31 August Es and the end of the season wind down

Here, as I gaze over my estates from the lofty heights of the old stone tower at the end of the West Wing, I see the workers toiling in the fields to save the wheat crop ...

Harvesting the wheat as seen from GM4FVM's QTH on 27 August 2017

Actually, there does not seem to be too much toil involved sitting up there in the cab of the harvester watching the machinery doing its work.

If I really did have a West Wing with a stone tower on it, I would have attached another antenna to it long before now. Especially if it had lofty heights.

No, this week I have been watching the field behind the house being sucked clean of all its produce, then straw baling being completed. The straw bales have already been removed and no doubt ploughing and drilling will be complete within days. Who knows what crop will be pushing up next year?

When it comes to harvest time I start thinking of Autumn, and the end of the Es season. Time for me to review the Summer and then batten down the hatches for Winter.

This year I feel that I have overdone things over the Summer. I think that it is time for a break from operating and use the opportunity to spend a bit more time with my other projects.

Most of my amateur radio life has been marked by upsurges and downswings in activity. I am not an operator with just a rig and a bit of wire, but nor am I someone who invests all his time and money in this hobby. I move around the middle ground, sometimes getting too much involved and having to step back a bit. So this is time for a step back.

The Es season is over, the Christmas VHF Contests are over the horizon. Time for a measured reaction. The Autumn promises more Es, more aurora, more meteor scatter, and more tropo. So bring it on, as I am not going hunting for it.
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 31 August produced a nice Es opening.

I knew it was coming towards the end of the week because the RSGB VHF propagation report said there wasn't going to be one then, but "at the head of the week" and it would "struggle" due to "weak Jet Streams".

So, of course with this promise I reckoned that if they say it will happen weakly at the beginning of the week I should start looking for a strong one at the end of the week. I find that is the best way of treating these reports, and it has always worked for me.

I am not saying that Jet Streams have nothing to do with Es (though that is what I think, but it is hard to prove a negative), but what I can say with fair certainty is that using them for prediction does not work. Relying on the predicted Jet Stream to base an Es prediction is always wrong here.

Jet Streams might be implicated in Es (I doubt it) but if this is the track record of making predictions based on them, what I have seen over the last year or so makes the predictions look laughable.

Es as reported by DXMaps at 21:18 on 31 August 2017.

I had a number of nice contacts, including I6FLD, IK4ISR, IZ8IBC, SP7QJF and SP8NR on 50MHz, and returning regulars DD3SP and OK2BRD on 70MHz.

Actually Sandro, DD3SP was an interesting one on 4m as I worked him first with meteor scatter on MSK144 at 13:16. I guessed that would be my last German station on 4m for this year, as their temporary authorisation ended on 31 August. But then I worked him again on SSB on Es at 20:32. I also worked Jiri, OK2BRD twice, both on Es. First by FT8 at  20:37, then again on SSB at 20:45.

It is notable that the last QSO was at 22:55 and I only stopped because I needed some sleep. This bout of Es was generated by a geomagnetic storm caused by a coronal hole. There was no widespread aurora, though I did hear the usual Northern Ireland beacons over the previous day or so. I often see this Es pattern repeat itself during positive polarity coronal hole disturbances. Perhaps today we will get some negative polarity material from the Sun too, and maybe an aurora.

10m Es was pretty good as well...

10m Es on WSPR, 31/8/17. Presumably Mauritius was F layer, but you never know!

A great day of Es to round off the season, so to speak. I will miss the German stations on 70MHz even though, due to conditions, they have not been as prevalent as previous years. I already miss Italian stations who we have not heard on 4m for several years.
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It definitely has been a busy Summer and I am in need of a bit of a break. Never mind the radio, a brilliant Tour de France (Rigobero Uran was brilliant) was star of the season. Now the battling of Contador, Nibali and Aru are keeping me welded to the television and La Vuelta Ciclista a Espana. Not just cycling, but cricket has been superb too, plus of course Masterchef Australia. What a Summer.

I am not going QRT, just taking a bit easier. There is plenty more for this blog, or so I hope anyway.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

2017 Es season - not that bad? Aurora springs to the rescue.

I wrote this over the past few days. It started off being a piece complaining about poor Sporadic E conditions. As the piece developed, it turned out that things were not as bad as they had seemed.

What was bugging me was that on the 70MHz band (4 metre band), I had only had one Es QSO so far in August. Normally I would have had many more, and I can often work up to 8 DXCC in August, whereas of course in 2017 it was just one. I moaned about this in my last posting, and I went off and got the figures out of the logs to prove it.

Of course, it was probably just random variation (and not the weather and definitely not the jet stream). As I was finishing off my blog there was a small opening on 4m. I worked two stations in 4m, both in EA. One was on SSB and the other on FT8. That was followed the next day by a short opening into OH with two stations worked. For a while, the OIRT interference made it look like the "good old days" of Radio Gdansk...

OIRT broadcast stations at GM4FVM on 27 August 2017

So I have decided to re-write my downbeat piece as a review of the good things that have happened recently. And why not?


I can hardly complain about the 2017 Es season as a whole, even if August has been relatively poor. Six trans-Atlantic contacts on six metres on six different days so far this year. These cross Atlantic paths are (we believe) multiple hop Sporadic E. Ron, WB3LHD, went so far as to send a very striking QSL card direct ...

QSL Card received direct from Ron for 6m FT8 QSO on 29 July 2017

We do have sea eagles not far from here, plus kites and buzzards overhead, but that is quite a bird. Even the slightest squeak from any large bird sends Katy out of the garden and into the shack for shelter, so I have kept Ron's card out of her very sharp cat vision.

However, none of those NA QSOs were in August.

I suppose in this respect I am "old school". I really like receiving an unexpected QSL card through the post. After I sent the card back (direct) Ron sent me a screenshot of what the QSO looked like from his end. Unfortunately I did not take a screenshot at my end.

Nor can I complain about working 7K2KF in Algeria recently. I view this as a new continent. Sure, I have worked Madeira and the Canary Islands on 6m, which count as Africa, and had many 2-way spots with CN8LI on WSPR, but I have never before had an actual QSO with a station on the African continental mainland itself.

