VE8EV - Amateur Radio From the Top of the World

RAC Winter VE8RAC(VE8EV) SO Mixed HP

2011-12-18T10:53:00.003-07:00

Call: VE8RAC
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: SO Mixed HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 20

Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs CW Mults Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
160:    23    5       4      3
80:     63 31       4      6
40:     96 91       9     10
20:    128  215       9     11
15:     97  303       9     10
10:     26  156       5      7
6:       1    1       1      1
2:       1    1       1      1
----------------------------------------
Total: 435  803      42     49 Total Score = 581,854

Comments:

+11 RAC

What a deal, two contests with no aurora in the same year! I had lots of fun and was able to wave the RAC flag pretty evenly across all the bands.
Sure glad I'm not the one who has to answer all those VE8RAC QSL requests!

73 and Happy Holidays,
John VE8EV

Checks and Balances

2011-12-12T17:05:00.004-07:00

My XYL is fond of reminding me that life is all about checks and balances. When it comes to amateur radio under the auroral oval that is especially true. When the high-latitude K-index is zero (as measured at the NOAA station in College, Alaska, only a few degrees south of us) propagation will generally be good. Higher than zero is not as good, and more than two is just plain bad. According to my research, there have only been 15 days this year where the high-latitude K-index was zero for the whole day. That means that for any particular event, like a contest or dxpedition, the chances of having good conditions are only 1 in 23 or about 4%, just slightly better than the odds of rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice. The rest of the time we just struggle along and do the best we can under the circumstances. More sunspots certainly help but that also increases the frequency of solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and other solar badness that rains down from space and stirs up the aurora.

I’ve been pretty lucky this past couple of years with having those long odds come in during expeditions and contests. If you’re planning an Arctic dxpedition you can at least try to increase your chances a bit by scheduling it for a period during the sun's 27-day rotational cycle with no recurring coronal holes. Coronal holes increase the solar wind and generate high K-indices. For contests and other fixed-date events though, it's all luck of the draw. I managed to hit the low K numbers for most of my island expeditions in 2010 but our trip to Tent Island in June this year was something of a washout due to the poor conditions. For many years I had fantasized about what the ARRL Sweepstakes contest would be like without aurora and this year it finally happened. The K-index was at zero for the entire duration of the contest and it was everything I always dreamt it would be. The high bands were open late, the low bands were productive, and new records were set. Only two weeks later I decided to get on during the CQ World Wide CW contest and maybe pick up some new countries for DXCC. A little bit farther south of us conditions were being reported as great although many had difficulty working stations on paths that crossed over the pole. The K-index here peaked at 4 and there was a solar radiation storm to boot. I could hear a few weak signals from the west coast of the USA but that was it.

The high Arctic certainly is an interesting place to live but it's all checks and balances when it comes to ham radio.

ARRL 10-meter Contest

2011-12-11T22:34:00.001-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: SO CW LP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 14

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
CW: 322 63
SSB:
-------------------
Total: 322 63 Total Score = 81,144

Comments:
Just 100 watts and a vertical for this one so I decided to go CW only. The marginal antenna, low power, aurora, low SSN and lack of time all conspired to keep the numbers low. Given my limited CW prowess it was probably just as well. When I had time to get on the radio I'd find a quiet corner at the higher end of the band and run callers with only an occasional foray to S&P the loud guys. I got up early Saturday and CQ'd away for four hours without a single caller, hoping for that mythical morning opening to Europe. It didn't appear and I suspect that from this part of the world in December it never will. Still, the band was open to everywhere in North America for at least five hours both days so I certainly can't complain.

My ability to copy CW is still a bit ropey and I was kind of nervous at the very beginning. Wouldn't you know the very first answer I get to my cq was 7K4QOK! Once I got through that the rest was fairly smooth sailing. The rate meter actually hit 100 for a few short bursts so I guess I'm starting to get the hang of it. Worked a pretty good cross section of W/VE, a handful of Asians, VK/ZL, and a few South Americans (although not as many as I remember from the old days on 10m).

Lots of giggles in this one for some reason. The best was working the W8 with the drifting TX. He was zero beat at the start of each call but his frequency would increase with every key stroke until he was out of my passband. After three tries I finally opened up the filter to 3K and got him in the log. For some reason it sounded hysterically funny and I chuckled about it all day long. I also found it very amusing that it took me three tries to figure out why the KH7 station was laughing at me instead of sending his exchange. Is this what normally happens to people after listening to beeping for hours on end?

Happy Holidays and hope to hear everyone in the RAC Winter Contest next weekend!

73
John VE8EV

SS SSB VE8EV Single Op HP

2011-11-21T17:20:00.002-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160:      0
80:       1
40:     95
20:     431
15:    1009
10:     198
------------
Total: 1734 Sections = 80 Total Score = 277,440

Comments:

I had a whole assortment of issues all weekend but, oh boy, did the conditions ever make up for the things that went wrong!

I stayed in the chair for the whole 24 hours and for the first time ever I didn't run out of propagation. 15m was the money band all weekend. 40m was slow Saturday night but at least the rate meter never hit zero. When 15m got a bit too crowded for my liking on Sunday I went up to 10m and had a great run there for a couple of hours. I avoided 20m like the plague. It was wide open to everywhere at once and everyone was stacked two or three deep from one end of the band to the other although I did manage a nice run there during the last hour Sunday when it finally started to thin out a bit.

