CW Ops CW Open and "Team Limbo"

CW Ops is an international organization designed to bring together Amateur Radio operators who enjoy using Morse code.  As of this writing, there are just over 1000 members worldwide.  CW Ops is very active in on-the-air activities, including two monthly contests.  Last year, they started the "CW Open", a longer weekend-based contest that is similar to the monthlies, in that the contest is split into three stand-alone periods.  For the CW Open, the sessions are 4 hours each, and it's effectively like having three separate 4-hour contests on the same day.  Each 4 hour session is separated by a 4-hour off period.  One of the neat things about the CW Open is that it also features a team competition:  teams of up to 10 operators can be formed to aggregate the operators' scores from the three sessions.  I had the idea of forming a team of all QRP operators - not necessarily to win (that would be tough against the many QRO stations out there!), but to give QRP a little publicity ...and to just have fun!  So, "Team Limbo" was formed:  how low can you go?

We missed a full team by one op, so that's 9 QRP stations on our team.  Last year, there were only 7 QRP entries total for the contest, so that's actually a pretty good showing!

Here are the Team Limbo ops and scores by session:

Call	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3	Total
KS0MO (by W7FB)	15,392	15,352	8,230	39,024
WB3AAL	420	132	225	877
N8XX	-	3.498	2,100	5,598
AD4S	256	-	-	256
WC7S	6,177	7,826	4,950	18,953
K2UFT	5,561	-	-	5,561
WA4ZOF	100	48	121	269
AA4GA	4,071	9,265	400	13,736
NI0R	-	7,644	-	7,644
Total	-	-	-	91,918

Field Day 2012

Just damn.

This one never even got off to a good start.  Last year was my first FD by myself, operating QRP in class 1B-battery.  I ended up in ninth place, which I was fairly happy with considering my apartment location and smallish 50-foot doublet.  So, this year I decided to revive my goal of making top-5 in my class, and planned on putting up a full 80m doublet at our new home out in the country, and possibly even a couple more antennas for switching directions on 20m and up and such.

Instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour on Friday and getting up Saturday morning like I'd "planned", I stayed up late and slept in on Saturday.  Around about noon (that's T-minus 2 hours to the start of FD here), I went out to the shop and started looking for stuff to build my antennas and get them up.  Let's just say it wasn't all exactly where I thought it would be!  As a result, I got a later start this year than last year - it was 37 minutes into the contest before I got on.  Dang.

The weather was miserably hot and humid, in the 90s here in Georgia...and in all that time, I only got up the one antenna:  an 80m doublet with the feedpoint up about 25 or 30 feet.  Not great, but still better than I had last year.  Unfortunately, the solar flux was in the mid 80s and the sunspot number was in the mid teens, with higher band propagation forecast as "poor" and 20 meters only "fair".  Well, at least I won't miss those other 20m and up antennas I wanted to put up.  And, luckily, I'll have a workable antenna on 80m, in contrast to last year, and a better antenna on 40.

So, I'm off to the races and yes, the bands suck.  So much so that I'm easily distracted and my butt-in-chair factor suffers.  I never get any runs going and spend most of my time search and pounce.  Finally things settle down a bit, but it definitely feels slower than it did last year.  I guess I should have printed out some rate sheets to compare...maybe I'll do that later...

I take a little nap or two, get something to eat, look at the Dish Network receiver when Mrs. AA4GA tells me it died, etc.  I'm sitting back at the rig around 9pm when a storm comes through - a good bit of rain, and a lot of wind - probably gusting over 40 knots...the wind kept up for a half hour and the rain about an hour or hour and a half.  It was so bad at one point, I thought about tearing the computer and rig down and hauling them back inside the house, but since there was no apparent lightning, I kept at it.

I decided this year to actually try some SSB contacts for two reasons:  one was to fill in some of the slower times when the CW band seemed worked out, and the other was to work my local club - I figured since I was not joining them for FD, I should probably make an effort to work them - they were at W4G, a multi-club effort, and only about 5 miles from here, but I never heard them.  So I made a few SSB contacts, but when I moved to 75m late in the evening, lots of loud stations were CQing in my face.  Oh, and the little SSB operating I did mostly served to remind me why I'm almost exclusively a CW operator...I know it's got a lot to do with it being Field Day, but most of the operating procedure I heard made my skin crawl like fingernails on a chalkboard.  I doubt I'll take a mic to FD next year...