7K2KF on 6m at GM4FVM on 25 August 2017

I am not sure why this has taken me so long as the CN8LI spots prove that the path is open quite often. 2162km to 7X2KF is not far in 6m terms. It seems that the "FVM equations" are the problem, with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Morocco all within easy range but not very active. The issue here is not about the level of Es, but more about the level of activity. Or so I suspect.

It also depends how the weekends fall in the month. Conditions are always better at the weekend. Of course, this is not true, but it seems to be. There are more stations around, they make more noise when the bands open, and that gets others involved.

I have also had a few QSOs into France - which is a great place for me to find new squares on 6m. France was late to release the 6m band, and then at first only part was opened up. Now it is easy to work French stations but they are still few and far between. Given the size of France, just about everybody starting up is in a new square for me.

However good things have been on 6m, 4m has not been good for weeks. I have to conclude that it is probably just normal statistical variation. Up here at 56 degrees North I am towards the edge of the strong Es. Stations in the Mediterranean get much more, and the further North you go the less we benefit from it. So it might reach us here on 6m, but the ionisation might just be too weak to work at 4m from here. A few days like that and it makes all the difference.
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If Es levels may be down (and reading the above, they probably are not down), auroral activity is definitely down.

I wrote a long piece about auroras to illustrate them, but I still have not posted it.

There were more auroras over the last couple of years, and fewer recently. ("Please, no more figures Jim", they cry). That is probably due to the well established pattern the auroras peak in the two years after a sunspot maximum.

Like meteors, auroras do not go away just because it is not a maximum period for them. The various sites suggested that a coronal hole might have been active for the previous two days, but nothing exciting was predicted for 23 August. Suddenly my 10m WSPR monitor showed a blast of noise which filled the waterfall right across the screen. It must have been fairly wideband but I did not see it on the higher bands...

Wideband noise burst on 10m before the aurora on 23 August 2017

This was followed by me hearing the beacons on 2m in Northern Ireland, plus the 4m beacons on  Syke and in Northern Ireland. Interestingly the 4m NI beacon is now running PI-RX mode and I could compare the signal direct and via aurora, depending on which way I turned my beam antenna.

GB3CFG beacon near Carrickfergus while beaming directly at it (tropo)

GB3CFG beacon while beaming North (aurora). PI-RX is decoding despite the Doppler distortion

I must say something more soon on this blog about PI-RX beacons. Let us say now that unlike almost every other data mode, PI-RX works during an aurora. Looking at the comparison above, between direct and via aurora, it is amazing that PI-RX can make anything out of it at all.

Beacons were all very well, but what actual stations could I hear. As usual, not many.

I managed to work one station each on 4m and 6m. They were both LA9BM. Leif and I seem to find ourselves in this position quite often - the band is open but there is nobody else to work. Not quite though, he worked a few more, including OH0CO. I had heard OH0CO over the past few days via meteor scatter but he did not hear me, and I did not hear him on aurora. Aland Island would have been a new DXCC on 4m and 6m, but not a new square.

Anyway, I worked LA9BM on 4m and 6m using CW, and not even using my pre-programmed QSOs using the keyer memory. All done old style with a keyer and brain power. I did hear a couple of other stations but their CW was far too fast for me to try to work. Why does anyone use fast CW during an aurora when signals can be distorted and hard to copy?

I like a good aurora. Even if I only got to work one station on two bands, this one was better than nothing.
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73

Jim

GM4FVM

Amateur radio rotator rant

OK, I have been fed up about this for ages and it is time for a full-frontal whinge.

There certainly is a thing called "buyer's regret". That happens when you buy something and then wish you had bought something else. This is not the case here, I think.

I think that none of the rotators on the market meets my needs, for reasons I will explain.

The thing about rotators is that the market for them is not very big. In my career I have had three rotators, the first two bought second hand. So in my first 40 years of radio I spent less than £100 on the first two. Then I gave the first one away about 10 years ago (a Ham M dating from the 1960s). It went to a needy new amateur. The second one, a Yaesu G-600, which must be 20 years old now, is still in use.

Then eventually I had need of another one (maybe I should not have given away the HamM). I bought the third one for (I cannot recall how much now) but it would now cost £376.75 for the rotator, plugs and bottom clamp.

£376.75 for the most basic rotator on the market (the Yaesu FT-450)!!!

That does not include postage or the cables. Nobody is likely to use less than 30m of cable. 40m supplied by Yaesu and complete with the plugs costs £100. You can do it for less, but with the plugs costing almost £30, not much. You can find the plugs on eBay for a few £££ and get your soldering iron going. As for the cable, at one point in one of my runs the rotator cables is two parallel runs of old mains flex (total cost for that bit £0).

If you buy the long cable and the bottom clamp that brings it to £480.

You can, for sure, do these things to get the price down. Once you do so, you are departing from the CE approval which is needed to sell appliances in the EU. This is meant to protect you. If you do something like use old mains flex and then your house burns down, your insurer may take a dim view of you departing from the CE marked "official" Yaesu cable with its pre-fitted plugs.

I looked fairly carefully at the small rotator market at the time. The Yaesu was not my immediate choice. I would have preferred a worm-drive mechanism, which the SPID rotator has, but even the lightest SPID appears to be much heavier than the Yaesu and claims only to take 50mm diameter masts (mine are 52mm).

Also on the market seem to be:-

The equivalent Hy-Gain rotator, the venerable AR-40X sells for £449.95.

You could get a Create RC5-1 for about £500 (+ £££ bottom clamp) or the Spid RAU is £480.

Now if you take a step above the entry level there is much more choice. However, these are choices not available to me. My mast is light weight and not able to accept anything much heavier. Anyway, if you pay enough for a rotator you can get anything you want, which is not the point for anyone on a budget. It is a bit like me remarking on my £1000 rigs and then getting emails from people saying that a £4000 Elecraft radio and matching Elecraft linear is better. Yeah, sure, and a new Rolls Royce would be better than my 8 year old Volkswagen. I keep making points like this but the Elecraft "my wallet is bigger than yours" brigade keep writing to rub my nose in the dirt of my limited budget.

