Friday 21 December 2018

VHF Sporadic E when you least expect it.

It is sunset here as I write this - today sunset is at 15:36. Only seven hours of daylight today, with the Sun rising at 08:37. Not exactly the type of day one might associate with Sporadic E. Yet I am reporting on a really good Es opening the day before yesterday, the 19th of December.

This is my second post today, the other one is here http://gm4fvm.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-etiquette-of-meteor-scatter-contact.html

In the midst of being on the lookout for December meteor showers it is easy to overlook seasonal Es. The same applies in early January. The things to look out for are when your MSK144 graph fills with a single strong station. Watching 10m is another trick, which is how I found it (thanks to Jaap, PA0O, whose 10m WSPR drew my attention to it). Then again one could watch DX Maps, PSK reporter or set up alerts on your phone with EsSense.
PSK reporter showing 15 minutes of 6m Es on 19 December 2018. Note that was already dark at ground level.
Or maybe just listen for it ...

There is often Winter Es about at this time of year, which is frequently wrongly called "Christmas Es". That name tends to makes people look at the wrong time. It could happen during my annual appearance on the RSGB Christmas Cumulative contest, but it never does. Not yet anyway. Sometime between early December and mid January seems to be the time. You just do not know exactly when or how often. It is usually a middle of the day thing, so having it in the dark is a bit unusual.

The opening here lasted two hours and 40 minutes, and I worked 36 QSOs, 22 squares, and 8 DXCC in that time. Plus I had a contact with Dale MM0INH at the end, when we tried to express how tired we were using the few characters you get in the FT8 mode.
6m Es contacts at GM4FVM on 19 December. The guy due South thinks he is at the South Pole (he isn't).
9A3ST (JN75) looks like the best DX at 1652km.

Great fun, totally unpredictable. All we need now is an aurora and a strong tropo opening and Christmas is complete (well, unless I get any "Co-op for Men" that is).

This says to me that the 50MHz band is a key part of my all-round VHF activity. I do find it a bit "easy", but then again not when I am pushing for DX. However, when I am putting together a year-round schedule of things to do, 6m has a habit of surprising me (in a nice way).

Simple antennas are very effective on 6m. Wire dipoles, crossed dipoles, HB9CVs, and verticals can all play their part. I was still using only 50W or so from the IC-7100. Being around at the right time is always important.

I did not do much on 4m during this opening, and I find that Winter Es rarely reaches 70MHz. However, I did hear a German station on FT8, but just long enough for one decode. 10m was also quiet, perhaps because activity is low. This is especially true on the WSPR mode which I use so much. I am beginning to think that WSPR is doomed, which is a pity given its ability to make antenna comparisons and run all night. I will not give up on WSPR in a hurry because I think that it still has relevance.

Anyway, that is amateur radio. Like life, you just never know what is around the corner.

Perhaps that is just as well.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

The etiquette of a meteor scatter contact

EDIT - I have amended this a bit as over the past 4 years I have moderated my opinion about board like KST. I have only moderated a little though. 

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I have a couple of postings nearly ready so this one should be quickly followed by another. Nevertheless, there are some things I want to get on record before we move on. These are about how we make meteor scatter QSOs, not about the data mode technology or the science of the meteors themselves.

First of all though, as it is nearly Christmas, I have to clear up some doubts amongst you all about what to buy me for a present. It is customary to give some manly scent at this time of year, but the one I use is not available in most shops because it is, of course, a designer label. Not for me (the man who has everything) something common to the parfumiers of Paris. No, coming in a subtle plain grey tin, is my "Co-op for Men". It will only cost you £1.00 for a 250ml spray, available via the exclusive Co-operative Wholesale Society of Manchester (branches all over the UK). Do I have sophisticated tastes, or what? Plain postage will do, no need to send it "signed for".'

Moving swiftly on, I know that some beginners on MSK144 and meteor scatter are flummoxed by the strange way contacts are carried out. It is not easy to know where to beam. Also, the long gaps in the QSO when nothing appears to be happening can be confusing.

As for beam angle, WSJT-X's meteor scatter solution, MSK144, offers two suggested beam directions when you put in a callsign and locator. These are "Az", the true direction, and "B", which is a suggested direction (sometimes B is called a "Hot bearing", which I thought was when the wheels fell off your Morris Minor). In theory the true direction will not work at all. Beaming directly at the station should produce no result as the meteor trail will block the direct path. In practice this is not quite true, but there are still better results to be had by beaming slightly off the true angle.

The angle WSJT-X suggests will provide a path to one side, and the relative deviation suggested to the other station should have you both pointing to the optimum point in the sky for communication. The reality is that my beams are not very gainy so they are wider than perhaps the designers of WSJT expect. So for me, a smaller correction seems to suit better. I generally take the true angle and add some correction up to about half that suggested. However, I always correct on the same side of the true as the "B" angle suggests so that we both point on the correct side of the true path.

Note that the deviation suggested will depend on the distance to be worked. So the two stations I worked along the same true beam heading in my last post, the Drammen Radio Society, LA2D, in JO59 (522km) suggested a deviation of 14 degrees north of true (Az54, B40), while Jukka, OH6UW in KP22 (1742km) had a suggested deviation of only 10 degrees north (Az54, B44). Other factors come in, but generally the further away the smaller the deviation. The less directional you antenna is, the less this matters. For a short yagi you can pretty well forget about it.

The other oddity for someone trying MSK for the first time are the rather un-nerving silent gaps between decodes. Because the meteors are often sporadic, you might transmit for 5 or 10 minutes before the station at the other end hears you. This is understandable (not everybody is as good an operator as you) but then there might be another 5 or 10 minutes before you hear their reply. So there is a variable wait to get the reply, during which you do not know whether to  keep sending, give up and try to work somebody else, go and have a cup of tea and a fig roll, or abandon meteor scatter entirely. My advice is to keep sending for as long as you can without overheating your equipment.

How difficult this can become depends on whether you are operating during a strong meteor shower or looking for "random" meteors at any other time of the year. During a major shower things work like an FT8 contact, you get the reply immediately and every signal is long and  strong so you feel comfortable. But when the shower slackens off you have long gaps of unpredictable duration. This adds to a joyous period of expectation during the quiet periods.

Take yesterday ... I heard that German stations had now got access to 4m again. So I went to 70.174 to call CQ. I heard from DK2EA and we exchanged reports. I never heard his RRR and the next decode I got from him was him working  G0CHE. At the same time OH3XF in KP10 called me. At this stage I do not know if DK2EA has received my report. He may have replied or not, I may have missed his reply, and he has gone on to work G0CHE. As clearly he now is doing something else, I decided to turn my beam to OH3XF instead.

After exchanging reports with OH3XF I heard him sending 73. At this stage many stop, but I decided to sent 73 three times to show OH3XF that I have heard him. In theory this could go on for ever, as not hearing anything might mean that OH3XF has stopped, or just that the meteors are not falling at this right moments and he is still trying to send me 73. There is no positive way to know.

After that, having sent 73 three times I went back to DK2EA and tried to finish that QSO (which might be finished anyway). I then received DK2EA sending CQ twice, but he did not reply - or I din't hear him reply.

GM4FVM trying to work DK2EA but succeeding with OH3XF

Frustrating? I do not know for sure that I worked DK2EA, but the fact that he did not come back to me later suggests that I did.  I did work OH3XF, (KP10, 1575km), a nice bit of DX. He replied to my CQ, and it took me about 5 minutes for me to get that reply, during which time I had started a QSO with another station. This is not unusual. You then have to decide which one to work (or try both, as some stations do, sending messages alternately). Most people just go for the best DX.

So it can get confusing. This variable 5 to 10 minute gap can mean that it is 20 minutes before you get a reply to your call, during which time you are feeling a bit on edge. The better the DX, the longer you are likely to wait. Some random contacts can last for hours if you have the patience, but the message is not to give up.

During all the time I was working OH3XF I could easily have received a further message from DK2EA (I didn't, which suggests he was beaming somewhere else by then). Anyone can call you at any time, they having heard your CQ of 30 minutes ago. This requires you to be flexible and ready for anything.

The QSO with OH3XF was quite quick at 4 minutes 15 seconds after I heard him, but I do not know which of my CQs he was replying to. Depending on which one of 18 CQs sent by me over  a period of 9 minutes, it was a total of 9 minutes or 18 minutes or probably somewhere in between.

For comparison, I had a QSO with DF5VAE, Charly, (JO64, 1004km) on 2m on 12 December. I saw a CQ from him and replied and the whole QSO took 18 minutes and 30 seconds. I waited 12 minutes and 30 seconds between hearing his report and receiving his confirmation that he had got mine, during which time I was sending him my report every 15 seconds. Charly emailed me with a very nice message - it turned out that he had called me after an earlier decode but it had only been one way at that time. You just never know ...

Remember, if you hear someone replying to your CQ of 30 minutes ago then they have been calling you for 30 minutes, i.e. 60 times. They must want to work you!

Despite all this complication, during meteor showers most QSOs are fairly quick and easy. It is only nutters like me who love random CQs who plod on for hours flogging lost causes. Many times I have sent a report and waited ages for a reply, even sometimes seeing the DX station working someone else in the meantime. I hope that when they do eventually see my message they will reply to it - and they usually do. If we have exchanged reports they can feel free to work somebody else while I send RRR, provided of course they reply to me once they do eventually get my signal. And persistence often works.

I say I like random meteor scatter, working outside the showers. I also like random QSOs, not involving skeds. Sure, I can do individual skeds and I welcome anyone who wants to set one up. What I do not like doing is to use chat rooms to organise my ordinary QSOs. The KST Chat is used by many, and the moonbounce ones are also popular. I do not enjoy using KST or the others. I find that people use them to avoid actually doing radio. Sure there are good folks (don't write in to say you are one of these good ones) who use them to advance their activity. Many others prefer to chat about irrelevancies. It isn't what I want to do, but they can do what they please. It is a free world, or at least it is supposed to be a free world.

I think that with the privilege of an amateur radio licence comes some responsibility to other amateurs. It helps to actually listen to the radio. If your head is up your rear end on a chat room you don't hear very much (unless you do it with headphones on of course).

I just do not like chat rooms. Chat rooms seem to take the amateur's attention away from the radio and into the world of Narnia. But fine, off you go, nobody is stopping you. Just do not write to me to complain because I do not like chat rooms. It doesn't mean I do not love you as a person, it means I do not enjoy chat rooms. 

So I have to use internet chat rooms to some extent if I want to use moonbounce and microwave bands such as 1296MHz. Also, when I come on to give away points during contests on 432 and 1296MHz then KST helps. I have used it to keep up with dxpeditions. However, each time I find the whole process other than basic sked setting is something I just do not like. Most of the time I select the "I am away" option and only read the postings. If I post anything I usually end up with a feeling that I am avoiding radio and using the internet instead.

