GQRP Club and SPRAT

Attached is the 6V6 valve transceiver by Geoff, G3YVF, from SPRAT magazine number 137 (Winter 2008/9). It uses 19 parts in all.

Join the GQRP club and receive the excellent SPRAT magazine every 3 months. The fee is only £6 per year (or equivalent in other currencies) which is excellent value. See: http://www.gqrp.org/join.htm for details on how to join. You can now pay with Paypal too if you prefer. BTW, if times got hard and all other radio mags had to go then SPRAT would be the one I'd keep.

Every quarter SPRAT is packed with circuits, ideas and news of interest to those who enjoy QRP. Back issues of editions 1-132 are also available on a GQRP club CD for just £5 if you are a club member.

Help in the shack?

Contest operating was a little slower this morning as I had a "little helper" in the shack. This is my 14 month old grandson who is staying with us at the moment.

He was fascinated by the morse key, so there is hope that a future radio ham is in the making.

Update from W2UW on his 20mW transceiver

My FETer (1 FET transceiver for 80m) appeared in SPRAT this month. The circuit is very much based on a 40m transceiver created by Glenn Yingling, W2UW. His original 40m version, on which mine was heavily based, is called the FET-1. Today I got a nice e-mail from him with an update on his results.

Dear Roger, I was surprised to see your little article in the sprat mag about your FETer, it was interesting. I am glad to see that you credited me.

By the way, you might be interested in knowing that I have made 451 QSOs with my little rig. I have not met my goal of working all of the states east of the Mississippi river. HI I still have 4 to go (Fla., Ala., Geo., and Miss.) They are way down there! I may have to wait until the next "peak".

I am 81 yrs. old and still think radio is "magic". Hi

Glenn

W2UW

451 QSOs with a tiny little 1 FET transceiver is pretty good going Glenn. Well done!

2-way transatlantic QRP

Just worked VE3DJX on 14.060MHz CW. He was using 5W to a 3el and I was using 5W to my (low) 15m long end-fed long wire. Despite the poor sunspot conditions it is still possible to make 2-way transatlantic QSOs using QRP with the most basic of stations and antennas.

2m AM now on the RSGB band plan

At last 2m AM gets a mention in the bandplan as published in the Feb 2009 edition of RadCom. Sadly not as the 144.55MHz "centre of activity" on the 2m chart, but rather as a comment in the footnotes.

Still this is better than nothing and people interested in 2m AM now know that 144.55MHz is the place of preference to centre AM operations. There is still interest in 2m AM as (a) simple gear is easy to build and (b) there is a lot of surplus ex-PMR AM gear around going for almost nothing. Also it is interesting to compare AM and FM as part of self-training.

It would be good if the AMers in GM-land would migrate off 145.8 down to 144.55 now so that all AM in the UK was on/around one common frequency.

HUGE 160m 3el yagi antenna

Take a look at this antenna for 160m and 80m. It is the antenna used by OH8X and is absolutely massive.

This is certainly not my idea of ham radio, and the complete antithesis of QRP, but you have to take your hat off to these guys for the engineering of this monster beam which weighs tons. I wouldn't fancy scraping the ice off in mid-winter!

Long-term HF deterioration?

Some time back I recall discussion about a theory that the ionosphere was not behaving nowadays as it was, say, 50 years ago. I'm not talking here about sunspot cycle issues but whether or not there are factors at work that mean HF comms today is more difficult than many years ago due to ionospheric structural changes. I'm also ignoring things like increased noise floors due to SMPSUs, lights etc.

Can anyone point me in the direction of any definitive references to this theory?

AA1TJ's 1 transistor transceiver

Take a look at Mike's neat 1 transistor VXO controlled 80m 80mW transceiver, The Reggie, which uses a passive RX with the VXO acting as LO for a heterodyne mixer. He's worked some decent distances with this modest little rig. Mike has a great website with plenty of other fine ideas. The little Reggie circuit continues to evolve so keep checking back to his site.

http://mjrainey.googlepages.com/reggie

Update 19/1/09: Mike tells me he has measured the MDS as -87dBm (using a sig gen and a stepped attenuator/20dB pad) which is pretty remarkable for essentially a passive RX using a switching mixer. It implies Mike can hear around -90dBm clearly in his ST3 headphones.

The spots return...

After weeks without sunspots the sun is showing signs of life again with solar flux levels around 70 (the highest for a year nearly) and sunspot numbers between 13-20 depending on who is doing the counting. Time will tell if this is the start of better things to come or another false dawn.

See http://www.solen.info/solar/

Some off-air historical ham recordings

Thank you to those of you who have submitted ham audio links. Here are some for starters. I will add others if people let me have links.

http://files.myopera.com/davews/files/vp8.mp3 A recording of Bob McLeod VP8LP in Goose Green on the 20m amateur band on the evening of the Argentine invasion in the mid-1980s made by Dave Sergeant G3YMC.

http://files.myopera.com/davews/files/zl3gq.mp3 A short recording of a CW contact with Peter Watson ZL3GQ in Christchurch, NZ made by Dave Sergeant G3YMC on 4th October 1977 when using just 10W at Dave's end.

http://www.qsl.net/wa5iyx/ra/zk1aa69a.ra ZK1AA 6m keyer/beacon in 1969.

http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Internet_and_Radio/Sounds/ has many different audio clips spanning many years and many bands.