Around midnight, I needed a nap, even though I knew it was probably prime time on 80 and 40...so I set a clock for an hour and a half.  I finally got up about 3:15 am.  Par for the course.  I operated for about three hours, knowing my wife would be up at 7 and that would get me back at the rig again...which it did...around 8 or 8:30 when Anna left the house.  She stuck her head back in the door as she was leaving:  "hey, you sure do have a lot of wires out here".  "Yes, I do...they're just temporary!"  I figured she was talking about the 2nd and 3rd antennas I'd just left in the yard and not put up at the beginning of FD.

So I slogged through the rest of the contest, but it was really slower than I'd figured it would be based on yesterday's condx.  Oh well, the propagation's got to be bad for everyone.  With my distraction and bad condx, my score was over 25% off last year's, and I was looking to improve...ugh.  As it ended up, I had 329 QSOs this year compared to 449 last year...and I was hoping for 500 plus.  I got the same 250 bonus points as last year, and this year's score would have placed 14th last year, so with worse condx, maybe still in the top 10...total points this year:  3,500.

So I come in the house to chillax after the contest and look out the front door and see my antenna...which I should not be able to see!  The feed point is at the grand height of three feet!  No wonder no one was answering me on 75m last night!  No wonder so many of my QSOs were like pulling teeth!  I figure the antenna had loosened up in the storm last night, so I operated 75% of the contest with the antenna almost on the ground!  So, chalk this one up to lesson learned...I hope!

Next year...don't stay up late on Friday.  Get up early on Saturday to put up the antennas - and have the antennas built ahead of time!!  Get done hanging the antennas before the WX gets unbearably hot.  Go inside into the air conditioning and nap after getting everything set up.  Start on time - when 2pm Sunday arrives, even though some folks can continue operating, the bands really empty out and that's wasted time.  Oh, check every once in a while to make sure the antenna's still up!  As long as I've been doing this, you'd think most of this would be second nature, eh?

What I did do new this year that I like was set up on a north-facing porch on the side of the house - it's covered and never gets hit with direct sunlight, so it's relatively cool.  I'm likely to operate there again next time.

Last year I did a basic analysis of battery used and used a total of 8.6 amp-hours.  This year, I used the same equipment exactly (FT817ND at 5 watts), and total battery consumption was just under 8 amp-hours, so I'm sure I operated less this year...without analyzing the logs, I'd guess 16 hours total.

Here are the band totals:


  Band CW Qs  Ph Qs 
-------------------
   80:   42     2
   40:  153     4
   20:   67     0
   15:   59     2
-------------------
Total:  321     8  


With bonus points and power multiplier, Total Score = 3,500.


See you in FD 2013!

Kenwood TS-440

From Universal Radio

I got a TS-440 way back in the 1980s - it was my first solid-state, no-tune-final rig.  It had an automatic antenna tuner.  It was amazing.  Later on, I upgraded it so it would talk to my computer.  I did other mods too:  I added the ability to use a separate RX antenna, installed International 2.1 kHz and 400 Hz filters, and added a board that let me monitor my SSB transmissions (that was back when I operated a lot of phone contests).  For a TS-440, it was pretty tricked out.  I worked a lot of contests and DX with that radio.

Then, in the 90s, I got a pair of FT-990s and the '440 went on the shelf.  It stayed there for a few years until one day I decided to hook it up and blow out the cobwebs...but the old faithful '440 just showed dots on the display.  Dang.  So, I put it back on  the shelf, where it stayed a few more years.  I probably would have sold it, except I knew no one would give me what the upgrades were worth...and it was a radio I had a history with and didn't really want to sell.

I eventually surfed up info on the "dots" problem and decided I'd try to get the rig going again...a couple years later (last week!) I finally got around to checking it out.  I hooked the '440 to a 12 volt supply and hit the power switch - I was amazed when the rig powered up on a frequency and not with dots displayed.  But every few seconds, the display would flicker to dots, but would come back on frequency - not as bad as I'd remembered, but still not usable.  I had discovered over the years that the dot display was an indication that one of the PLLs in the rig had lost its lock. The primary culprit was some rubber potting compound that Kenwood used that goes bad over the years and becomes conductive.  There are several other potential causes, but a cleanup of VCO-5 is the best place to start.

The other tell-tale sign of a problem with VCO-5 is rough audio - which I discovered I had.  The QRG was a bit jumpy as well.  So, I dug into the rig and popped the top off the VCO-5 shield.  Sure enough, there was some "Evil Brown Goo" - I measured about 300-500 mV between the EBG and ground so I knew it had gone bad.  There was one spot that seemed worse than the others, so I took some tweezers and pulled a bit of it out and powered the rig back up - and with that little bit of effort, I noticed an improvement - much less dot display.  I still had bad RX audio, so I decided to pull the PLL board and dig out all the EBG I could.

