excellent proof that it's doing it's job and radiating well. Any change to prop it up outside on the balcony?



>de RadioRay ..._ ._

"Remember though it's less about the hardware than what's between your ears & fulfilling the needs of you & your tribe."

AB-SO-LOOT-LEE korrekt-o-mundo !
This is the #1 reason for getting the ham license.  It is so that those who want to prepare have the opportunity to LEARN, to DO and eventually to "OWN THE SKILLS" for competency in radio communication, whether tactical (around the neighborhood), Area (in State) and long range (continental and more). The ham ticket provides am excellent path toward leanring that DOING this and more - quite legally. The biggest flaw that I see is the 'I'll just buy the radio and when TSHTF I'll just talk."  Three words: "No You Won't" (four words, if you count the expanded contraction.) The example: is like me owning a fine U.S. Army kit of field surgical instruments and learning while I go - in the field - extracting your appendix. (Gee - I wonder which one of the wiggly things IS his appendix?) Quit squirming and let me look around in here . . .  :o   .... Not the best way to learn - eh?


Time for me to go split some wood and wire in an electrical socket next to the wood stove.


73 de RadioRay ..._ ._

This being a site with emphasis on alternative radio communications with possible use during emergencies, I want to emphasize that Ham radio does NOT require thousands of dollars in transceivers, towers and world class beam antennas.  Those things are VERY cool and yes - they extend your reach. (I'd love to have them, but there is this thing called 'thrift' that keeps getting in the way...) , but this coffee shop portable series of demonstrations is proof of concept that YES you CAN set-up and operate just about anywhere, with good results and by doing this as a hobby it's also enjoyable practice, should you have to set-up your portable radio station for less desirable reasons.

The idea of Gil, a relatively new ham, operating 'portable' at a table in a coffee shop is a clear demonstration that you CAN operate successfully with relatively inexpensive gear, expedient antennas in odd locations and STILL enjoy ham radio.  Naturally, what we do as a hobby/mania would become a rather powerful tool when/if ordinary infractructure based communications fail. It also emphasizes the HUGE difference that CW makes over voice.  Gil & I have done a couple of experiments in switching from CW to voice and when conditions are 'better' we can make voice contact and have fun with it.  However, just for fun, I usually sign-off in voice THEN in CW as we did today.  When Gil 'beeped' back in CW, the difference from 'weak readable' in SSB went to OUCH! my ears, because I had the gain up so high to pull-out the voice, that the Morse was quite strong in my headphones.

So - what are YOUR thoughts?  If Gil can set-up in a coffee shop and tap Morse over 800 miles to me - operating with 5 Watts (max) into an antenna leaned against a post, other diners, orders being served, cars whizzing by ont he busy street, could this serve to illustrate the use of listening/transmitting as necessary for other than hobby use?  Remember - what we do as a radio hobby, was state of the art Special Operations territory a generation or less ago in history.  Our hobby is a powerful tool.

Your thoughts?



>Ray

After MUCH head scratching and etc. I discovered why signals from Gil were quite readable but not as strong as they probably should be.  More importantly, my signals to him were not at all strong.  Using analysis software - and Kentucky Windage- it was determined that my 130 foot doublet antenna makes a big null right on his location and the take-off angle is too high for the prefered path, forcing us to a lower band, higher absorption and noise.  We were making useful contacts - no question - and it was quite impressively functional considering the use of expedient antennas and powers as low as 200mW..  HOWEVER - I didn't want to settle for "functional" and so designed a wire beam of a type I used a long time ago with manpack sets: the Half Square antenna. (GOOGLE)

In about two hours, I put in a quick and dirty Half Square pointed toward Gil, expecting him to be at home with his best antenna at the ready.  At the appointed time I heard his signal, switched between antennas and sure enough, about one S-unit improvement, little or no fading, while on my 'regular' antenna, he was down one S-unit with deep fades and increased noise. THEN he taps to me that he's not home running 14 Watts into his PAR EndFed, properly installed, but instead he's at the coffee shop using a BuddiStick, wedged-in among chairs, tables and frightened housewives...   ::)   using his K1 at 5 Watts. So - his signal ranged from S3 to S5 on the first test, S4 to S7 on the second about 45 minutes later. I recorded the audio and have sent it to him.

:o  ! The RF noise in an urban cyber cafe' must be tremendous !       :o

Be Warned!!!  JUST when you THOUGHT that it was safe to go enjoy a fine cup of coffee , served by a shapely 20 year old barrista...


some guy sets-up a 'coffee clandestine' radio station and begins to radiate mystery signals into the ether to who-knows-whom???   ha ha




de RadioRay ..._ ._

Broadcasting is a funny thing.  I mean - if I TRY to send a bulletin to a Buddy and many others happen to know the freq/time to monitor it - is it 'broadcasting'? 

Except for in the most extreme, I am not planning to be on the move. I am building my little patch of ground here on this rural peninsula into a water, food and comforts producing cornucopia a few steps at a time. While I USED TO bound through the mountains of the American West like the tiger, sleep in snow caves and live using little more than my knife , a coffee can and my fur-lined-jock-strap.  Those days are gone for me. These days, my biggest ally is God and location - in that order.

