It is time to set my goals for 2019. This year, they will be somewhat reduced due to health limitations.
Hard to believe another year is here, even after being tired from accomplishing so much in 2018 — all but one goal was completed.
I had a wonderful (and large) class at the Red Cross in Providence that wrapped up in May, several of the new hams joined NCRC, for which I am grateful. At this point, I think I’ve taught somewhere between 10 and 15% of all hams in RI.
My slow crawl through DXCC continued with 268 confirmed countries. At this point it is mostly a process of waiting for non-populated spots to be activated — I hope to live long enough to get to the Honor Role. But my band-challenge points did go up to 1340, so only 160 to go to the next award level. Getting there will require much more 160-meter work.
I did participate in my first FMT and achieved the top “Green Band” performance level with an average error of 11,3 parts per billion.
I did not complete my goal of 3D printing an electronics project case, even after enrolling in a course at a local college. A major health issue came up which sidelined me for a couple of months. Thankfully I’m still here and able to plan for 2019.
One of the things I am most proud of was completed on the last day of 2018. I had been working with a wonderful young man, Ryan, who is visually impaired, for the past 16 months. Ryan took and passed his Technician License yesterday. I’m hoping that Amateur Radio will be an important part of his life moving forward.
A few other accomplishments in 2018.
So the next step was to enable DMR services on the ZumSpot. That was easy, but several more menu items relating to DMR popped up. Suspecting that I didn’t want to be linked to Europe, I changed over to some US looking settings, but still have no idea what talk groups I should belong to. More DMR reading ahead!
That said, I have a pretty screen showing both YSF and DMR enabled, and sure enough when I transmit with my DJ-MD5, I see that on the dashboard. “WB4SON using DMR time slot 2, going to Talk Group 12345678.
Here is the configuration. I picked the first of several BM_United_states_310x masters, then picked the DMR+ Master as DMR+_77… as shown below.
At one point, while watching the Dashboard, I noticed that another ham WB6QZL keyed up in the same talk group. While the dashboard showed activity, my radio showed nothing. It may well be that I don’t have an “all” talk group enabled. We shall see!
During one of the almost endless sales, I purchased an Alinco DJ-MD5 about a month ago. It came in today, I started the process of trying to figure out the radio (from a perspective of someone who never used DMR before or that particular radio).
My first observation: Remember that old argument “What came first the chicken or the egg?” Well there is a similar one for hams: “Which came first the radio or the manual?” In this case, the radio for sure, as the manual is useless.
The sites selling the radio call it a “Dual Band DMR 5W Part 90 Color LCD With GPS”. I’d guess that “part 90” means FCC Part 90 Certified, however the sticker inside the radio says it is FCC Part 15. Heck that’s scary. I’m fairly sure when I read the initial ad for the radio that it claimed to be Part 90 Certified. A search of the FCC database application indicates that it has been approved under FCC rules part 22 (Public Mobile Radio) and 90 (private land mobile): https://fccid.io/PH3DJ-MD5
The first mystery facing the user is how to get the radio to do anything, like bring up a local analog repeater. The answer to that task lies in understanding that the DJ-MD5 is part 22 and 90 certified. This means that most features of the radio are NOT accessible via the keypad (at least not initially) as users of those radio services aren’t allowed to do much more than select a channel to talk on. As shipped, the radio transmitter is disabled.
To solve that mystery, one must obtain the programming software and use a micro-usb cable to program the radio. Finding the software is a bit of a struggle, as there is no entry on the Alinco website. However, several amateur dealers link you to a commercial radio site that sells these radios, and happens to have links to the software and manuals:
https://www.remtronix.com/downloads/DJMD5_CPS_1.01.zip
I did not have to install the USB driver (probably because the proper driver was already installed on my PC — there are only a few makers of USB to serial interface chips). When I plugged the cable into the radio, it emitted a few beeps, then showed up on my PC as COM8. Also installing the software from the above link went well, and sure enough I was able to download the programming from my DJ-MD5 into the PC. A bit of messing around (flipping through more menus than you can shake a stick at), and I had changed it from powering up in the frequency mode, to the channel mode, and had programmed a local analog repeater into Channel 1, and my ZumSpot Simplex repeater into Channel 2. Being a DMR newbie, I figured that the DMR ID# I had applied for years ago would be entered as my radio ID — but who knows!
The analog stuff worked fine, usual decent signal reports. The DMR stuff will require more digging.
I did go through the radio menu, discovering how to turn on the GPS, and within a few minutes noted the time and date was closer to reality. Then going back into the radio menu, I found how to specify my timezone (GMT-5), and everything was correct. It took about 3 minutes for the initial capture from my easy chair inside.
How appropriate, on the first day of winter, for a non-fan of cold weather, snow & ice, that I should reach QSO #10,000 in my logbook? My small contribution to the one billion QSOs entered into LotW as of 12/19.
My thanks to Carlos, TI2CC, in Costa Rica (a fellow LotW user, I might add), for being my 10,000th QSO on 21 December 2018 at 16:04:30 UTC (15 Meter FT8).
HRD Logbook Entry #10,000 for TI2CC, Carlos in Costa Rica
And the actual contact itself!