I went hunting for PR (last thing before bed Saturday night on 40m) and VI (first thing in the morning on 20m) and lucky I did as they were the only ones heard. All the rest came to me and the sweep was in the bag early Sunday. Also bested the old NT section record by almost 50K.

The computer crashed about a half a dozen times Sunday afternoon before I figured out the problem, apologies to those that I stranded in the middle of a contact. Despite the glitches, PowerSDR and the Flex worked like gangbusters dealing with the QRM and finding gaps to slide into.

Thanks to all for the Q's, especially all the '1 Alpha's that called in and muddled their way through the exchange for me to make the contact.

73 John VE8EV

As Good as it Gets

2011-10-18T18:46:00.013-06:00

As regular readers might know, propagation at this latitude is always dominated by the aurora. Right overhead almost all the time, it seems that HF conditions here only seem to vary from "poor" to "nil". As this solar cycle started to ramp up (finally!) it seemed that things got even worse as the increased activity stirred up the aurora more than it improved propagation. Finally, though, I think we’ve reached the tipping point where the solar flux is high enough that signals are able to push through most of the auroral disturbance and thanks to a rare lull in the geomagnetic activity this past week the propagation has been absolutely astounding!

I’m in the process of moving so I haven't bothered to put the yagi back up after taking it down in July. With only a 23ft non-resonant vertical as a backup antenna I haven't been very active lately. Most of my contacts have been limited to the odd JT65 or CW QSO in the evenings. It was becoming rare to even hear stations on SSB (never mind trying to actually work them!) and I was beginning miss the days of zero sunspots and zero auroral activity when I could at least count on 20 meters to be open for a little while each day. Last weekend, though, with the sun spot numbers firmly in the triple digits and the solar flux index around 150, my perception totally changed. 10m and 12m were both open late into the evening here and 15m and 20m seemed to be going around the clock.

Friday evening I went out to the shack and was surprised to hear the T32C Kiribati expedition on 10m SSB. I easily worked them and then heard them again on 12m. And worked them. And then again on 15m. And worked them. In fact, just in the space of 90 minutes I had them in the log on 8 different band/mode combinations! With a just couple of hours again on Saturday evening and an early morning excursion Sunday for the low bands I had them on every band except 160m and a total of 18 band/mode slots all in one weekend. I’m usually happy just to make any contact with a big dxpedition. A couple of years ago I blogged about chasing the K5D Desecheo group and back in January I spent almost two weeks trying to work the VP8ORK expedition, only managing to eke out a single ESP-strength CW contact on 20m the one day that I could even hear them. And that was with the yagi and the amplifier!

According to the scientists predictions, this is it: the peak of cycle 24. Hopefully these conditions will last at least for the next several months. I sure hope so because the geomagnetic activity peak usually lags the sunspot peak by a few years. The forecast for this latitude a few years from now could be pretty gloomy...

The amazing conditions continued for the rest of the expedition!

Shack of Ages

2011-08-06T13:23:00.016-06:00

I was going through an old family photo album and found a picture I'd didn't recall seeing before. As a young 13-year old SWL this was my first "shack". The old Philips receiver was an early 60's solid-state unit and I remember that it was supposed to be powered by a dozen D-cell batteries but I had it wired up to an old car battery and a charger.

1977 - I used the little 3-channel CB to talk to my buddies with "walkie-talkies"

Many happy hours were spent tuning the world and collecting QSL cards from short wave broadcast stations and my walls were decorated with the schedules and posters the broadcasters used to send along with their verifications.

I pursued other interests as a teenager and it wasn't until my late twenties that I became interested in radio again. A new Yaesu FRG-8800 all-mode receiver quickly led to my amateur license and a second-hand Cubic Astro 151 rig.

1993 - The original ham shack. I spent a lot of time making digital contacts on AMTOR and the new (then) PACTOR mode.

A couple of years later I moved to a new QTH and upgraded to a Yaesu FT-767GX with the 6m/2m/70cm option modules. I also modified my FRG-8800 receiver with a 70cm downconverter and the factory 2m option module and worked the world via the AO-13 satellite. It was still a few years before cell phones, the internet, and text messaging and visitors to the shack were wowed by the amazing communications abilities via HF digital modes, intercontinental contacts through high-orbit satellites, and global messaging via LEO store-and-forward packet satellites.

1995 - World traveller Gwen VK3DYL calls home from the Arctic.

Life goes on and when I started a new family and a new career ham radio fell by the wayside. The equipment was disassembled, the shack converted to a children's room and there was very little free time left over for hobbies. It would be another ten years before I was finally able to get back on the air. This time I built the shack in a portable trailer so I could relocate it at will. A new Kenwood TS-2000 replaced the old radios and new soundcard modes in software replaced the TNC's and dedicated computers. Now, all the station functions were on a single PC and a single radio.

2008 - Back on the air after all those years.

The first time I ever saw an HP TouchSmart computer I knew I wanted one for the shack. I had been contemplating a rack mount console arrangement for a long time and the touchscreen was finally the motivation to build it. Both sides of console tilt forward for easy access to all the cabling in the back while all the controls are within easy reach. A wireless mouse and keyboard keep the number of exposed wires to a bare minumum.

2011 - A Flex 3000 software defined radio is the latest addition.

Having used the new console layout for over a year now, I find it to be completely satisfactory in all respects. I expect the layout will remain essentially the same for the foreseeable future and new efforts will all be focused on towers and antennas. That will be a good topic for a future posting :)

VE8EV/P - Instant Expedition

2011-07-29T07:11:00.003-06:00

I'll be operating from Victoria Island NA-006 this weekend during the IOTA contest and as time permits. Hope to hear you!