At first, I thought I could leave the shield in place, but decided I needed better access so I removed it.  I was also going to try to tweeze out all the goo without removing any parts, but there were some parts I couldn't do that for, so I ended up removing a couple caps, a transistor and the varactor, which was a bit stressful, as it's now unobtanium.  I also broke a disk ceramic cap and decided to replace a resistor that had gotten a bit beaten up in the de-gooing process.

So after several hours I decided VCO-5 was as clean as I could get it and put the rig back together to see if I needed to dig any deeper.  Amazingly, the rig now sounds great and no indication of PLL unlock on any band.  So, it looks like it was a relatively easy repair as far as the dots go.  I haven't actually put the rig on the air yet, but I'm enjoying listening to it!

There are a lot of online pages devoted to the repair of the dots problem:  this one by OZ1BXM was my main reference....that and a lot of info included on the TS-440 Yahoo Group.  Thanks to everyone that has documented working on this problem...it allowed even a hack like me to get my old rig going after about 15 years in mothballs!

I'm looking forward to using this one again!

Appalachian Trail Sprint QSO Party

July 22, 2012 - click here for info!

Spartan Sprint - May 2012

Tonight was my first Spartan Sprint since completing the ATS-3b.  Since one of the main reasons I built the ATS was to have a lightweight rig for use in the Spartan Sprint, I was really looking forward to it.  I had decided on a 9v lithium battery for power, but had no idea what to do for a lightweight paddle - the only paddle I own is a Bencher, and that's much too heavy to use if I want to be competitive in the Skinny Division!

The station

My goal was to make at least 20 QSOs, but I fell short with 16 - I'll blame the QRN, as there was a fair bit of static on the bands.  My rig consisted of the ATS-3b, band filters for 20/40/80, new Sony earbuds with volume control (!), a 9v lithium battery, and the paddle described below.  Total weight was 5.2 ounces, or .325 pound.  Not tubby at all, but close to twice as heavy as a real lightweight Spartan Sprint entry.  16 QSOs on a .325 pound rig equates to about 49.23 QSOs/pound - not bad, but probably not good enough to win the Skinny Division.  I'm really looking forward to fall and winter (I know, it's still spring!) for nice quiet bands....with a little luck, I hope to break 30 QSOs before next spring.

Not very durable, but *very* lightweight!

I had a WA1JOS touch paddle board that I'd gotten to use with this rig, but hadn't put together yet, partially because I hadn't decided where to mount the board in the rig's case...or even if I wanted to do that.  Then it hit me:  I can go with an outboard touch paddle.  So, last night I took a small light cardboard box, built and stuffed the board inside, attached 9v and key out leads and glued a couple PC board squares on one corner of the box to use for the pads.  It worked pretty doggone well, and weighs next to nothing.  If I can figure out a way to mount the board that I like, and add a switch to disable the touch pads for times I'm just listening, or want to use a larger paddle, I just might make the addition.  W3DX has added the same board to his ATS-3b by velcro-ing the touch keyer board to the main radio board.  The photos I've seen make it look like the keyer is attached to the micro-processor.

A fun little monthly contest - I wish more folks were active in it.

Steve Weber's ATS-3b

KD1JV designs some pretty cool radios.  He's been producing a series of transceivers in kit form called "Appalachian Trail Sprint" for several years now.  Characteristically, they're small, lightweight, radios designed for use while on backpacking trips.  They use DDS VFOs and have a lot of functionality built in to a microcontroller that runs the whole show.  Steve generally kits up about 100 kits at a time, and they are normally sold out within a day or two of the offering.  He is constantly changing the rigs around and making improvements, so any particular rig has a fairly short run.

ATS-3b with switches on "wrong" side and 80m filter

The rig that had the most appeal for me was the ATS-3b.  I liked it because it was multi-band (6 bands possible through changing out filter boards) and fit in an Altoids tin.  While I'm not much of a hiker, this rig seemed ideal for the Adventure Radio Society Spartan Sprints, a contest that includes huge scoring advantages for lightweight rigs.  Unfortunately, the ATS-3b was introduced in September of 2007 and after a couple batches, all had been sold...and I didn't become active in QRP or even know of this kit until February of 2011.  So it would appear that I would miss out - and I wasn't very interested in Steve's latest ATS-4 rig because it was bigger, and heavier, and used a somewhat funky bandswitching arrangement - effective, but not what I was looking for.

Then, one day last summer, Jim, AL7FS, started selling off a number of surplus QRP kits, including an ATS-3b.  The response was pretty strong, and Jim decided to enter everyone who was interested in purchasing the rig into a lottery, and my name was the one pulled out of the hat!