OK, meteor scatter is daunting for the beginner. I cannot deny that long and worrying silences, strange beam headings, odd spells of heavy activity with weeks of seemingly nothing, uncertainly about who you are working and if you are finished, a distinct lack of 73s, plus lots more, seems to be a long list of off-putting peculiarities. However, it is very rewarding. Just imagine sending a signal and waiting in hope for ten minutes for a reply, which might come right now or later. Then ages later, out of the blue, some DX appears. Delayed gratification - just what we hair shirts love.

On the 6 metre band, at least, you can operate for a lot of time as if you are on a "conventional" mode.

Finally, it helps to set up a separate WSTJ-X "configuration" for MSK with longer watchdog times and so forth, and I hope to cover that at some stage too.

Speak soon.

73

Jim
GM4FVM

Thursday 29 November 2018

Spennymoor Rally and progress since the 1970s

On Sunday last I visited the Bishop Auckland Amateur Radio Club rally at Spennymoor, County Durham. This turned out to be quite a big event in a pleasant hall in the Spennymoor Leisure Centre, easy to find and well attended.
General view at Bishop Auckland Amateur Radio Club Rally 2018.
Sometimes I think about rallies and decide "I do not need to buy or sell anything, so I will not go", which seems to ignore the obvious fact that the benefit of rallies is who you meet rather than what you buy. Anyway, the traders soon show you that there was something you did need, it was just something you never realised existed.

I did manage to buy a couple of things and there may be more on those in a later post, so it cannot be said that I bought nothing. The real benefit was meeting lots of people I usually only contact via the radio.

Despite being a person who prefers to keep a low profile, I was wearing a badge which shows my name and callsign. I am of course instantly recognisable anyway, being probably the only middle aged overweight man there with grey hair (almost none on top), glasses and wearing an anorak showing too much tummy ... can't be many amateurs who look like that.

Well, no, better show the badge.

I had long conversations with Graham, G8DST, Gordon, G8PNN, Brian, G8KPD, Derek, G1ZJQ, Clive, G4FVP, and Eddie, G0EHV. I also managed to say hello to Chris, G4FZN. The conversation with Graham, G8DST, was wide ranging. We did agree about developments in Software Defined Radios, many of which are excellent - though some manufacturers seem to overprice what they have on offer. This was a great discussion. We had never met before and we hardly share a band or mode in common. I might be right when I say that amateurs share a common bond even if the areas they specialise in are different. Graham said he reads this blog, so his judgement is clearly first class.

A long blether also resulted from meeting Gordon G8PNN. Once again Gordon managed to get me thinking about 1296MHz. It should be recalled that I had hardly ever strayed above 146MHz before this year, so that would be new turn of events for me. I have to admit now that for a few months I have been secretly reading the Microwaves section of the RSGB's magazine Rad Com and it all seems rather interesting ... but no, not right now. So it was timely to meet Gordon. Great also to meet Derek, G1ZJQ who I usually encounter when he is on hill tops. Brian, G8KPD, Chris, G4FZN and Eddie G0EHV are regulars during activity contests which I do appear on from time to time. Clive, G4FVP, is someone I have worked on the shortest Es contact I have ever made (151km).  So, all in all, I had a great time and learned a lot.

Moving on, there is still something nagging in my mind about the earlier comments on VHF in the 1970s. Several of you commented or sent emails about this period, when over a couple of years local VHF traffic moved from geriatric equipment and wasteful methods to miniaturised modernity. 2m DX moved from the preserve of a few CW and SSB enthusiasts into the mainstream. Those of us who lived through it look back with fondness to the dying days of a 144MHz band which sounded like HF must have done 40 years earlier (with some of the same equipment still in use).

The thing which is nagging in my head was first brought up in an email to me by Bruce, GM4BDJ. Bruce  said that at the time many locals built the G8ARV design for an FM transmitter. This reminded me that the NBFM Handbook I mentioned also made a big point about how easy it was to build a 2m FM receiver and transmitter. The focus was not only on buying ready made equipment, though home built may have been physically bigger and perhaps less powerful in terms of output power. Bruce is correct - home building was the route many followed then.

This thought has been churning about in my mind. Well actually I have taken Bruce's point and run away with it in some strange direction, so the mad stuff in this posting is all my own fault.

Why so little home building now? Then of course it was relatively easy to get frequency stability with a crystal (which somebody else always made). One crystal would be all you needed, before repeaters arrived on the scene. Now it would be quite a task to build a frequency synthesiser and make it passable in terms of unwanted phase noise. Now FM stations routinely use 50Watts output power, something which would have been the preserve of very few back in the 1970s. But then, by a strange turn, we can now find some of the things we need on single chips, if we can accept that soldering resistors is something we can put behind us.

The early pioneers in amateur radio, back before the Great War, would have not only built their own radios, they would often have built their own components. They might have wound their own coils and built detectors. Very soon basic components such as resistors and transformers would have been available for their needs, and specialist radio items too. Later there emerged a tradition of building radios out of standardised commercial components, though I am not sure what the even older "old-timers" said as they could recall building Leiden Jars from scratch. Maybe "these modern folks have it easy in the 1930s with their factory made capacitors. But can they open capacitors up and fix them?".

At about the time of the 2m revolution, Yaesu brought out the FT101. This featured plug-in circuit boards. In the event of a fault you could pull the faulty board out and send it back to the supplier to be repaired (or so the advertisements said). You could buy an extender board to allow you to fix the fault yourself, with easy access. This raised the obvious question, why not just change the faulty board for a new one? And so, at a stroke, we moved from making repairs by using standard components to just changing boards. Behind the sceptical views of the 1970s old timers was the (correct) opinion that minituarised equipment was going to be hard to fix. You would end up having to change the entire board (and never mind the problems with the wafer plugs and sockets on the boards).

And so we stagger to today. The next step in the progression from making components, to changing components, to changing boards, is the inevitable .. just change the radio. I met a technician who was responsible for the radio equipment on a huge cruise ship. Unlike the radio officer of old he had no responsibilities for operating, he just repaired the radios by ... changing the entire radio. Rather than a box of components he has a store of complete radios to plug in. And why not? The radios are now small and cheap compared with years ago, and we all want cheap cruises (?).

Apparently the next step is for the ship to go for a refit and get the entire suit of electronic equipment changed at one go. Why wait for failures? I can see the logic, rather like the fluorescent lighting in a former workplace of mine, where every tube was changed when one got faulty. Once you get the ladder out you might as well do them all.

So I suspect that the next thing I hear about an amateur is that as the green meter bulb has gone out in their LinearAmp Gemini 4, they are getting a new shack. New bench, new PSUs, new radios, and new shiny leather chair. Just go to the shack shop, where you just say what bands you want to work and give them your credit card number, and they will deliver the entire thing. Oh, you do need the skill to plug the mains plug in (and turn the switch on) - a special Plugging In Training Course will be available at extra cost, though switching on is at owner's risk.

Actually, the meter bulb in my LinearAmp Gemini 4 amplifier has stopped working, and I have just ignored it. Amateurs are (or should they be?) made of sterner stuff. We cannot, however, ignore progress. We need to be part of progress. I could not build the superb geared VFO drive on my FT101 when I bought it, but that did not stop me using it and it never did fail. Just because some of us cannot built every bit of our gear from 6BA screws, Meccano, and rubber bands does not make us less able to comprehend our hobby. I think we need to be somewhere in between builders and buyers.

Sure, we lost something when we ditched the Pye Cambridges, the Philips 1000s and the AR88s. At the same time I am not going to set about building an IC-7300 on Veroboard out of components. Progress will inevitably raise the size and complexity of the unit by which we repair things - up from components to boards and even to entire radios in some cases. That does not mean that we do not want to understand how it all works, and even tinker a bit.

I know that Bruce has recently built several HF transceivers with success. I am a bit envious of him there. It is possible to buy kits and you can also find hours of innocent fun piecing together a station. I know some people build their own SDR transceivers (though I have not yet met anybody who wrote all the software from scratch as well). It can be done and it is very satisfying. Nevertheless, I think we should recognise that some of us have learned more about radio because we don't need to build everything from scratch. If I had to build something to run MSK144 on 432MHz out of components I doubt if I would ever get beyond the first stage. On the other hand, if I could only be still enough to appreciate 80m CW I just might have more money in my bank account and I might feel a bit more satisfied with the hobby. Sadly, I don't feel like doing that, but I can share the joy of those who do.

Thanks Bruce for reminding me that the constructional approach was to the fore in 1970, and in many ways it still is. Construction should be at the heart of our hobby.

I think that progress will continue to raise the complexity of the unit which we can replace, in effect by reducing an entire stage which once occupied a large printed circuit board to a single chip. In fact, the whole radio might go on a single chip, at a price we once paid for a component. At the same time, what a magnificent thing it is that we can still build meaningful parts of our stations.

Despite all this we should recognise that we have a special right conferred by our licences to build our own equipment, alter commercial equipment, or assemble our own stations. I hope we never lose sight of that.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

Wednesday 14 November 2018

VHF, 1970s style - A Second Slice

I am not trying to gloat, but ....
QSL for the contact between NC1I  and GM4FVM by 432MHz EME on 27 October.




This takes me right back to the day I received my first QSL back when I was a short wave listener. I am not an active collector of QSLs, but they do have a certain fascination for me.
Thanks to Frank for the direct QSL - mine was already in the post.

Right enough of that.

I have had quite a few comments about my posting on 1970s VHF.

It is interesting that Jan, OZ9QV seems to have had a similar experience to mine. Clearly this is a widely found phenomenon. Jan fell on his feet by getting an IC-202 (in fact the full set of 202s). I never had an IC-202 but they seemed to be the portable rig to have. In the early days everyone really needed to hold their nerve and not buy a Liner 2. We all knew they were terrible but nobody then knew what was coming next - the IC-202 was much better. We still do not know what is coming next.


Tim 4X1ST had an IC2E as well as an IC-202. The IC2E represented the next step for 2m FM radios in that they then progressed away from crystal control entirely and we suddenly had thumbwheel frequency setting. What an excitement that was. I had an IC-240 mobile rig which used a pre-set diode matrix to produce an old-style crystal-type selection knob. The idea of the IC-240 was to look like the IC-22A crystal radio which went before it, but to save on the crystals. What had changed under the skins was that Phase Lock Loop technology had freed us from crystals.

Prior to the PLL we struggled to afford crystals. Although the radio magazines carried advertisements from companies who would etch a crystal for your desired frequency, this service did not come cheap. I recall that in 1977 I bought something called a Ken KP202 hand portable. This was in an attempt to get better performance than my previous Trio brick portable. The drawback was that the Trio had been second hand and came with crystals, whereas the Ken was new and I had to buy them. I struggled to pay for them. This added to the fact that the Ni-CAD batteries were dire and unable to keep the Ken anywhere near its stated 5W output meant that this thing had a short life. If only I had known what was coming next ...

Thanks to David, GM4JJJ, we have a time line of equipment which clearly shows how things changed. He went on to an FT-290 which was rather like an IC-202 on acid. The FT-290 moved on from the VXO to a sythesiser which mimicked a VFO, though with distinct steps.