Edit: operation was July 30 - August 1, 2011

RAC Day VE8RAC(VE8EV) SOSB/20 HP

2011-07-01T20:34:00.003-06:00

Call: VE8RAC
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: SOSB/20 HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 20

Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs CW Mults Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
160:
   80:
   40:
   20: 260    566      12        12
   15:
   10:
    6:
    2:
----------------------------------------
Total: 260    566      12        12
Total Score = 97,200

Club:

Comments:

292 VE, 7 RAC

For me this turned into two completely different contests. The first one was Thursday. All night I had lots of callers and good rate on both modes. When things slowed down at 0630z I already had 500 QSO's in the log and had bagged all but a few multipliers. I grabbed three hours sleep and when I got back on things were still pretty slow and just went downhill from there. Lots of power line noise and very few signals to be heard. I struggled all day Friday to put 300 contacts in the log over 13 hours. I spent most of the day on CW as very little was coming through on phone. There were several zero rate hours around midday and I eventually threw in the towel an hour early, took my toys and went home. Apologies for all the mangled callsigns and CQing in the faces of callers I couldn't hear. Better luck next time!

Low points:

- What should have been an easy run of Europeans at midnight turned into a packet frenzy when someone spotted me as a rare IOTA island. I went split for a while but eventually gave up and retreated to the friendlier waters of the Pacific.

- I'm not a CW guy. I'm having lots of fun contesting in CW but my 20wpm repertoire pretty much ends after callsigns and 5NN+exchange. I felt like a deer in the headlights several times when guys felt the need to chit-chat. All FB, but I'm just not there yet. Maybe next year...

High points:

+ First contest with the new Flex, all integrated with the touchscreen and N3FJP for CAT, keying and voice. Sweet! Not a single hiccup through the whole event and when all the big signals were booming in Thursday night the sharp filter skirts almost brought a tear to my eye.

+ Almost making the dual-mode mult sweep. I had VY0HL call me on both modes Thursday night and at the end I only needed VY1 on CW and (doh!) NT on phone.

73 and Happy Canada Day!
de VE8EV

XK1T - Snake Eyes

2011-06-20T16:37:00.020-06:00

Every time I activate a rare island in the Arctic I always remember to give a large part of the credit to luck. Bad weather, either on the ground or especially in space, can scuttle the plans of even the most well organized expeditions. On our trip to Tent Island (IOTA NA-193) this time luck was definitely not on our side!

Planning for an activation of NA-193 began almost a year ago. Herschel was the only island in the Yukon Territory Group and it had been activated three times before. Despite the activity, demand for the group had increased over time and this year it landed back on the official IOTA "Most Wanted" list. Herschel Island is a bit far from here so I began studying the coastline with Google Earth and the official Canadian government mapping data. I quickly found Tent Island which was just a few kilometres inside the Yukon border and only 130 kilometres (by air) from home!

Gerry, VE8GER, has a 19' boat and our original plan was for a summer trip to the island during the IOTA contest in July. Gerry happened to make a trip up that way last summer and reported that in addition to very shallow water the area was inhabited by thick swarms of ferocious mosquitoes! We quickly decided that a snowmobile trip in the spring would be a far better idea and began to make plans accordingly. As spring drew nearer, however, we just couldn't fit a trip into our schedules and had to come up with a third option. We would go by boat in early June when the water levels would be highest and the mosquitoes would (hopefully) not be out yet.

It was a hot, sunny day when we set sail for Tent Island. We spent the afternoon packing the equipment and loading the boat and by 5pm we were underway for what was expected to be a four hour cruise. The route to Tent Island took us down the Mackenzie River through a 120km long maze of channels in the river delta followed by a 35km stretch across the aptly-named Shallow Bay on the Arctic Ocean.

Tugboats and barges along the river as we head north towards the Arctic Ocean.

We made good time through the river channels but once we arrived at Shallow Bay our luck started to change. We took this part of the trip very seriously as there have been many fatalities over the years with boaters running aground out in the bay miles from shore. Despite several attempts we could not find deep enough water to get out into the bay. After several close calls we decided to back-track and head an hour further north towards Langley Island and try to cross the bay from there. By this time the weather had turned cold and cloudy, a fog had rolled in, and there were two-foot swells rolling down the bay. By GPS and depth soundings we picked our way between the islands and finally made it out onto the bay. The heavy seas and fog made for slow going and there was rarely more than four feet of water under the keel all the way across. The swells were frequently breaking over the bow but we made steady progress. Shortly after midnight the fog lifted, the sun came out, and we caught our first view of Tent Island in the distance. Even that close to our goal we were still not sure we would be able to land. We tried several different approaches to the island that were all too shallow but eventually we found our way in and made landfall on the east side of the island. Two huge driftwood logs had blown up on shore and made for a perfect place to pitch the tent and provide anchors for the tower. We spent the next three hours unloading the boat and making camp. Our tent was a huge 12'x14' canvas wall tent and we took our time to make sure it was well secured. We were both well aware that the two big logs we were anchoring the tent to did not just fall out of the sky! When a storm blows in off the Arctic Ocean the surge can go several hundred metres inland and being only 2 metres above sea level it was obvious that anything on Tent Island could easily be washed away.

Setting up camp under the midnight sun at Tent Island, Yukon.

