My quest to learn CW (16)

  Steady it goes. However had to skip last 2 days CW training because of the CQWPX SSB contest in which I participated. A post about that at a later time. At the right you see which faults I keep making. Is it just me or is everyone making these faults? I seem not to be able to hear the difference between 5, S and H especially when the letters are near to each other. I know it is probabely a matter of training, training and training. Some people seem to have a natural rhythm feeling, I do not have it. When the speed goes up I mix U and V as well, especially when they are behind a letter or a number that ends with a "dot". By the way I can't hear the calls at the right at once, it takes several tries before I got them. Very difficult was BX3/DJ3KR, this one took me at least 10 repeats. Why do I train on higher speeds? Well to train ICR actually. 

So, what else was going on with CW training this month. Well, I keep an eye on the blog from PE2V Vincent. It is in Dutch but if you really want to read it you can probably translate it with google or something. Vincent started to learn CW just a couple of months before I did. I'm a little envious because he's already able to make real ragchew QSOs with CW. He also gave me a few great tips to improve my learning and offered to help me. That's the right HAM spirit. Although so far I'm not really ready to get help, it might be a personal thing. I'm used to do things on my own and I realize sometimes it is better to change that. Takes time though...

Vincent told me to train with short stories and QSOs on CWops. Here are the links to the training sites:

https://cwops.org/fundamental-practice-files/

https://cwops.org/intermediate-practice-files/

The meaning is to listen to the stories and copy the words and complete the short story in your head. No writing involved. So far the first story I figured out the first sentence "Jim has been a HAM for 16 years. He...." and then I lose my mind over and over again. I'm not able to figure out the next words and sentence. It frustrates me and after a few tries I stop with a bad feeling. I think I get distracted or may be I'm afraid of not remembering the first sentence. It might be a psychological thing? I don't like to listen to podcasts either, may be I'm not a good listener. Reading and writing is something I prefer. You see, all kind of doubts. But to meet my goals of making a QSO I really need to change I think, perseverance is the golden word.

Luckily Vincent had an other golden tip for me: Have fun and celebrate every next step you make. Don't look at what others can and do, do what you can do. So I continue with my CW quest. And at a certain moment I will get it and make that 20 minute real CW QSO with just a radio and morsekey or paddle. That's my ultimate goal.

Morse Code Battleship

I won! 

You probably know the battleship game. There are several variations. I even played battleship via packetradio about 25 years ago. What a fun! Hamradio duo developed a battleship game in which you have to play with morse code. An excellent way to train you morsecode skills. While my daily CW training on LCWO.net does continue it is a little boring. The battleship game is a welcome distraction.

https://tools.hamradioduo.com/morse-battleship/

Oh, more fun. They also developed Jake from Waverly IA, an AI robot who likes to have a QSO with you on CW.

Excellent to train CW as well. And you can see that my CW keying is not that good, I make a lot of mistakes. As far as getting on the air, I dare to make short 599 QSOs but don't ask me anything because you will not be able to decode my answer ;-)

https://cw-bot.hamradioduo.com/

#60m Pakistan worked

 

#60m Comoros worked

 

First 60m new on band of 2025.

Experimental multiband halo rebuild (4)

 I was not really satisfied about the experimental halo yet. Some fine tuning was required. The weather was beautiful today and because they expect rain in the next week I decided this was the day to do some antenna work. The 15m loop resonance was on approx 21.400 MHz which was way too high. I had to make the 15m loop longer. It was nice to see whatever I did with the 15m loop, it did almost not affect 20m and 17m. In the end I added 20cm on both sides. So far I'm satisfied and I hope the antenna will perform well in the upcoming CQWW WPX contest at the end of the month.

SWR is below 1:2 on all bands. Good enough for me. If the radio is decreasing power because of a bad SWR I can always use the internal tuner.

And yes, there is some loss. But that will not be much. I think I will still be able to make some DX.

I worked 6Y7EI on 15m SSB as a test, got him in two calls. I'm curious about the effect of rain on this experimental halo version 2.0. So far on 20m there was no change when the antenna was wet. Did not test other bands yet. With the upcoming rain forecast I probably post about it next week.

Nerve-wracking battery replacement Iphone 8

 Not really HAMradio related....or is it. In essence any mobile phone is a HAMradio isn't it. Anyway, my Iphone 8 battery died last week. I was only able to use the phone with the charger connected. So I ordered the necessary things to replace the battery. A new battery, battery sticker to mount it in the phone and a new screen sticker to mount the screen to the Iphone again. I already had the special tools needed for this repair. Unfortunately, my vision is no longer what it was 20 years ago. So I also use a big magnifier glass with LED light build in. The whole operation can be done in 15 minutes, if you know what you are doing and....if you're lucky. I had no luck and it took me at least 2,5 hours to complete the whole replacement.

Above the Iphone when I finally got it apart. It wasn't that easy but I managed to disconnect the screen from the phone. Then it took me at least 30 minutes to remove the old sticker that glues the screen to the bottom part. The assignment was "simple", remove all the old sticky material. 