We are getting ahead of the 1970s here, though it is interesting to note how things developed. Once we had the Liner 2 the mould was broken and progress quickly produced better equipment, first with a wide VXO (the IC-202) and then something which came close to a VFO (the FT-290). For FM gear the compact crystal radios quickly gave way to first wide step PLL synthesisers and to a period where mobile radios resembled crystal control but under the covers had dispensed with the rock-bound concept entirely. LED displays were expensive and not very practical in cars (I recall that Trio had a nice one). The present situation whereby you could programme your FM radio with the necessary channels and scan between them was still a way off.
A comb bound book from the 1970s - is it time more books were hand-bound with plastic strips?

Getting from what went before to what we had by the end of the decade was a tricky business. In my NBFM Manual, published in 1974, (price 90 pence, I recall going to Doughty Street to buy it) by G3TDR and G6JP, a lot of time was spent explaining to operators that (Narrow Band) FM was not as bad as they might think. Obviously there is the drawback of capture effect, which I seem to remember was the often quoted reason why AM old-timers hated it. The authors had a lot of reasons to say that the benefits of FM outweighed the drawbacks. There was the "relative freedom from interference to television, radio and audio equipment", and of course "excellent rejection of impulse noise". They went out of their way to stress the efficiency advantages of having an output stage running at full power all the time rather than just during speech peaks. This was a definite attempt to sell the benefits of FM to the amateur community.

They drone on about how most amateurs of the time know FM only by receiving stations using slope detection. They rightly say this is inefficient. Pretty well all of those stations using HF receivers and down converters were set up to receive AM, and they tuned to one side for FM. Slope detection worked, but badly. All those AR88s, R1155s and B40s in use by the stations I worked were hampering the operators. Slope detection was a bodge. The authors of the book say that "nbfm can yield results equal to am over a given signal path provided a proper limiter/discriminator is used in the receiver to obtain optimum performance with nbfm".

Looking back, I see the classic situation. It was rather like getting away from spark, changing from AM to SSB on HF, and even a bit like today with the emergence of advanced data modes. People resisted. They preferred the established order of things, even though it was limiting them. Back in 1970 this was not a simple change - it was from valve to transistor, from surplus to amateur gear, from old to new, and from home-made to imported. The picture of an amateur in his lonely shack lit by the dim lamps of an AR88 with its unique smell (I used one!) was a romantic one, whereas a tiny Japanese box with two pots and one knob on the front hardly seemed proper.

"Why change?" they asked me, and I struggled to answer, though I knew that it was more efficient and, quite simply, they could work greater distances. This is still my answer to those who doubt the point of data modes. I wonder do they too cling to some idea of the amateur as a romantic figure saving lives at sea or ready to clip on their leather helmet and go into military service, morse key at the ready.

For me it all boils down the question of "what amateur radio is for?" That is still the question that nobody asks today. If this is supposed to be a technical hobby to allow us all to learn, then we need to confront the sort of technical problems that face today's radio world. I doubt if many people training professionally in the science of radio spend much time on ex-Admiralty B40s, splendid as those radios were. In the 1970s they needed to know about FM, repeaters and minaturisation. These days no doubt it is about data communication. Everybody needs to know about propagation. Unless you push yourself you never learn much. So I think that the hobby MUST keep up with technological trends or there will be no learning, and then no hobby.

Those old guys in the 1970s didn't know much about propagation and they didn't want to know. If they could work to the other end of town that was enough. That is not self training of the licensee, that is just talking on the radio. Now we have network radio for that. I still hear those old views today from some those who I speak to, but then again most other do realise the need to modernise.

Even the NBFM manual has something to say about SSB. "it is often said that amateur radio is progressive and this is broadly true - the relatively rapid change over to the single sideband mode on the hf bands shows this to be so. This being the case it seems strange that the amateurs have been so slow to change on the vhf and uhf bands but it is true that a fair amount of ssb is beginning to appear after many lonely years for the early operators". That was 1974, and within about 5 years the change away from AM was complete.

With the arrival of FM, miniaturisation was down to the changover in architecture rather than a sudden move towards smaller components. FM radios did not need high level modulators like those needed for AM. The PAs could be tailored to the constant output power and heat sinks sized accordingly. Gradually better devices appeared and in due course integrated circuits became common. However, to start with, much miniaturisation could be achieved simply by having well designed amateur equipment rather than ancient commercial cast-offs. The mobile radio industry (PYE etc) was already producing smaller more efficient radios but he amateur community only used their 20 year old products.

And so we move on to today. Perhaps we need a modern alternative to my 1970s MBFM Manual. This would try to encourage modernisation amongst radio amateurs now, just as it did then. Of course the technology is entirely different, but the point is the same. We need a shake up every so often. It is great to look back at the "good old days", but that is what they are, old days.

Having said all that about efficiency, the 1970s switch to modernity was largely product driven. A plentiful supply of compact, efficient, affordable rigs built on new technology, be that the FM or the SSB variety, and that took away the logic of sticking with the old museum pieces. Will the Icom IC-9700 do the same for software defined radio as the IC2F and its ilk did for FM? I certainly hope so.
Pre-release photo of IC-9700 (Icom UK).
I have complained before here about the dearth of radios for serious 2m and 70cms work. There seem to be plenty for FM and digital voice. Until recently for SSB and data modes there was the outdated Kenwood TS-2000 and the £3000 Icom IC-9100. Excluding mobile rigs that only leaves the Yaesu  FT-991 which has issues. Now we are getting more details about the Icom IC-9700. From what we know so far this is a software defined radio which looks much like the IC-7300, but covering 2m and 70cms. It also includes 23cms using a built in transverter-type arrangement. So far we believe that it runs 100 watts on 2m, 75W on 70cms and 10W on 23cms.

I was expecting to complain that this radio was out of the financial league of most radio amateurs. I was wrong - again. Now we hear that it is predicted to cost £1795.95 in the UK, this being provisional (no doubt depending on what BREXIT throws at us in the meantime). At that price it is certainly not cheap but it is a lot less expensive than I would have expected. Rather like the IC-7300, the launch of the 9700 may be Icom once again bringing the benefits of SDR to us at the right price. Other manufacturers seem to view the easier to make SDR technology as a reason to raise the price.

https://icomuk.co.uk/News_Article/2/1284/

Is the IC-9700 likely to be as revolutionary for 2m and 70cms now as the Liner 2 was on 2m back in the 1970s? We do not yet know. It could be that it is the next generation of SDR equipment which will make the difference, just as the Liner 2 was followed by the far more effective products which arrived over the next 5 years.

We shall see. Icom say they expect the IC-9700 to be on sale in February 2019.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

Thursday 8 November 2018

Moonbounce and a bit of tropo

First of all, there was a nice little 144MHz tropo opening here on 5 November. There was also a bit of aurora about but I heard none of it.
144MHz contacts at GM4FVM on 5 November 2018
Not bad at all. It took all day but I worked 12 squares, with DXCCs including GM, G, F, DL and OZ. DK8WK is 1078km so that was not bad either. A new square was GM6VXB who this time was in the wet square IO98. It helps that Martin works off shore and occasionally operates from the strangest parts of the North Sea.

Worth mentioning is that the barometric pressure was not high. What the weather was doing was looking like the pressure was high when it wasn't - it was about 1012 mb (I should be using hectopascals I guess) but pretending to be 1030 with a lovely mild, still, clear day here with no wind and plenty of sunshine. That is one in the eye for the weathermen at the RSGB propagation predictions department. They didn't see that coming (well, neither did I).  

I am not entirely sure how to put all this into context with my contact last week with NC1I on 70cms Earth-Moon-Earth. Jan OZ9QV commented "I am looking forward to hearing more about 70cm EME from you." That is a fair enough comment but I am not sure. I know that many others have caught the EME bug and gone 100% for the Moon. On the other hand I was back on tropo duty the next week.

An email has flooded in from Frank, NC1I, who read this blog and kindly commented. He also sent me a screenshot of my QSO
GM4FVM as seen from NC1I on 432MHz moonbounce.
Click the image to enlarge, as per.

Frank says that I was -24dB on the first day and -26 on the second day. As I was a new station for him Frank confirmed that I was not in his database. Thus I was heard without the benefit of deep search.

It was great to hear from him and also good to see my signal on his waterfall.

He adds "My station uses (48) 15 element K1FO rear-mount yagis. I have mechanical polarity rotation however if I remember correctly at the time of both of our QSO’s I was receiving and transmitting horizontal. Power at the feed is around 1100-1200 watts. I have a cavity preamp that measure around .16 dB nf mounted at the feed. This system has been in use almost continuously since 1994! I live in a rural area and have about 5-acres of property but still there are houses less than 100 meters from my array so I do have noise/interference, especially near the horizon."

The difference is colossal - he has 48 times 15 elements, and I have one 12 element yagi. He has 1100 to 1200 Watts at the feed but I have less than 95 Watts. The key factor of course is his preamp which allows him to hear my weak signal.

I think Super Stations and weekend dabblers are like the poacher and the gamekeeper - we need each other. If we didn't have poachers (that's me by the way, a sort of blow-in who makes the minimum of effort and liberates the salmon) we wouldn't need gamekeepers, but then again, if we didn't have gamekeepers there would not be so much game to attract the poachers. So we live off each other. The little stations benefit from the investment of the big stations, but the big stations get the squares and the nice DX on a regular basis. It seems like a happy balance, except perhaps that there are not enough of either of us, at least on 70cms.

If I wasn't for Frank and his carefully engineered station I could never have done it.

Frank also confirmed what Jan suggested by confirming that even smaller stations are possibilities for improbable DX ... " The smallest station I have ever worked on 432 EME is a 3-element yagi (that’s not a typo it was a three element yagi) and 60-watts so it doesn’t take much. Single yagis with 12+ elements and 50 watts are pretty easy for me to work. My array gain is 31+ dBD."

Whilst my contact with Frank can hardly be described as a great surprise - I did think it was possible if unlikely and gave it a go - it has certainly surprised lots of other people. Several locals have been reeling in amazement. For those who think that moonbounce is something for others comes the dawning realisation that they could do it if they tried.

At the other end of the scale, John, GI7UGV, is one who does try and he got in touch. He was listening the same day as me and he heard DL7APV (I didn't!). John has a better receiver and antenna set-up than I have but he was not in a position to reply. John is known to me as a satellite and amateur television operator but it seems that he has been bitten by the moon bug too. It is a very inviting area to explore. As John said "It actually worked, shouldn't be surprising as was told it would work but actually seeing and hearing the signal ever so faintly in the speaker finally confirms it :)" That captures the excitement of the moment better than I could.


Finally, another amateur asked some very detailed questions about EME and I will post below my reply to him. Each point is open to debate by you all, but I was trying to dispel a few myths.
============================================
1) I am just a beginner. That has its merits, because I do not have complex gear or big antennas.