The following morning was a beautiful, calm, sunny day as we worked on assembling the tower, yagi, and HF station. Luck was still not on our side, though. The yagi had been strapped to the side of the boat and the heavy seas coming across the bay the night before had filled the traps with water. We spent the next two hours disassembling the antenna and taking apart the traps to dry the coils. Just after midnight zulu we finally had the antenna up and working and got on the air.

Yagi all dried out, stood up, and ready to get on the air!

Conditions were only fair the first night. After working North American sunset and some Pacific contacts we turned our attention over the pole to Europe. More bad luck. Only a handful of Scandinavian and Russian stations were making it through. We found out later that despite the promising auroral forecast, a solar coronal mass ejection and several small solar flares had conspired to keep the K-index at 2 or higher. We shut down at one in the morning that day with only 300 contacts in the log.

The next day was windy, cloudy and cool. The K-index was at 3 and we limped along until late afternoon when the propagation gave out entirely. I switched to CW and called CQ for over an hour with only 4 replies! Fortunately, I had also brought along my portable satellite gear and worked many stations via AO-51, SO-50, and AO-27 satellites.

Making our own propagation via amateur radio satellite.

Things eventually picked up during NA sunrise and then improved steadily all night. I had high hopes that we were finally going to get a big opening to Europe so while Gerry worked the early risers I took a nap and planned to come on at 0600z and run as long as I could. I dozed and listened to Gerry making slow, steady progress with what sounded like an unruly pileup. This was his first experience running with a big pileup and I thought about relieving him early but he was holding his own. I decided it would be better to rest up so I could focus on rate later on.

VE8GER running his first pileup and doing a damn fine job!

Once again, though, lady luck spat in our eye. I got up around midnight and took over right about the time we ran out of propagation to Europe. I was expecting the band to stay open all night but now the only Europeans making it though were weak and watery and couldn't hear us at all. I stayed at it for several hours and put a few hundred JA's in the log but that was it. Around four in the morning the generator ran out of gas, the wind came up, and it started to rain. I went to bed happy that we were at least starting to make some progress and was sure that propagation would be even better tomorrow.

First thing the next morning Gerry was woken by a crash as the flapping tent had pushed the watt meter off top of the amplifier. I started to come around when he came back in from starting the generator, dripping wet from head to toe. The wind and rain had continued all night and water was running into the tent from numerous places. Upon trying the radio we found that the rain had soaked the traps again and the SWR was off-scale-high. We decided the best course of action would be to pack up the radio gear for safekeeping and wait for the winds and rain to die down so we could fix the antenna. I felt better after the gear was safely stowed but conditions continued to deteriorate. A support for the corner of the tent let loose and we struggled in the wind and rain to get it retied. Worse still was the ground. When we were setting up we found that the permafrost was only about six inches below the surface. With the heavy rainfall the ground was now becoming quickly saturated. Puddles started appearing in the tent as the ground under the tarpaulins kept getting squishier. Soon everywhere you stood a puddle would quickly form around your feet. Not yet willing to give up, I kept making satellite contacts from inside the tent, but things were not looking good. Around four in the afternoon I went outside and was horrified to discover the boat had come partially untied and was threatening to wash up on the beach. Having high seas push the boat up onto the beach and stranding us was my biggest fear! Worse still, it had dragged the rope across our fuel cache knocking over several gas cans which were now leaking our precious fuel! I hollered for Gerry and we spent the next hour repositioning the boat and getting it safely re-tied.

Once the boat was secured I surveyed our situation. The storm was not showing any signs of letting up. Our campsite had turned into a swamp and was well on its way to turning into a lake. Even if the rain stopped right away we would still have to abandon the camp site and (maybe) find a better place to pitch the tent. The yagi was still out of service until we could take it down and dry out the traps, and if we moved the tent we'd need to relocate the tower as well. We were both soaked to the skin and there were limited prospects of getting dry any time soon. I suggested to Gerry that maybe we should think about packing up and heading home.

Our perfect campsite transformed into a swamp and was now becoming a lake!

We kicked around the options and decided that there were only two. Either way we had to tear everything down and load up the boat and then we could either go home -or- we could wait out the storm in the boat, try to find a new campsite, and start all over. Given the conditions, finding a better spot seemed unlikely. Even if the rain quit right away it would still be days before everything (including ourselves!) dried out. The wind was pushing the water into the bay against the river current so the water levels were up. We decided to get while the gettin' was good. Gerry and I flopped around in the mud and rain for the next couple of hours tearing everything down and loading up the boat. We pushed off around 9PM and after an hour of pounding through the three and four foot swells on Shallow Bay we were safely back into the river channels and headed for home.

Final QSO total was only 830, fairly evenly split between North America, Europe, and Asia. Of those, 35 were on satellite and 5 on CW. Better luck next time, I hope!

XK1T Update: Back on dry land

2011-06-19T02:49:00.000-06:00

Had to cut the expedition short and abandon the island as a storm came in off the Arctic Ocean early this morning with high winds and torrential rainfall. Details to follow in the morning but we made it back, soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone, but nevertheless safe and sound.

73
John VE8EV

XK1T - Update

2011-06-14T20:20:00.000-06:00

We didn't get nearly as much prep time as we wanted due to busy schedules leading up to our trip. We'll start packing gear and loading the boat in the morning (Wednesday) and we'll see how it goes. When we're ready to go, we'll go!

Weather and propagation (aurora) are both predicted to be marginal but at least there's no snow in the forecast. We had snow almost every day last week but today it's +22C. Just depends whether the wind is blowing in off the Arctic Ocean or not.