So, I've got a fairly complex, small, SMT kit to build, and I've never built anything using SMT nor have I built anything at RF!  So, I decided I'd work my way up to the ATS-3b by building several other little projects beforehand.  And I decided I wanted to hand-solder and not use any of the hot-air SMT methods.  I built an SMT dummy load kit, a Softrock SDR receiver, a crystal checker from scratch, a frequency counter, and a couple other small projects.  None of these presented any problems.  So, I figured it was time to start the ATS-3b!

Last Friday I did a parts inventory for everything but the band boards - the manual didn't include a parts list for these, and I figured anything missing wasn't critical and could probably be subbed from my parts stash.  The inventory was OK, with the exception of having two extra resistors of one value and being short one 22k surface mount resistor.  After reviewing the parts placement diagrams, it looked like the parts list was wrong and the count was fine, so I launched into soldering resistors.  The first thing I realized was that the 805-sized resistors were a good bit smaller than the 1206s I'd used before!  Not to mention that the parts were packed in a lot tighter on the ATS PCB!  Then, I got started on the 603-sized resistors...they were almost too small to be fun!

Saturday morning I got started back up and completed the resistors and inductors and went on to the capacitors.  Luckily, the worst was over with the passive devices - those dang 603 resistors.  The caps went a lot faster because they were bigger, as well as color-coded.  I was being careful to have all the resistors oriented the same direction, and that along with having to actually read values made the resistors slower-going.  So, after taking in dinner and a movie with Mrs. AA4GA Saturday night I got started on some of the chips.

ATS-3b and Sindy...and a couple more filter boards

Sunday I continued with the ICs and on the DDS, almost drag-soldered it in place, using Solder Wick to clean up the pins later - seemed to work just fine.  We had a picnic to attend Sunday afternoon, so I didn't quite finish the rig on Sunday - I had completed the chips and was working with the through-hole parts and got through most of them before turning in.  I have one of the "Sindy" Altoids tins and didn't want to mount the rig as designed, and discovered that Chuck, WA6LTV had done exactly what I had in mind - put the pushbuttons on the back side of the board, and open the tin when needing to access the buttons...so, that's how I'm mounting mine.

Monday evening I finished the through-hole parts and before testing, built up the 40m band board.  I had a bit of a slowdown because the color codes on my trimmer capacitors didn't match the details in the manual I had printed.  After some checking on the AT_Sprint Yahoo Group, I decided my printed manual was a later version, so I pulled out the CD that came with the kit and popped it into the computer.  Sure enough, the color codes in that version of the manual matched my parts, so back on track.  The worst part of the band board was the 45-turn transformer on a .37 inch toroid - not a lot of fun with my fat fingers...and I've got another of those for the 30m board, and one with 60 turns for the 80!

Anyway, I got the 40m board done and started the checkout routine - I put in a pair of earbuds and connected the power and immediately heard a morse "8" - ah, it works!  I went through all the tests up to adding L3 into the circuit when I went to bed.

Tuesday evening after work I wound L3 and completed testing - I actually got to use my 'scope for the first time as a real tool!  Everything checked out fine and I calibrated the DDS and peaked the RX bandpass...on to the 40m filter board.  This is the only place I ran into any problem.  I'm only getting out about 1.9 watts using a fresh 9v battery.  I played with the windings on the board, but not much improvement.  I'll have to do some more checking on this, and see how the other bands work out, so I'll go with ~2w for now.

Connecting the rig to an antenna was pretty neat - it actually hears pretty doggone well!  I put the dummy load back on and played around with some of the commands and controls and after a few minutes decided to call CQ to see if I could snag someone.

I tuned up to about 7033.3 and CQed about 4 or 5 times when Bob, W9JQT called in at about 569, giving me a 579.  Bob's call was familiar, and during the QSO I remembered why:  Bob is the creator of the Rockless - a Rockmite derivative he designed that uses a VFO.  Amazingly enough, Bob was running a Rockless!  A neat rig that is on my list of possible construction projects.

I did commit a faux pas while working Bob...I thought I was using the RIT on the ATS-3b to tune Bob in a little better, but didn't have the RIT switched on - so we kinda chased each other around the band a bit - ouch!

The mounting of the rig in the Altoids box actually was pretty uneventful - instead of trying to drill the holes, I used a Dremel tool and various grinding bits to open the holes up after drilling small pilot holes.  It worked pretty well.  So far, I haven't opened up the hole for the digital display...I've found I don't really need it as the rig is designed for full annunciation through the headphones using Morse.