2) There is a "centre of activity" on 144.120 which some people use as a calling channel. Otherwise everybody is spaced out a 1kHz intervals between about 144.105 and 144.145

3) I use a combination of these sites to find out who is on ...

https://www.chris.org/cgi-bin/jt65emeA
https://www.livecq.eu/latest.asp
Basically I look to see who is calling CQ and then if they are strong with me I might call them. You can tell the Super Stations as they give their antennas and power on the chat room, 2x12XY/1.5K is two 12 element crossed yagis and 1.5 kilowatts. By comparison mine would be 7H/300 for a seven element horizontal yagi and 300W which is small. However, the gain figures add together and if I can hear someone running, say, 600W, then they should hear me 3dB lower, or 6dB lower if I was running 150W. Most of the time I run 200W on 2m. Generally they can hear down to about -26dB.

4) There is far more activity at the weekends. HB9Q is on 2m most weekends and they use a large dish and can work stations down to 50W and simple antennas. Most stations who take part in UKAC contests could work HB9Q at moonrise or moonset.

5) They don't count countries or squares so much as initial QSOs. After all, once you go via them moon it doesn't matter where in the world the station is in terms of distance. I don't routinely post on the chat room as I don't often call CQ. Sometimes I post a thank you to somebody I have worked which is also a confirmation. If I do that I get besieged by dozens of stations on the chatroom who want skeds.

6) I can get to within 1 degree of accuracy which is far better than I need with my antenna. However, that is once I have got it pointed at the moon. Because my mast is in two  telescoping sections there is play between them and I probably do not get better than +- 2 degrees to begin with. This does not seem to matter.

7) Most people use JT65B. You can use CW and I can hear HB9Q's CW ident perfectly clearly. The WSJT-X software can show all the directional and elevation data if you select "astronomical data". You need to tweak the WSJT-X settings a bit. This is to largely get round the error correction which would otherwise stop you decoding a lot of it.

8) One QSO per day is my practical limit. I have about an hour at moonset or moonrise. QSOs take about 8 minutes and it is all peace and calm compared with meteor scatter.

9) There are so many variables that conditions change over the month. The moon distance changes about 10%, for instance. Then there is Faraday rotation, polarisation differences caused by the curvature of the Earth and the range of the station you are working ... sometimes a week or more would go by when I would hear nothing.

10) Elevation isn't everything. Several of the "big" EME operators in England have no elevation but they do have, say, 2 x 9 ele Tonnas. You soon get to know that your antenna has lobes in the vertical axis which you can use as the moon rises or falls in the sky. With a single antenna and a hundred watts most UKAC stations would be in with a good chance, though a mast-head preamp is the only thing you would want to add if your coax run is over 20m.

Just doing it once is most of the fun. Simply listening and learning is fascinating to me. Nothing about it really makes me think I would want to have a Super Station and high power. I have worked stations on 2m and 70cms, but only heard one station on 6m. So far!

P.S. I find this site handy as once you have told it where you live you can see ahead as to when moonrise and moonset will fall, what the angle will be both horizontal and vertical, and the moon distance...

https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/
==============================================
It is well worth reading GM4JJJ's comments to my last posting.

Many of the generalist "VHF" books are not very helpful. In my view, they tend to make the whole thing look difficult and expensive. There will always be a photo of some enormous Goonhilly type antenna and some QSL cards from an operator who spent a million quid on gear and who lives in a stately home with enough land to put up said antenna (bitter ... who me?). Whatever happened to the concept that this hobby progressed by taking many small steps, each adding a quantum of improvement, and each of us developing skills and knowledge along the way?

As so often, I disagree. I disagree that this needs to be seen as difficult. With folks like Frank, NC1I, around, us ordinary types have a chance of a really memorable EME QSO. I thank him for that.

We need a few gents in this hobby. Luckily there are still a couple of us about.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

P.S. Just in case you think I am going cold on EME, I have thought about a separate (small) antenna system with elevation ...

Sunday 28 October 2018

432MHz Trans-Atlantic EME on 95 watts, OK I was wrong

There seem to be two themes on this blog (apart from "I'm right and everybody else is wrong", but that is what blogs are for). They are

1) our pre-conceived ideas are wrong so we should try this,or

2) my preconceived ideas are wrong and I am a chump myself for not trying sooner.

This posting is rather about the second type.

On 27 October I worked NC1I on 70cms moonbounce. A fluke?
On 28 October I worked NC1I on 70cms moonbounce for a second time.

Here is what I wrote about my plans for 70cms on this blog on 19 July

This is not an Earth-Moon-Earth capable 70cms set-up. Or at least, it isn't designed to be. It is designed to be vastly better than no setup at all. Adequate, not excessive.

Erm. I was wrong about that. Clearly, it is EME capable. Or perhaps "it isn't designed to be" was my wishful thinking/ get-out clause.
432MHz DX Maps on 27 October 2018

OK, lets get this straight. I still think my 70cms set-up should not be EME capable. To review:-

Icom IC-7100, Microset RU432-95 95W linear, 17m of Hyperflex coax, SHF Mini-70 pre-amp, 2m of dodgy RG-213 and a 12 element yagi with a boom length of about 2.5m (part of a dual band antenna).

This is not world class in any way. The IC-7100, admirable as it is, is a mobile rig. I have cut corners - if I had wanted to go for EME I would have bought a 300W linear and a better pre-amp, but the extra cost (£900 !!!) put me off that entirely. I used existing coax which works on 70cm OK but it not earth shattering. I could have reduced the RG-213 to 3/4 or even half its length if I really wanted to - or replaced it entirely. And, lets face it, a 12 element compromise yagi is hardly up to 70cm EME muster.

It is talk like that (the last paragraph) which I criticise others for using as justification for not trying.

Guilty.

Just because it looks difficult is not reason not to try.
As usual, click to enlarge if necessary.

It wasn't a plan, this 70cms EME thing. At least, there was no plan until I heard NC1I. For the past couple of weeks I have been trying aimlessly to get back into 2m EME and failing. Conditions have been poor. Then on 6 October I noticed Bernd, DL7APV, mention on a chat room that he was working on 432. I went to the frequency and heard him so I reported that and he suggested that we try a QSO the next day. It didn't work. Back to square one.

Bernd has what I would call a "Super Station". 128 x 11 elements. That is pretty big, and it is able to elevate, which puts my 12 elements fixed horizontal pretty much into the shade. Why was I not able to work him on 7 October? After a bit of pondering it dawned on me that my antenna is best near to my moonset when the moon is close to my horizon, and at that point Bernd has passed moonset and cannot see the moon (at least for now). If I could elevate my antenna I would be in with a chance. Or I need to try with somebody who is still seeing the moon at the moment when my antenna is working at its best.
DL7APV's 432MHz antenna ...
My immediate reaction to seeing a 33dBD gain antenna is to run away and hide. My antenna has about 12dBD gain. However, I knew I needed to stifle that feeling. The two figures add together, it isn't a competition. Anyway I did not work him, though he said that there was a contest on 27 and 28 October and he would be on for that.

Come 27 October if I had any hope it was of, maybe, working Bernd.  The same problem arose - as I do not have an elevating antenna he was weak and had dropped out by the time ground gain had started to make my signals to the moon stronger.

As it happened my usual EME chat room was off the air. I decided to call CQ. I was using Live CQ to keep an eye on what was happening and I picked what seemed to be a clear frequency. By another chance I was 1kHz away from NC1I who was clear as a bell. This is a bit of a dream of mine on EME - stumbling across someone I can immediately hear. It isn't so unexpected; on looking up NC1I  on QRZ.com it turns out that he has a Super Station and runs 1.5kW, or at least he can run that much.

So I thought it out. If he has 1.5kW and I have 95W, that is going to give him say 13dB advantage over me. I can hear stations down to, say, -26dB so he might hear me if I heard him at -13dB. At the start he was -16dB. At one stage I went out and raised my antenna height as I feared that the moon would disappear behind the roof ridge, but it turned out that raising it took about 6dB off the signal - it was better lower down. Ground gain and height advantages produce funny effects and my antenna height is not that important when it comes to the moon. Of course, I still thought it might be. So the plan was to keep the antenna as low as I could and stick it out until the moon fell low enough towards the horizon for ground gain to give me a chance of working NC1I.

I started calling NC1I at 08:24. He finally heard me at 09:25. I was calling for an hour and during that time I had all sorts of doubts, in addition to the antenna height issue above. Doubts about antenna direction and whether this contact was possible at all or not. I had many doubts about Doppler effect and whether I had factored it in properly. Then, as the moon fell below 4 degrees (and all the other European stations had lost the moon below their horizon) NC1I's signal started to climb up each segment -13, -12, -08, -04 ... so it was easy to see that ground gain was coming to my aid. Also. my antenna was beginning to function better as the moon started to get closer to the horizontal angle at which the boom is fixed.

When I called at 09:24 I knew immediately as soon as NC1I replied that he had heard me. Even though it took a minute longer to receive the signal and decode it, he must have clicked on my callsign. His frequency moved about 150hz, the amount I had miscalculated the Doppler effect. He must have seen me. And then ... well it just went like a normal QSO. Nothing special about my first trans-Atlantic EME contact.

After the contact he was calling CQ and within fifteen minutes he had disappeared entirely. Moonset had arrived.

Just to prove that it was not a fluke I tried again the next day
This time I left it until the moon was lower - under 3 degrees elevation. I was risking moonset behind the hills. The result was the same though.

I know that logic comes in here - if I hear a station at -15dB and he has a 13dB advantage over me on transmit, then he is likely to hear me at -28dB. Add to that the fact that his receive station might have a better pre-amp and receiver than I have (almost a certainty). Thus he WILL hear me. The EME path is usually steady and I bet he lives somewhere which is electrically quiet (like on a ranch!). Still, I never really expected him to reply both times.

As for the distance (5133km on six figure locators) ??? Well, logic also tells me that if I can reach the moon it hardly matters where on the world my contact is. With an indicative path distance of 752,034km on 27th (a mere 747,302km the next day) it matters little which of us is where on the Earth. Still, working round Europe has seemed a lot easier than reaching the US on 2m. On 70cms my lower power is more or less balanced by more antenna gain so my ERP is much the same, so why am I surprised to do it on 70cms first?

I suppose these 70cm figures give a clue to my pessimism built on years of ignorance

2012 NIL
2013 1 QSO dx 92km (GM)
2014 NIL
2015 1 QSO dx 30km (GM)
2016 1 QSO dx 5km (GM)
2017 1 QSO dx 82km (G !!!)
2018 47 QSOs, 8 DXCC, 2 continents, dx 5133km

Lessons to learn? I am often wrong. I can even believe my own negative script. 95W and 12 elements did do it and I suppose if I had done a careful budget I could have worked that out in advance. Still, my job was to make my tiny signal reach him, which involved sticking at it until the ground gain kicked in, not raising the antenna too high, paying close heed to the moon's movements and not allowing my doubts to overwhelm me.