Next assignment: remove the old sticker that glues the battery to the phone. No way.... it was not possible to get grip on the old stickers. After 30 minutes of trying I decided to lift the battery which it did, although not without damage. This it took me another 30 minutes to remove the old stickers. All included I was 1,5 hours on my way to success.

Connect the screen again. But the connectors are so tiny you have to feel if they fit in. At my age feeling is not that good anymore. It took me at least 15 minutes to connect 4 connectors to the motherboard again. Have I told you about the screws?

At the right you see the largest screw. The others were smaller, I could barely see them. I managed to screw them all in with the help of my magnifier glass. You see that I already fitted the new screen sticker which I am shure I pushed in well at the sides so it would stick well. The blue protection is removed just before I fit the screen again. But not good enough... 2 hours...

Part of the sticker came loose when removing the protection layer. At that point you can't do anything. You hold the screen with one hand and with the other you have no choice and so I carefully tried to stick the sticker inside the phone. I think it doesn't matter if 2 cm at the side of the screen is not glued, while the rest is. And actually after mounting everything you didn't see it at all. Battery health is now at 100% again, mission completed.

I also ordered a new tempered protection glass for my screen but unfortunately it was way to large, prbabely for an Iphone 8+. Not that important and something for later. At least I can call and app again. And if I want remote control my radiostation, do some morse training and watch the DX cluster.

First VBand experience

Yes, it is made like this. VBand adaptor.

 My first experience with VBand today. 

I fabricated a kind of adaptor with an old mouse. I opened it took the printboard out and soldered a connector to my paddle parallel to the switches that work for the dot and the dash. Not the best thing but it seems to work. I first did some practice and for me 14 wpm works best for now.

However VBand is not really forgiving or my timing is very bad. I was hoping for a QSO with the build in QSO robot, but I struggled. I really don't know what I'm doing wrong except that my timing seems not be that good. It seems that the robot gets confused? I managed to send a report and name. The robot came back with a report and name. And then it kept calling "hw cpy?". I tried to give a report again but it seems it's not what the robot expects?

So I took the opportunity to try another channel. I saw some dutch looking calls. Makes it easy because we can key in the same language.

I had a nice QSO with Hielke NL8120. Hearing his CW was great but VBand also has problems with his keying it seems. Anyway, it went better as I thought. At least we could understand each other. We exchanged QTH, names were already known of course. It was very nice to have a chat in CW for a change.

Should we be prepared?

/P setup tested at a German QTH
1,5 years ago

   Should we be prepared for a scenario without energy and (internet) communication? I thought of that after the MIVD and AIVD (dutch military/general "secret service") announced several times that Russian intelligence ships try to gather information about internet/energy cables in the Northsea within our economical territory. Luckely the dutch navy and coastguard did prevent this a few times and are still on it. You can imagine this is just one thing happening, in the mean time it could be all information has been gathered already to plan a sabotage action. I think in the 80 years after WW2 we forget that these happenings can get worse very fast. We are also much more vulnerable compared to 80 years ago. Our country already had several cyber attacks. Internet did replace old telephone lines and is used for 99% of all communications. If you disconnect a country like the Netherlands from the internet the whole country is on a halt. And what about electricity? A few attacks on the biggest electricity plants is wiping out most of our country including the internet. Imagine how most people will panic.

Of course this is all a doom scenario. You all know the preppers that think the world will fall down and anything very bad will happen soon. On the other hand, we have learned from WW2 that radio communication is most important. Back in the days the technology was not that advanced, but the resistance was inventive and we know the stories about successful communication. It is also difficult to sabotage every radio transmission, so it is excellent to be used in emergency situations.

One of the well known hamradio "preppers" is OH8STN Julian. He is well known for his videos about emergency communication setups. Julian tells us that you should be prepared and take action now. Lately he also warns that we should be prepared and exercise our emergency setup regulary. Of course there are organisations like ARES you might be interested in. But the average hamradio enthousiast can be prepared as well. 

Personally I'm not that well prepared. I really should be more serious about this. I decided to make a list of items I really need to have ready when everything fails. Actually I will not publish the list for safety reasons. Call it suspicion...

  I had a small laptop and a small windows tablet, but both were outdated. I did need something faster and have it prepared to use for emergency communications. You probabely think: "why the laptop". Well, like Julian revealed in one of his videos, in an emergency situation you're not able to be with the radio all the time since you need to find or build shelter, find food, find a heat source in winter and care for others. A good emergency system should be working while you do other things. So you can check and send/answer messages whenever you have time. Best (free) software for that is VarAC and Winlink. JS8Call is another nice one that will do fine, but it needs an exact time from the computer in order to work well, this is an disadvantage but can be solved in several ways (more about it in another blogpost).

