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

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

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.
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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/

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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 ...