Success Sat & WinLink During WFD

Posted on February 19, 2025 by robert

My club, Newport County Radio Club, runs a pretty effective Winter Field Day each year.  While we may have left “multipliers” on the table in prior years, we usually have the highest QSO count for Category 1O (one transmitter, outdoors) in the country.  This year we maxed out the possible multipliers and had a comparable number of contacts.

My job was to send/receive Winlink messages via RF link from the site, and to make a Linear and FM Satellite Contact.  Fortunately things worked out well for both items.

Yours truly shown at Glen Park waiting for a satellite pass. I use an Arrow crossed beam, and an IC-9700. Contacts were made using RS-44 and the ISS Cross-band repeater.

As I was driving away from Glen Park, I took this photo of the beam that was erected in the snowy field (triband beam, plus 6-meter beam, and a support for a multi-band dipole. It pretty much sums up WFD; cold and isolated, but still a thing of beauty.

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Usual workup for WFD Satellites

Posted on January 21, 2025 by robert

Winter Field Day is this coming weekend, and it offers a total of SIX multipliers for making at least one CW/SSB and one FM satellite contact.  In addition another ONE multiplier can be achieved by sending/receiving a message via WinLink while at WFD.  I run the WB4SON-10 gateway on 145.050 MHz and it is an easy shot from our WFD location in Portsmouth RI.

If the gods of the ISS are willing (repeater not turned off for a EVA or other activity) and the stars align, I should be good to go for SEVEN multipliers.  There will be good passes of RS44 and the ISS starting at 1:56pm local time on Sunday.

My thanks to the following who helped me test my radio out this afternoon:

N4QWF RS-44, KB8CR ISS, W4NEG ISS, K0LB ISS, N8HI ISS, N5ACR ISS

JO-97 and MO-122 were also calibrated (Great downlink signals but nobody responding to CQ)

Posted in ISS, JO-97, MO-122, RS-44, Satellite, WFD | Leave a comment

40+ Years in the ARRL

Posted on January 18, 2025 by robert

I received a 40th year pin and certificate from the ARRL (not to be picky, but I think I first joined the ARRL in 1980, so that would be 44 years).  In any event it has been a long time.  I became a Life Member of the ARRL about a decade ago and continue to support them annually through the Diamond Club.

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First POTA Award for 2025

Posted on January 9, 2025 by robert

There is ALWAYS something to do with Parks On The Air

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Operator-to-Operator Award With AB9CA

Posted on December 11, 2024 by robert

Dave AB9CA is another one of those POTA operators who always seems to be on the road and on the air.  I usually hear him multiple times a day.  I finally completed a Operator-to-Operator award with Dave earlier this month.

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QRP Labs QMX+ Received

Posted on December 8, 2024 by robert

I’ve been very impressed with the evolution of QRP Labs and their fine single and multi-band QRP rigs.  I’ve built many of them.  Their latest venture is the QMX+, which is a 160m to 6m CW and Digital radio (they are talking of adding SSB in a future software revision).  They changed the form-factor this time, and rather than jam everything into a micro-sized box, they’ve opened things up, which makes assembly MUCH easier, and allows space for future features.

Posted in CW, Digital Mode, QMX+, QRP, QRP Labs | Leave a comment

Unbelievable 10-Meter Activity for CQ-WW Contest

Posted on November 24, 2024 by robert

This weekend is the CQ World Wide CW contest, one of the largest of the year.  When I woke up this morning, I checked out the waterfall display from my Flex6600M, and could not believe my eyes: 10-Meters was wall to wall CW signals from 28.000 to 28.200 MHz.

Zooming the display out so show the bottom 200 KHz of the band loses some of the fine details – pretty much every 200 Hz there is a CW signal.  In almost 55 years of ham radio, I’ve never experienced as much 10-Meter activity.

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What a Beautiful Sight!

Posted on October 23, 2024 by robert

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Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

Posted on October 16, 2024 by robert

This is seriously off topic, but there was good viewing of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS about an hour after local sunset here in Rhode Island tonight.  It was fairly easy to find using a smartphone camera, but I had to wait a bit longer to see it with my naked eye.  The full moon rising, even though on the other side of the sky, was so bright that it eventually washed out the comet.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS gets its name from the facilities that first spotted it back in 2023: the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Tsuchinshan means Purple Mountain) and the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).

Photo taken at 7:04 PM local time (23:04 UTC) looking almost due west from Exeter RI

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Spectacular Auroral Display

Posted on October 11, 2024 by robert

Solar Cycle 25 has been an exciting one for sure, with many X-level solar flares and a few excellent opportunities for those of us who live around 41 degrees latitude to see auroral activity.

This past week several notable flares corresponded with large Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) that were Earth effective. One of those flares impacted earth and produced a Major G4 Geomagnetic storm (in fact, it was just a tick below the level of Extreme G5). The CME impacted earth after 1500z Oct 10, causing the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF/Bz) to point south, creating perfect conditions for aurora.

Here in RI, last light was around 6:45 PM local time and by 7:15 we were in a remote area with good views to the North, East, and West.  The display was stunningly bright to the naked eye.  At one point the red/pink color in the sky was so intense that I noticed the ground was reflecting the color.  The photos below were taken between 23:20 and 23:30 UTC.

The Geomagnetic storm continued for almost 12 hours as shown in the Space Weather Prediction Center graph below.

As always two wonderful sources for Amateur Radio operators interested in solar condition are:

Space Weather Prediction Center record of K Index showing severe conditions around October 10

Photo by author taken around 23:25 UTC in Exeter Rhode Island

Photo by author taken around 23:20 UTC in Exeter RI

 

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