Here I go again. "I am surprised by those two contacts"

I should have tried this ages ago.

73

Jim
GM4FVM

Tuesday 23 October 2018

Galashiels Rally and how you should spend your money on VHF

Last weekend I visited to Galashiels rally. I should have taken a photo but it never occurred to me. Anyway there were plenty of people there and various trade stands. I bought a solder sucker (90p), a switched mains plug (£1.60), two fixings for wire antennas (50p) and a rather flash loud speaker for £6.00. This was all swamped by the fuel to get there and back, which I estimate at £10.00, plus an hour's drive there and another hour back. You see, I compare all costs and all benefits.

"He is mean".

It was worth it though to meet various people, including a couple of hams who I have worked before but not met. I enjoyed a chat with Dick GM4PPT who is a stalwart of VHF operation, and Robin, GM7PKT, who I have contacted quite a few times on FT8 on the 144MHz band. What both these amateurs have in common is that the paths between us are very difficult due to the mountainous terrain. So it was good to have the time to chat.

Robin's experiences with FT8 are very like mine. In fact the mountains which surround him are much taller than the hills I have to deal with. Despite this he is having success with FT8. This, and comments on this blog, all make me ponder about the success we have been having with FT8. I was a regular user of JT65 and JT9 before FT8 and somehow I never seemed to do as well with those modes, The facts though are that FT8 is slightly less sensitive than those modes. I suspect that a lot of it is due to the greater take-up of FT8 on VHF.

Also at the rally were a lot of second hand radios. There were the usual rather ancient VHF rigs, but there was also a rather neat looking Icon IC-7100, the very rig I was claiming is quite good value at £700. There it was at £550. And they didn't sell it during the rally so I asked how to buy it afterwards just in case.

At the same time I met another amateur who had brought a year old 2m and 70cm radio which he was offering for sale at £35 and eventually he took £33 for it. He then tried to buy a 40 year old 2m FDK for £25. Here he was bringing a perfectly good modern radio and trying to upgrade to an ancient one. He admitted to me that the FDK was very large and would probably not fit in his car. I asked him why he would make a swop like that and he said "nostalgia". In the end somebody else bought the FDK from under his nose - no doubt soon to find that it doesn't have CTCSS or 12.5kHz channel spacing and it is pretty deaf anyway.

Thinking a bit more about all this, I have come up with my own theoretical "law of diminishing returns". This is entirely non-scientific and definitely not a law. It is just my theory about how to best spend money. It was prompted by the experiences at Galashiels and also one particular local who has an interesting approach to VHF operation. The guy in question has outdoor HF antennas, and used to be a keen VHF dxer. For VHF now he uses an indoor quarter wave whip on a magnetic mobile base, stuck onto a biscuit tin lid.

I cannot help feeling that running a radio into a quarter wave vertical and using a biscuit tin lid for a "ground plane" is not a really good use of resources. So I have come up with a graph to represent my law of diminishing returns (which, again, isn't a law). The graph shows a better way of gaining returns for your money be showing an alternative red line.

The idea is that if you use an indoor vertical it doesn't matter how much you spend on a better rig it makes little difference. Your money is better spent on ancillaries like masts and antennas, or coax and pre-amps. Well, that is my view.

Of course lots of people have problems putting up large outside antennas (though the biscuit tin lid guy can as he has HF ones), or have planning issues, but it might be worth a try with something simple - more than buying a new radio anyway. Even if you go portable because you cannot get a good antenna up at home the same general rule applies, so long as you can lug the associated gear out to your portable site. It will usually make your station work better than the same investment in a fancy radio.
The GM4FVM VHF cost/benefit graph (aren't results measured in "JIMMYs"?)
 You will probably need to click on this to enlarge it enough to see it.

I am suggesting that after you have got a "new" multimode (by which I mean modern, the second hand IC-7100 at Gala show would do at £550 and save you some dough for antennas), spending more on radios just keeps you nearly flat on the dotted line. You will have diminishing returns in that there still is a return, a better rig is a better rig, but you get less benefit in term of results for the £££ you spend now than on your basic radio. On the other hand, spending on other things (along the red line) brings you steady returns. I have found that spending a £ on the red line brings a considerable result, whereas spending a £ on the dotted line seems to do very little..

Who am I to tell people how to spend their money?

I have no right to suggest all this, but I do believe that you get a lot more return out of improving your station generally rather than improving your radio. Yet at Galashiels nobody was selling yagi antennas, good co-ax or masts (well, there was one old but nice second hand Clarke pump up mast which I looked at for a long time!).

So what is the way I am measuring "results"? Well, based on my experience - locator squares, distance, countries, surprise long distance contacts, learning about propagation, lots of things. I never said my theory was scientific.

Hey, results are measured in units of increased utility (work that one out).

As for my order of things to improve, well that is based on what I see going on around me. A gable end mast is just a pair of T and K brackets attached by expanding masonry bolts into the end wall of a house - fine if you have a masonry end wall, but there are other ways of doing it. If you have a vertical, get it into the clear and as high as you can using a gable end mast. Ideally use something like a half wave which does not need a biscuit tin to ground it. Next thing is a directional antenna, even if it has to be turned by hand. We used to have TV rotators but nobody has made one that passes the CE test so they are not available in Europe at present. Rotators are simple things, just a motor and a gear box and you can usually get them cheap second hand.

Here is s simple example. For a while I used a vertical on 50MHz. I did very well during the sporadic E season. Then I got an HB9CV (the Diamond one) mounted on a simple bracket cadged off a neighbour and supported by 1.5 inch thick-walled alloy tubes. With the vertical I could work Europe; once I had the HB9CV I could work across the Atlantic. It wasn't easy, but it was possible.
Simple, HB9CV, old TV rotator, good enough to work Puerto Rico on 6m.
The step up in results from a vertical to a directional beam, even a simple one, was huge and far greater than any investment in radios or linears could have done. I was very chuffed when I worked across the Atlantic for the first time. That antenna opened the door to meteor scatter and aurora work too. Better antennas are better on receive as well, so they beat linear amplifiers by a mile.

After that, a better antenna - I am not suggesting that your first steps in improving your antenna are likely to be your last. I certainly have tried my first setup and then upgraded in every case (except, so far, 70cms). As you know, none of my current antennas has a boom longer than 3m and that is enough for me. My advice is to pay little attention to the number of elements and more to the length of the boom (the HB9CV being an honourable exception).

It cost a bit, but I found a tilt-over, crank-up, mast to be very valuable - also more valuable than a linear. For VHF use it allowed me to get to twice the height over the ground of the gable end type of fixing. Partly getting a tilt-over is due to me getting older and less about to climb and haul things about up ladders. Also I live in a wild and windy place. Once again a wall-fixed tilt-over mast is enough for me, free standing masts are a step too far here.

Whilst I rank the free-standing mast as being more useful than a small linear, I don't rate big linears anywhere. I do not see the need for full legal output anyway, and I am content with moderate power. After a while barefoot is not enough, but I am happy to look in the magazine at what the contest operators are using and get with about 3dB of majority are using.

Better coax. A lesson we all have to learn one way or the other. It is expensive but it is worth it and in my book worth more than the same amount of money spent on the radio. Coax does not last for ever, and when you need to change it there is a chance to improve it. A mast head pre-amp - the final essential item on my list to a achieve best results, something to bring your receive performance into line with your transmitting ability.

Then, maybe, someday, a better radio. I like better radios, but I am kidding myself if I was to claim that they really get much better results.

I bet I am criticised for saying all this. If it was not for the subsidy the amateur radio magazines receive from equipment sellers advertising really expensive radios then we wouldn't have a radio press. And we all love a nice radio, including me. Yet when I want to buy a £200 mast head pre-amp I had a devil of a job finding somebody to sell me one, whereas I can buy a TS-890 at £3999.95 (carriage extra) - reduced from £4299 - a snip - anywhere.

By all means spend your hard-earned money on a shiny new radio. But please, think about climbing the red line first.

"There he goes again - off on his hobby-horse."

"I bet he buys some fancy radio soon - he is just softening us up."

73

Jim
GM4FVM

Sunday 14 October 2018

My grudging appreciation of the Icom IC-7100

Yes, I know I have promised something more about 1970s VHF, but it is all just too complicated. I am working on it. In the meantime, this ...

I believe that the major Japanese manufacturers are puzzled by the Western habit of buying "mobile" radios and using them as base stations. Why, for instance, when Icom offer us the IC-9100 base station, would anyone want to use the IC-7100 mobile radio from home?

Erm, maybe because the IC-9100 is currently £2799.95 while the IC-7100 is £999.95.

Now of course the IC-9100 is a better radio than the IC-7100. It is better equipped, it has a built in ATU, it will produce 100W on 2m and 75W on 70cms (or at least it claims to, I have no personal experience) compared with the 7100's 50W on 2m and 35W on 70cm. With the 9100 you can add a module for 1296MHz, if you have £623.99 to spare for that.

If you accept that the IC-9100 is better, even though you might wonder if 180% more £££ would bring you exactly 180% more joy, that does not mean that the IC-7100 is easily written off as a base station.
The IC-7100 control box at GM4FVM

I must declare my interest. I have had an IC-7100 here since August 2013. You can look back in this blog and find me moaning about the "clicking" sound on transmit, which I can find but nobody else has ever heard (maybe it is inside my head). You can also find me complaining about the low average output on SSB, which I resolved by using an outboard speech compressor. Apart from that my total list of complaints is NIL.

(EDIT -  here is some of it http://gm4fvm.blogspot.com/2015/03/is-ic-7100-good-rig.html)

Five years is a long time for me to hold on to something which I might have doubts about. That's the thing about the IC-7100, it just does its job. It works. I have never doubted it. OK, along will come the IC-9700 which will I guess make a better VHF  base station than even the IC-9100. But will it cost £999 new?

I noticed a couple of second hand  IC-7100s on eBay. They sell for about £700, or even less. That is quite a bargain. No doubt there are some poor condition ragged ones about, perhaps modified ones too, but mine has had nothing more radical done than to add an N-type socket to the VHF side. Any others like it on sale might be a very handy used radio.

Let's think about it. Rather than comparing it with sets at three times the price, at it's own price, second hand, it is streets ahead of anything else around. The Yaesu FT-857 is an ancient plodder by comparison - it doesn't have IF DSP like the IC-7100.

The 7100 is still in production. You could pay sky high prices (£1000++) for an out of production IC-910, and not get the USB connectivity of the IC-7100. The 7100 just needs to have its USB plugged into the computer with no audio data interface. Sure the IC-910 is better in many ways but the 7100 gives you HF for free.

There are lots of out-of-production VHF radios you could buy second hand for maybe half the cost of the IC-7100. The problem with this is that they are now so old that their performance is below what we have come to expect. Solder joints are failing and capacitors are drying out. The IC-7100 is stable enough for data in that it does not drift significantly. It is probably more sensitive than the old rigs but maybe not quite in the latest transverter league. For £700 you would get solid performance by comparison with older equipment, but it is not quite earth shattering.