As with all my previous trips we have a very detailed list of equipment to pack and a spacious 16'x20' tent to operate from so once we arrive on the island we'll be good to go. It's about a four hour trip from town out to the island.

I'll update this post right before we leave.

73
John - VE8EV

XK1T - Tent Island NA-193

2011-04-27T21:44:00.002-06:00

The dates are set for the next island trip. VE8GER and myself will be activating Tent Island, Yukon in IOTA NA-193, and a new one for CISA from June 16th through June 19th. Our primary mode will be SSB but look for us on CW later in the operation or if conditions are poor. We'll have the yagi, amplifier, and wires, and will mostly be active on 20m. Some operation on 30m, 17, and 15m is also likely.

I'll post another update prior to departure or if anything changes.

73
John - VE8EV

When All Else Fails...

2011-03-03T09:19:00.012-07:00

The ARRL has adopted the slogan "When All Else Fails..." to highlight the critical role amateur radio plans in the aftermath of natural disasters. But what happens when "All Else" just fails on its own? Last week I had yet another opportunity to find out.

Living on the edge of the world has it's communications challenges. For many years up until around the turn of the century we were served by a robust and multi-layered communications system. There was a chain of microwave relay sites going south that handled all the telephone and low-bandwidth digital circuits. Most private networks were carried by satellite. Commercial HF radio was still widely used across the north for aeronautical and marine communications. The nascent internet was still a low bit-rate, dial-up affair. Then the telephone company upgraded it's network. The old analog equipment was replaced with a new chain of high bandwidth, all-digital microwave sites. Suddenly, bandwidth was cheap(er) and plentiful. Companies dropped their private satellite links and leased lines from the telco. The commercial HF networks were still there but now they were operated remotely from the south. In the same timeframe, Internet usage exploded and the "cashless society" emerged. Paper money became passé as most people only carried debit and credit cards. The digital revolution had finally arrived.

This wasn't the first time everything had come to a screeching halt. About once or twice a year "the network" goes down. In the south everything would be instantly re-routed but up here at the end of line that isn't an option. Usually service is restored within a few hours and until then the stores put up "Cash Only" signs in the window and everyone grumbles about not being able to get on the Internet. The only difference this time was it went down right before the worst blizzard to hit the area in years.

I got up Friday morning and like most people the first order of business was a cup of coffee and checking my email. When all the usual troubleshooting failed to make the Internet work I grabbed the phone and dialled a long distance number. "We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed." I had seen the blizzard warning the day before and I knew that we might be without comms for more than just a few hours. I dropped by the mayor's office to discuss emergency communications options, including ham radio, and just about the time I got home it started to snow and the wind picked up.

Visibility was down to near zero as I hunkered down in my shack trailer and started making contacts. Around lunchtime I touched base with a "local" VY1 station (about 800 miles away) on 40m but most of the day I just ran stations on 20m in JT65 digital mode, smug in the knowlege that my little station was still firmly connected to the outside world. The storm raged all day and all night. Saturday morning I went out to discover that the snow had drifted in blocking the door to the shack and even covered the exhaust vent for the little gas heater. I shovelled the door clear and cleaned the snow out of the heater flue and got back on the radio. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, though, I had to force the door open and shovel the snow away. By lunchtime I was on the verge of being trapped in the shack and, although I can think of worse places to be trapped, I finally gave up and went into the house.

The storm showed no signs of letting up. I kept peeking out the window to make sure my antennas were still up and, surprisingly, they stayed up all weekend. That night the local cell phone company rigged up a satellite link for outgoing long distance calls so at least we had some communications. I had let all my friends and family know I could get messages out via ham radio if they needed but most only wanted to update their Facebook status. It was around this time that the novelty of the whole situation started to wear thin. With no ATMs or debit card machines machines we pooled our cash and made a run to the store for necessities. Canada has always been far ahead of the rest of the world in electronic banking and particularly so here in the north where banks are few and far between but just then it didn't seem so great. It was lucky that we just happened to have a few hundred dollars in cash on hand because usually we don't. Others weren't so fortunate and had to beg or borrow to get by.

On Sunday the winds let up little but at least it stopped snowing. I got called into work to deal with storm-related issues out there and by mid-afternoon when I got home the winds had finally abated enough to start digging. The snow was almost to the top of the door on the shack and I spent the rest of the afternoon shovelling. And shovelling. And shovelling. By nightfall I was back in the shack and had all the steps and sidewalk clear.

Monday morning the winds were finally calm and the sun was out. The phones and internet came back up and life quickly returned to normal. I spent the rest of the day looking for my truck...

I know I left my truck around here somewhere.

NanoSail-D: Sailing the New Sea

2011-01-21T12:29:00.036-07:00

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people." - JFK 1962

The idea seems simple enough. Have a sail that can capture the solar wind and use it to propel a spacecraft. This is the concept behind NASA’s Nanosail-D satellite. A joint project between NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Nanosail-D was launched in November 2010 as a sub-satellite riding on another NASA research satellite called FASTSAT. The mission was at first thought to be lost when the Nanosail satellite failed to eject from FASTSAT however on January 19th the satellite unexpectedly popped out of its carrier and began transmitting telemetry data. NASA quickly issued an appeal to amateur radio operators across the world to assist it in collecting data from the satellite.

The next day I got an email from a local ham and avid space enthusiast Nelson, VE8NE, looking to borrow a yagi antenna and a UHF handheld radio to try to receive the signal from Nanosail-D. I knew from experience that picking up the low-powered signal from a tiny microsatellite is really not something you want to attempt for the first time, outside at 35 below zero, and in the dark, so I invited Nelson to come over in the evening and we’d use my satellite station to receive the data.