My gripe is not so much that the Yaesu rotator I settled for is not really very good. Well, it is not very good at all really, but then for a motor, some gears and a housing, what do I expect?

My gripe is that at least some of the cost of the Yaesu, (and the Hy-Gain and Create) rotator must go on providing me with the mechanical indicator. When you think about it, this is a masterpiece of electro-mechanical engineering. However, I don't need it, I don't want it, and I cannot see why they persist on selling it.

Controller for my Yaesu G-450 complete with clock-face indicator and no digital control

Going back to my old Ham M, it had a nice simple single slider control on the front. Sprung to centre off, and a slight pressure either side released the electro-mechanical lock on the rotator. Any further pressure on the slider moved the antenna. You could stop turning it and keep the slight pressure on so that it coasted to a halt before allowing the lock to engage. And the display was a simple meter calibrated from South to South via North - it just read the voltage coming down from the resistor in the rotator.

Then moving on to the Yaesu 600, its control box had two buttons, left and right, plus some dorky wiring to stop you trying to turn the antenna both directions at once. It also has a lock, but you cannot control it separately. And it had this amazing clock-face 360 degree indicator, which the Create and the Hi-Gain have too. This a great thing, but does it really tell me much more than the old meter did? They used to sell the meter version alongside the clock-face ones, and the meter version was cheaper (of course). Now you have to shell out on the fancy display.

None of this would matter had my display on the G-600 not failed. Maybe after 20 years that is not so surprising. But whilst a meter could have been fixed, this marvel of all that clockwork complexity was beyond me. So I bought an EA4TX digital control box, reviewed here. Now this is a great device but it costs almost as much as the Yaesu G-450, once you have added the tax and carriage, and you have a lot of tinkering to get it to work. It was a simple choice when I was faced with the G-600's indicator failure to buy one, and it has kept that rotator in business for another couple of years, but it is a lot of money and work to go to if I want to replace my G-450 indicator.

Let us just consider this. I have one rotator under computer control, the G-600. I had to re-wire the G-600 controller to extract the motor voltage and organise the new EA4TX box. It worked out fine in the end. Now I would like to have the G-450 under computer control and the sums just do not add up. I need to delve into a perfectly good controller to get the motor supply out, and then spend as much as the original rotator on a control box. Crazy.

So why don't Yaesu just sell a controller with two switches and digital readout showing azimuth? Or even a small LCD screen with a pointer on it? And, crucially, a nice USB socket allowing connection to a computer? After all, this is what SPID do for the RAU. And high end, larger, heavier, more expensive rotators do allow easy hooking up to a PC.

I think that the problem for Yaesu and the other manufacturers (except SPID!) must be that any investment in updating the rotator control box must be a very doubtful proposition when they only sell most amateurs one or two rotators in their entire career (in my case, one every 20 years). You need to sell a lot to recoup the cost of re-tooling your production.

Set against that, most electronic devices now have been redesigned in this way. Moving parts are minimised. Even a single humble meter can be the cause of a re-design, to be replaced with a digital readout. Transverters have been redesigned to replace a meter with a numerical display or an LED strip display, and transverters are very low volume products. So surely the cost of making those mechanical clock-face displays must justify a change of direction (ahem!).

The EA4TX shows how simple it is to include PC connectivity and stand-alone back up.

From what I can see SPID do a display with a simple three figure azimuth read-out in degrees. This has a USB output for the PC. You can use this "stand alone" without a computer using the display, or with the computer using the USB socket.

You can add on interfaces for some Yaesu rotators but you have to buy the unwanted display first and the interfaces are expensive and do not work with the G-450 anyway.

What I would really like to see would be Yaesu making a modern controller for the G-450 (and I suspect the G-650) with a built-in power supply and a socket for their standard rotator plug. This would be a straight replacement for the existing rotator control and it would feature a USB socket. As well as being available with the new rotator (and surely cheaper than the exiting controller) it would also be sold as a replacement for people like me ... or those whose mechanical readout has inevitably failed.

But, you say, there already is such a device. Yes, believe it or not, Hy-Gain sell just such a thing for Yaesu rotators - the YRC-3X. Weird. They sell a device to fix their competitor's rotators. This is exactly what I want. Downside? It costs £449.95, just for the controller. In other words, I could just about buy a brand new SPID and its perfectly suitable controller, for the price of the Hy-Gain replacement box.

If only I knew for sure if the SPID does fit my masts or not. 50mm - do they mean that as an exact measurement? And as for the weight quoted for the SPID, are those shipping weights for the whole kit, or just the weight of the rotator? I am fairly sceptical about the level of detail you get for these things, after all, the torque and wind loading figures given are not comparable between makers either.

You can see that if I could sort out the details I would rather sell the Yaesu G-450 and buy the SPID than spend the same amount of money buying the Hy-Gain box to convert the Yaesu. Not that there is anything wrong with the G-450, just that I am irritated by paying twice to get it working the way a  modern rotator should.

Anyway, Yaesu continue to sell an outmoded and no doubt expensive to make controller and give no option for purchasers but to buy it. I bought one. The rotator is OK, as far as cheap rotators go. It meets my needs in the sense that it has not broken down yet - though the first Yaesu G-450 which was supplied to me was seized solid and it took weeks to get a replacement. If the wind causes the gears to strip then I will know that it is not good enough mechanically. I already know that it is not good enough when it comes to the controller.

I suppose that the manufacturers are stuck with small volumes of sales. If Yaesu think that selling the G-450 with no computer connectivity will force people to buy heavier and more expensive rotators then they are wrong, as they would be too heavy for me. I cannot blame Hy-Gain charging a high sum for their replacement Yaesu controller as the market must be small. So, come on Yaesu, get that controller modernised and start selling replacements.

Where is the Chinese manufacturing industry when you need them? A rotator is a 30volt-ish motor, a bearing or two, a couple of gears and some castings. A controller is two switches, a display, a circuit board with a couple of relays, PSU and USB socket. Surely that could be done for less than £380? In radio terms the volume may be small, but someone could corner the market with a well-priced rotator. If the existing manufacturers cannot modernise and innovate (with the exception of SPID who do try), then can newcomers come in and shake it all up?

