International Beacon project

As you probably already have guessed, as a radioamateur I'm very interested in propagations. One of the usefull tools to check if the circumstances are in good shape for a DX, is the International Beacon Project. This worldwide system of HF beacons transmits on 5 bands, 24/7 on a known timing sequence. Every beacon transmit 3 minutes starting it's CW ID in 22wpm, followed by 1 second 100 Watts, 1 second 10 Watts, 1 second 1 Watt, ending with 1 second 100mW. 

For more info about The International Beacon Project, the time schedule and a lot of tools that help you make use of the beacons, take a look at the website of the Northern California DX Foundation.

For a dynamic worldmap showing the actual upcoming transmitions on the several frequencies, take a look at the bottom of the Homepage.

DVAP finaly arrived!

Yes! It arrived. Finally. I ordered a DVAP dongle on February 27th and after almost 3 long months the parcel containing this little red wonder arrived by UPS. Because this dongle is so popular,the manufacturer could not keep up with delivering. When the DVAP which was becoming mine roled of the factoryline, the guy who distrubute the stuff put the wrong adress on the package and transported it to Canada. Anyway, with a long detour it finally reached my supplier Parmacom, who almost instantly directed it to me. You'll understand my eagerness to unpack it and give it a try.

In the package a smaller carton folded box appeared which houses everything. The box contains the red dongle (offcourse), a USB to mini-USB cable and a manual. Installing is easy, simply plug one end of the cable in the dongle and the other half in your computer. The dongle is equipped with its own litle antenna, which is replacable with any other SMA handheld antenna. It is said that the packed antenna is not a very good one (-3dB gain), but this problem is very simple to overcome by placing another one with a positive gain. Like this it should be no problem to cover the entire neighbourhood giving 10mW.

The dongle contains the driver, so installing is done automaticly. The DVAP website shows a link to the software which you simply download and is nothing more than 1 (one) exefile. Afer starting the program, you have to fill in your call (which you have to register for the second time with an extra C on the 8th place), choose a frequency in the 2m band and of you go. Of course there are some configurations to do on your transmitter, in my case a Icom IC-92AD porto. The website had some good examples wich I placed in the porto's memory. After hitting the powerbutton and hooking up the DVAP on reflector 17A, I immediately received a signal and on the program al kind of info showed up. Connected and working!

Big advantage is not only being QRV on any place where there isn't a repeater or a hotspot. As long as there is a connection with the Internet (Hurray for KPN hotspots!) 10mW is enought to talk wit any other D-star fan on the world! The weatherforecast for the coming weekend is perfect for outhouse testing the DVAP and its reach, the results will follow in a later blog.

WSPR - first steps

Triggered by an article in one of the ham magazine's, WSPR (pronounced as WhiSPeR) took my attention. This digital mode isn't used to communicate, but developed for doing propagation research. With as little power possible you send and a recieve signals containing your call, grid location and used power in dbM (in my case PD0JDF JO22OI 37). A few moments later you can check the results on an website.

Again the Internet gives you the start by offering much info about the topic. The program used is downloadable here. After installing, setting up your rig and a bit of finetuning in receiving the incoming signals, your on. WSPR is cycling through transmitting 1 or 2 minutes and receiving the next 5 or 6. The received signals appears in the waterfall.  When gathered and undecoded, the results are uploaded onto a database and on the WSPR website you can see the results on a global level. Its very important to have your computerclock at the exact right time, for this purpose are different programs, this one works fine also under Windows 7.

I turned my rig to 14.096500 MHz (20m is my favorite band) and pulled power back to 5 Watts. This is the minimum on my set. After setting the clock, installing the software and hooking things up, nothing happened! After a doublecheck, I realised I just had to be patient. The program was waiting to start at an exact point in time. After a couple of minutes things were going to happen. The program was receiving signals on the 20m band and at the end of the cycle it started to transmit for a minute. This was followed by a period of standby and the cycle started again and again.

After a couple of houres cycling through sending and receiving signals I visited the main WSPR website at http://wsprnet.org/ and pointed direct to the map section filling in my call. What then happened, exceeded my expactations! The map showed als the station who had spotted my signal and uploaded it to the WSPR database! Spots from Canada till Australia with only 5 Watts!

A couple of weeks ago I increased the height of my wire antenna. This was done to lift the antenne between the houses and to increase the upbeam angle. Zooming in on the map to a closer look on Europe, I noticed that the nearby countries were better reachable than before. On 20 meters I didn't had a lot of transmissions with German stations. The map is showing they are now 'in reach' instead of hopped over.

WSPR - I'm sure i'll going to have a lot of fun using it. 

Building a ZS6BKW

Inspired by the fun of constructing a G5RVjr antenna (see 'Enough for  G5RVjr'), I tried my capablilities in selfmaking an other antenna with good experiences of fellow amateurs, the ZS6BKW antenna. Again, all info was in reach on the Internet, what would we do without it? This antenna is based on the G5RV antenna and designed by Dr. Brian Austin, ZS6BKW.

 
Because my leftovers were implemented in the G5RVjr, I had to order some parts. After receiving the parcel  with the Lizte and open line (called kippenladder - chickenladder in Dutch), a rainy afternoon was the moment to put thing together to something called a antenna.

After constructing the parts, I hooked the antenna up the atticwindow and the other side downwards to the garden shed. A quick stroll on the bands showed reasonable results so this antenna is on the list to take with me on my holiday.