Now this wasn’t really news to me. I’d seen the request from NASA in passing but it didn’t strike me as anything unusual. The use of amateur radio frequencies on tiny research satellites is not uncommon and neither is asking the amateur radio community for assistance to downlink the telemetry. It’s usually a rather ho-hum kind of deal but as I looked into this one I realized that it was actually going to do something exciting. Exactly three days after being released from the "mother-ship" the satellite was programmed to automatically unfurl a gigantic solar sail and that 72-hour timer was due to run out tonight! A quick check of the orbital parameters showed that the satellite would pass by several times and, shortly after the sail was set to deploy, it would pass almost directly overhead. Looking at the ground track I also realized that the satellite would be flying over mostly open ocean on that particular orbit and we might even be one of the first stations to confirm the sail deployment. Needless to say, I got more interested in a hurry!

I dug up the data format for the telemetry frames and hacked up a quick Excel spreadsheet to decode the data so we could tell what was happening. Shortly before the first pass Nelson arrived and we got everything set up. My entire station is automated so once the satellite came over the horizon all I had to do was push a button. The exact position of the satellite is computed mathematically based on the current orbital elements, our precise location on the earth, and the exact time. The tracking software calculates the antenna pointing angles and passes that data to my antenna control program. It also figures out how much to adjust the receiver frequency to compensate for the Doppler shift as the satellite approaches and passes that information along to the radio control program. Finally, the signal from the radio is fed back into the computer sound card where another program turns the received audio back into digital data and displays it on the screen.

The first pass was a bit of a disappointment. The signal was much weaker than I had anticipated and all we decoded were a few partial data packets. As the satellite disappeared over the North Pole and passed over Europe we watched the Twitter feed coming from mission control at Santa Clara University in San Francisco to see if there was any news. A ham in the Netherlands had stayed up late to help relay data (it was the middle of the night there) but the last bits he was able to capture were still a few minutes before the sail was supposed to deploy. Nanosail-D slid down the far side of the world and headed over Antarctica as mission control pleaded on Twitter for someone to send them the data that would confirm whether their experiment had worked or not. Anyone in Australia or New Zealand? What about Hawaii? Alaska? Anyone..?

While we were waiting I had re-calibrated the antennas and moments after the computer said the satellite was back in range we could hear the signals from space. Nelson climbed up on the roof of the shack to see if the satellite (now supposedly sporting a 110 square foot solar sail) was visible to the naked eye while I stayed down below and tweaked the digital filters as the signals got stronger. Finally, after numerous partial decodes, a complete telemetry frame appeared on the screen followed 10 seconds later by another. I quickly pasted the data into my spreadsheet and there it was: SAIL DEPLOYED!

Screen shot of the decoded telemetry. The sail deployed right on schedule!

I hollered to Nelson (still up on the roof) that we got it and immediately transferred one of the frames to NASA with the comment "Merry Christmas!" in the notes field. After Nelson announced on Twitter that we got the confirmation of sail deploy, the guys at mission control asked us (via Twitter) to also send the data to them by email. Shortly after that here is what they posted:

@NanosailD I have data from @naeisel and am checking. First look is promising. Sorry that I have to verify and confirm. Will let everyone know soon.

@NanosailD John @naeisel has done it! I have two valid data sets and both have the correct signatures.

@NanosailD NanoSail-D has sent data that it deployed the sail. Will wait until tomorrow morning for ground based tracking to confirm.

I got a nice email from NASA the next morning confirming that our data was good and we were the first station to report the indications they had been looking for. Never a dull moment in this hobby!

73
John - VE8EV

The automatic confirmation page received after submitting telemetry.

VE8SUN - Here Comes The Sun

2011-01-11T12:18:00.003-07:00

Living above the Arctic Circle gets me the strangest gift from Mother Nature on my birthday. Every year on December 6th the sun sets and doesn't rise again the next day. Or the next week. In fact, it doesn't come up again for a whole month. After 30 days the sun finally peeks above the horizon for a few minutes and then a bit higher and longer every day after that. The good citizens of Inuvik, Northwest Territories celebrate the return of the sun every year with the Inuvik Sunrise Festival. Bonfires, fireworks, and other public events help to kick off the new year and remind everyone that the days will only be getting longer and warmer from this point on.

To share the fun with everyone else, the Inuvik Amateur Radio Club decided to run a special event station this year in conjunction with the festival. I applied for and received the callsign VE8SUN and on the advertised date we fired up the VE8EV mobile shack. The aurora was pretty heavy so we mostly stuck to 15 and 20 meters. As the electronic overcast flared and subsided it was interesting to hear a big pileup of loud stations calling one minute and then dead silence on the next over. To make up for the lack of HF propagation we also worked the satellites, which generated a surprising percentage of our total contacts!

It was a very pleasant experience to operate with a different style than my usual contest or DXpedition QSO machine. No matter how many were calling I did try to spend a minute or two passing along interesting tidbits about the event and the unusual QTH, although with the unstable conditions it was sometimes difficult. I worked several ops that had visited Inuvik before (either for work or pleasure) and even worked one station in Arctic Norway that was located further north than we were and wasn't expecting their sun to return for another two weeks!

After a lengthly absence the sun just peeks over the horizon.

Full-colour QSLs and certificates will be printed shortly and should be available in a month or so. For QSL details click here.