Where is Adam Smith's hidden hand? (Note: obscure reference to the Father of Economics, who also resided in IO85 square).

Rant over.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

Es and broadcast QRM, the Wouxun 950PL, and 2 computers with PstRotator

Sometimes with amateur radio you just have to wait and watch...

Katy, 2nd operator at GM4FVM waiting patiently

At other times you let your guard down. You go off duty, you get slack, you relax. You know, you have waited for ages and nothing showed up, so you took it that nothing was going to happen.

Katy has slackened off She is in there as her tail shows

It was when we were slacking, two days ago, that we missed Moldova on 2 metres. That would have been a new country and a new square. I saw something happening on EsSense, but I went out and cranked the antenna up and poured myself a Ribena, then I came into the shack and heard somebody else working Moldova and then the opening was over. Grrrr.

You win some, and you lose some.

Often, when Es is at its strongest, there is simply nothing to work. On 6m here the band is full of Russian (and general Eastern from here) TV signals. On 4m there are lots of OIRT broadcast signals. The noise gets so high that the rig overloads. Curtains. I might as well climb into Katy's bed (no tail to show, honestly; I am not The Devil).

Here is such a day (18 June). Although a bit short of overload, the radio was full of OIRT on 4m and no further progress could be made. I have got used to sitting this type of thing out. I might be able to hear an SSB signal in there, but there is no chance of being able to understand it. Not with my ears anyway.

You might be able to see, just between two peaks of FM broadcast, a faint line which is indeed an amateur signal. Right in the passband of the receiver on 70.176

That line is indeed DG0KW. I had just worked DF5VAE (accidentally I was on 70.170, but he still found me). Apparently JO64 is new square for me though I was surprised by that.

It certainly looks as if you can squeeze a JT65 signal between the sidebands of the FM broadcast signals. In fact, DF5VAE was more of less on top of an FM signal, yet he was easy to decode.

I am beginning to get the impression that JT65 works quite well in the face of heavy FM interference. I suppose CW might work too, but JT65 takes the agony out of listening to the terrible raspy noises. I could never have worked either of them on SSB, and indeed I would not even have tried.

Just a word of explanation about OIRT for those of you outside Europe. The Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision is (or was) a group set up after World War 2 to establish TV and FM broadcast radio standards in Europe. The FM radio band they proposed was around 70MHz (now 65.8 to 74MHz). Western European nations left OIRT in the 1950s once 88 to 108MHz became their preferred band and OIRT was left to cover Eastern Europe, or in reality the former USSR and its affiliates.

In the past radio amateurs had to deal with broadcast stations in the 70MHz band from many countries in Central Europe. Gradually former "Warsaw Pact" countries abandoned OIRT frequencies and opted to go with 88 to 108MHz.

As far as I know OIRT as an organisation no longer exists, but the term "OIRT" is used to describe stations still operating on those frequencies. Typically, I hear stations in Russia (especially Kaliningrad), Ukraine, and Belarus, but other countries further East still seem to be operating too.

I believe that most OIRT stations are now just duplicates of stations in the 88 to 108 MHz band. It must cost a lot to keep them running as they certainly must rack up quite an electricity bill.

Wide band FM at considerable power is just one of the snags to get over when trying to work Es on 4m. It just shows how good the propagation is on that band. They do not make it impossible to operate, you just have to find ways to work round the commerical stations, as we used to do on 160 and 80 metres in the good old days.

Imagine my puny JT65 signal successfully battling through that wall of RF.
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To be frank, I never really expected the Wouxun KG-UV950PL to become my shack FM radio.

I had intended it to be a mobile radio and I still think it would be great for that. However, it never made it past the shack where it replaced two separate rigs.

There is a good review of it here ... if the link is broken it is this ...
http://www.g3zpf.raota.org/articles/wouxunKG-UV950pl.pdf.

In my experience so far this review says almost all you need.

The 950 is really is two radios in one box, and one of them only covers part of the range. This is odd and hard to get your head around. I have one set up to cover 50 and 70 MHz, and the other for 144 and 432 MHz. Strange. Luckily mine came with the programming cable thrown in so I can tame it that way. I would hate trying to set it up manually as it took about 10 days to figure out how it works. At least with all the memory frequencies in place I could adapt to it and learn as I went along.

I had looked at the 950 as a possibility before, but it seemed too expensive. Adding the programming cable tipped the balance.

My Wouxun KG-UV950PL - I separated the control head from the rig to install it

What can I add to the G3ZPF review? I have it mounted with the control unit in the shack shelving and the radio itself mounted at the other end of the shack - the control cable comes as standard. I took the strain off the mic cable by adding a right angle ethernet plug with a cable to an ethernet "back to back" socket. The mic plug is therefore not tugging on the rig socket when you transmit.

There may be two radios in the 950, but there is only one RF socket. I already had a Comet CF-530 duplexer doing the same job for my Wouxun handheld in the car, so I brought it in to allow me to split the 50 and 70MHz signals from the 144 and 432 MHz ones.

The review mentions the volume control issue at low volumes. This is a snag for me - I cannot get it low enough with the inboard speakers. Easy enough with outboard speakers. So I just set the speaker on the microphone as my main speaker. In a car this would not be an issue as low volumes are not needed.

It takes a bit of getting used to. I suppose that every new FM radio does. Now that I know that it takes two presses of the PTT coming off scan to work the transmit function, I can do that. I can now enter frequencies via the keypad, but the process takes some remembering. However, I use it almost entirely on memory mode.

Now that I have had it for a few weeks I can say that I thoroughly approve of the Wouxun 950. The basic 950P model covers 10, 6, 2 and 70cms, and that might be the one for you. However, the 6, 4, 2, 70cms "950PL" version is the right one for my particular purpose. Both versions are marked 950P on the front, incidentally.

Aside from the rather odd control arrangement, the radio side is fine. It is powerful (40 to 50W) and sensitive. The squelch works well. Sensitivity is similar to other single and dual bands rigs I have used, and there appears to be no performance penalty by reducing the rig count by one. It is certainly streets better than the ancient ex-commercial PMR radios still in use of 4m.

