ON5ZO – OQ5M

I just opened my mailbox and was shocked to see ‘P43JB SK’. I could not call CQ, be it in a contest or on the WARC bands, and Joop would call me.

I met him in person in Friedrichshafen 2005 or 2006. We both attended the BCC Contest Dinner. It was a hot evening and a lot of people went outside for some fresh air. There we met and started talking about who knows what. Contesting, DX and antennas for sure. I remember him as a warm, open friendly guy. While we were chatting, his wife was taking pictures left and right.

A couple of weeks later, there was an envelope in my mailbox. He had a picture of us both printed and mailed it to me. I didn’t ask for the picture to be taken, I never asked for the picture to be sent to me. He just did it. The picture has been on the shack’s wall ever since. In fact, it’s even the only picture that is there (don’t have any other ‘famous ham shots’). I always was glad to work him and say a quick hello. That’s what our hobby is all about.

Thanks a lot P43JB for the 45 CW QSO in the last ten years. RIP OM Joop!

Sometimes a bad performance still yields a surprising result. My IARU Championship performance in 2011 was NOT good, in fact it was pathetic to my own set standards. A boring contest too because of the lack of DX. It was the turning point of bad versus less bad / good propagation. The results are out and indeed on a global scale my ranking stinks. But what if we look to CW only HP in ITU zone 27? Yes, number one. No big deal. It seems that there were no real competitors, mostly casual participants. And only 10 in total… Too bad the certificates for the IARU contests for Belgian participants are never signed by the national organisation’s president (UBA). I have a few of them but the signature lacks.

Sometimes you discover nice QSL cards in a big stack, cards that bring back memories. Sometimes you discover a lot of bad QSL cards in a big stack. Not in log, bad date, bad mode.

Sometimes ON4BHQ links to a bargain. This time he points out that the ALS-1300 seems to have dropped in price as quoted on a German distributor’s site. Less than 2600 Euro for 1200W solid state / no tune is a good price-to-power ratio. Too bad quite a few reviews on eHAM say it stinks. No sign of the ACOM 800W SS amp so far either… Speaking of which: maybe it’s not good to be an early adopter. Let the masses discover the design flaws and buy a revised model later on.

Sometimes you just got to have patience and process another few hundred QSL cards.

The new year 2012 is gearing up but things have been slow in the ham radio department. I chased a second hand bargain price solid state amp last week but since the seller lives more than 90 minutes away from here one way, I just couldn’t get there before the weekend. First come, first served. Bye bye amp.

I did a final inspection of the tower and rotator on Friday and got a kind helping hand (in fact a pair of them) to put it back on track on Saturday. It was pretty cold but sunny and dry. I had to climb up two times and put on gloves the second time. The aluminium was so cold! And I really don’t like climbing towers.

I also collected three years worth of ‘buro QSL’. Three shoe boxes. Not for infant beach slippers, no: adult boots size 45. I’ve already done 2/3^rd of one box. That’s almost 700 confirmed QSO that need to be QSL’ed. For 2/3^rd of the smallest box so in the end it’ll be a few thousand *sigh*.

I loved QSL when I started in the hobby. Everyone remembers the first DX cards.  Over the years I’ve come to hate it. It costs money and even worse: a lot of time. Face it: almost all of our QSL cards are stored away in boxes, cases, cabinets etc. And what do we do with it? With LotW no sane person still sends actual cards to the ARRL, does he? If I ever need to retrieve a card for say Nebraska on 10m CW, I’ll need to go through ALL cards to find it. Knowing Murphy a few thousand cards will pass through my hands then.

I admit that it is a part of our hobby. Another legacy from a previous century, just like the antique CW that I love so much. So now I’m filling up the second plastic box (yup, this one) to put it back into the storage room. I remember the day that Scott W4PA (the world’s most read contest blog before he quit the scene out of the blue) wrote about throwing away thousands of QSL cards. All his cards into the bin, all at once. Good riddance! He coined the term ‘blasphemy’ and I felt like that when I read it so I will never throw away all those cards – for now. Gosh, it’s more than three years already that W4PA’s contesting log burned out. How time flies!

Back to the pile of QSL. The plan was to use GlobalQSL: upload ADIF, click here and click there – done. And pay over 100 US$ per 1000 cards. That will cost me a few hundred Dollars for this QSL-batch. Alternative is buy the cheapest of the cheap cards from UX5UO (who offers very good price/quality). Why buy full cover glossy cards when they end up in boxes never to see the light again? The price of the QSL cards is in favour of UX5UO, but then I need to buy labels, print them and stick then on the cards. More work! As if they smelled it, ON5UR QSL Print Service sent out a promo-mail today announcing even nicer cards. Max ON5UR’s cards are VERY nice and ultra high quality  but too expensive for me to buy them – on principle. My card only ends up in your box never to be seen again, right?

