What Ham Radio is All About

Here’s a new video from the ARRL shot during last year’s Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio.

Highly recommended viewing.

The importance of Services

This week I was delighted to learn that we had yet another Amateur Radio enthusiast join our club – Many thanks Mr Harold Smith (VA3SMH) – Welcome to the Oakville ARC!

What really caught my attention was the memo line on the Cheque – “Support for repeaters and digi” – which reminded me of the importance of Services in a club. Sure Programs such as courses and Field Day provide important learning and social opportunities, but Services, such as the repeaters & various bolt-ons (like linking or digital technologies) are an opportunity to pool our resources and have access to better tools than we could deploy ourselves.

Plus there is a social element to building out these resources. We are blessed in this club to have an abundance of clever folks and a diverse set of talents. as I look around the table, I’m reminder that, given a goal, there is little in Amateur Radio that this crew could not pull off if we set our minds to it.

Mr Smith’s cheque memo line is a reminder that these services an important reason to join a club – we need to pay attention.

Christmas Dinner 2011

A quick, but important “Thank You” to Jim Byers VE3AJ  for his effort & skill in organizing the club Xmas dinner over the last few years. Xmas 2011 was another success at “Tuckers” on the Burlington /Oakville border. Great food choices, terrific facility and fantastic value.

Thanks Jim!!!

Why CW?

Back in the old days, all Canadian hams had to pass a CW test at 10 wpm and then run CW for at least six months before they could apply for a 10-meter SSB endorsement on their basic license. After one year you could try for your advanced license but you still had to bring your paper log with you to show that you had been on CW and then pass a CW test at 15 WPM.

Now with the no-code license a lot of new hams are missing a great part of Ham Radio.

So why CW?

You can build a working CW transmitter kit for $25. (The Tuna Tina CW transmitter (on left) is a 330-milliwatt 40-meter crystal controlled rig that works with any receiver.) Talk about cheap! Used CW transmitters like the DX-60 (in photo) can be had for a few dollars at a flea market.

CW is much easier to use during contests. Some contesters only run CW and hate SSB contests saying it’s too noisy and annoying.

CW is actually faster than talking when it comes to making contacts and passing information. It’s a lot easier on the ears. 

Learning CW is relatively easy and once you know the letters and numbers there are lots of slow CW nets for you to listen to daily. Here’s a guide to learning CW. If you want to improve your CW, Morse Runner is a free downloadable contest simulator.

How Much Power?

Contesters and DXers use kilowatt amplifiers to help cut through pileups. Running a big amplifier is not for the newcomer as any defect in the station will become immediately known once you switch on the amp. Also for maximum efficiency amps need to be run on 220 volts instead of 110.

Canadian hams need an advanced license to run more than 250 watts.

Most rigs run 100 watts and that’s plenty for most casual and personal operation. you can easily work the world with a 100-watt rig.

But what about QRP? 

QRP is defined as 5 watts or less on CW or 10 watts or less on SSB.

At VE3HG I’ve been running QRP for over a year now and during a variety of contests I can say I don’t notice a difference between 5 watts and 100 watts on CW.

On SSB it’s a different story but that hasn’t precluded me from working Australia and all of Europe on 5 watts SSB. I regularly talk to my friend John, HK3C in Columbia at 5 watts and when conditions are awful I kick in a 50-watt amp that brings my signal right up with the big boys.

How can that be?

It’s because the actual difference between a station running 100 watts and one running 5 watts is only 2 S units. In other words if the 100-watt station is being received at S-9, the QRP signal will be heard at S-7 and if you didn’t look at the S-meter you’d not be able to tell the difference.

Running my 50-watt amp just brings my signal up a little wee bit – maybe an S unit or so.

BTW you can buy a really good QRP rig (HB1A – see above) for just over $200 new at Durham Radio. Add a Par end-feed QRP antenna and you’re on the air.

Here’s a good post on Why QRP?

What other HF Antennas Are Out There?

If you realize that almost all antennas are really just dipoles, it gets pretty easy to see that the cheapest way to get on the air is with two wires of equal lengths cut to the appropriate frequency and feed with a feed line.

Commercial beam antennas are just dipoles (fed with a feed line) with passive director and reflector elements in front and behind the “driven” element. The extra elements “beam” the signal forward creating gain and lessening the antenna’s ability to hear signals from the back or sides.

Loop antennas are very interesting.

If you’ve got the room for a full-size loop antenna it will perform as a low-noise DX antenna. The loop doesn’t have to be round. It can be almost any shape but the height above ground should be the same everywhere and the higher the better.

There are small transmitting loops (magnetic loop antennas) which are usually less than 1/10th of a wavelength in circumference. The are very small in size and highly efficient but have a very narrow tuning range often measured in a few kHz before needing retuning.

Loops can be used inside the shack (or attic) and do work.

Here’s a link to everything about loops.

Another way to hide your antenna at the home station is to put a vertical wire into a tree and feed it into a weather-sealed tuner at the base.

A 43′ vertical wire fed into a tuner and working against a well-hidden ground-radial system can be an excellent DX antenna on all bands from 80 to 10 meters.

Commercial vertical antennas are available from DX Engineering among others that cost over $1,000 and will work no better than your humble 43′ wire feed into a tuner. Commercial stations and guys with tons of $$ buy these for their contesting stations where reliability trumps cost.

Same thing for some of the very expensive travel or portable type antennas. Most wire verticals or dipoles at 1/4-wavelength above ground will work circles around them. Guys buy these because they make for a neat package.

Having said that PAR antennas make a very interesting single-band end-feed wire antenna that only need one end up in a tree and are feed at the other end into coax. These antennas need to be trimmed using a tuning meter (SWR bridge) to work properly but are excellent Field Day or portable antennas. They will also work being hung out a second- or third-storey window.

What other HF antennas?

Some hams say if they could have only one HF antenna it would be a multiple-band vertical. There was one on the Ontario Swap Shop recently for $50 which for an antenna which can get you on four or more bands without switching or extra coax is pretty good.

The vertical antenna while somewhat noisier in receiving than a dipole (as noise tends to be vertically polarized) does have the advantage of very small footprint (you can mount it in the back garden or on the roof of the house) while capable of working real DX (as the vertical antenna has a low-angle of radiation compared to a dipole which if not high enough tends to radiate a lot of energy almost straight up).

Verticals that are ground-mounted need a bunch (10-20) of ground radials placed just below the surface of the lawn (insulated or non-insulated wire of any size will do and the longer the better with a minimum of 8′ necessary) to work. The coaxial cable can be buried under the lawn as well. (Any coax can be buried but there are specific brands designed for burying that are available from distributors.)

Verticals mounted on the roof or anywhere above ground work best with tuned (meaning cut for the frequency) elevated ground radials. The good news is four tuned radials will often outperform 20 or more radials buried underground.

BTW if you happen to live near a salt marsh or you’re going on a DX-pedition to an ocean front property a vertical mounded in the saltwater flats will outperform just about any other antenna. A world record was set using this setup by a QRP (low power) contest group some years ago.

Verticals come in single-band (for DXing contesting) and multi-band versions that can cover all the HF amateur bands in one antenna.