I'm aware to be prepared means that I should use the system once and a while. That includes updating the software on the laptop. When I really need the software it should be updated, an internet connection will be not available at that time... Another thing is power, I'm thinking of building a bigger emergency electrical power system for instant use if needed. The 90Ah battery I have now is nice but only suitable for a few hours a day especially in the winter.

Inspiration for this blogpost came from OH8STN's article: 

https://oh8stn.org/blog/2023/02/20/starting-point-off-grid-survival-radio/

You probably think now, why put all this on your blog. This should all be a secret isn't it. Well, I'll have to explain that I'm close to one of the most dangerous areas of my country when it gets to a war of some sort. The Eemshaven harbour is an strategic point with all kind of power plants, a LNG terminal, a military area/harbour, a large Google data center, several power cables from Skandinavia, a large fuel storage etc. etc.  And yes, the Russians already know all of this. Not difficult because you can find everything on the internet, and exact locations are shown in google maps. And now the story (in the newspapers) goes that Russians are spying on us when unloading frozen fish at the harbour. Ah well, those journalists have probably never heard of internet :-). The conclusion is, I probably don't really need all my radio gear. In case of a war the first thing I would do is totally destroy all power plants, energy supplies/cables and internet connections, I fear I'm too close to it so I will never get out alive and use my radio to call for help... 

But anyway, others will survive and hopefully this post is an inspiration for them...

In the mean time I'm reading a lot about past resistance communications in WW2, especially from and near my QTH,  for a new story on this blog. Can we learn from what happened in the past? I don't know as 80 years ago it was a complete different era. But at least we learn to fight for our freedom one way or the other.

Experimental multiband halo rebuild (3)

 And again the weather was fine today. Lots of sun and a reasonable temperature. Good for antenna work.

As I wrote before this experiment has a different approach. I use thicker isolated wire and make a real halo instead of using "speakerwire" which is not really weather resistant. To the left you can see the feedpoint with the Diamond BU50 1:1 balun.

After experimenting for over an hour I decided to drop the 12m part of the antenna. Whatever I did I could not get 12m right. It doesn't really matter I can also use 12m on my Gainmaster 1/2 wave 11m antenna with the internal tuner from the radio. And it does at least as good as a 12m band halo. The 17m halo was too short so I made it 40cm longer and that was a good choice. 17m is excellent now.

I made everything as ugly as possible, since ugly antennas work the best :-)

Not to forget this is the open side of the halo on the picture at the right. It is most important because this is were you can tune the antenna. The problem is that if you tune one halo others will change as well. It takes a lot of time to get things right. While tuning I kept the change of resonance point, when mounting it high on the tower, in mind. It expected it to shift upwards and I wrote about it in previous posts. I wrote down the most ideal "best" frequencies and tuned the antenna on lower frequencies for compensation.

The nice and easy thing is that, instead of folding back the end of the loops, tuning can be done by changing the angle of the halo ends. 

Steeper angle at the end: resonsance frequency shifts down.

Not such a steep angle: resonance frequency shifts up.

Depending on band the change can be 100-200 Khz.

The results on the ground before mounting it in the tower again:

I thought it was good enough considering the resonance shift upwards which I noted in my post about finishing it the last time with "speakerwire". So, I mounted everything into the tower.

Unfortunately the shift upwards did only happen on 17m as expected. On 15m the shift was larger as last time and on 20m the shift was downwards. That's the fun with experiments, you never know what will happen.

15m band: best frequency on 1m height 21.173 MHz, at 14m height 21,404 MHz (231 Khz shift up)

17m band: best frequency on 1m height 18,046 MHz, at 14m height 18,122 MHz (76 KHz shift up)

20m band: best frequency on 1m height 14,117 MHz, at 14m height 14,092 MHz (25 KHz shift down)

Information above is written down because I need it when fine tuning the antenne when I have the tower down again. 

The antenna is very good usable partly with the internal radio antennatuner. I had 1,5 hour before dinner and decided to go for the ARRL SSB DX contest. On 15m it was easy to work for instance the state of Washington and California which are normally not easy to catch. On 20m things were very quiet but I worked a few from the USA anyway. Most stations were present on 10m. Of course I used my 4 element LFA there and struggled to find a good frequency for running. I did a combination of running and S&P and worked 115 stations from 43 states in 1,5 hours, good enough for me.

Experimental multiband halo rebuild (2)

  The weather here is improving. Sun is shining and temperature today was about 7C (45F). My XYL wants the antenna away from the garden. I agree with her. But experiments take time.

From what I read in other building descriptions on the internet you should start building with the highest band. So I started building the 12m loop last time. Fast forward....next time I wil start with 20m again. It turns out after I made the 20m loop all other loops are way too short. Have to fix that hopefully tomorrow.

Also the glasfiber is bending too much due to the heavier wire. I already attached guy lines on top. I need to adjust them in the end.

The result so far:

12m is way too short and also SWR is not what it should be.

15m too short

17m too short, SWR/resonance very nice

20m is fine.

Hopefully the weather will be good enough tomorrow to continue tuning the antenna.