BARC’s field day preparation to be hosted at Oakwood school.
Meeting video
Get ready as it looks like the 2023 Hurricane season has started with a vengeance! We have two named tropical storms developing in the Atlantic now. The rains are starting to come our way reminding us of past storms, so get ready! Field day is a readiness exercise and we need to be there for our community should the bad things happen. Get your HT’s out and re-learn how to program them. Get them charged and find the extra batteries. How about HF readiness? How about a “to go bag?” How about food, water, clothes, first aid kit etc… Come out and join the fun at FD and brush up on your communication skills or learn something new.
As of May 3, 2023, all amateur radio operators must evaluate their station for RF exposure and keep this form in your records in case of a FCC audit. It’s on the honor system but all it takes is one person reporting your antenna and the FCC may check if you did your evaluation or not.
There are links below for a calculator to figure out your home system. If you want to geek out as hams do and want more in depth explanation of things as well as a walk through on the calculator, Ria N2RJ (formerly of ARRL) has a YouTube video explaining it all. Since there is some question regarding dBi versus dBd with antennas, I have also included another video of Ria actually explaining this difference. I made a note when these things start so you don’t have to sit through it all if you don’t want to.
Well, you may have missed the best picnic ever! It was the first “The BARC -n- The PARC” picnic held on Saturday 4/29/23 at 11am at the Clark’s Neck Fire Department building between Washington and Greenville. The master grillers were Gary and Jorge that did a fine job grilling the hot dogs and hamburgers over a real charcoal grill. Delicious!
Sides were provided by too many to list here but are all thanked for their efforts to make this a success. About 30 people were in attendance and a lot of rag chewing went on between the members of the two clubs. We started with Queso and chips, moved on to coleslaw, potato salad, baked beans, cornbread, salad, and many other dishes that filled the plates to the very edge.
Then you cannot forget the deserts like fresh Key Lime Pie, a delicious apple bake, cookies of all descriptions and cakes. I cannot remember all the items as a food fog set in after I was full! Many drinks were brought to wash down the great picnic. A great time was had by all and we hope to do it again. Thanks to Beth and Gary for organizing it and to all that came with or without food and made it a success. 73 N4PVH.
My name is Pete Wene, WA5T, and I am the Trustee for the 146.685 2 meter repeater owned and operated by the E.N.C. Repeater Inc…..fondly referred to as the “Grifton 2 meter Repeater.” As you may or may not know, the repeater has not been operating optimally for several years now. We lost our receive antenna thus limiting its operational range/footprint. It currently receives off a ¼ wave coax stub. The ENC has purchased a new antenna and has it on hand, also we have a new repeater. controller, and link radio to replace the old equipment currently installed on the WNCT/WITN TV Tower in Grifton.
The receive antenna is at the 1600 foot level and per the tower owners it takes specially qualified individuals with a $5 million bond to work on the tower.
So here is our dilemma…..we have not been able to find anyone qualified to do the tower work within our limited budget. The last quote we got was for $2500…..one day’s work. The E.N.C. Repeater Inc has a very limited bank account, which would be depleted in less than one day. Due in part to COVID and limited budget we have not been able to make the necessary repairs. We want to move forward with this project as soon as we can.
Over the past several years our membership has dwindled significantly. To help offset the cost of doing all the work we are soliciting donations from all clubs in Eastern North Carolina as well as trying to increase our member base. An increased membership base will help in the out years but our need is now. Any help would be most appreciated and go a long way to service the Eastern North Carolina Amateur Radio community and provide an emergency service asset. Membership applications as well as donations can be sent directly to our Secretary/Treasurer David Burt, 1425 Harris Ct., Cary, NC 27511
Membership in the ENC Repeater Inc has minimal involvement at best. We hold one meeting a year to elect officers and board members, usually in the spring, and one for a cook-out gathering in the fall. Attached is a membership application. Please see this email gets the widest dissemination. If you have any question please email me.
73, Peter M. Wene, WA5T
President KARS VP WCAR ENC Trustee Member SCARS Member NBARC
Please fill out the application and send in as much as you can afford to support the repair of one of the most available repeaters in Eastern NC.
Here is a list of things coming up this year that are of general interest… Please send me any items not on this list. Please participate in as many things as you can. It is your Amateur Radio Club! (Not listing regular meetings, board meetings and breakfast meetings as they are on a schedule already). See Contest Calendar for scheduled contests.