73
John - VE8EV

RAC Winter Contest

2010-12-19T15:59:00.002-07:00

Call: VE8RAC
Operator(s): VE8EV VE8DW
Station: VE8EV

Class: M/M HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 7

Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs CW Mults Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
160:
80:
40: 29 3 6 3
20: 31 493 7 8
15: 56 6 5 2
10:
6:
2:
----------------------------------------
Total: 116 512 18 13 Total Score = 109,120

Club:

Comments:

+11 RAC

A little bit of aurora made for a bumpy ride most of the day but we had some great runs whenever it lifted. Spent a lot of time on 15m and 40m but twenty was the only band that really opened to anywhere. Thanks to Radio Amateurs of Canada for the snappy callsign and Wally VE8DW for manning the second chair.

73
John VE8EV

ARRL 10 VE8EV SO Mixed HP

2010-12-12T19:35:00.001-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: SO Mixed HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 10

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
CW: 112
SSB: 182
-------------------
Total: 294 72 Total Score = 58,464

Club:

Comments:

Fairly casual effort, just Saturday afternoon and Sunday til 2230z. I could follow the "2pm peak" across North America on both days. Zero rate until 2pm in New England when suddenly the band lit up with W1's and slowly tracked west until it was just 6's calling around 2pm Pacific and then died out after that. Had a lot of fun especially on CW!

73
John - VE8EV

ARRL 160 VE8EV M/S HP

2010-12-05T13:27:00.003-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 9

Summary:
Total: QSOs = 50 Sections = 38 Countries = 12 Total Score = 5,168

Club:

Comments:

I had a home renovation project go into extra innings and wasn't able to get on until Saturday afternoon. The K-index was 0 or 1 the entire time and I thought I'd be able to do better than 50 Q's! Ratio of heard to worked was about 2:1. I spent a lot of time CQing but not many takers. I got spotted twice and that was directly responsible for about half my QSO's. I'll have a better antenna next year.
73
John - VE8EV

SS - Living on the Edge

2010-11-22T12:06:00.019-07:00

I was actually a bit nervous going into this year's running of ARRL Sweepstakes Phone. Everyone counts on at least some activity from the Northern Territories section to get that clean sweep of all 80 ARRL and RAC sections but there are very few active stations here and I sure wouldn't want to disappoint anyone. As a result, I always approach SS with a more serious attitude than I do for any other contest. You can just never tell when the aurora will be out in force and conspire to silence all the far northern stations. That said, I think we've all done the best that can be expected from up here to keep NT off the most-missed section list, at least on phone.

I watched the geomagnetic forecast with a bit of trepidation as there was a big bump in the activity predicted for right around the weekend of the contest. When it passed before the contest started, I began to think that maybe this was "the year". With the high demand for NT I've always thought that if the darned aurora would just go away for a couple of days and a few sunspots would show up, one could run up a pretty decent score from here. I wasn't under any illusions though. Here on the far northern edge of North America we're a long, long ways from everyone else (Miami, Moscow, and Tokyo are all about the same distance away) and once everyone drops down to the low bands (which are the most affected by the aurora) to spend all night working their neighbors with low wire antennas we're pretty much shut out until morning.

For the first four hours I kept up a decent rate at first on 15m and later on 20m but at 0100z, with over 400 Q's already on the books, the band closed as if someone hit a switch. 40m was wide open but EVERYONE was already there and packed about three deep from one end of the band to the other. With the new 40m yagi I didn't have much trouble working anyone I could hear but most of the weaker stations were buried under the QRM from the big guns. I tried repeatedly to get a run going but nothing worked. Every time I thought I had found a tiny bit of elbow room to squeeze into I quickly found out that there were guys I couldn't hear already running there. I struggled all night but by the time I gave up and went to bed at 0600z I had only made 65 Q's in five hours. I even checked 80m a few times in the vain hope that I might pick up a few contacts there but there was still enough aurora out that I didn't hear a peep anywhere on the band.

I was back at it by 1100z for east coast sunrise. There was no activity at all on 20m yet so while I waited I S&P'd on 40m. The first station I heard was VO1TA and after missing NL last year I wasn't going to let him get away. He had a big pileup of stateside stations that I couldn't hear but luckily he called for a VE and I managed to get his attention when the din went down. We were careful to get all the details right because we both knew it wasn't likely either of us would get another opportunity to work our respective sections (and I never did hear another NL station).

With the addition of NL to the 70 sections worked the day before I started thinking about a sweep. I've been the last section for a lot of guys but I've never had a sweep myself. Since I was unassisted all I could do was run run run and hope for the best. Once I found a frequency and started on 20m I thought my missing sections had been broadcast on CNN because all but NT and PR called me in the first 15 minutes. The other thing I started thinking about was the section record. VY1JA had set the high-power record of 229,000 back in 2002 and some quick math told me that if I could keep the rate up until the high bands went out I might have a shot. I started skipping the voice keyer exchange on the stronger stations and just spoke the exchange as fast as I could. The rate meter crept up to about 150/hr and I can't believe anyone could get much faster than that in SS without sounding like a chipmunk!

Around lunchtime my spider-sense started tingling (or maybe I just caught a bit of a Spanish accent in the pileup) and I asked if there was any Puerto Rican stations on frequency. Sure enough NP4G was in there and that only left Northern Territories for the sweep. I'd hate to miss my own section! I had reminded VE8GER before the contest started to make sure he found me but here it was noon on Sunday and I hadn't heard from him yet. I started to think that maybe he had run into equipment problems or had an accident on his way out to his cabin but I needn't have worried. About an hour later he called in and the sweep was in the bag! I checked the log after the contest and except for one each of PR and NL I had multiple contacts for all the sections so pretty sure I'll be sipping coffee from the official mug next year. Sweeeep!

