VO-52 SAT QSO

With the IO-Ten Element Satellite antenna working so well since I put it up, I decided to have a another shot at making a video demonstrating just how easy and uncomplicated it is to be able to work the Low Earth Orbiting SSB Sat like VO-52. Hope you enjoy the video and look out for the Festive hat.

Cyber Shack

Whilst SWLing the HF bands each evening, I had a play around with Adobe PhotoShop CS2 and came up with this funky cyber shack.

I enjoy the SWL side of Ham radio just as much as actually transmitting my own signals, I like tinkering around with the PC at the same time as keeping a close watch out for interesting signals. As you can see with the above image, I had a mess with some of the filters, which is pretty straight forward enough. Basically I was just messing about and having fun whilst listening to fellow Hams.
Oh yes, I could not resist working a couple of interesting Stations at the same time.

2E0HTS CYBER CHALLANGE
I wonder how many Rigs you can spot and for those who enjoy the challenge leave the Make & model info as a comment (just for fun)

HF Mobile 60 Amp Power Source

The Toyota mobile Ham station has been working amazingly well since I knocked up the roof-bar mounted stainless steel antenna brackets. The reports and results that I've received have made me realize the benefits of running 50W /mobile into 3 meters of 50 ohm low loss coax. A nice and simple set up with low losses with a well grounded rig/antenna to the vehicle chassis combined with a modest antenna is a very effective way to put out a good signal, as I have been finding out over the past 6 years.

With the Yaesu FT100 set at 50W I can operate continuously when the vehicle engine is running, but the Toyota 2.0 Litre Petrol 4X4 needs a 45AH battery to power its creature comforts, which get a bit of a hammering during these wintry months.
So, I decided to replace the battery with something that would give me a bit more Umph, for both the Toyota and the amateur radio equipment carried on board.
I picked up a heavy duty replacement 65AH battery, which will give me a few extra amps for a lot longer. The mobile station is now at 100%, firing on all four cylinders! Listen out for 2E0HTS/M somewhere on 20M. Have a nice weekend.

Excellent Conditions provide new DXCC

With the CondX being as good as ever, I have continued making some brilliant DX QSOs on the 15M Band using the SSB Phone mode. Yesterday was very good up until dusk with a repeat of the same excellent openings today also on the 15M Band.

I have been working with my good old Yaesu FT-767GX and 50W into the Vertical Hustler 6BTV which is fitted with wire radials and is ground mounted with a 5’ foot length of 1 ½ inch, solid steel bar that protrudes from the ground 18 inches for the fixing of the antenna base. I have had the Hustler for over 5 years and find it works excellently on the higher portion of HF, especially during the day times when the F-Layer position suits the vertical angle of radiation perfectly. I find that during the evening when the F-Layer changes the three sided vertically polarized delta loop usually takes over from the straight forward vertical, giving a different angle of reflection/radiation. Again the Dipole which is totally horizontal at around 30 ft above the ground also works better in the evening but is poor during the day light hours. It’s nice to be able to switch between the three differently radiating antennas and can be very useful indeed to make the most out of the 50W that I use.

With the 15M Band been as good as it has been the 6BTV has been getting some awesome reports as well as managing to acquire a new DXCC in the log. The latest Country to be added to the list was New DXCC - Ghana - 9G5TT on 21.250 MHz, the exchange was a 5/9 report which was very nice to hear.
I worked many stations from North, South and Central America, all of which were big signals providing lengthy and interesting conversation which I really enjoyed. My log from this weekend contains quality as opposed to quantity QSOs and I hope that we can continue to enjoy the true nature of the hobby, which is making friends with fellow Hams worldwide and sharing some lovely experiences. In a nut shell “What a great time we can have when we get a little propagation”.

Here are a few of the Guys I worked during the fantastic opening on 21MHz. - VE3XN, W4TJE, K4VV, K1NIU, W2VP, W9RE, WX4TM, PY2DU, 9G5TT, W9EXY, & TI8II. I hope to get lots more nice QSO next time and in the meantime, have a great week 73!