So, what do you do on a rainy Saturday? Go bother another ham at his shack! I bothered two of them! I stopped by Doug K4ROK’s shack and changed his microphone cables to new ones then drove to Dave’s W4EJ and saw his new K4 set up. What a blast it is! In the process of checking his work bench out, I spotted some older rotary antenna switches connected to his radios. Why would Dave have these old antenna switches connected to his new K4? It turns out they are about 90-100 dBm separation between connectors. It virtually totally isolates the different antenna inputs from each other. I asked about what he did with the older Alpha-Delta switches he used to have and he had removed them, placing them in a box. Looking in the box, there were two types of 4 port antenna switches present, one Alpha-Delta-4 and one MFJ-1704.
A-Delta4-SwitchMFJ-1704-Switch
I asked what was the difference between the two, other than price, as they have the same form factor. Dave decided to show me how to test the separation between the channels.
Step one: turn on the spectrum analyzer, connect one end of the two leads to the scope and the other ends together, shorting out the two leads. Turn the calibration to Zero.
Turn Cal-to-zero
Disconnect the two leads from each other and then connect them to the input and output of the switch.
Input and output connected to the switch
Turn the switch selector to the connected input, then turn it to one of the other open ports to see the difference in the signal (should drop as there is no signal). This was also true when the open ports were open or shorted out with shunts on them all. Theoretically if there was total isolation, when the selector switch is connected to the input wire, there should be a zero reading. When the selector switch is turned to an open input, there should be no signal (only background noise of the machine).
Here are the results:
MFJ-1704 connected to inputMFJ-1704 connected to open port (53dBm)
For the MFJ-1704 switch there was a 53dBm separation of the two ports, more than adequate to keep two antenna inputs from mixing in the switch causing interference.
Delta-4 connected to inputDelta-4 connected to open port
The Alpha Delta-4 switch had a separation that put the signal below the noise floor of the instrument (unmeasurable) or less than 75dBm on this set up. Now this is SEPARATION! As you can see, you may have to pay for quality to get the separation you need to get a clean signal into your Elecraft K4, a radio that can hear and detect the difference. If I had a poorer quality radio, it may not make that much of difference as the radio cannot detect and reach the noise floor of the switch anyway, a version of the radio being a little deaf so that the interference from the switch on the signal is not detected.
The older rotary style antenna switch that Dave was using had “N” type connectors on it. The center connector was connected to one of the 6 output connectors by only connecting the center pin of the N connector to the output and not touching anything else achieving the high degree of separation. Makes you think about the quality of the equipment you purchase may limit your station’s ability to communicate. Each piece of the radio frequency path can have significant effects. Every decision about which switches, which connectors to use (N vs VHF), the quality of the cables, the radio and antenna all have significant effects on the ability of your station to communicate effectively.
Front
Happy hunting for high quality parts at a bargain! 73 Peter.
BARC is reviving the breakfast meetups. Thirteen hams and a few spouses gathered in the side room at Great Harvest Bread Co Saturday morning. We have some long-time hams in the group and collectively there was at least 300 years of radio experience in the room. We shared our ham histories, reconnected with old friends, discussed some brushes with royalty, and of course discussed antennas and operating too. A good time was had by all, and we are looking forward to next month’s meet up.
Keep 9am of your second Saturday mornings open and watch for updates as the location is not fixed. Check the Facebook group: W4AMC-Friends for details as they become available.
About a month ago I was invited to go to Snowshoe, West Virginia to go skiing for an extended week end with 4 other guys. I jumped at the chance as I had never been there.
I looked back and the last time I went skiing was 7 years ago. Time is not your friend. My diet is not my friend (gained a few pounds!). Age is not your friend as stamina and core strength is waning. Now you are going to hurtle down an icy slope on skis and hope not to hurt yourself in pursuit of 4 ski maniacs… I did manage to get away scott free from injury! I did take an afternoon off and went sightseeing the area and drove by the Green Bank Observatory, stopping in to check it out. This area is near the center of the very large area called “The radio free zone” where two way transmitters are not allowed. Within 3 miles not even your HT and Cell Phone are allowed! When taking a tour of the facility, they put your cell phone, iWatch and digital cameras into a Faraday cage mounted in a diesel van that has no ignition noise. All this to suppress the electronic noise of the personal equipment. They are dead serious about RFI noise suppression! This radio free zone is subdivided into 3 areas depending on proximity to the radio telescopes. Here is the largest zone (WV, VA, MD):
The area has no TV or Radio station broadcasts, no cell towers either as this very large antenna is trying to pick up signals from distant galaxies and find the hydrogen line signal looking for civilizations and the presence of water and other elements. It is in a valley with 2000′ hills on all sides providing shielding from radio interference from outside the zone.