I’ll just plough my way through the three boxes and see how many cards I need. Then decide what to do. Some people knit a sweater next to the fireplace, I just process the QSL you sent me. No, I don’t throw them in the fireplace.  :)

This time the beast has been given a name: Andrea. She even makes watefalls run uphill. Last night was bad. Overnight the wind picked up speed. But this morning around 10.40 local time the sky turned black and there was a roaring noise. I went upstairs into the shack to look through the window and check the tower and antennas. My stomach turned upside down. Hail, rain, thunder and hurricaine-ish winds. The mast had turned another 90° and while noticing this, there was a strong gust that swang the yagi and dipole another 90° live as I was watching. Total offset from from the rotor’s controller position is now 270°.

Clearly the Create (type RC5-B3, the heavy duty model) rotator’s mounting flanges got somewhat loose so they lost grip on the 50 mm aluminum tube (10 mm wall thickness). I climbed the tower yesterday afternoon when storm #1 was gone. You can see the ‘skid marks’ of the mast’s tube wrubbing the clamps. Still the clamps have enough grip to rotate the antennas even in the wind. I’m kinda lucky the mast slipped in the rotator. If not the motor’s gears might have been destroyed. The problem is that to tighten the flanges again, the inner section of the tower needs to be cranked up. You cannot put a wrench on the bolts when the inner section is nested into the two outer sections.

As per OptiBeam’s directions, I have always turned the antenna’s elements into the wind so it’s the yagi’s boom that takes the wind load. This has never been a problem in the past. Until now. I draw two conclusions. First: this is one helluva storm with the strongest winds I have ever witnessed since moving in here in 2003. Second thought: once or twice a year when the tower is tilted over, I check and tighten all the bolts. But since installing the tower and antennas in October 2004, I have never touched the rotator clamp’s bolts (because they’re hard to reach, as mentioned above). So these bolts will now also be tightened when I do a checkup. I might as well buy a tube wrench for this.

ON7RU said that sometimes people put a bolt through the mast and the clamps to join them. This way the two can’t move relative to each other and the tube can’t slip on the rotator. I wonder if this is a good idea since the torque on the rotator might become very high.

Another thing that crossed my mind is that it would be handy if the rotator’s controller had an offset adjustment. That way I could readjust the bearing and calibrate north regardless of the potmeter’s position. The Green Heron controller has this function. But it’s an expensive piece of hardware while the original Create controller is working fine. And it doesn’t tighten the bolts either.

If 80-100 km/h wind gusts can do this (and other damage all over Belgium), I do not want to see what a real hurricaine or a tornado would do to our house and the antennas… The horror!

This afternoon a bad storm hauled ass over Belgium. Wind speeds up to 100km/h in central Belgium. I knew it was bad when I noticed our dog’s house moved half a meter. It’s a big heavy dog house and I put it against the fence only yesterday after heavy gusts on the evening of January 1st. Those pushed it forward about 20 cm. The dog house deplacement is my own benchmark: it never moved this far forward since putting it there in 2004. So I went upstairs to look through the shack’s window and inspect the tower and antennas. I was scared to see the yagi and 40m dipole had moved 90° to where I pointed the controller.

The dipole is still parallel to the 20m driver. So it isn’t that one antenna moved away from the other. And what are the odds of both antennas slipping over the mast exactly the same amount? It’s not that the rotator is broken: it still holds the antennas still when powered off and still moves the antennas when I move the controller to turn the antennas. Only: it’s 90° shifted. So it seems that the mast / tube turned inside the rotator clamps / flanges when twisted by the wind. But the clamps still hold the tube to turn the antennas. Strange.

No real damage but it’ll be a pain to fix this. I don’t think I can do this when the tower is tilted over. Not in a hurry either because a second similar storm is announced for tomorrow night / Thursday. Great! Real damage is reported on Twitter by ON7RU whose Hex Beam took a fatal beating. I hope all other amateurs in Belgium got away? But this storm must have taken out some more antennas, it’s hardly impossible that no one else has lost something. I knew this was bound to happen: we got away without a real storm for too long. And since this ‘winter’ is far too warm (+10° on average), all we get from over the Atlantic is rain and heavy winds and the occasional storm.