Chipper

I was pleased to awake to the sound of an old friend taking me back thirty years to my youth. I am of course talking about the HF Chipper that I am hearing on 17M and 15 Meters making a pleasant QRM sounding woodpecker noise.

I used to hear this noise a lot back in the early 80s when propagation was very good. When State-Side signals from mobile Truckers were coming in loud on AM using simple mobile antennas and little rigs.

When I switched on this morning and heard the noise, I said to my YL Louise how conditions should be definitely on the up. Shortly after I tuned around 20m and I found signals coming in from Dominica Republic, Jamaica, India and China all before mid day. I am now making the most of the opening and at present I am active on 15m using the Hustler 6BTV and FT-767. I've just had a great QSO with Gary - VE3XN on 21.290 and right now I am tuning around the many loud signals. Hope to see you on the band somewhere over the weekend, especially now we are entering the up slope of the Solar Cycle. Happy DXing.

Graduation

As well as Ham Radio, Work and Life in general, I have been studying in service with the University of HUDDERSFIELD.  This has meant that I have spent the last two years teaching, writing papers as well as reading and researching many different types of Theorists. It's been lots of hard work, self discipline and commitment but well worth the effort when I graduated earlier receiving a Certificate in Education (PCET).

I took my YL – Louise and Mum – Janet, to the Award Ceremony, where it was a proud moment for all.
MUM and Myself

Louise took some nice pictures to put up for you to see - 2E0HTS, washed, scrubbed and gowned, which is a once in a lifetime experience!
Louise and Myself However after seeing myself in the Cap and Gown I wouldn't be at all surprised if I am found to be appearing in the next Harry Potter, Hog-warts adventure, as a Wizard or something? Hope you enjoy these pictures…

The day was extra special as the Chancellors blessing was on screen from Professor Patrick Stewart, OBE, better known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

The actual moment of Graduation

Group photo of my Tutor and Class 2007 - 2009 after our Graduation

Right thats it, time to get some Zs. Til next time....

The Bands

The past couple of mornings have been a bit frosty so I decided on the Car rather than Motor Cycle to get to work which worked out well as I've heard some great signals coming in on 20m from VK - Australia and  JA - Japan. The distant DX Stations usually start coming  through well up here from now until around late February time. I use the trusty little Toyota 4 X 4 to get through the winter months and at the same time I get more radio time in to operate my FT-100 mobile Ham Station. For the time being, the Motorcycling will be used solely for pleasure when the WX is more reasonable avoiding any unpleasant accidents.

Back in the Shack, the past two evenings have been a different story as by the time I get back from work the 20M band has closed down and 40M has not been particularly exciting either. So I have been tuning down on 80M instead and having fun working European Stations on SSB using the recently made home brew 130 ft dipole. I have been getting good reports from the dipoles performance which consists of two equal legs at 65 ft made from 2.0 mm multi stranded copper wire, which is fed with 25 feet of 350 Ohm ladder feeder, terminating at a home made choke into 50 Ohms Coaxial cable (RG58 Heavy). The radio that I have been using with the dipole on 80M is the FT-767GX from Yaesu, I worked some nice Ops such as German Club Station - DL0WER with Andy (DL1BI ) behind the Mic. Other 80M QSOs included, PA3FAO, HA6FQ & ON100PES . ON100PES is a special event Station that is celebrating 100 years since the first Belgian expedition/research station made it to the Antarctic. I always enjoy working the Club Stations and special event Call Signs that are found on the 80M band. 

Thats all for now hope to hear you somewhere on HF soon, I will be active on the SATs also as usual. 73 thanks for the visit.

PSK-31 Contacts

The past couple of nights have seen quiet conditions on 20m so I've concentrated on working a couple of satellites as well as listening around on the LF bands. I had some fun last night on PSK-31 working stations up and down Europe. Using my home brew 130ft Dipole, FT-767 interfaced to my PC and Nomic rigblaster I worked quite a few stations on 80m running qrp (30w).

