Minimalist Digital Modes

I began using digital way back in 1999 with my now vintage FT100. Those early days of digital were experiments in the infancy of PSK31 and other modes available on the early beta programs at the time. It sure has changed. In 2004 I was on the beta test team for Ham Radio Deluxe testing and reporting bugs back to Simon Brown in Switzerland. HRD is now in the hands of a commercial company and it gets better with every new release. Yesterday I hooked up my KX3 to an Acer Aspire One. The Acer is a small portable laptop that sports 1GB of ram and a 160GB hard drive. When new it ran WinXP and last week I upgraded it to Win10 Home. I installed FLDIGI and it all ran just fine and used about 650mb of ram - so there was still some unused memory. It all ran just fine and made a contact with Mary, KC4TIE in Kentucky. She gave me a 599 report. I was running a 12 foot wire antenna and the internal tuner of the KX3 tuned it up on 20m with no effort. I was operating portable at the kitchen table with the power set to 3 watts. This will be my new portable setup for digital modes now. Next on the list is installing some JT65 software to see how this minimalist setup works decoding real weak signals.

Canadian CBC Monitoring Station at Richmond Ontario c.1983

From my amateur radio collection of photos - these were shot on Ektachrome 100 way back in 1983. CBC used this station to record and re-broadcast BBC and other shortwave broadcasts for Canadian listeners. The station has been long gone but the original building is still there out on Fallowfield Road in Ottawa's rural west end. It may be a private residence now.

More photos to follow!

If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

My father-in-law Noel, above, fought in the Royal Newfoundland regiment as a commando during the North Africa campaign and at Monte Cassino in Italy.

 

 

My nephew Tony Rusk, on his return from Afghanistan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above is my father on leave in London at Trafalgar Square sometime around 1943. He was in the Royal Canadian Air Force based at Tholthorpe near York. He was an air traffic controller for the duration of the war and boarded with a farm family. All four of the Baillargeon brothers returned home to Tecumseh Ontario after the war.

Band Conditions and DX

My apologies for not posting of late. Just too much going on but I do manage to get down to the shack late in the evenings. This has always been my favourite time to hunt DX. I’m a casual DXer and I don’t do contests. My work schedule allows for late nights and early morning operating times. I follow Hamspots.net, and operate digital and JT65-HF exclusively. I keep power levels below 20 watts and 99% of the time keep it at 10 watts out using my FT-950. I’ve done this even during the lowest parts of the 11 year sun cycle and still managed to work lots of rare and obscure stations. Often when the band seemed dead, out pops a rare South Pacific station and I snag them on the first call.

Just yesterday I worked Tanzania, 5H3NP, Noel, at 0400Z on 20m psk31 running all of 15 watts. Noel had a good clear signal and he told me he’s on every night at the same time. I did hear him the previous evening but he was working Europeans and Russian stations in a pile up.

 

 

A couple of days ago, on 10 meters Serg, D2QR was on from Angola; again a nice strong signal and worked him on his first CQ call. The call looked familiar and checked my log and sure enough I had worked Serg in 2004 on 20 meters.

Earlier at 0445Z I worked Metin in Istanbul Turkey on 20m psk31. I noticed that I worked the Turkish and Tanzanian just after their sunrise times. I monitor this by reception reports displayed by PSKReporter maps and can watch the grey line creep along the countries that I’ve just worked. It’s a great DXer’s tool. It’s integrated into the current version of Digital Master 780.

Conditions have been really very good lately and urge you to get on the bands and work some of the rarer low power stations currently easy pickings during the late night hours on 20 meters and daytime DX on the busy 10 meter band.

Draconid Meteor Shower And Incoming CME

This just arrived from Spaceweather.com:

DRACONID METEOR WATCH: Earth is about to pass through a stream of debris from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, source of the annual Draconid meteor shower.  Last year, Europeans witnessed a faint but furious outburst of 600 meteors per hour when the shower peaked.  No such display is expected this year, but the Draconids are notoriously unpredictable.  Northern-hemisphere sky watchers should be alert for slow-moving meteors emerging from the head of the constellation Draco the Dragon (not far from the North Star) on Sunday night, Oct 7th, through Monday morning Oct. 8th. Check http://spaceweather.com for more information and updates.