When I logged K6IT on 17m CW in the late afternoon of December 31, I closed the books for the year 2011. A year in which I focused on contesting. A year in which I replaced the WARC triband dipole with a 40m rotary dipole. A year in which the sun developed freckles after the summer. That gave us 10m back. Daily DX on 28MHz, how long have we been waiting for that? In 2011 I crushed a number of personal records in big contests. But I knew I did not spend a lot more time in the shack than the previous years. So I was glad to run my log 2000-2011 through my statistics-mill. Surprise!

Breakdown by band

As you can see 2011 easily tops 2007, the previous record I didn’t expect to break at all. But look at the numbers on 12m and 10m and especially the evolution over the years. Clearly in correlation with sunspots and SFI. The following image clearly shows I am still a CW lover. The boost in SSB numbers is due to serious efforts in WPX SSB and WW SSB.

Breakdown by mode

Clearly not into digital. I made 154 QSO in CQ WW RTTY SB10 – the start of the 10m resurrection, and worked ST0R on 3 bands RTTY. Still no interest in PSK or other PC modes which all seem utterly boring. It ain’t CW folks. I don’t know where that 13 for AM comes from. Now, the question is: with much more QSO in the log, did I spend much more time in the shack?

Breakdown by days

The answer is: yes but not much. I know there were days, especially in autumn, that I really wanted to get a taste of the improved conditions. In years before I might have supressed the urge to go to the shack by telling myself that there is nothing to be worked because of the absence of sunspots. That does not work anymore. Over the last weeks I have noticed that the higher bands are open most of the time. Some days better than others, sometimes a solar phenomenon works with us or against us. BTW: one ‘QRV day’ means a unique date on which at least one QSO is made. So this can be anything between a 24h contest period with 1500 QSO or just one or two QSO in a few minutes that day.

The bad thing with seeing these numbers (the curious ON5ZO) and knowing myself (the competitive ON5ZO) is that I will want to try to do better this year (the never satisfied ON5ZO). That said, I already know now that 2012 will have some ‘occurences’ that will severely may slightly limit my operating time, and maybe even temper my eagerness to be on the air.

The past year 2011 once again was a busy but fun year. ON4CCP and I managed to synchronize our agendas for another CW fieldday. The addition of the 40m rotary dipole in February (tnx agn ON4BHQ for the helping hand) proved to be a good thing, and the homebrew WARC inverted V compensated the loss of the trapped rotary dipole. My UBA software version 2 took a lot of lunch time and burning midnight oil to get it done but I’m glad I rewrote it. Checking the logs is also time consuming but much less with version 2. Almost ready for 2012. The ramp up of Cycle 24 after summer was what we’ve all been waiting for. More fun, more activity and the resusciation of 10/12m. And for myself I’ll remember my personal bests in both CQ WW contests. The only thing I regret not having done is the processing of almost 3 years of ‘buro QSL’. That is n° 1 on my to do list of HAM side projects (making QSO has absolute priority): collect my boxes full of incoming from the club’s manager and answer all the QSL cards.

To those reading and following this: all the best in the new year. Good health, love and friendship and a steady income is what I wish for all of us with excellent HF conditions to boot. Let’s enjoy the Greatest Hobby on the World in 2012. 73!

Not much happened after the ARRL 10m contest. I had a bit of a radio burnout. I’ve done more radio in the last months than usually. Surfing the waves of better propagation, you know. CQ WW RTTY, chasing the Rockall expedition, California QSO Party, trying some DX on 10 and 12, the usual contests (LZ DX, CQ WW SSB and CW) and of course two days of ARRL 10m – two days that were only two hours for the last couple years. Add to that the extra workload for the end of the year and I was not too keen on sitting in the shack.

I added a piece of solid state electronics to the shack. Not a solid state amp but a solid state disk. I replaced the SATA hard disk in the Win7/64 machine with a SSD (solid state drive). People tell me it boots lightning fast. Well, I don’t notice any difference. I must admit that with the SATA drive Win7 was a fast booter already compared to the old XP machine or theVista laptop. With the SSD I think it boots just as fast. Probably the mother board is too old and does not support the fast data rates of the SSD which is SATA3 and I’m pretty sure the MB is not SATA3. The Win7 Performance Index took a leap from 4.9 (conventional SATA disk) to 7 (SDD) so the OS itself does notice a faster disk. I used the freeware XXClone to make an image of the C-drive to the SSD and made it bootable which saved me the trouble of reinstalling OS, drivers and all the software. With the Win7 install DVD in recovery mode, I was able to fix a MBR issue which is another thumbs up for Win7. I never pulled that off with XP.