So far, I'm very happy with the new rig - I've just got 5 3 more band modules to build and then squeeze it all in an Altoids tin!  Here's the rig on it's first field trip - I had a gig to play at an outdoor arts festival, and on the way out the door, decided to grab the ATS-3b and a bit of wire to just listen on while I was waiting for our band's slot.  The rig is just balanced on my leg with a 9v battery.  Pay no attention to the fine antenna connection!  It really is no problem to operate the rig by lifting the lid.   This is fun stuff!

Tuna Tin 2

I've been a ham for over 35 years.  One thing I've learned over that time is that there are two basic types of hams:  operators and tinkerers.  Sure, there is a lot of overlap, but most folks can be categorized as one or the other.  I've always been an operator.  While I've never built a transmitter or a receiver, I have done a fair amount of tinkering, building keyers and audio filters and other accessories:  usually from kits, but occasionally from scratch.  Even some simple switching stuff of my own design.  But never a radio.

And on the surface, that's kinda odd, as in the "old days", say the 1960s and back, almost all hams built their own gear to some extent.  Certainly more than is done today.  But I've always had a little niggle that made me want to build a radio.  I've been drawn to QRP over the years and read a lot of the QRP articles in CQ and QST, but I never did anything about it.  Then a year ago, when I started getting back on the air, I knew that niggle would come back and that I would want to build something.  So, I started building up a collection of parts and reading articles and QRP books and thinking about what to build.  Between that and the information that has become available on the internet over the past 20 years, there is a huge body of potential QRP projects out there.

I knew I wanted to start with something simple, and that I didn't want to just stuff a board with parts, so I wasn't really interested in just buying a kit - although there are some really nice ones out there these days. I recently picked up More QRP Power, an ARRL publication which is really just a collection of reprints of articles from QST.  Included was the March 2000 cover article "Tuna TIn 2 Today", which was an updated version of Doug DeMaw's classic from 1976...the same year I was first licensed.  It's simple, classic, and had no unobtainable parts - in fact, I already had everything I needed on hand.

So, this past Friday night I started on my own Tuna Tin 2.  While there have been a number of TT2 kits over the years, and at least some version of it is still available, I wanted to "roll my own".  I decided to build mine using Manhattan construction.  I also wasn't that interested in building one up in a tuna can, so I plan on eventually housing mine in the now-classic QRP enclosure, the Altoids tin.

I had recently built the K8IQY Magic Box T/R switch from the Four States QRP Group, so I didn't need the TT2 T/R switch.  Also, due to some issues I'd heard mentioned on the Magic Box Yahoo group, I decided to add a keying circuit so the Magic Box wouldn't be switching the 12v.  I don't know if it was really needed or not, but what the hey!  The mod I used was from N4UY on this page.  I also used the recommend bandpass filter from Ed Hare's 2000 article to clean up the output.  Oh, and I replaced the 56 ohm resistor in the PA emitter lead with a 33 ohm resistor in series with a 100 ohm trimmer, allowing me to vary the output power easily.

Friday night I got all the parts together and started soldering and completed the oscillator.  I didn't bother testing it, but continued Saturday afternoon and just resumed where I left off, builing the PA and winding the toroids.  After a couple hours I connected power, a crystal, a dummy load and a wattmeter and shorted the two keying leads together, and couldn't believe it - just below 7040, there was a clean signal at about 250mW output!  I adjusted the Q2 pot to give me exactly 200mW and shut everything down - no troubleshooting needed!

Later that night, I pulled ou the Magic Box, my Drake R4, the TT2 and a straight key and hooked it all up.  The MO QSO party was in full swing, but I couldn't get anyone's attention:  I don't know if I was too far off the CQers' calling frequencies, or if I was just too weak, but no one heard me.  Dang.

I decided to call CQ, and was happy to see the reverse beacon network had several skimmers that picked me up.  Whew, it really does work...but the SNR sure is low!  I spotted myself on QRPSPOTS.com but that didn't seem to help.  I dozed off and tried again about 3:45am with no luck.  When I got up at about 8am after putting on coffee, I decided to try one more time before the sun got up too high.  Right before I was about to pull the plug, W0EA saw my spot on QRPSPOTs and gave me a call.  He was about 559 with his 5 watts and gave me a 219 - almost an hour after sunrise on 40 over a distance of 708 miles (over 3500 miles/watt!), I'll take it!

I don't know that I'll get WAS with this rig or not, but I hope to give it a shot over next winter.  By then, I'll have the board in a box and everything all neated up...for now, the TX is just a board with some wires hanging off it...not very pretty - but it works!

I'm not sure what's next, but I've got a couple projects in mind...maybe an updated Sardine Sender from the same era...