Stations were coming in well on 80 meters around 3.582 lsb and I worked stations from Norway, Sweden, Germany and the UK including SM6AMU and a fellow Twitterer M0TZO - Paul. For a full transcript of the contact with Paul you can read it here on MØTZO's Blog. Twitter is proving to be a lot of fun and I'm managing to bag a few Twittering followers into my log.

Thanks to all my followers so far, hope to get many more. If you're not on Twitter you can join up here feel free to add me to find out when and where I am active on the bands.

Roof Mounted Mobile Antennas

I have always used fixed mounts on my vehicles for both HF and VHF antennas which are the boot mounted grub screw type to ensure a good ground is obtained. The only snag is the corrosion that an take place beneath the mount and not forgetting the wibble wobble whenever I opened or shut the back door.

I decided to fabricate my own mounts which would bolt to the roof bars giving an extra 5” (127mm) height above the existing mounts.
To prevent any further corrosion problems I decided to use 3mm stainless steel as the material which took a bit of drilling but easy enough at a very low RPM using a radial drill. Once I removed any burs I bent the mounts into a right angle and mounted the stainless plates as far apart as possible on the roof bar. Each of the mounts is drilled in line to match holes in the roof bar (2 holes each mount) which I bolted up tight.

The antenna mounts went on to the stainless mounts nice and straight, I fixed a short grounding wire to the locking nut on the antenna mount which I fed to a close by bolt that was connected to the vehicles chassis. The SWR was 1:1 on 20M and whilst mobile earlier this morning I made QSO with Roy – VK6MV beaming long path. Roy was 5/9 at times from Cuballing, in Western Australia coming in very well to Yaesu’s original Field Commander more commonly known as the FT-100. I recieved a 5/5 report which was excellent as I was actually mobile. I also made QSO with Estonia and Italy whilst operating /mobile with the new antenna mounts. The final result looks a lot better than the commercial mounts you see, the new mounts are solid, well grounded, neat, as well as very strong.

The Antennas pictured are 145/433MHz and 14MHz, The Vehicle is a Toyota Rav-4
Mount Is Grounded To Chassis With Short Wire

CQ WW DX

Over the weekend I celebrated 4 years of romance with my lovely YL Louise M3TLL. I first met Louise at work during the 2005 CQ World Wide DX Contest when we were involved with the STAR Centre project. Louise and I hit it off during the contest and I have managed to continue to catch the yearly contest ever since. I look forward to the CQ WW Contest every year as Louise always supports me by encouraging me to take part in the contest; it reminds her of when and how we met. I guess I am the lucky one when it comes to how we celebrate our anniversary playing radio during the CQ WW DX contest. I sure did get lucky and picked a good one there! Thanks for putting up with me Lou!

This Years CQ WW results gave me, 48 DXCC and 15 Zones.

14MHz, 21MHz, & 28MHz were worked using the FT-847 and Hustler 6BTV Vertical. Both 3.5MHz & 7MHz were worked using the FT-767 and a 135 ft Dipole. I made just over 100 QSO and gave away lots of points. Thanks to all participants and for all of the effort you all put in every year, once again I thoroughly enjoyed my anniversary.

See you next year and for those that are interested, here are the 48 DXCC and 15 Zones I worked over the weekend.