INCOMING CME:  A coronal mass ejection (CME) is heading for Earth.  The incoming cloud is expected to deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetosphere on October 8th, possibly sparking auroras at high latitudes.

EARTH-DIRECTED CME: Magnetic fields near sunspot AR1582 slowly erupted on Oct 5th sparking a B7-class solar flare and hurling a CME toward Earth. The Solar and Heliosphere Observatory (SOHO) captured this image of the expanding cloud:

Fall and Puppy Linux In The Shack

Fall is a busy time out in the country where I live. It’s a time of getting gardens and lawn ready for winter. Other chores at the VE3MPG qth is getting the snow implements ready for the winter snow storms – getting the cutting deck off of the Kubota diesel and attaching the plow or blower onto the front, changing the oil and filter, attaching chains and 50lb weights to the back wheels for traction in the deepest snow. Some of our firewood has been delivered – nice hard maple and it’s all stacked nicely in our woodshed. I keep a good supply in the enclosed back porch and once every few weeks it’s replenished from the main supply in the woodshed. There are two airtight wood stoves here – one on the main floor and a large one in the basement. It keeps us cozy all winter, along with our geothermal heat pump.

Other fall duties are using up or freezing fresh vegetables from our organic garden. It’s jelly time too and as you can see from the picture above it is a very nice batch this year. I have a Siberian crab apple tree and this year it was packed with fruit so there will be enough jelly till next year. We try to consume foods grown with a few kilometres of our home – organic honey, organic pork, beef and chicken from the neighbouring farms.

At this time of year there’s often a lull too, where I find a few hours to try new software in the shack. I had an old 2004 vintage HP Pentium 4 computer sitting around. A few months ago I was reading about a very efficient Linux distro called Puppy Linux. This distro loads into memory, either from a CD or a thumb drive. On this antiquated HP machine software starts instantaneously because it all runs in fast memory instead of from a hard drive. Puppy runs much faster than Ubuntu or Windows on the same hardware. One of the Puppy distros that I discovered is a customized version by the PSKmail.org group.

Their Puppy DXpedition Disk includes many Linux amateur radio programs. Included are three logging programs, Fldigi for digital and PSKmail, satellite tracking, APRS software and many others.

There’s an excellent set of instructions included there on one of the links.

There’s also Puppy Linux Server CD available on the PSKmail.org site – it sets up a psk mail server running in ram and is a little larger distro than the DXpedition Disk distro. It includes everything for setting up a PSK mail server and a few other enhancements of interest to the Linux knowledgeable amateur.

This is the distro that I use in the shack – I installed it to a small hard disk and the system boots in about 10 seconds and runs from ram. I have 2 gigabytes of ram installed but it will run in a lot less. I’ll eventually have my FT-100 connected and running using psk mail on 30 meters. That’s a future blog posting coming up later this year. Puppy Linux is very easy to use and it will automatically recognize most hardware in your PC. It even included drivers for my old Realtek wireless card and configured itself to connect to my wireless internet network – easy peasy! I’ve been playing with variations of Unix/Linux since the early 1990s and this is one of the easiest flavours of Linux to learn on and play with. If you burn a CD/DVD of Puppy leave the disk open instead of finalizing the disk after burning the software image. That way you can add/configure new software and updates to your Puppy CD or thumb drive.

I do hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog posting. For you photography enthusiasts the photos at the top of the jelly and crab apples were taken with a Canon 10D SLR in RAW format and post processed in Adobe Lightroom. They were all shot with available light at 100iso at 6.3 megapixels.

Here are a couple of links of interest for today:

Distro Watch – the ultimate repository of Linux distributions

 

Ontario High Points for SOTA hams in Ontario

New Feature On The Blog

Ham radio is all about learning new things and keeping abreast of new developments in our hobby and in general. Broadening our knowledge base keeps the old mind active.

A new feature I’ve been wanting to implement on this blog is a Link Of The Day. Some days it will be included along with what I’m writing about or it will be a stand alone article that I find interesting, either about amateur radio, computers, science or a good old fashioned WTF type link. More often than not there will be at least two links that I find interesting and hope that you do too.

I hope you all find this new feature as interesting as I do.

Remember, you read it here first! – Bob VE3MPG

Links of the day:

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Tin Foil Hats Actually Make it Easier for the Government to Track Your Thoughts

 

 

 

 

 

3D Sun for the iPhone 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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