Another ‘end of year tradition’ is the RAEM contest, or at least show up for a couple of QSO. Unfortunately this year it was on Christmas Day. That made it a bit of a pain to participate but I managed to play for a few  hours (250 QSO or so). I think this is the most fun you can get next to the CW QTC in WAE CW. I like the long alphanumeric exchange, preferably sent not too slow. Distance based scoring adds to the fun: a JA or ZL boosts the score as well as an ice cold Siberian UA0. Next year it’s on December 23, I might as well go for a full time effort then.

Another classic ON5ZO end of year activity is trying to work DX on 30m at my sunset. Usually I work a bunch of W6/W7 a little after their sunrise, which is my sunset in winter. Today was the first day I actually tried but it was a bust. I worked Nevada, Washington and Oregon and if I recall well also one Californian. Hmm, as I type this I am thinking it’s not too bad and certainly better than nothing. But I seem to remember working much more of these every day the past years. I hope to be QRV the coming days to check if the sunspots also ruin 30m. Or does the better propagation on the higher bands draw the people away from 40/30m? I also got called by a JA and regular VU2PTT called me too with a nice signal. Hey, it wasn’t so bad then: about 10 real DX in just over 100 QSO 

Log checking reports for CQ WPX CW are out. Here’s what’s striking me:

************************* Not In Log *************************

7035 CW 2011-05-28 1413 OQ5M           494 F8IDR         0030
7018 CW 2011-05-28 1905 OQ5M           639 F8IDR         0026

What the @$^%#??? You should know that my LCR/UBN is always very clean. I log very little errors and I only log when I’m 100% sure.  So F8IDR calls me twice, 5 hours in between, with only a handful of contacts judging by the numbers – and the first QSO has a higher number than the second.

Open logs are a good thing. Here’s the F8IDR log. OQ5M is not in there so at least the log checking is OK. At 14.13 op F5XX was taking a 90 minute break. At 19.05 he was on 20m. The log is submitted as Single Op (F5XX) HP Assisted.

Question arises: WHO is F8IDR? Unknown to QRZ.

However, Google ‘F8IDR’ and I end up here: ‘WPX par F8IDR en photos!’ Clearly single op, no? There is a Picassa album entitled ‘2011-05-28 WPXparF8IDR‘ here that once again shows a Single Op activity.

Google also learns us that “L’IDRE participera avec l’indicatif F8IDR au contest WPX HF (http://www.cqwpx.com/), le week-end prochain au centre de vacances de GUCHEN qui se trouve dans la vallée de Saint Lary. Bernard F5XX et l’équipe du DX gang gère la partie technique avec F6KPH de Tarbes. Pour l’instant 18 inscrits à cette participation: F5PU, F5SAW, F6KPH, F5LEW, F5RVI, F5SZR, CHRISTINE, F5AUB, F1NHN et MCH , F6GXY et M, F5XX, F4ENH , F6BKB, F5BTH, F6HED et YL, C RIVAYRAN ……“.

Luckily French is my second language after Dutch so it’s easy to understand that Single Op in English means at least 18 people in French  :o)   Yes things are not always what they seem to be – or in contesting lingo: what they’re claimed to be. I’m curious to see if this log will indeed end up as SO. I recently made a posting about assumed unclaimed cluster assistance by Belgian operators (more than one). I decided to put it in the trash bin because I think ON’s just don’t care. Maybe the F’s don’t care either?

Not much has happened after CQ WW. I wanted to rebuild the 10m yagi for this weekend but the project hasn’t moved. The cold or flu I was able to suppress before CQ WW hit back hard after the contest. Today is the first day in almost a week that I have been moving without pain. Last week some kind of flu got me and I went to work despite the fever. But on Friday I cracked and the virus could have its way with me. A lot of rest and sleep and some reading was all I did. And browsing 3830.

Now the time had come for the ARRL 10m contest. A forgotten contest, but propagation on 10m in CQ WW SSB reminded us! So I wanted to play in this one too. I also wanted to use a second antenna fixed to EU: the 3 element monobander that I dragged from under a thick layer of dust (literally). With CQ WW and being ill, the project hadn’t advanced so on Friday I took the opportunity to finish it. You know how it goes. I used a different design (wideband in stead of narrowband CW only) which in turn changed the feedpoint impedance. So I needed to make another hairpin. All things went quite well, I got the yagi assembled just when it became dark. Which means: “too late”. I still wanted to test it and put up the base for my push up mast, but without the counter weight. Since the yagi was only on a tube two meters high, it didn’t fall. The analyser showed resonance around 27 MHz. Ouch, wrong band! Pruning the hairpin shifted the SWR dip into the right direction. I wanted to make sure I was seeing things without coupling to the ground, so I added another tube. Bad idea without the counter weight. The feedline pulled the boom away from the center of gravity and dragged the yagi to the ground. Result: a bent reflector and a frustrated ON5ZO. I should have known that rushing things is a bad way of working, especially doing this work outside in the dark. I straightened the bent element, took away the feedline and called it a day. The contest will be done with the high tribander only… During the contest I wondered if a lower antenna would have helped for EU.