As well as looking as if the case is used as a heatsink (as on my previous VHF FM radios) the 950 is equipped with a cooling fan. This is great. I used to have radios like the Yaesu FT-1900 and 2900 which got incredibly hot. A cooling fan is very useful, and I cannot hear it.

At almost £300 it is a bit pricey for what me, but then it is better value than some other quad band rigs. Now that I have got used to the quirks, I like it.
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I have gone back to using two computers as a trial.

Despite all the comments to the contrary, I cannot get two instances of WSJT-X to run reliably. Two versions of MSK144 overload the computer (any computer I use up to my most powerful), and two versions of JT65 run for a while and then one of them get stuck in decode (but stops decoding). So I split them across to computer to see how I would get on.

So far so good. There is no detectable increase in noise, though I have not looked everywhere yet. I may add yet another display screen. I can now run two versions of WSJT-X easily, one on each computer.

I have used a "Smart KM-Link" to allow me to control both computers from one keyboard and mouse. This is a USB device, unlike the older switches which also  switched the monitor. It allows the mouse to move between the screens and automatically switch between them. Apart from some fan noise from the extra PC, the operation of the screens is exactly as before.

This works fine but I struck a problem with the rotator software driving my Yaesu G-600 rotator (the G-450 uses the standard Yaesu mechanical display). The display for my existing software prevents the mouse switching between screens. As I was using the basic software which came with the EA4TX ARS-USB rotator controller ("ARSVCOM"), it was time to switch to some more advanced software.

For some time I have been eyeing PstRotator by YO3DMU. I downloaded it and paid the very reasonable sum of €20 to register it.

PstRotator display - as always click to enlarge if necessary

It does lot more things than I will ever require. First plus is that I now have a choice of 12 presets instead of eight. Not that I can actually think of four more just now, but I have the option. I can enter a locator and the rotator will point there (useful) and even a callsign works too.

This is as far as I need to go with PstRotator for now. It provides lots of options for the future.

We will see whether I stick with two computers as time goes on. However, PstRotator seems worth having.

73

Jim

GM4FVM

A dual-band antenna, 70MHz JT65, and classic rigs

These are the days of the Es season when I change gear. I go into cruise mode.

The "new-ness" of it all has passed. I have no need to work the same station today as I worked yesterday. Others do have this need for some reason. Mostly I sit and watch them all working each other, and I wonder what they have learned since the day before.

Personally, I prefer to look for new squares and new countries. I am of course happy to answer calls if I call CQ, but then I do not spend all day calling CQ. I leave it to others to call CQ continuously. And they do that duty rather well.

True, I have had a few successes in the past few days. IK2MMB (JN45 1382km) was a nice contact on 2m on 16 June. HA/SP7VC (KN17 1866) was a new square on 4m. I really appreciate people activating these rare squares.

It was not so good with an activation from the Nordic VHF meeting in Sweden. The 4m meteor scatter station would have been a new DXCC as well as a new square but it was not to be. I heard them many times, but could not get through. I tried to email them as they did not seem to be sticking to the split they were alleged to be working, but I only got a reply after it was over, and it said that I was too late. Clearly this team put a lot of effort into this activation but sadly I could not work them. Again, for another year. I said that last year.

Also nice have been some contacts on 70MHz JT65. There is no frequency allocated for JT65 on 4m. In fact, the WSJT-X software is supplied with entirely the WRONG preset. It defaults to the WSPR frequency, and every month or two I see people who use this setting this being scolded on the cluster.

Anyway, several people have commented about 4m and I decided to try 70.176. This is not ideal as it falls inside the precious German allocation, but where else to go? I then worked G0XVF and G0MJI, both of whom have been pressing for some JT65 action. Then I was really surprised to work GM4ZMK, also on 4m JT65. This was followed eventually by DL5MCG (JN48 1113km), my first "DX" JT65 contact on 4m. It is not for me to say that 70.176 is the "right" frequency, but I hope that it (or some other one) becomes standardised.

So why do I want to see JT65 on 4m? For the same reason I like it on VHF in general. There seems to be a general lack of interest in data modes amongst some VHF operators. However, JT65 is not just a replacement for SSB or CW, it offers its own special attributes. It is particularly suited to long distance DX working. It was designed for Earth-Moon-Earth use and that is a similar steady low strength situation.

Lately we have had many stations worked from Europe on 6m, as far away as China, Japan and Korea. This, it is suggested, is "Short Path Summer Solstice Propagation" (SPSSP). How this differs from multi-hop Es is subject to discussion. For example, is the frequent path from here to the Caribbean, or the United States or even South America at this time, also SPSSP, or what? Well, in any case, JT65 is brilliant for it. CW also works, SSB is tricky and that is it.

As I write this I am still struck by a station in China who was working streams of Southern European stations on 6m, and who then posted that he was hearing the Angus beacon on 4m well over S9. The Angus beacon in China! Then the posting appeared that Haiti is now available on 4m too (is this official?) plus last year's information that at least one other South American country (was it Colombia?) is also active.

First of all - the 4m Angus beacon was heard in China when there was no 6m path for me. How often would 4m paths be available, perhaps on different trajectories, when 6m is open? How did we not know about SPSSP before a few years ago (i.e. not before JT65)? What can we do with it? Does it extend to 4m regularly, if at all?

I saw an interesing post on a Belgian amateur site. It said that this is a "scientific hobby and not just a communication hobby. In other words, it is not CB". How true. Here we have a genuine scientific discovery in SPSSP, and that beats working the same station on successive days. Well, it does for me anyway.
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I have been trying to reduce the number of poles here. Also, my cobbled together ex-dual band beam was in use on 6m, and something had to be done before it fell down in the wind. I seem to have resolved all this, though I now have another dual-band antenna, which was not in the plan to start with. Or two antennas mounted at the same height working on two different bands.

The replacement for the old 6m beam is commercial. Making it into a dual band beam is entirely an FVM invention. It is a Sirio SY50-3. This is the three element version. It is rather well made and should survive the weather here well.