V26B- 21 MHz- ZONE 08- Antigua & Barbuda
LQ0F- 21 MHz- ZONE 13- Argentina
P40A- 21 MHz- ZONE 09- Aruba
OE5UAL- 28 MHz- ZONE 15- Austria
CU5CQ- 21 MHz- ZONE 14- Azores
8P5A- 21 MHz- ZONE 08- Barbados
OT5P- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 14- Belgium
AA4V/VP9/P- 21 MHz- ZONE 05- Bermuda
E73M- 28 MHz- ZONE 15- Bosnia Hercegovina
ZV5E- 21 MHz- ZONE 11- Brazil
LZ9W- 21 MHz- ZONE 20- Bulgaria
VE2IM- 14 MHz- ZONE 02- Canada
VY2ZM- 7 MHz- ZONE 05- Canada
VC3O- 14 MHz- ZONE 04- Canada
EA8MT- 21 MHz- ZONE 33- Canary Is
EE9K- 28 MHz- ZONE 33- Ceuta & Melilla
9A7A- 28 MHz- ZONE 15- Croatia
P33W- 21 MHz- ZONE 20- Cyprus
OL7R- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 15- Czech Republic
HI3K- 21 MHz- ZONE 08- Dominican Republic
RM3Q- 21 MHz- ZONE 16- European Russia
DF0HQ- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 14- Federal Republic of Germany
OG5B- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 15- Finland
F8AKC- 28 MHz- ZONE 14- France
FY5KE- 21 MHz- ZONE 09- French Guiana
4LOA- 21 MHz- ZONE 21- Georgia
OX2A- 21 MHz- ZONE 40- Greenland
HG1S- 7 MHz- ZONE 15- Hungary
IR4X- 21 MHz- ZONE 15- Italy
UP6P- 21 MHz- ZONE 17- Kazakstan
HB0/HB9AON- 7 MHz- ZONE 14- Liechtenstein
LY8O- 21 MHz- ZONE 15- Lithuania
CR3L- 7 MHz- ZONE 33- Madeira
ER4DX- 21 MHz- ZONE 16- Moldova
CN3A- 21 MHz- ZONE 33- Morocco
PJ2T- 21 MHz- ZONE 09- Netherlands Antilles
PI4DX- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 14- Netherlands
SP3GEM- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 14- Poland
YR1C- 21 MHz- ZONE 20- Romania
GM6NX- 7 MHz- ZONE 14- Scotland
YT7R- 28 MHz- ZONE 15- Serbia
YT7R- 7 MHz- ZONE 15- Serbia
OM8A- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 15- Slovakia
S53S- 7 MHz- ZONE 15- Slovenia
ED5T- 28 MHz- ZONE 14- Spain
V48M- 21 MHz- ZONE 08- St. Kitts and Nevis
FS/K1XM- 21 MHz- ZONE 08- St. Martin
HB9AAP- 14 MHz- ZONE 14- Switzerland
9Y4D- 14 MHz- ZONE 09- Trinidad & Tobago
W9RE- 21 MHz- ZONE 04- U.S.A.
K1TTT- 3.5 MHz- ZONE 05- U.S.A.

Model Tower 2

I had a go at making a slightly different mini tower and yagi out of TIG welding wire and this is what I came up with.



The tower is two sections with a six element yagi antenna that can be rotated 360º simply by hand. The model is made by myself from 3.2mm TIG welding wire which has been built using the MIG welding process. As usual it was fun making it and there is no doubt that I will be fettling up some other project soon. Hope you like it!

IO-10Ele Performance Test On AO-51 & VO-52 Satellites

Since I last blogged about the latest tweak with the modified IO-10Element 145/435 dual band Sat Yagi, I've been watching out for AO-51 and VO-52 in order to continue testing the latest antenna. The performance is proving to be excellent both the AO-51 & VO-52 down links have been coming in loud and clear, I have made plenty of QSOs this week after work in the evening. Its been a lot of fun, I am addicted again h.i.

List of Stations and which Satellite was worked to make the qso with latest
IO-10 dual band Sat Antenna.