The IC-7100 was designed with FM and DStar operation in mind. It has good cooling and an effective fan. This means that it is very happy with high duty cycle work, and data seems to pose it few problems.

There are some nice aspects of using the IC-7100. It has separate PTT outputs for HF and 2m/70cm. This means you can use a linear on 2m and a different one on, say 4m or 6m, and the linears would only come into use when you select the right band. Of course, HF, 4m and 6m are all one one PTT output, and 2m and 70cms are on the other, just like the RF output sockets. I certainly made us of this feature. Also, as the control head is separate I could mount the radio at the point where the 70cms coax enters the shack whilst having the control box on the desk. This saves some lossy coax.

For the European market the IC-7100 comes equipped with 70MHz. This was a bonus for me at the start as I already had a 4m transverter. I planned to stick with the transverter. Within weeks I was using the IC-7100 on 4m exclusively. Later I used the LDG IT-100 automatic ATU with it on HF and that proved very satisfactory. After that it was my 6m rig, then my 2m rig, and now it is my 70cms rig. In that role I can produce a map of what it has done because it is my only 70cms transmitter (apart from FM which I only listen to).
70cms contacts at GM4FVM 30 June to 14 October 2018 (F1BHL/P sadly missed off the bottom of the map)
If this looks modest, it is 70cms and I had my first QSO on 30 June which is three and a half months ago. All of them on the IC-7100 - though lately with a 95w linear. On all bands I have had hundreds of contacts on the IC-7100, from Greece on 70MHz to Canada on 50MHz, to Australia on 28MHz and lots elsewhere too.

There have to be some downsides. My early model came with a fairly poor microphone. The physical design with its sloping display is a bit odd. Spinning the VFO feels rather peculiar as the control head tends to move - it needs the free moving finger cup which the IC7300 has. Some of the logic for switching between meters on the touch screen display seem strange. Some people don't like the monochrome display but it never bothered me.

This is a very personal thing. I borrowed an Icom IC-910 and hated it - the ergonomics appalled me. I do not like the looks of the TS-2000 (but it is discontinued now anyway). The IC-7100 is not a radio I love either. I cannot deny it has served me well. As a new buy at the current price of £999 (and less on the grey market) or about £700 used, it really does compare well with older models in the same market sector (which means the Yaesu FT-857). As for anything older still, I wouldn't consider any of them if I could find a clean used IC-7100. It certainly is not perfect, but it is modern and it works.

In case you think I might throw my IC-7100 out when I do eventually buy a VHF base radio, have no fear. I have plans for using it mobile - goodness, a mobile radio used mobile! Of course, I cannot buy a VHF base station until somebody makes one I would want or could afford, but that is another story.

73


Jim

GM4FVM

Saturday 22 September 2018

VHF, 1970s style.

I have been away, in Norway this time. Here is the usual photo of me somewhere unexpected ....
I was only on Honefoss platform because of a landslip on the track, and the Oslo to Bergen train had been diverted over a freight route to bypass the problem. This then led to us missing some stations and we then had to wait at Honefoss for buses to bring along the stranded passengers. After some shunting, the whole effect was to make us a hour late. Many UK rail travellers believe that such things only happen here. Thanks to a passing Australian tourist for taking the photo.

Anyway, I was going to say something about the radio world I joined, and how different it was from now. Sorry it is too long, but I cannot make it much shorter. Any errors are my fault, I am relying on an over-stuffed memory.

1) The Licence
I was first licensed as G8JWG on 4 February 1975. That was an "Amateur (Sound) Licence B"  which only allowed operation above 144MHz. I had passed my City and Guilds Radio Amateurs Examination, which was one part of the process, but I had yet to pass the Post Office morse test, which involved sending and receiving 12 words per minute morse.

I could only move up to an "Amateur (Sound) Licence A", which covered all permitted amateur bands, once I had passed both the exam and morse test. Some people waited until they had both and went straight to Class A. Others, like me, did the exam first and then learned the morse. The exam pass lasted indefinitely, whereas the morse pass was only valid for a year. If anyone had not applied for a licence within a year of passing the morse test they had to pass it again, which they also had to do if they later let their licence lapse for a year or more. On the other hand, once you had a Class A licence you never needed to do a morse test again for as long as the licence remained valid. It seemed a bit barmy that a morse test pass was only valid for a year, whereas if you could get a Class A licence, never use morse again, but still be regarded as proficient for as long as you paid your fee every year (which was exactly what I did).

The Class A and Class B thing was a clear enough system then?

There was a strong incentive to do the exam first and the morse second, as then the exam pass could not expire while you waited to pass the morse, whereas the other way round the morse pass could expire waiting for the exam pass.

You had to pay a fee every year. More than one for me actually, as in addition to the main Amateur (Sound) Licence B, which was then £3.00, I had an Amateur (Sound Mobile) Licence B which cost £1.50. The fees soon doubled. You had to renew each of them every year, and they kindly wrote to you telling you the time to pay had come. You then posted them the money and they sent you a receipt through the post, stamped "PAID" by the Cashier of the Home Office. All very formal and there was no Paypal in those days. You had to be careful as not only was illegal operation actually pursued in those far off days (which is not the case now) but if you had a Class A licence and you let it lapse for a year you would have had to retake the morse test.Taking it once as bad enough, taking it again would have been terrible for me. Actually managing to pass it twice was probably impossible for me.

Then, not only did I have my licence, and my mobile licence (I never had the television one to make up the full set - that came with an additional callsign too), there were all sorts of other bits and pieces. When I moved house and potentially had two possible operational locations, one had to be signed G8JWG/A. You needed to write to the local Post Office engineer and get approval to use a /A address. As usual click on the photo to enlarge if necessary.
When eventually "hand portable" equipment became available (in my case a 1 watt Kenwood TR-2200 which weighed 1.7Kg and needed a neck-breaking shoulder strap) you needed permission for that too. Given the quality of the equipment available and the capacity of the batteries of the era it was barely a practical idea anyway.
This was in the era before mobile phones, a time when anyone walking about the streets talking to someone far away was likely to be thought to be mentally deranged. There was, however, a further oddity. This portable operation was an extension of the mobile licence so you used your callsign /M, which seemed a bit odd being portable. /M meant mobile, or at least potentially mobile, be it in a car or on foot (but never in a bus, which was specifically banned). /P (for portable) did not mean what we all thought portable would mean, /P meant in a field, or by their definition somewhere without a postal address. If it had a postal address it was /A (for alternate) anywhere other than at your registered station address. But woe betide you if you used the wrong one, for there really was enforcement!

Slightly strangely, if you were not earning enough money to run a car and decided to operate pedestrian mobile instead, you had to spend some of the money you didn't have to buy a mobile licence you wouldn't use in order to get a piece of paper to tell everybody that you were not a madman but a radio amateur.

The first licence I had was that, then standard, Amateur (Sound) Licence B, the one with the specific ban on using spark transmission. If the use of spark seems improbable even in 1970s, it hadn't long died out for ships lifeboat emergency sets. When I worked in a photographic shop we sold remote shutter releases operated by spark transmitters. Am I really that old? Wot, no Bluetooth enabled 35mm cameras then?

In February 1977 the Home Office wrote to me and advised me that I could now have an Amateur Radio Licence B instead of an Amateur (Sound) Licence B. I was told that this would give me greater flexibility and I would now not need two licences (one Sound, the other Sound Mobile) plus two letters authorising use at an alternative address and pedestrian mobile. Also gone was the requirement to get the approval of the local Post Office manager for /A operation (you only had to notify them instead). Hurray! The price went up so that the one licence cost more than two previously. Such is progress.

I would love to show you the original licence but the Home Office insisted on me returning it before they would send me the new one. I think this shows how important the actual bit of paper was in the days before electronic communication. Somewhere I hid the mobile version as I only sent them the main one back, but right now I cannot find it.

The Home Office sternly advised me ... "Be sure to read the clauses concerning calls signs and log-keeping". I mention this because nowadays suffixes such as /A, /P and /M are no longer even a requirement, now they are just a recommendation. You don't need to sign /M any more, and generally I don't after establishing contact. Nor do you need to keep a log except under specific circumstances. At least this new licence had shifted pedestrian mobile into portable, which seemed more sensible at the time.
Debate about the difference between a "temporary location" and "alternative premises" was to dog the hobby for years. So was the requirement to use your callsign every 15 minutes and when changing frequency - people still do even though this is no longer mandatory. It just shows that we amateurs have our own rules over and above those imposed on us. Try giving out an address when you contact every station, every 15 minutes and when you change frequency.

The logging requirements were very onerous. Although the new Mobile licence clarified mobile logging in the sense that it made clear that you had to log everything as soon as possible, you still had to log everything. Everything included CQ calls and the many tests using the frequency testing equipment you had to have (and there was a page in the licence devoted to that), mobile or not. Think of it as using today's contest logging, but on paper, and if you were rash enough to go mobile you had to recall it all and write it down later.

It was really very bureaucratic, even with the "flexible" new licence. You trifled with it at your peril. There were station inspections (the unit who did this have been more or less disbanded so there is not much chance of it now). People listened and on one occasion I received a very odd telephone call from a Government employee in the radio department which proved that.

2) Class A licence.
I really wanted to get my Class A licence, at least in part because I had heard about this 4m band thing and I also heard a rumour that there was more to VHF than 2 metres. So I had to learn morse and reach 12wpm. I did this with the help of Eden GI4AIO and Dave GI4CWZ. These people took me in and spent time training me. You had to go to them - the Class B licence did not allow you to use morse on the air to reach proficiency. You were banned from sending CW on the air - even though you only had a VHF licence which did not require morse proficiency.

There was a large band of people keen to tell you that because they could do morse easily, you should find it easy too. This was rather like people telling someone with dyslexia that he ought to read the rules they had drawn up. But wait, those people still exist and still think that their fortunate ability to do CW should apply to everyone. It doesn't. It never did.

I did listen to weekly slow morse (from GI3SXG I think), but of course that only covered receiving. As it happened, my sending was fine, it was the receiving which needed attention. I also had some morse records. These were 12 inch vinyl records which you could play at various speeds, 33, 45 or 78 rpm as your speed increased. The drawback was that the tone of the morse changed when you changed the speed, and so did the spacings. It was tedious, but it had to be done.

Eventually I applied for my morse test. Some of my contemporaries had hit on the idea of heading off for Lifford in County Donegal where the Republic of Ireland post office examiner was very co-operative. I never heard of one of them who did not pass first time. I, on the other hand, being more principled and not wanting to spend the money on the 200 mile round trip, opted for the UK test. This took place at the Custom House in Belfast. I won't mention the examiners name, and the pass certificate was not issued by him personally so it has a different name on it.

The gentleman in question was a marine telegraphy examiner. It was pretty clear that English was not his first language, which might have helped me in the end. For whatever reason we didn't exactly form a natural conversational duo.