The elements appear to be aluminium tubes with castings for the attachments. The attachments hold the elements using worm screws tightened with an Allen Key (Hex Key). The attachments themselves are pre-fixed to the boom at preset lengths. They are lightweight castings and look very impressive.

Attachment for the reflector on the Sirio SY50-3

The antenna is otherwise conventional, with the dimensions you might expect. The coupling to the coax is via a gamma match, and the recommended tuning settings seemed to work with a low SWR.

I am impressed by the construction. Whilst light weight, it looks sturdy. It took about 90 minutes to build (during which I built it back to front - in some ways I am still like a beginner).


The irony is that I am now about to replace the co-ax to that antenna because it was ruined by water ingress - through a Sirio vertical. Sirio antennas have generally served me well, but their 4m J-pole CX 4-68 seems to have a problem. I was warned that it lets in water, so I double wrapped the joints with self-amalgamating tape. Despite this, it filled with water, which seeped past the PL-259 and into the co-ax. The CX4-68 is a great antenna, but it has this basic flaw.

So, with the new Sirio beam up, and my Sandpiper ring base 5/8th 4m vertical above, where am I to put a 2m vertical? Why do I need a 2m vertical? Good question.

I then took my trusty old dipole, which has been in use here for many years. Over the years it has been altered to serve for 2m, 4m and 6m, horizontal and vertical, fixed and rotatable, portable ... everything. Now it is formed as a 2m dipole and fixed vertically between the driven element and the director of the Sirio 50MHz beam.

Sirio 6m SY50-3, with 2m vertical dipole and Sandpiper 4m 5/8ths vertical

This is a bit difficult to photograph. It is hard to see that the 2m antenna is vertically polarised, and the 6m horizontal. And the stand-off for the 2m antenna is exactly beside the boom on the 6m beam in the horizontal plane, but it never looks like that from the ground.

In reality, the 2m support is beside the 6m boom.

I had done this before of course. You may recall this 2m antenna briefly beside the 4m beam in the past. It may not last much longer this time. It is a lash-up. Any compromise will affect both the 6m beam and the 2m vertical. For now though it is working fine.
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"Classic" rigs have quite a following.

Myself, I can do without.

There may have been a "golden era" of amateur radio equipment. It started with commercial SSB transmitters and transceivers. Early Collins, Drake and KW rigs are in this category. Then a series of hybrid transistor/valve rigs from Yaesu and Trio/Kenwood.

However, I would say that rigs from the all-transistor era which followed are not worth resurrecting. Early transistorised rigs have output transistors which are prone to failure (they were dodgy at the time), failing switches, filters going out of alignment, capacitors leaking, resistors cooking ... in fact they are something of a liability. The older ones are similar, but worth fixing thanks to the (hard to find) valves.

Then we had the arrival of surface mount technology at which stage nothing is easily repairable. Unique displays fail and replacements are not available. The chips were discontinued years ago. The switches fall apart. Everything is tiny.

Try to put these rigs on the air and you find the problems. From my point of view drift is the big drawback. These things were designed before we had JT65 and WSPR. They cannot cope. For FM they often have the wrong spacing, the wrong deviation, no CTCSS, noisy synthesisers ...

Are there no classic rigs in the modern era? Possibly the FT-847, a rig I have never owned.

I can see the idea of buying an old VHF rig. They used to be single band, and often they were much loved in their day. There is no such thing as a VHF rig now, so the old ones appeal. In general, they do not fit into the modern shack. For all the reasons above, old rigs are a problem best avoided. The VHF ones seem to be worse as technology has advanced.

They say you appreciate your own old rigs. So it is personal. Yes, my Trio JR-599 would be a classic if I still had it. Or my FT-101s. Or the TS-530 I never had. I recall the KW2000E from the radio club at the Belfast YMCA radio club, and the FT-200 in the Queen's University club. Do I want these now? No thanks.

Key factors for me now - panoramic displays, DSP filtering, ideally SDR architecture, USB digital in/out for data modes, very good frequency stability - all things unheard of in the "good ole days".

So why do these old tubs attract so much interest? Well, the shops like taking them in as trade-ins ("part exchange") and then selling them on. Magazine articles praise them but ignore the problems. Everybody is making money selling them and writing about them, so of course they say they are great. Yes, put one on your shelf. But don't expect it to be much use these days. Turn it on and take a photo with the lights on (if you can get them to work). Then turn it off and admire it. They look great. That's about it in my book.

I can see that true pre-SMD classics are great restoration projects. The repair then is the object, rather than trying to suggest that the restored rig is comparable to anything we might use today.

If there is a classic rig worth having, it was made before 1980 in my view. After that they are just bundles of heartbreak.

They do look nice though. If I wanted to live in a radio museum I would not be working much. Luckily, I want things to work as well, so that is OK by me.

There is room in this hobby for all sorts. Sure, put your old rig on the air. It is not for me though. I will watch you drift past my waterfall. If you can get your receiver to stay put you will see my truthful reply "no decode". Sorry.

73

Jim

A bit of an Es opening.

"Somehow we have so far avoided those ear-bending days on 4m where your head is spinning after working seven or eight DXCC in half-hour whirlwind of broadcast interference and huge signals. Yes, we have had the broadcast stations, but not a full opening. Not so far. Not here."


Was it only yesterday morning I wrote that on this very blog (check below if you want to read it all)?

There was a bit of an Es opening here yesterday.

Somebody somewhere was listening to my pleas. Must be "The Es Fairy".

It says something that I have not quite assimilated everything yet and only the 2m band contacts have really stuck in my mind. I still have to work out exactly what new squares and so forth I have worked. There are now 40 cards waiting in my in-box at eQSL and I have not had the time to look at them.

Firstly was this opening was on 6m, which I largely avoided due to local QRM. I did a little bit of 6m WSPR to inform me what was going on....

6m WSPR at GM4FVM on 07/06/17

That was nice enough but eventually, late in the evening, the local QRM had gone to bed and I went back on JT65...

6m JT65 contacts at GM4FVM 22:40 to 23:00 on 07/06/17

There were lots of stateside stations on but I was having a bit of a problem with the linear, plus, to be honest, I was not operating at my peak. Past my bedtime.