They have interference monitors that are sensitive. A story was told on the bus by the driver that also works at the site. He said that one day the ski lift operator got a phone call from the observatory that stated he had a person on the lift that had a high power radio on him (possibly a HT). The lift operator replied that he has hundreds of people around him, how would he know who it was? The answer was “he is right next to you and just got off the lift”. The lift operator went over to the skier and stated that he had just gotten a strange phone call, did he have a radio on his person. The skier stated of course I do here it is! It was turned off immediately. The ski lift is about 10-15 miles away from the antenna.
The original 300′ dish was in service for 27 years but failed due to metal fatigue in 1988. The plans were made to replace it with a dish that was much larger and had active panels that can redirect the signal (re-focus) the entire 2209 panels to an accuracy of the thickness of two widths of a human hair. The dish is 110 x 100 meters wide and can hold an entire football field in the dish. The sensing tower is 30% higher than the Statue of Liberty. This structure can make one revolution in about 9 minutes and reaches 85% of the sky. It took 10 years to build and was completed in 2000 and placed into service costing about $100 million. The observatory has 18 other dishes and antenna arrays spread out over the large campus. One is directly connected to the University of NC at Chapel Hill. Many projects are ongoing including SETI (looking for extra terestrial life, measuring the effect of our missile launch to hit the asteroid coming by Earth, and many other interesting projects.
Funding is mostly through the Science Foundation but the federal involvement has been cut back to 60% so they have to scramble to find paying projects to support the yearly budget of about $15 million/year. It is so typical that our government builds a fantastic installation at great cost but then cuts the budget to support it later. They let the observatory staff scramble to maintain the equipment so that it does not fail like the first one did. The benefit of an instrument like this is only measured in the future when we make discoveries like the first black hole in Sagittarius (in the middle of our galaxy). Or how about measuring the effect of our missile explosion on an asteroid that was passing by earth. The measurements of this experiment will help planetary defence against a large asteroid hitting earth and causing mass extinction as what happened to the dinosaurs in the past. Just understanding the universe and what happens to stars like our sun would change the way we see the world.
We all gain benefit eventually from research done well and I encourage you to see it for yourselves and contact your representatives with the idea that they need to support more research in all fields.
It was an afternoon well spent and I walked away with a new found admiration for the engineers, workmen, scientists and all the support staff keeping this running and discovering new things. Keep up the good work. I had to buy something in the gift shop:
For those that missed it, it was fun and had good food. Awards were handed out, stories told, and appetites satisfied. A total of about 15 members were there while 4 more were on zoom. Next year you all need to make a commitment to come and bring a dish. The Immanuel Baptist Church meeting room was ample space and a good place to have the event, thank you Mark for getting the room and all those that came with a dish. They were excellent. Merry Christmas to all.
Drone Show at Washington airport.
December 17th was the first Drone show. There is a real push to get the drone industry started here in eastern NC. Training pilots, establishing factories to build them and software industry to control them is hoped to get established here. There were “full scale” airplanes, a noon time aerobatic show, Radio control airplane demonstrations and many vendors or booths to visit to see how the technology is maturing. Some photos…
Special vehicle with pneumatic tower for the antennas, the control and the video feeds were coming from the drones.
Search and rescue organizations use expensive drones to find people. Their drone was made in Japan (DJI) and had four sets of stereo cameras, one on each side, to detect obstacles and avoid collisions. They could however use Amateur radio help in being able to cover areas bigger than 2 miles as that is as far as their assigned HT’s can go. We could help them communicate farther than 2 miles with other frequencies or repeaters. Ideas anyone?
The multiple types of drones were interesting. Drone plans are available that you can 3D print the parts and assemble them yourself. This is a modular idea where different functional modules can be snapped onto the bottom for different purposes. Cameras, ground penetrating radar, drop box to drop fish food and many more multipurpose modules can be attached.
Some drones took off the ground with electric motors on the booms and then, when in the air, the gas engine in the back would start and push the airplane into flying mode. The electric motors would then stop and the plane would fly like a normal airplane carrying whatever payload in the belly of the body for hours. It would fly automatically and then return to the takeoff site. It would then transition to vertical landing by turning on the electric vertical motors and stopping the gas engine. This would stop forward motion and land vertically. The orange drone takes off vertically then turns horizontal flying a programmed path taking very high resolution photos. Landing is just the reverse. Horizontal flight with wings is much more efficient and makes the batteries last longer.