PS: Contact was made with 25 watts into an inverted L, up about 60 feet, resonant on 160-meters. LotW has 10,064 Qs in it (I must have made changes to 64 entries, since you can’t delete your mistakes), and QRZ has 9,768 (I have NO idea why it is lower as it should match exactly).
PPS: 69.6% of my LotW entries have been confirmed. That is almost unbelievable, so thanks to all the hams that upload to LotW. And for the record 53.0% of the QRZ logbook contacts have been confirmed.
PPPS: For the record, it is 58 degrees F, very windy, and raining like mad today — more like fall than winter. But as they say, “Winter is coming”
I’ve been a little obsessed making year-end QSOs for the International Grid Chase, and watching LotW count up to ONE BILLION QSOs.
It happened at 23:32:06 UTC on December 19, 2018 (6:32:06 PM EST).
Fantastic job ARRL and IT staff and volunteers!
Here is to a billion more before the end of the next solar cycle.
At approximately 10:15 AM EST (15:15 UTC), the QSO count in Logbook of the World rolled over to 999 million, only 1 million QSOs to go before it hits a BILLION.
LotW has been going up about 3 million QSOs every 8 days. At that rate we can expect the billion mark sometime between Dec 19 and 21 — about 3 days away!
Quite an accomplishment to the staff and volunteers at the ARRL that keep LotW humming along!
I had noticed that my waterfall was showing 20 or more signals that should be decoding, but only a few were. Nevertheless I continued to work stations for this final month of the International Grid Chase. I became concerned that the internal sound card in my K3s had been damaged. So today I hooked up a different external sound card and had the same small number of decodes. That was a good thing, it meant that my radio was fine. Must be something wrong with configuration of WSJT-X.
Before tearing into things, I went to the WSJT-X website and immediately noticed a fairly stern warning that said the FT8 protocol had been changed in a way that was no longer compatible with older version like mine (1.9.1). Users were urged to upgrade to 2.0.0 quickly and no longer use the older version starting Jan 1 2019.
Well, that’s the explanation. In the past few days the standard changed. My out of date program wasn’t decoding the calls from newer 2.0.0 users. I updated, and life is back to how I remember it.
Be sure to update your WSJT-X
I follow a fairly large number of groups that are associated with various aspects of Amateur Radio or Electronics. I’ve seen a lot of discussing pro and con about FT8. My personal view is that Amateur Radio should be as big a tent as possible. If someone finds something about the hobby that excites them and gets them on the air making contacts that is a good thing. So all the FT8 folks are doing good things for the hobby, and those that chose to complain would better serve the hobby by simply moving on.
That said, three things REALLY disturb me about the FT8 discussion, because they are based on misinformation and/or a poor understanding of what is going on.
First misconception is that FT8 is automatic. You turn on your radio, start the program running, and come back a few days later to see what you have worked. That is absolutely false. Yes the timing requirements are such that having a contact proceed without automatic sequencing would be difficult (and would waste time slots). But the user must initiate the contact. I did a bunch of RTTY work and shifted to other modes like PSK31 with the times. I don’t see anything more evil about FT8 than the folks that used to send “Brag Tapes” that would endlessly drone on about their gear. Honestly anyone who has ever used a program like HRD will find that a PSK31 contact isn’t much less automatic than a FT8 contact. Click a mouse, punch a function key twice and you have your contact complete and in the log.
Second misconception is the a whopper — FT8 somehow magically decodes signals below the noise floor. That simply isn’t true. The MSFK FT8 signals are VERY narrow (6.25 Hertz per tone), and the computer is using VERY narrow filters to detect those signals. But the individual bits, when looked at at the appropriate bandwidth, are about 9 dB ABOVE the noise floor at a minimum. Some might wonder why WSJT-X displays numbers like -18 or -24. Isn’t that 24 dB below the noise floor? Well that figure is referenced to a 2500 Hz wide bandwidth (a standard SSB signal), which is why the numbers seem so small. But take a look at the waterfall and you will see there is no magic going on. A fellow named Claude Shannon, way back around 1948, proved mathematically that no signal can be decoded lower than 1.6 dB below the true noise floor despite any amount of filtering or processing. In real life most systems require 5 dB above the noise floor or more.
Last misconception has to do with time keeping, with many folks opining that the clock must be accurate to milliseconds to decode. While it is true that having your PC clock within a second of accurate time is good, it is not uncommon to work people whose clock is 2.5 seconds off. The other thing is that the only thing that does matter is that the seconds are accurate. This is so everyone starts decoding bits at the same time.
It is pretty easy to set your clock based on WWV and get it more than close enough.
OK, off soapbox. Happy Holidays from the big tent.
AMSAT has reported that “during the next steps of commissioning we discovered an anomaly with her receive capability. After a few days of tests, analysis, and discussion, it appears that Fox-1Cliff/AO-95 will not be commissioned as our fourth Fox-1 amateur radio satellite.”
They continue to explore the possibility of recovery, but the bird is not currently receiving commands from the ground, and cannot be removed from “Safe Mode”. They are requesting telemetry uploads to help diagnose the issue. AMSAT engineers have been directed to focus their efforts on other projects.
My thanks go out to all the AMSAT volunteers involved with this and other satellite projects, and especially to the engineers that worked so hard getting Fox1-Cliff ready to go. So many good things ahead!