Most operating was done, as so often here, on 70MHz (4m band).

4m SSB contacts at GM4FVM on 07/06/17

I was pleased to work at least 2 new squares in Germany but I need to analyse it all further. I tried my
"doing the treble" trick (see here). Honestly, I forgot to do it, but a German station was complaining that he heard no 2m opening, so that reminded me!

This worked 100% on this occasion. Moving up from 6m, 4m was open and I knew which way to beam. Coming back down to 4m when 2m had closed, though a technical success, came at a time when I was exhausted. "Brain fade" I think is the modern term. Anyway, I had a pile-up to work through and ended up trying to work a Polish station twice.

Meanwhile, when I was on 2m ....

2m SSB contacts at GM4FVM on 07/06/17

Now this did make me sit up and pay attention. Nine contacts. Four new countries, Ukraine, Czech, Slovakia and Hungary, plus a new square in Poland.

2m Es is different from 4m, and totally different from 6m. It is hectic. Your best hope is exchanging callsign, report and locator as quickly and clearly as you can once. Any hanging about and the other station has faded away. The area covered is small and moves about quickly. Plus, we usually only get an hour or so of it on two or three days in any year. Before I worked out the "treble" approach I almost always missed it. So you have to make it count if you happen to find it. No wonder I was knackered after all this.

It would be easy to relax now and just analyse it all but we are off again today. 4m and 6m have been open into Europe. I spent a long time listening to Japanese stations on 6m. I worked some stations on 6m JT9 and then SSB on 4m. It seems that no recovery time is possible.

VHF contacts at GM4FVM up to 13:30 on 08/06/17

Several of you have sent me your experiences of the 7 June opening. This one from Mike GM3PPE seemed to hit the nail on the head for me ...

I have just had the most amazing opening ever on 6 meters.  Between 1827Z and 1857Z I worked WP2B, WP4JCF, VP2ETE, NP2J and PJ4NX - all about 56, giving me an average of 55.  Just astonishing.  The VP2 was calling CQ and getting no replies.  WP2B peaked a genuine 59 and worked a number of GMs!  I keep saying - just astonishing.  I missed FG4NN who was only about 44 with me and had a massive Eu pile-up calling him.  ...  I see now why they call it the "magic" band!

It just goes to show what can be done with modest equipment and a certain thirst for knowledge. Curiosity, is what I would call it, and it is well repaid when it all goes right.

Well, I guess that today's situation will be different from yesterday's. That is what makes it interesting. That is why I am curious.

73

Jim

GM4FVM (going to lie down and rest)

Making the best of Es on VHF.

With the coming of May, on this Northern Hemisphere anyway, the annual Summer Sporadic E season ("Es") cannot be far away.

There have been a couple of openings on 10 metres, with Gianfranco IU1DZZ heard here for several hours each day. So I thought it might be time to set out how I manage it. I am not going to talk about the science of the process much, and instead concentrate on the operations.

The Annual Season Starts ...
The exact start of the season varies from place to place. Being located at 56 degrees North it tends to come a bit later here than nearer the Equator. But, broadly, it runs for 8 weeks or so on either side of the Summer Solstice (22 June). I am dealing with the Summer Es season here, though there are openings around Christmas and the odd day at other times, including after auroras.

Although there have been several weak openings, my first VHF Es contact during the 2017 season was today as I write this (4 May 2017). That was a JT65 contact with EA4WO in IN80 square, at 1734km. It was followed by a QSO with CT1FJC in IM57 (2142km). Both EA and CT were showing up on 10m WSPR, which gives me a clue to where to point my 6m beam.

What follows are a series of these clues plus some hints and tips. They work for me, but of course you can just sit back and work VHF Es as it comes. Most of this has appeared in this blog before, but I am pulling it together for this posting.

It all depends which band of frequencies you use ...
The level of ionisation in the E layer will affect the degree in which any particular frequency is refracted back towards the Earth.

When ionisation rises sufficiently to bend your signal back to reach ground the band "opens". This can be quite sudden with loud signals where moments before there was nothing. Hopefully during the day the ionisation will increase and signals will get stronger. And as that happens the ionisation may rise further to allow the next band up in frequency to open. This is a "rising MUF".

As the ionisation and the MUF rise futher, this most distant contact may disappear as other closer stations are heard instead. So the A to B path is present only at a certain level of ionisation, which will vary with the frequency used. Click to enlarge the image below if that would help.

 The same thing happens in reverse, with the higher frequency bands closing in turn as the "maximum usable frequency" (MUF) falls.

At a certain frequency the signal just gets refracted back to the ground and above that frequency the higher frequency bands will be closed. It is therefore the maximum usable frequency at that time.

Since the higher frequencies require stronger ionisation, they tend to open less often. My own experience is that my favourite bands tend to open during the Es season as follows:-

10 metres - almost every day
6 metres - every 2 to 3days
4 metres - every 3 to 4 days
2 metres - two or three days per year

So, if Es occurs more often on the lower bands, why go up in frequency to wait for an opening to arrive? The answer to that question is next.

Es is always better when ionisation is weakest ...
Yes, I know. It depends what you mean by "best". If you want to fill in lots of squares in countries which are well within the longest distance possible, then "best" would mean working loads of stations. On the other hand, "best" in this sense means working the longest distance.

Rather like F-layer propagation, Es gets to the best dx when the signal is radiated as close to horizontal as possible and it is then reflected by the furthest away ionised cloud near the horizon, and reaches a similarly distant station as it completes its travel (in other words, when the transmitted frequency is just on the MUF). This path is favoured when the band has just opened or is about to close as it is then that the bending is least and you can reach maximum DX. Generally there is only one station to work then, whereas if you want loads of stations to work then pick periods when there is stronger ionisation, though paths will generally be shorter.

So longer distance is definitely "best", and shorter distances are also "best". Marvin the Paranoid Andoid would appreciate that statement. As usual, click to enlarge the photos if that would help.

But this diagram is at one frequency, what if we use that information to bad hop?

