Cochanneling activities

Much activity in being a radioamateur is experimental. Every ham is inventing the wheel again and again, in order to gain experience and knowledge to share. I think one of the best examples momentarily in experimenting is the cochanneling / diversity project for North- and East Netherlands. This project is a cooperation of more than 40 amateurs and tries to realise an analog relay system with a huge covering. Started as an idea in 2006, realisation began last januari. Now, some 7 months later, a multi relay covering most of northeast Netherlands is live. And although in an experimental fase, first reactions are very positive! 

Cochanneling is all about transferring the best received signal from a wide range of receivers/signals through the internet  to all the transmitters. The trick is that all these repeaters use one frequency! Image this: move through the covering area, you signal is received by different receivers and the best is transmitted in the rest of the area!  Initialy started with two repeaters, nowadays twelve are operational.

I quess a project like this will learn us a lot and thats why I think you should pay these guys a visit on their website. If you want, download the software to monitor the activity. The upcoming holiday allows me to spend a lot of time in an area located in the reach of two of those repeaters, you can imagine I will listen in on that frequency (in / out 431.623 / 430.025 shift 1,6 MHz)!

Exploring SDR

The nicest thing (at least I think it is) about our hobby are the many different aspects. If you seen enough of one, you can put this activity on hold and switch to another. A few months ago a conversation on 40 meters raised my interest in SDR (Software Defined Radio). Instead of using a rig with internal firmware, SDR is a more physical separation between hard- and software. You buy and build a kit, download some software and of you go! You can also buy ready-build kits. It was the general mentioning in the conversations that talked about very clean signals and the visibility of them on a computerscreen that awoke my interest. Second was the building of the kit. I'm not very experienced in selfbuilding and soldering, perhaps this was the oppertunity to make a good start!

While gathering information about this subject on the internet, I came accros the site of the Harzburg II kit. While focussing in on this 3-30 MHz 'Fernempfangsradio', many others pages showed up. One of them showed the ease of constructing this kit, so my confidence of building this was set. I ordered the kit, and start reading everything in order to prepare myself. The kit arrived in a couple of days, and when there was some spare time left I took the soldering iron in one hand and the construction manual in the other. It was with with great ease that a beginner like me was able to finalize this part of the project and as you'll understand it gave me lots of fun. After checking (and doublechecking) the board and its components, the moment of reward came in sight.

There are different programs to use, some of them are free to download on the Internet. First priority was checking if the board was functional, software topics will follow in a later stage. For a start I decided to make use of SDR-RADIO.com by HB9DRV, the same amateur who gave us Hamradio Deluxe. After hooking up the board on my little netbook by RS232/USB and an audio cable, I connected my multiband wire-antenna on the BNC connector. The kit also needs 13,8 volts. If everything is in order and a red led on the board is glowing, starting the software is the next step. Like all ham programs which talks to hardware, this program also needs some configuration. After telling the program which comport to use and which soundcard, the magic begins!


You'll understand the moment of joy and satisfaction when the board came alive and on the screen a beautifull diorama of a frequency spectrum showed up! On 20 meters, my favourite band, I saw several signals that were inviting me to click in order to focus in on them. Choosing one results in receiving that signal, and then there are lots of functions to fine-tune and filter them. Some signals are indeed very clean, although I'm not experienced enough to make a compare with my Yeasu FT-950. Also the propagations wern't very good, so I have to use it more often to make a good evaluation. I also want to make use of other SDR programs, for instance HDSDR (formerly known as WinRad). There is also a modification that expands receiving 160 meters on the agenda.

Very handy App!

The last couple of days were filled with searching and testing app's on both the Ipad and Blackberry. Some of them looks great and are worth a second view, otherone's are deleted right away. As a professional webmanager (one of my activities amongst several others) I thought it was a good idea to be as versatile as possible. For that reason I flashed my office smartphone from Windows Mobile 6.5. to Android 2.3.4. Again I am positively amazed! And again I started the search for nice app's and wow, what an offering. Litteraly thousand of apps are in reach. Some are the same as on the Ipad or Blackberry, others are intended for Android only.

One of the nice things I bumped into, is the one called ElectroDroid. This multilanguage app is FREE downloadable from the well-known Android Market or via this link. It's provide you with information of  resistor and inductor color codes, an Ohm's Law calculator, pin-out schedules, a voltage divider, tables of standard resistors and capacitors and a lot of usefull other ham related stuff. Offcourse there are many other apps that offers the same, but this is a collection of the most used. It has a nice look and feel, on a small screen of your smartphone it's very good readable. As a student for full license, this app certainly is going to help me to understand and explain the basic of electronics in a great way. So, if you have an Android, open Market and download this little jewel!

Back in business!

It's been a while, sorry for that. Due to family matters, I didn't feel like being busy with the hobby. Now the storm is over and almost everythings back to normal, there's some time and good mood left for hamradio issue's.

The last couple of weeks I bought myself some new gadgets. First of all I got myself a new cellphone, mainly because my old one (a Samsung Omnia II i800) didn't receive some of my calls. After hearing several time's "I tried to call you, but you weren't there" I went to the local grown-men toyshop and got hold on a Blackberry. After a couple of weeks I allready start to appreciate it, this neat little thing. Main purpose, being in reach, is a succes.

Second part of the gadget fulfillment is an Apple Ipad 2. Wow, what a neat kind of gadget this is! If youre, like me since 1984 a Microsoft user, this is something totally different. Offcourse, you can't compare apples with other kinds of fruit, but this is great. On the side that is. I'm a big fan of using the computer in all aspects of our hobby and I don't see this Ipad as an 'instead of'. First of all, the lack of interfaces is restricting you and it's impossible to connect to a rig (yet).  I wonder if there are amateur allready busy to solve this? I allready got me some ham related apps and when I have some experience with them, I'm sure you're going tot read about it. Same goes for the Blackberry offcourse!