Personally- rather than focus narrowly, hoping to develop an action plan for one specific scenario, it might serve us well to discuss TEOTWAWKI Radio in the various contextS which come to mind. For one, it might be a sudden avalanche of services, leading to the usual suspects taking to the streets and declining into a Mad Max situation, to something as mundane as the economic depression continuing to chip away, with the politicians using ever expanding wars to hold on to their positions of power.  Or -  maybe all this "CHANGE" will indeed turn the USA into a worker's paradise and we can all live in communal nirvana...  //yeaaaaaaah riiiiiiight//

Thoughts?



>de RadioRay ..._ ._

More on this later from me, but for right now.

1. Internet is too dangerous to not be tightly controlled - eventually. IMHO.

2. Internet is one of the first things to die in my local emergencies, but YMMV.

3. If it's all operating, then we probably do not have a 'communications emergency', just an emergency, so cellphones, Internet and etc. are all players.

4. Cellphones become unusable in even minor emergencies due to 'selective availability' which is a FEATURE that gives priority to those who are on 'the list' that is: politicians their concubines.  My wife and I were without cell phone and even texting during last year's laughably weak Virginia earthquake. Everyone hit the phones and they are only designed for a low to moderate percentage of people on them at the same time.

5. Generally, there is nothing inherently bad about being independent in your comms, but it CAN be bad if you are not.

CW:  Cw is the excellent baseline for all other communications.  Outside of commercial communications systems like cellphones and etc. a QRP rig of a few Watts allows more bang for the buck than just about anything else going.  It is your baseline/fall-back/JIC comms . . . If you desire more throughput, or more 'common' contact, then voice is fine, but you'll suffer in much larger equipment & power requirements for the ease of speaking rather than sending code under the same conditions.  Even for data networks, I'd HIGHLY recommend a CW back-up. Gil & I have been tapping CW in our skeds at power levels from 14 Watts down to 200 milliWatts, using a non-optimal wire antenna on my end and a combination of ultra-lite/compact packable antennas and the classic "W.O.W. Antenna" (Wire Out Window) . We use CW to coordinate other testing, like 'Let's Try Voice' which always sends us scurrying back to the reliable CW.  Look at the pics of Gil's Mantiz QRP rig, then look at the smallest voice rig of atleast ten times the power requirement. It CAN be done, but it's a drag.

>>> If you are bugging IN and have already set-up enough alt-power, then voice looks better, but I'd still use CW for passing printed nessage when there is no computer. If there was a NEED to use voice -like joining specific voice nets worth participating in- then it can be handy.

QQQ: What do you want to send/receive?  Do you need a HIGH volume of traffic, or relibility and portability for SITREPS and 20-50 word text messages, or a nice 'rag-chew' about current events?

Well - time for a nip of Nassau Royale (possibly the LAST bottle in Virginia !!!  >:(  ) then off to Zzzz!  I have a BIG DAY of stringing wire tomorrow!!


>de RadioRay ..._ ._

Assuming the loss of commercial infrastructure, with internet being first on the list, what are your expectations and 'wants' from the use of ham radio and radio in general?

Local Information:  For me, the first use of radio is for information from farther than I can personally see. This begins with 2 meter radio for local information.  However, my use of 2 meters is very limited because in this area, it's barely used at all.

National Information: The simplest form of mind control is to control what goes INTO the mind. By now, you've probably at least strongly suspected that The Mass Media is a very shallow and glitzy control mechanism for the generally dumbed-down public. As a people, we know more about "Desperate Housewives" and the NFL (the National Felons Legion)than we do about the noose that national and global politicians are cinching ever more tightly around our few remaining freedoms. We've been conditioned to think in sound bites and 'go with' whoever spliced together the best 5 - 10 second infomercial foisted upon us as news reporting, rather than requiring actual indepth reporting within an historical context.  As an example: most of our population wanted to go to war against Iraq as 'payback for 9/11' even though Iraq had nothing to do with it.  Now the public wants to turn Iran into a 'glass parking lot' because the TV says so, though most Americans can't find Iran on a map and don't know a thing about the Persians who have lived there for more than three thousand years.

This is where listening to shortwave radio comes in: 

#1 : Every broadcaster has an agenda, but by being able to listen to many, entirely different points of view on the news about our nation and the world via the foreign media, you're much more likley to be able to decide what is REALLY happening by reading between the lines.  I learn more about international and national crop failures, monetary policies and their effects from INTERNATIONAL broadcasters, than I ever do from the talking heads and 'press-titutes' of the domestic media.  It also helps in gaining more of a world view to understand that we've been lied to on may occasions and on most topics. Listening to the same topics via Radio Japan, Red Line frm the Voice of Russia, Deutche Welle (Germany)  and etc. makes for interesting 'information fusion sessions' with friends.

#2 : Being an old Cold Warrior, I never forget the use of shortwave radio to reach the millions who lived under Soviet occupation behind the Iron Curtain. Despite the power of the massive central State, millions listened to the outside world via UNTRACEABLE shortwave radio.  The internet is a wonderful tool that I believe is as pivotal as the invention of the printing press,. However, the internet IS a government system at it's core and by it's very nature, designed to be a tracing & collating mechanism.  Shortwave radio however, flows across borders and listeners can be very anon.  This might prove to be very handy later.