He gave me some character groups and let me practice on his morse key to get accustomed to it. He told me to try the whole script twice, which seemed odd. Then he started the test with the same script. This seemed even odder to me, as I had already got used to it. While I was sending he was signing a large pile of pink expenses claims and nodding regularly. Anyway, that seemed to go OK.

Then he sent to me. I still have the copy I took down, written in the faint pencil he loaned me, scrawled on a small square of lined paper. I won't embarrass myself by showing it here. "Read it back", he barked. I got on fairly well because he had asked me to read it back. I corrected a few mistakes which he would have found if he had read it himself. Then I got stuck.

"THE - missed a bit - SAMR ICANH" I stuttered.
He peered at me
"Doesn't that say THESE AMERICANS"? he grumped.
"Yes, I think it does" I replied.

I knew I had blown it but I carried on. I finished and at first he kept silent. Then he leaned towards me and grabbed me by the arm:-

"Tell me this is for amateur radio" he barked
"Yes it is" I said, a bit confused "I booked it for that"
"Don't ever let me find you at sea with that performance" he growled
"Oh no" I confirmed
"If I ever find you on a boat, I will throw you over the side. Your morse is terrible"
I nodded. It was true. My nod was my acceptance of his assessment. I would never make a marine operator, not that I had ever wanted to be one.
There was a long pause.
"In that case you've passed" he said.

That was that. The marine morse test was far harder and entirely different, so I still do not understand what he was on about. I have wondered ever since if perhaps his thick accent or my thick accent caused some confusion.

It is possible, allowing for the couple of corrections I made which he did not see, that THESE AMERICANS was within the allowable error limit (I missed three letters and got the spacing confused). Years later I recalled that I sent him letter and number groups of five characters, but he sent me plain text - I never even noticed that at the time. I guess because the slow morse I had been listening to was plain text I thought it was normal. The numbers were in random groups of five. He never even looked at my copy, but relied entirely on my smoothed out spoken version of it.

I had passed. My immediate CW career went on to see me work one station on 2m, one on 20m and I did not have another CW QSO for more than 25 years. I still have this man's assessment of me playing in my head.

At least it saved the petrol money for the trip to Lifford. The UK standard was, well, possibly on a par with Lifford. I did not sneak across the border to a foreign jurisdiction to gain a questionable pass certificate.. Oh no, I earned my questionable pass certificate by bungling my way through the oddest test I have ever undertaken, right here in the UK.

Later I received a certificate, signed by somebody else, and after that I also received through the post something called  a Radio Amateur Certificate and eventually a Class A licence covering all the amateur bands. I still wonder quite what all that was about.
Hmmmm. Apparently I had passed.
I immediately framed my Radio Amateur Certificate and proudly put it on the toilet wall - I never did find any other purpose for it. Then I had to wait to see what callsign would turn up.

Both of my callsigns were simply allocated to me. You had no choice, though a few patient people waited without a licence for a "better" callsign to be reached as they progressed alphabetically through the list. So I had been first been allocated G8JWG, which I disliked. It was awkward to say due to the W in the middle. I supposed that G8JUG would have been worse. Second time around I got GI4FVM which was better. I might have got GI4FUM, and becoming that would have been terrible.
At last I had my Class A licence.
There was a clause in the second licence which revoked the first one. I have never understood why people need more than one callsign in any country. It just seems to me to confuse things, befuddles the QSL bureau, and prevents the official number of licences issued figures from accurately representing the number of amateurs. Anyway, the only re-appearance of GM8JWG is the odd occasion when he spots GM4FVM on the cluster.

With GM4FVM being a "full" licence I could apply to operate in some other countries. Only some, as a only few had reciprocal arrangements, and some others would accept a UK licence as qualification for one of theirs. In those days the Republic of Ireland authorities required all their amateurs to provide them with details of the radio experiments they intended to carry out. Of course they required that for their "visitors" licence too, so for several years I had to set out the technical aspects of what I wanted to do, attach the required drawing, and back came this ...


3) Equipment and Operations "pre-transceiver"
When I started working on HF this was simple. The modern concept of the transceiver had emerged in the 1950s and by the late 1960s and it had really taken hold. Most HF operators had abandoned their old separate transmitters and receivers and gone over to SSB. The secondary bonus of  the transceiver was that you automatically transmitted on the same frequency as you received (the primary bonus being that it shared components as was thus cheaper than the separates). People rushed into the more efficient SSB and almost everybody was on the same frequency on transmit and receive.

There were,  of course, some HF old timers who refused to modernise. They often used surplus gear, with crystal controlled CW or AM. The use of crystals meant that they had fixed transmit frequencies and thus usually worked what we would now call "split". There were AM nets, who were theoretically on the same frequency, but this was pretty approximate. SSB required much better frequency stabilisation than AM.

Manufacturers offered matching transmitters to ease the pain of converting. If you had a receiver you could add a transmitter and share the VFO, which at least brought you onto the same frequency. If you had different types of tx and rx but you had a separate transmitter with a VFO and you wanted to get onto the same frequency then you could transmit a weak "netting" signal and tune your tx frequency until you could hear yourself in your receiver. It was not a very accurate way of doing things which was fine on AM but did not really work too well on SSB. It was tricky on CW. I still recall hearing netting signals before stations called me.

However, although the HF community had jumped into transceivers made by Drake and Collins, there was nothing similar for VHF. I used to visit the City of Belfast YMCA radio club in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their pride and joy was a KW 2000, a lumbering beast of a thing. No doubt, as an SSB transceiver it was cutting edge for its time; to me it seemed vast, heavy and unyielding. Later as Chairman of the Queens University of Belfast Radio Club for several years I used their Yaesu FT-200 which was a joy in comparison - but still heavy (7.6kg). The arrival of radios like the FT-200 and the ground breaking FT-101 changed something very important - they were affordable. It was the end of an era. The day of the HF SSB transceiver, however clunky at first, had arrived. For VHF there was nothing like it, so we muddled on.
Yaesu FT-200. About 60% of the price of a KW2000 and better all round. Photo rigpix
In VHF the world was very different in the late 60s. It was as if the transceiver had never been invented. Leaving aside SSB pioneers, the traffic later carried by FM repeaters was almost all on AM. By the time I was licenced the RSGB had produced a bandplan which was rather like a simplified verison of what we have now. Previously there was a regional bandplan for the 2 metre band. It looks very odd now, but it seems to me that the object of the Regional Band Plan was to bring together stations rather than keep them apart, as is the case now. At some time there must have been so few VHF experimenters that something was needed to let them hear each other.

The thing was, in the absence of new equipment, and given the well known reluctance of many amateurs to even consider keeping up with progress, pretty well everybody was still using the old regional band plan. The  home brewers probably did not want to go back to the drawing board and the users of commercial equipment quickly found that there simply was nothing suitable available apart from their cast-off ex-PMR taxi radios.

Thinking first about the more local traffic, there was a marked difference between London and "the North". In London the 2m band sounded to me like HF must have sounded before the arrival of the SSB transceiver. There were lots of AM stations, added to by a growing number of FM ones, scattered about an "all modes" section. The one thing which almost all of these had in common was that very few of them had more than one frequency to transmit on.

This seems very strange now. When I bought my second hand (used) 2m transmitter (I think it cost £11.00) it came with three crystals. That was my entire range of options for frequency selection. I see from log that I used 144.365, 144.770 and 144.950. Everybody else had different crystals and nobody really seemed to be on the same frequency. One joy of it was that your crystal seemed to give you personal use of a specific frequency - the downside being that nobody else was there. This was very much how things used to be on HF years before.

If 144.365 seems very close to the SSB "calling frequency", in those days the new band plan allocated SSB calling to 144.200 and described the upper end of the SSB section as "flexible", whatever that meant. With that fudge everybody could go on as if the new band plan did not exist. My 1974 "NBFM Manual" outlined the benefits of FM and showed the new band plan, but nobody seemed to care about either of these things.

The drill was that you called CQ for a long time on the one frequency you had in the hope that somebody would happen to be tuning past on their receiver. If they heard your call they would also hear you say, right at the end of your call, "tuning the band from high to low", or "tuning the band from low to high". If they only had one crystal, and many did only have one, they would give you a long call and hope that you would tune past them and find them before you had found somebody else.

Of course, I had the unusual luxury of three crystals. If somebody was calling CQ and said they were tuning from high to low I could select 144.95, which they were likely to find before 144.77. If they were tuning low to high I could select 144.365, and hope to get in before somebody else. As everybody was working split it meant that every QSO occupied two parts of the spectrum, and listening to both sides of a QSO involved me in a lot of VFO spinning. In a net of three or four stations you would find them all over the band. I have some cassette tapes of all this going on, and it is mayhem.

One reason why many people only had one tx crystal was that they were using ex-taxi type surplus mobile radios. These usually only had one socket for a tx crystal and one for an rx crystal. A company called Garex sold a conversion of a PMR radio which had a frequency tunable receiver while retaining the crystal controlled tx. This beast had a vernier dial for the VFO, but the receiver was not very stable anyway. These old PMR radios were amazingly bulky and crude. Brands like Pye, Cossar, Bundept, Storno were common.
I used a single channel version Cambridge on 4m. Photo: Pye History Group

Whilst by that stage the PMR users such as the fire brigades and the police forces had gone over to transistorised gear, the surplus we had was their previous generation of valvised equipment. These had been discarded for all sorts of reasons but made fairly good fixed stations. Older ones were entirely valvised, later ones were hybrid designs with a valve in the final transmitter stage.

The downside of these pieces of equipment must have been the trembler power supply. They were designed for use with 12 volt car electrics, and early ones had a simple buzzer-type circuit which cut the car's DC voltage into a square wave to feed to the primary winding of the HT transformer feeding the valves. Although later more efficient transistorised inverters were introduced, this was still fairly inefficient for amateurs who found access to high output power supplies tricky. Converting from mains AC to 12v DC at high current was hard enough with the technology of the day, but when it was then chopped up and converted back to high voltage AC and rectified and smoothed into DC you were really wasting a lot of energy in the process.

It must have been clear that this "tune the band" system was never going to last much longer but you would not have thought so. The 2m band was full of AM stations using two frequencies to work each other. FM was easier to generate than AM, and more efficient to amplify to useful output power levels. Repeaters were on the way, and with that would come an era where people used dedicated amateur gear rather than PMR cast-offs. It took time though, and many said that they would never change.

Of course, you did not have to use ex-commercial surplus equipment, You could build your own, and many did. There were one or two commercial products. TW made a range of transmitters and receivers for the amateur market, including some transceivers which were a receiver and a transmitter built into one box. Then there was the one I had - the EMSAC TX2 (there was also a TX4 for 70MHz).

Away from London things were simpler but also messy in a different way. "The North", where I ended up, seemed to include everywhere from Northern England to the North of Scotland and included the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. As we shall see later, many people in the North avoided the tricky issue of crystals and tuning by using the same AM frequency and avoiding new-fangled FM entirely.