Doing the treble ...
I use the information I gather on 28MHz WSPR to look for a 50MHz opening, then if things are good there, look for 70MHz and eventually 2m. It certainly beats sitting on 2m for 363 days a year waiting for the rare openings there. It is also possible to gather information from broadcast stations on the 88 to 108MHz band.

Doing the treble for me means following the Es opening up from 50MHz to 70MHz to 144MHz, making contacts as I go. This is usually only possible in the week or so on either side of the Solstice when ionisation is at its strongest.

As, by definition, the ionisation is weaker on the higher band, you often stumble across the "best" conditions as you move up the bands. And as it 2m there are only occasional short openings then they are often "good" if you can follow them - for instance contacts from here to Belarus and Italy. Not bad for 144MHz.

Moving down the bands after the higher ones have closed produces similar effects, usually with more DX around as they have been on the lower band all along (and missing the action).

Splitting the difference ...
DXMaps is an important resource for me. However, it depends on stations reporting contacts made. PSK Reporter is similar. If everybody sits around watching blank maps and nobody calls CQ then the maps stay blank.

However, if you see an interesting contact on DXMaps, how should you proceed? Well, I try "splitting the difference". Lets us suppose that I see an Es contact reported between an OH station in Finland and an EA station in Spain. Great. I need new squares in both Finland and Spain.

Imaginary contact similar to what might be seen on DX Maps.

If I beam at LA or EA I will almost certainly hear nothing. The signal is being refracted by a cloud of ionisation in the E layer midway between the two stations. So, I need to split the distance between the stations and try to work someone off that patch of E layer.

Likely path available (white line) based on the reported contact (red line)

Maybe I do not need Italian squares so much, but that is the likely path to open.

If you doubt this idea, here is some proof ...

Actual example from 70MHz DX Maps on 3 May 2017.

If you study DX Maps you will see these points where the cloud is located on a regular basis.

You can find the estimated ionised regions during an Es opening, by square, by clicking on DX Maps MUF ES tab.

It all depends of course as to how close to me to Es patch is. In my imaginary case it is nicely positioned for a good contact into Italy. If it was closer, I might hear nothing. Ideal spacing for Es clouds for best DX is about 1000km from me, which is an arc from SE Norway through to NW France.

Do the Es clouds move ...
Who knows?

If you look at DX Maps or PSK Reporter you will see the propagation move around. It is often said that the Es clouds appear to "move" North and West. I have never seen much evidence for this. The Sun is moving relative to the Earth (actually a product of the Earth spinning once a day) and it is the energy from the Sun which causes the ionisation. This would suggest that the patches of ionisation should "move" Westward. Look for yourself, but I find that most clouds tend to be pretty well fixed.

What does move is that the variation in the ionisation causes the path you can work to change, lengthening and shortening (and widening and narrowing in the process) , and that looks pretty much like the clouds moving from our perspective.

Then again, some clouds fade and others are made as the Sun appears to move in the sky, but the new clouds are not always to the west of the earlier ones, and may be to the north or south.

What sets it off? Now there is an issue for further discussion (but not here please). It certainly is not thunderstorms over the Alps, as we once read.

Are there two peaks of propagation during the day ...
Who knows?

A couple of years ago I tried to plot out all my contacts to see if there was a two peak pattern. I found no pattern at all.

For me it is, to use the famous Scottish jury verdict, "not proven" (other countries have just guilty and not guilty, but we place people we don't like but who cannot be found guilty into a nether land of doubt and suspicion for the rest of their lives).

If it exists, I sense a vague effect between the first peak at about 11:00 to 13:00 and the second from 16:00 to 20:00 (an hour later for clock time in the UK for Summer time). I would say that this is less noticeable at the start and end of the season.

The best I could say given my experience is that during most of the season VHF Es occurs after about 10:00 and rarely after 20:00. Near the peak at the Summer Solstice Es can occur almost all day and most of the night. This is especially true towards polar regions (where it does not get dark at that time of year).

I recently saw a suggestion in a magazine that the second peak only occurs at higher ionisation levels, so for example, might occur on 6m but not on 4m when 4m is only slightly open. For a weak event it suggested that only the morning peak would occur. I see the point they are making, I just find that sometimes I only get the later one!

It is very difficult to be certain because on 6m and 4m there are many countries which do not have the bands, and there might be various phases which open into desert or ocean.

What about multi-hop Es ...
A glorious thing if you can find it. With Es being pretty rare and irregular, we all thought that multi-hop Es was more or less incredible when I was first licensed. Then came some terrible dips in the sun-spot cycle and it emerged that what we passed off as F-layer propagation now turns out to be multi-hop Es. Some of the distances can be phenomenal. Some research suggests that up to 5 hops can be involved.

 It is bound to be less prevalent as you go higher in frequency, as Es is less common. However, at 6m I have worked trans-Atlantic paths. On 4m I have been heard in Asia. I am hoping one day to work into central Asia and Japan, but those things have not occurred yet. It depends where your station is situated. You can always hope.

What about the strange openings I can hear ...
10m and 2m are world-wide amateur bands. Generally you do hear only amateur traffic on them. On 6m and 4m things are different. On 6m you can sometimes hear TV timebase signals, mostly from Russia. On 4m there are wideband FM broadcast stations from Russia, and all sorts of sounds and FM signals from countries which do not have amateur allocations there.

These are useful indications that the band is open to somewhere and perhaps the path will shorten or lengthen to bring in an amateur station.

Expect the unexpected ...
The band noise seems to fall when the band is open for Es. This can be a useful sign. Sadly it often signifies that the band is open for a single hop into somewhere with few amateurs (like the North Atlantic).

Thinking about this, and the fact that for 180 degrees round me I am surrounded by sea at the key 2000km distance, I called CQ beaming West and was answered by a station on the Azores Islands. If you look at the huge size of the Atlantic and the tiny relative size of the Azores group, you might be surprised that it was possible at all, never mind that a station would be there, tuned to 70MHz, at the time I was trying. But it happened.

Next stop, Madeira and Capo Verde? Please.

You just never know. Which is the joy of the thing.

And finally ...
Post your result to the cluster, please, so that we can see it all on DX Maps.

Have a happy Es season.

73

Jim

GM4FVM