#3 : HF ham radio is a great way to communicate across an entire region - like in State and also across a continent, even internationally.  In talking with hams in the areas struck by post tropical cyclone Sandy, it was soon evident that the news media did NOT meantion many of the politically embarassing things which these real people on the ground were first hand witnesses to.   The direct conversations about power, water and domestic services being disrupted, looters being coddled, while homeowners were identified then charged with 'crimes' because because of their being seen on TV footage of them bearing bats, bows and pipes for the better pat of a month, when entire sections of the city just a 1/4 mile away were lit-up like - welllll like BROADWAY, was a clear indication of many things - none of them good.

So - there's a start. Let's get a discussion going about what YOU want, need or aspire to in radio and maybe a little bit about how you plan to do it.



de RadioRay ..._ ._

THAT picture is a blast from the past!  I actually used to copy Morse code on a teletype, whether ASR or KSR I cannot recall, but it was a model 28 - Kleinschmidt without the re-perf.  The keys were indeed pushbuttons with all the tactile response of the push button on a 1960 car door. Add to that the fact that you had SHIFT and UNSHIFT buttons to press to switch between letters and numbers/punctuation and you get the picture of what it was like to copy fast, mixed letter/number cipher traffic send by some Siberian conscript, high on Russian Partizanka cigarrettes and chai and or vodka, depending upon how long it has been since his last pay/booze allowance. They were'nt paid much, so they were known to drink MUCH to make-up the difference. Some of their transmitters were drift-o-maits, so I'd have to copy with one hand, while the other hand was on the knob of my beloved R-390A, tracking them as they chirpped and drifted.

>>>  THIS is why I am so jazzed about Direct Digital Synthesis - always on freq, no chirp or drift and palmtop computers that hold entire DEPARTMENTS full o of teletype capabilities ON STEROIDS!  Being able to park a radio on a WINMOR freq and have 'mostly private' e-mail over radio non-real-time is a good thing.

Enough of the good old/bad old days.  The nurse is coming down the hall with my meds and she gets angry when I am caught using the staff computer to talk to those outside of the assylum. . .    :P


>de RadioRay ..._ ._

Last Night I had a little trouble sleeping so I decided to call 'CQ' around the center of the 30 meter band on the 'big' rig at 75 Watts.  European stations were finally fading away so that I culd listen 'out there' for the more distant stations, and hopefully to make contact with some fellow hams who are not '599 73 SK' type of operators. My antenna is a 130 foot wire doublet at a bit over 40 feet in the air and fed with ladder line, running roughly NNE/SSW. For those who do not regularly operate thirty, it's a treasure trove of interesting stations, particularly during the off hours when non-US hams can get on the air an not be mobbed. Having operated from overseas many years ago, I remember how it was to be mobbed by rude paper chasers, while I trying to hold a conversation with a friend back in the U.S.  This was in the pre-internet days, so being able to talk with 'home' real-time was a treat!

Last night was one of those memorable nights. We've all had them - or should! The band sounded dead, yet I knew that is not the case, because 'utility' stations in Germany and elsewhere were quite readable on adjacent frequencies.  Besides, the middle bands are usually open to somewhere. With a little bit of calling 'CQ', I had two different South African stations give me a call. A distance of over 8047.6 miles! What a delight to actually have more than a bit of time in a QSO with such an interesting couple of fellows in an exotic place such as the former RSA!  I must say that their code was good, steady and well sent and neither of us required a mega-station to communicate.

The next contact was on the late night/early morning forty meter band with my heavily modified Wilderness Sierra Mk.4 (shown elsewhere). at the BONE CRUSHING POWER of between 2 to 3  Watts. This led to a nice, hour long chat with a fellow named Glen out in Kingman , Az. A distance of 2086.6 miles.  Glen is good on the key, so I was able to 'slide the weight back' on my old Vibroplex original 'bug'  to do a LOT of talking at a brisk but not fast speed ( ~ 28 - 30 WPM ). This allowed an hour of real conversation on a wide range of topics.

So, even a modest station of less than 100 Watts, attached a basic doublet/dipole antenna hung in the trees often yeilds the ability to talk with other hams all the way across the Atlantic ocean before their breakfast is ready in the southern hemisphere. Then QRP to a great CW man two thousand miles away who is also a radio insomniac! Contrairy to what those glossy magazines and web adverts say, you do NOT require a mega-station, huge linear amplifier and a sound-studio voice equalized for 'Hi-Fi SSB' (what a silly idea!) .  A good receiver, a few Watts on transmit and an old Morse key will do the job nicely.

73 de RadioRay ..._ ._

Aaaah! but he was adored by cops in America because he invented . . . .



... that's what GIL told me!    ::)


>de RadioRay ..._ ._

Thanks for the tip.  I worked the QRP station aboard the USS Batfish QRP to QRP on forty meters, a little over one hour ago. 


>Ray