21 December 06
Feld Hell and Friends
Last Friday marked a momentous event in the history of ham radio — the FCC declared that knowledge of Morse Code will no longer be necessary in obtaining any level of ham license. This move has been long forthcoming, especially since many other countries in the past few years have abandoned the Morse requirement. My initial reaction to this news was a bit of guilt, followed by relief: my campaign to learn Morse Code has gotten sidetracked these past few months. The FCC decree goes into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register, and from that time on all I’ll have to do is pass a multiple-choice theory and practice of operations exam to get on the air on the high frequency bands (30 Mhz and below).
What I’m immediately interested in is some of the digital keyboarding modes. These take advantage of the digital signal processing capabilities of modern computers’ sound cards. One hooks up the computer to the audio input and output of the transceiver, and types away at the computer to send digital signals over the air. The advantage of these digital modes, and for that matter Morse Code, over voice is that they work very well with weak signals.
There are many of these digital modes in use — some new, for instance PSK31, which has gotten quite popular, dates back to 1999, and some quite old. One of these, Hellschreiber, goes back to 1929 in Germany. It is essentially a fax mode, where one transmits an image of the text one types out, the characters getting encoded into a 49-pixel matrix. It was originally used over landlines and over radio, the latter version termed Feld Hell (Field Hell).
The name Hellschreiber comes from that of the inventor, Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell, who turns out to have had a very long and interesting career. He died in 2002 at the age of 100. He eventually got interested in typesetting, and in 1964 invented the first digital typesetting system called the Digiset. His company in 1990 merged with Linotype to form Linotype-Hell AG, a corporate name which seems to have lasted until 1996 when Heidelberg took them over and spun off Linotype as a subsidiary.
25 July 06
Saskatchewan to Lake Elsinore
It’s been too hot to play with radios outside (Saturday it got up to 44 degrees C) so I have been doing some AM broadcast band DXing with my little Sony 7600G world band receiver. In radio parlance DXing means to try to listen to distant signals for their own sake. At nighttime AM band signals can carry quite far because they bounce off the ionosphere. So tuning around with even an ordinary AM radio can pull in some surprises. The best catches so far have been CBC Radio One at 540 kHz coming from Saskatchewan (the program at the time was “Northern Lights”) and XEPE (“Cash 1700”) broadcasting at 1700 kHz from Tijuana (though aimed at Southern California). The latter is the broadcaster for the Lake Elsinore Storm, the Single-A minor league team in the California League for the San Diego Padres. As I write this they are losing 3-2 to the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.
9 July 06
Antenna Birding
I have my portable antenna set up near the vegetable garden, tuned to 6 meters. Having figured out the guy cord system, I’m more inclined to leave it set up for a while. But this means it’s a good perching spot for birds, the antenna elements being up about 16 feet or so. Today we had a western kingbird on it. What will be next?
23 June 06
Amateur Radio On The Football Pitch
I now have a reason to root for Ukraine (who joins Sweden, Holland, and Australia in my list of underdog favorites). One of their starting midfielders, Serhiy Rebrov, is a radio amateur. His callsign is UT5UDX and he likes to work radio contests using Morse code. He scored the second goal in Ukraine’s rout of Saudi Arabia four days ago. Ukraine now pairs off against Switzerland, the winner of lackluster Group G.
18 June 06
Garden Portable
I’ve just made a major upgrade to my ham radio gear, going from having only a handheld transceiver to a 100 W mobile HF rig with a portable antenna system. For now I’m setting this up near the garden. There is a group called HFPack that specializes in portable radio systems; what I’m doing is hardly as adventurous as most of their efforts but I’m calling this my garden portable setup.
Until I take my general license exam (not until I finish learning Morse code), I can’t get on HF bands, but I can now play on 6 meters (between 50 and 54 Mhz in frequency). This is exciting because if the ionosphere is cooperative, there is the chance to work some pretty distant stations, and the period around the solstices is the best time to do this. No such luck today though.
12 June 06
In The Field With The World Cup
I’m coming up with creative ways to follow the World Cup, not being one who can watch every match on TV. When Pica went into town yesterday to watch Mexico-Iran, I headed south on my bike to do my bird survey. No problem, the match was being broadcast on ABC Channel 10. I can pick up the audio for that on my radio by tuning to 197.75 Mhz. I managed to catch 3 of the 4 goals that way, in between looking for house sparrow nests. The commentary wasn’t that enlightening but it sufficed.
4 June 06
The Letter G, The Number 5
I’m a little bit more than halfway through the project of learning the 43 main characters in the Morse code set. I’m now working on adding the number 5. In the Koch method which I’m using, you add a character at a time to the set you already know and practice with the new set until you reach an accuracy of 90%. It’s interesting how adding just a single character causes my overall accuracy to drop and I have to go through a whole new round of practice, rewiring a few neurons.
It is now worthwhile for me to listen to and try to copy real live Morse code conversations. It has to be pretty slow code for me to have any success at all, and since I have many more characters to learn I expect a lot of trouble. It is good practice though. Today on 10 meters I was hearing a couple of operators having a good long ragchew sending slow code. It was heartening—they must both be beginners.
25 May 06
New Use For Health Plan Documents
They make good pads for Morse code practice. At least the blank bits do—Section 400 of this one (Eligibility, Enrollment, and Termination) has 12 pages of dense text and I can only squeeze in one row of practice groups at the bottom. I wonder how many of these 90 page documents go straight to the recycling bin.
16 May 06
Fishing For Zambia
Pica’s garden has turned into a amenable place to do radio. I’ve strung my 15-foot speaker wire antenna through the almond tree and hooked it up to my little Sony shortwave radio. A favorite shortwave pastime is to try to pull in signals from the far corners of the world. A good time to do this is at dawn or dusk, as the terminator, the border on the face of the earth between day and night, is a good path for radio propagation. Yesterday, at 0320 UTC on 4910 KHz, I was pretty sure I heard Radio Zambia, at least according to my database. The signal was there again this evening—very cool.