I started around 8 AM utc on Saturday, which seemed late. Yet the band was not really open and I had a slow start. It quickly became clear that propagation this weekend is not to be compared to the fantastic conditions in CQ WW SSB. Right after our local noon,USAcame through and the rate went up. I wanted to keep a balance between both modes. I tried to keep the number of contacts in SSB and CW equal, as well as the multipliers. I managed to do this, with some nice rates – but nothing shocking. Around 1600 utc signals started to fade and the band soon closed. No real W6/W7 openings. Maybe better luck on Sunday?

Not really. Same scenario. Slow morning, hope for JA that didn’t come. Only one or two for the multiplier. Chase mults. Wait forUSAto come through in the afternoon. Have a good hour or two withUSA. Feel the band closing. Sweep the band for the last contacts. Finished around 1730 utc.

Objectively spoken this was a great contest compared to what we’ve seen after 2002. But if you compare to the conditions in both CQ WW earlier this year… Oh well, good times were had. DX was worked. What else would we do on a weekend?

Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. To buy a second amplifier or not? The answer could be a simple yes or no. But nothing ever is simple…

I have two transceivers. The main reason is not for SO2R because I don’t always do that. The real reason is that if one fails, I can always play radio when the rig is under repair. The benefit for having two identical devices is that you always have one working example to compare the broken one. In the case of the K3 I can measure reference values in the working rig and compare to the bad rig. Or even do a board swap to identify the broken PCB. I used the same reasoning to buy two identical switched mode power supplies. I like symmetry and redundancy. Where it is practically and economically possible.

Right now I only have one amplifier. Which is OK because you can only use one amplifier. Except for SO2R but that has worked with the second rig barefoot. But a second amplifier would be nice for these SO2R operations. And if the main amplifier breaks like the ACOM 1000 did last year, I am forced to go low power. Again, that is not a real problem: I even won the UBA SSB contest this year in LP while my ACOM 1000 was under repair.

So far, we have two pros: back up amplifier and for Radio2 in SO2R and one con: it will be an expensive item that will only be used for a few hundred contacts each year. Suppose I was in a spending mood and the pros persuaded the con, what amplifier to buy then?

Of course my first choice would be the Elecraft KPA-500. This transforms the K3 into a 500W ‘set and forget rig’. No tuning, no buttons to be pressed – just TX and run 500W. 500W is not real QRO but for radio 2 and backup amp, it’s enough. And it’s small and light for possible portable operations. None are planned, but it might help to make a decision.

I have a BIG problem with this amplifier, namely its price. At the current exchange rate, adding S/H and 21% VAT when brining it to my home, this amplifier cost me about 2000 to 2200 Euro depending on slow USPS shipping or fast but expensive UPS delivery. That is a lot of money for only 500W. Granted it is a “no tune – no buttons” amplifier in combination with the K3.

But an ACOM 1000 currently costs less than 2400 Euro. That is full kW. Granted: not really portable and it needs tuning. But with my ‘tuning table cheat sheet’, a QSY from band A to band B including retuning the amplifier, takes 5 to 6 seconds. Every auto-tune amp costs A LOT more than a manually tuned equivalent. Those are expensive stepper motors…

The newly announced ACOM 800S solid state amplifier should cost 2600 Euro (no official price quote so far however). I don’t know what to think of that… It closes the gap between 500W and 1000W, and it is auto tune / solid state (no warm up time).

Another possibility is the ACOM 1010 which costs around 1600 Euro. Still a good 750W, and smaller and lighter compared to the ACOM 1000. Italian solid state auto tune amplifiers are out of the question. Too expensive and questionable stories read. So I don’t see any other alternatives in a modest price range. Or do I?

One day I found this amplifier. Price “About ~1400 USD”.  That is a bargain converted to Euros! And solid stade, and no tune, and full kW. I contacted the manufacturer and he answered me “it’s not for the export market and not yet available.” So there you go, not for export – whatever that means.

You see it’s not simple. And as long as there is no real winning amplifier that has the right specs / price ratio for a second, rarely used amplifier, I will leave my money on the bank. But with the given economical climate, is that the smartest thing to do?