VO-52 * 2M1EUB/P *11/10/09 * 1950 * 432 * J3E * 59 55 * Scotland
VO-52 * SP9UNU *11/10/09 * 1954 * 432 * J3E * 59 59 * Poland
VO-52 * SP5MG *11/10/09 * 1956 * 432 * J3E * 59 59 * Poland
AO-51 * MWOBBU *12/10/09 * 1825 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * Wales
AO-51 * MOITF *12/10/09 * 1827 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * England
AO-51 * EB1HBW *12/10/09 * 1828 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * Spain
VO-52 * EB1DGH *12/10/09 * 2147 * 432 * J3E * 59 59 * Spain
AO-51 * MOJMO *13/10/09 * 1748 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * England
AO-51 * GOFGX *13/10/09 * 1750 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * England
AO-51 * LX1BB *14/10/09 * 1710 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * Luxembourg
AO-51 * EA4CYQ *14/10/09 * 1844 * 144 * F3E * 55 59 * Spain
AO-51 * EA1BAO *14/10/09 * 1847 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * Spain
AO-51 * EA3LX *15/10/09 * 1807 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * Spain
AO-51 * EA5SR *15/10/09 * 1807 * 144 * F3E * 59 59 * Spain
AO-51 * FOFIG *15/10/09 * 1810 * 144 * F3E * 59 55 * France
VO-52 * EB1BAO *15/10/09 * 2105 * 432 * J3E * 59 59 * Spain
VO-52 * IW6OVD *15/10/09 * 2108 * 432 * J3E * 59 59 * Italy

2E0HTS IO-10EL 145-435 Satellite Antenna

Being content with something is often easier said than done when it comes to Antennas, yes you guessed more messing with the Satellite beam.
In the past, the FM Satellite signals that I have received have been very weak compared to the portable outdoor ARROW Antenna.
The SSB SATs such as VO-52 & FO-29 have always been stronger and much easier to work compared with the FM Birds whilst using the IOIo Antenna.
I have been using the FT-847 Noise Reduction and DIG Filter to assist in pulling out the voices from the FM hiss but still have had a struggle on my hands with most passes.

I had another look at my A430S10 Yagi and decided to fix it above the 145 IO Beam using 30mm wooden spacers at a fixed 30º elevation. I have tried 15º, 20º and 45º elevation fixed in the past and have found 30º to be the best compromise. The Compact IO 145 Loop out performed a 4Ele Yagi, I just need an edge on the IO 435 loop. The 10Ele was the answer! A more accurate aim is required which I have now mastered.

The combined antenna is working better than expected, it seems like this time I got it right, I am now in the position to be able to hear the FM SATs – AO-51 & SO-50, loud and clear in the shack on the FT-847.
Since Installation, I have made plenty of QSO on AO-51 including a first Satellite QSO for M0JMO – Josh, earlier this evening as well as lots of other successful contacts into EU and up and down the UK.

RESULT! The FM SATs can now be worked from inside a warm shack as well as out in the cold on the QRP ARROW set up.

The new IO-10 145/435 is now very effective on VO-52, my downlink signal is up at 5/9 on all passes between 2º - 60º, and I can get into VO-52 at a distance of 1700 miles with a good signal back to IO93CU.

Catch you on the “Birds” 73

Mobile HF DXing

The weather is once again lousy here in N.England so I decided to leave riding the Motor Cycle at home today and drive to work instead. On my return journey back home from work, I came across a nice 5/9+20 signal on 20M which belonged to K7ZSD - Brad, who is located 25 miles N.W of Portland, Oregon in the US.
I listened to Brad - K7ZSD working Stations all over Europe as I drove home and decided to give him a call from my mobile Station which worked out great. Brad came straight back to me with a 5/5 report and very good sounding audio from my trusty FT-100. When I got back home I checked Brads call sign on QRZ.com and released why Brad sounded like he was sat with me in my vehicle! Here is Brads - K7ZSD ham station tower array which is so impressive I thought you guys would like to see it.

VO-52 Satellite Video

Check out the latest 2E0HTS Satellite video filmed by my YL Louise-M3TLL.

This video is aimed at newcomers to the SSB Satellites and shows me using a home made IOIo antenna and a Yaesu FT-847 making Contact with IK3VZS-Italy and LY3L-Lithuania. Both contacts are made on SSB via Earth Orbiting Amateur Satellite - VO-52 and are worked from my home location in N.England.
VO-52 was launched on the 5th of May 2005 from Sirharkota (India) and is still performing very well.