That was the local traffic. VHF Dx-ers had virtually no commercial equipment available.When you think about it, dx is generally across regional boundaries and that meant crossing the regional bandplan areas too. Thus you had to work split or break the band plan rules.

The options for SSB were limited. In the early 70s basically you had to use an HF transceiver and a transverter. You could build a transverter or they were available from makers like SSM (later to be SEM). These things were essentially like the receive converters we used on AM but with the local oscillator frequency tapped out and used to mix up the SSB transmitted signal to 144MHz. I mention this because some of them actually had the receive converter (still in its box) attached to the back of the case. The final output stage then was a valve, usually a QQV 06/40 producing upwards of 50 watts.

There valve transverters were potent things indeed. I had one. Usually they relied on the HF transceiver for their high voltage to apply to the valves. Most Japanese HF rigs had a socket like an octal valve base which allowed you to extract the high voltage. Later I also had a Yaesu transverter which went further and was even styled to matched the FT-101 I had. This one made it possible to just turn a switch and move between HF and 2 metres - what a luxury. And this transverter had a transistorised final stage, though only 20W output.

The obvious problem with transverters is that they required you to have an HF radio to drive them. An HF radio involved a very large cash investment for a Class B operator who could not use it for HF. Even for those who could, the HF radios of the time were not very suitable for general 2m use as they lacked FM, did not have the ability to work split frequency and many older ones had no provision for a low power output to drive a transverter. Lacking an alternative, we still did it and made everything work somehow. If you did not have the money, or the determination, or the knowledge, you were stuck with AM and either split frequency operation or the perils of using the single AM mobile frequency.

4) Equipment and operations "post transceiver"
There was a time which I can well remember when 2m (which was all of VHF for most people) lived like a hangover from the 1940s, with valve equipment, fixed crystal frequencies, split operation and a rather hit and miss CQ system. I see that in my AM/FM only days in 1975 I worked stations using many Pye Cambridges, Pye Vanguards, and even a 90 watt Pye Base Station (probably the one out of the dire but homely TV series "Dixon of Dock Green"), all ex commercial. Apart from the Base Station, nobody was using more than 10W, many a lot less.

One station then was using a Heathkit HW17 valve "transceiver", another variant of Garex's idea of a tunable receiver with an unrelated crystal transmitter. About a quarter of them had homebrewed the tx but used commercial HF receivers with VHF converters. Somebody was using an ex-Navy B40 receiver with a homebrew converter. The receiver alone weighed 46Kg, as much as I weighed myself in 1975. One station (G6QN) told me that he was first licensed in 1922. He must have felt at home.

Although it was a joy to operate in what was really a radio museum, this had to end sometime. The regional band plan had been officially replaced by 1974 (though clearly it took a while for anybody to notice). The arrival of receivers that weighed less than a young radio amateur, the appearance in amateur circles of reliable transistors for output stages, and an influx of remarkable compact, cheap, Japanese gear changed everything. The change was really product led rather than any effort by amateurs to modernise.

Probably the first thing that most people noticed was the appearance of the Belcom Liner 2. This appalling excrescence was in fact an SSB CB transceiver with a 144MHz transverter, all bundled into the same box. It was a true transceiver, and it ran about 7 or 8 watts of SSB, so it was immediately transformative. It came with the standard cranky CB-style VXO with stepped frequencies. With a bit of twiddling you could tune right onto somebody's frequency, which was a novelty at the time. It arrived before the end of the Regional Band Plan so the supplied coverage of 144.100 to 144.340 was no use to those unfortunate enough to live in "the North". Modified ones were available for us, but then those ones shared no common frequency with ones used in other regions. Those sticking to the old Regional Band Plan, which was already doomed by the possibility repeaters, were going to have to get up to date.

I have a Liner 2 here. I never owned one years ago, so I bought one from Derrick, GM4CXP for "old times sake". I get it out sometimes and look at it. It is awful. This is a "Northern" one, so the frequencies are wrong for the current band plan. I seem to recall that 145.41 MHz was the Northern SSB calling frequency. I wouldn't use it now anyway so it stays the way it is.

The Liner 2's great plus (the transistorised output) was also its weakness. Already operating at the limit, the final could not take any more. People realised that the Liner 2s audio stage was uncompressed and thus its average output was low, so they turned up the drive. Bad idea. Although the talk power went up, the Liner splattered all over the place on speech peaks. Sure, they were fine if you left them alone, or so the story went. Better still was to add a Datong RF speech processor (I still have one of those too, this time my own one from 1975), but then if you used one on a Liner 2 you just overheated the output transistor and it died anyway.

For those who treated them well the Liner 2s were a joy. People climbed hills, put up aerials, and actually came on the band. Distance records were broken, and 2m had come of age. How come? Well, the Class B licence helped to get the numbers up, but freeing people from the necessity of owning an expensive HF radio and a transverter too was key.

The Liner 2 cost £151.80 from Lowe's in 1973, which was 5.5 months pay for me. I might have afforded one if I had been prepared to go without food for 5.5 months. I never had one then but it changed the face of VHF operation.

By comparison, the FT-200 transceiver was £159.00 at the same time, so the pathetic Liner 2 cost as much as a very competent 100W multi band HF rig. An SSM transverter cost £79.09 and suited the FT-200 perfectly, so a much more effective solution existed if you could afford it. Nevertheless, the Liner 2 was still the most portable thing around. It was years before Icom, barely functioning when the Liner 2 came out, produced the rig the Liner 2 should have been, the IC-202. But that is another story.

Briefly there was the Braun SE600. This was a majestic radio, an attempt at a multi-mode VHF transceiver. It still had a valve in the final stage (!) and about 20 watts output on SSB. It looked like a piece of lab equipment and with a digital readout (gosh) and two VFOs it cost £627.00. The Liner 2 cost the price of an FT-200; the Braun cost the price of four FT-200s. I don't think they sold many but it was a bold view of the future.

On the transceiver front, the mainstream Japanese manufacturers were not far behind Braun. By 1975 my notes record a few, a very few, stations using rigs like the Yaesu FT-220 and the Trio TS700. These were the first mass produced VHF multi-mode transceivers we had seen. They included FM and moderately stable VFOs. By modern standards their output power (10W), receiver sensitivity, and strong signal handling characteristics are not great shakes. But at the time they offered a real step forward. They came with repeater shift - the first UK repeater GB3PI arrived with an experimental service in late 1972. Within 5 years most UK amateurs were within range of a repeater. My first repeater contact was via GB3LO on 18 March 1975.
The Yaesu FT-221R. How I would have loved one. Photo rigpix
Later the Queen's University Radio Club had a Trio TS770 which included 70cms - now that was a shock. Even the basic TS-700 was well beyond my pocket, as was the Yaesu FT-220. I really loved the look of the 220 and the later 221, and its VFO. I still find it a pleasing design but there just was no money for it. I decided to go down the transverter route because I already had an FT-101 to drive one.

Briefly, before the transverter I had one glorious period with an SSB mobile rig. Not wanting a Belcom Liner 2, I bought the mainstream answer to it, the Trio TR-7010, as soon as it was released. It was an SSB/ CW transceiver. I had joined the modern world at last. I could operate on the same frequency without problems and run to the dizzying heights of 8 watts through its transistorised final stage. It was magic and there was lots of SSB mobile and fixed operation to follow.

On the local AM/FM front, things were changing too. Tuning the band in either direction was not easy while you were mobile. In my part of "the North" everybody stayed on the mobile frequency of 145.800. This meant that all the local traffic, fixed or mobile, in half of the UK was on one AM frequency. There were always multiple QSOs going on. There were heterodynes all the time. As you drove about you found yourself in the middle of somebody else's conversation and neither of you had an alternative frequency to use.

For most people 144.8 AM was VHF, end of story. How wrong they were.

The rig that caught the mood for local operation was the Inoue IC-2F. It helped that is was more or less the first of its type available in the UK. It was a compact FM transceiver equally at home mobile or in the shack. It offered 6 crystal controlled channels and 10W output. Compared to a Pye Cambridge this was an object lesson in miniaturisation and efficiency. It actually had a knob on the front which you could turn and change both the receive and the transmit frequency (fancy that). It is difficult to describe how revolutionary a radio like the Inoue IC-2F was, and it was quickly followed by Yaesu's imaginatively named FT-2F and many others.
Inoue IC2F - a game changer in a modest way Photo ik3hia
By 1975 I had worked someone using an IC-2F and visited someone else who used one. I was already converted. Inoue changed their name to Icom and started developing a series of VHF base station rigs which quickly progressed to the IC-201, a remarkable bit of kit which competed in the multi-mode area with Yaesu and Trio (later to be Kenwood in the UK as it already was in some other areas).

Having heard about the Inoue IC-2F I knew I had to do something as single fixed tx frequencies and separate receivers were quickly becoming obsolete. My first (mistaken) reaction was to obtain a modern transmitter, as I already had a receiver. I was still thinking in terms of separate tx and rx. The tx I bought was something called a Telford TC9. This was an FM transmitter with a VFO. I would still have to net in, but I would be freed from crystal control. It didn't last long as the internal power supply blew and took everything else with it. That was a pity as it had a very nice Eddystone-type slow motion drive. I did try a VFO kit for the EMSAC. It worked, but was hopelessly drifty. 

Eventually I caved in and at the end of 1976 I bought a Standard C-828 Japanese FM transceiver and went channelised for FM. I never worked AM on VHF again. The Standard 828 was a fairly novel thing as it used the same crystal for receive and transmit - useful at a time when crystals were so expensive to buy. Later I also bought the optional VFO which ... also ... turned out out be hopelessly drifty. This was the factor which caused so much trouble then. Before phase lock loop technology nobody really cracked it. I am still using the Standard 3 amp power supply I bought with the 828 in 1976.
Standard C828 Photo rigpix
Soon everything had changed. Within a couple of years we had given up tuning the band and separate receivers. We arrived at channelised working, transistor output stages, repeaters, a unified European Band Plan, multi-mode VHF transceivers (even if I couldn't afford one), compact mobile rigs ... modernity ... in a very short period. These days I might be surprised if someone turned up on the doorstep wanting to inspect my equipment, but in 1975 I expected it to happen any day.I knew someone who had his licence suspended after such a visit. It was a worry. However, we all got on with it and tuned the band from top to bottom.

There are still some dunderheads who, 45 years after the frequency was allocated for other uses, still operate AM or FM simplex on 145.800. Other, more sensible individuals, try to rekindle their memories by refurbishing old radios from this era and they get much satisfaction from doing so. I personally would like to just remember how it was and move on. I prefer to use modern equipment in a modern way. Each to their own. However, I still remember the complex licensing, the separate transmitters, the valves glowing purple and the whole rather primitive nature of it all.

73

Jim
GM4FVM
P.S. I do not know whether bandplan is all one word or two, so take your choice from the above.