Some drones are “tethered” or tied to a box on the ground by a cable. This sounds crazy. Why would you tether a drone? Some applications of this technology may want a platform in the sky to hold cameras and other sensors at an altitude and stay there for days on end. The cable brings power to the drone and it does not need a pilot to fly it as it goes only straight up or down like an elevator. With high resolution cameras, they can monitor very large areas and see smaller areas that could use more scrutiny and send out a mobile drone to that area only. For amateur radio, we could use it to hoist a temporary antenna or repeater to a great height that we would otherwise need a tower. This would be perfect for emergency communication use in a disaster. Of course we need this!
Many educational institutes are starting educational programs like STEM education, flight school, drone engineering and software writing. Any drone that weighs more than 250 grams will need flight training to get certification to fly these larger birds. The FAA was present as was the Coast Guard.
This was the first drone show and it was free. It is interesting which frequencies they want to use (looking at 2.4 – 5 GHz). We need to keep a look out as to what is happening to the frequency spectrum to be able to defend our spectrum! Maybe we can be part of the conversation and help steer the direction that this is going. Keep a good lookout! 73 Peter.
Software based Oscilloscope
If you listen to the “Amateur Radio Workbench” podcast, they frequently make reference to how many purchases they entice each other to make on the show, things that they did not know they needed! I was a victim of this enticement and used their discount coupon to buy an “Analog Discovery2” from Digilent. It is a software based oscilloscope, signal generator and much more. You have to see it to understand the trouble shooting you can do with this tool. You can test circuits, design electric circuits and find logic problems in electronics. I just got the box and unpacked it. Here are the parts. You download the manual and the software (runs on PC, Mac, Linux). It is quite something. I am just learning the tool. and will post more info as I learn how to use this.
Oliver Dully, K6OLI, serves as District Emergency Coordinator for ARES LAX Northeast, which provides amateur radio communications backup for 911 receiving hospitals in northeastern Los Angeles County. Operators with ARES LAX Northeast use innovative technologies like Winlink with VARA HF, VARA FM, Packet and AREDN mesh, for example, to provide amateur radio solutions for the complex communications demands of medical facilities when commercial options may have been compromised.
He is one of the initiators of the VARA FM Winlink Autobahn connecting Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.
Oliver has authored several popular Winlink Quick Guides for Packet and VARA FM.
He also coordinates the Winlink Did-you-feel-it (DYFI) project, a Winlink Development Team collaboration with the United States Geological Survey. In his role as Forms Manager for the Winlink Development Team Oliver coordinates the creation and management of Winlink forms.
With his radio friends Oliver enjoys supporting events like races and charity events. Oliver and Tran K6NHI live in Pasadena, CA.
Wald, D. J., V. Quitoriano, and O. Dully (2021), Amateur radio operators help fill earthquake donut holes, Eos, 102,https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EO155013 . Published on 22 February 2021.
Quick Setup Guide: VARA FM 4.x.x (2022-November)Quick Setup Guide: VARA FM 4.x.x By Oliver K6OLI Last Update Special thanks go to Scott KI6SC, Martin HB9AUR, Keith KD6PYD, Brian KM6IGY, Jeff W2JCL, Tom KN6BKT, Mike KM6KAQ, Jim KM6TGJ (SK), Ken KI7EIH, Scott NS7C and Denis K0TX for your testing, for your suggestions, insights and encourageme…bit.ly
Quick Setup Guide: Packet Soundmodem (K6OLI)Quick Setup Guide: Packet Soundmodem (K6OLI) Last Update , Mike KM6KAQ, Scott KI6SC, Brian KM6IGY, Lew AC6LS, Keith KD6PYD, Jim KM6TGJ, Ken KI7EIH, Joe AH0A, Tom N5TW, Mike XE2/N6KZB, Scott NS7C, Roger K6WXD and Denis K0TX for testing, for your suggestions, insights and encouragement….bit.ly
Quick Setup Guide: IC-7100 VARA FM, UZ7HO & VARA HFQuick Setup Guide: IC-7100 VARA FM, UZ7HO & VARA HF By Oliver K6OLI Last update , Jeff W2JCL and Robert WY7AA for testing, for your suggestions, insights and encouragement. Table of Contents Table of Contents 1 VARA FM Winlink Settings 3 VARA FM Modem Setup 4 VARA FM Setup 4 VARA F…bit.ly
Presentations:
Great ShakeOut 2021 – Winlink Did-you-feel-it in Action: https://youtu.be/EYuTQv85rjk Published on 19 November 2021
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