The high bands were good to me all afternoon. When I heard some activity on 10m I even gave it a try just for the novelty but I knew my rate would still be better on 15m. That said, after 10 minutes on 10m the rate was 60/hr so I'll definitely have to keep an eye on that band as conditions keep improving. Back on 15m I watched the score and QSO count creep slowly towards the record all afternoon but eventually I realized I wasn't going to make it before 20m closed up. After the frustration of the previous night I was dreading going back to 40m and when I was on 20m I milked it for as long as I could. I figured as long as I could keep the rate at least in the double-digits it was probably more than I'd get on 40m. Towards the bitter end I was hearing more and more serial numbers of "001" and even walking a few non-contesters through the exchange! Eventually, though, I had to move. 40m was a bit better than the previous night but almost all the stations CQing were already in the log. I managed to squeeze into a wider-than-average gap between a couple of stations, put the attenuator on to blot out some of the QRM and started calling. Surprisingly, I was able to work a steady trickle of stations, almost all with a precedence of A and very low serial numbers but the rate meter was stuck in the 20's the whole time. I came pretty close but at the very end I was still about 125 Q's short of the record. Still, not a bad score considering the limited contribution of 40m and a total lack of any 80m contacts. Maybe next year! Final numbers before dupes and log checking were 1309 Q's x 80 sections for 209,440 points.

Finally a clean sweep!!! I wanted to tie the broom to the mast on the trailer for the ride home but I forgot...

SS SSB VE8EV Single Op HP

2010-11-22T10:31:00.001-07:00

ARRL Sweepstakes Contest, SSB

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 0
80: 0
40: 117
20: 592
15: 591
10: 9
------------
Total: 1309 Sections = 80 Total Score = 209,440

Club:

Comments:

I worked hard at this one and finally managed to get my very first sweep! Band conditions were the best I've ever had on SS weekend. I even worked 10m for a few minutes.

Full write-up at http://ve8ev.blogspot.com

73
John - VE8EV

CQ World Wide - Let's Make Lemonade!

2010-11-01T15:21:00.021-06:00

Regular readers here might think I sound like a broken record but contesting from this far north is all about the aurora. Now that the sun is starting to wake up from its lengthy slumber the increased activity is both improving propagation and stirring up the aurora in equal measures. I started checking the geomagnetic forecasts a month before the contest and everything said October 29-31 would be three of the quietest days this month. With a positive auroral outlook, our goal for the contest was to double our Multi-Two NT (VE8/VY0/VY1) record set last year and it looked like everything was on track. In addition to myself and VE8DW we had not one but TWO new operators on the roster. VE8GER had been active since this time last year and VE8NE just moved to town and had never operated HF before but was willing to give it a try. We had a new Mosley S-33 yagi for 40m and 20m (it also does 17m) and I arranged to borrow a 50 foot trailer-mounted crank-up tower to hang it from. The TH6DXX and low band vertical were still up from last season and my mobile shack trailer had a number of upgrades added over the past months. In short, we were ready to make some noise!

The one guest operator who is never invited but ALWAYS shows up is Murphy. He arrived early this year so he could help out the week before the contest. His first contribution was (relatively) warm weather. Good for working on antennas and such but it also kept the river from freezing enough for VE8GER to get to town from his cabin out in the bush. Scratch one operator. Murphy also wanted to help out with the propagation. The Wednesday before the contest the geomagnetic forecast for the weekend changed from "mostly quiet" to "active at high-latitudes due to arrival of a CME". Being one operator short was not a show-stopper but active geomagnetic conditions surely was. I could easily foresee having the K-index at 5 for the whole contest and only hearing a few fluttery signals on 20m from guys that couldn't hear us calling. Been there, done that. The final blow was on Friday afternoon. After helping to get everything set up on Thursday, VE8DW had a family emergency come up and wouldn't able to operate on the weekend. The only good part was that after his triple-play of bad news, Murphy eventually left to help out others (did he show up at your station on the weekend..?)

As always, there wasn't anything that could be done about the propagation. We'd just have to fight through the aurora and hope for a few openings. I thought about going SOAB but I knew VE8NE was still keen to get on the air so I decided to be the good Elmer and planned for Multi-Single. He wasn't going to be available during any peak hours but would still be able to get his feet wet chasing multipliers on 20m for a few hours at night while I cruised the low bands. After a quick read of the M-S rules we were more-or-less ready to go at 0000z. My plan was simply to run on 40m during the night, 20m during the day, spend every other hour chasing multipliers, and hope the aurora held off long enough to at least get a few hundred contacts in the log.

As most plans are wont to do, mine did not survive first contact with the enemy. At only fifty feet high the new yagi was just "ok" on forty but the band sounded like daylight-20m with wall-to-wall signals one end to the other. I couldn't find a decent place to get a run going but didn't have much trouble S&P'ing and since it was just the start of the contest there were more than enough stations to keep me entertained. There was not much activity on 20m but VE8NE managed to put a handful of mults in the log including a VU and an S79, both of which were the only ones heard during the contest. After midnight local I dropped down to see what was happening on 80m and 160m (not much) and when VE8NE left I spent the rest of the night jumping from band to band to band, always being mindful of the "10-minute rule". The bands were all still going strong at 5am when I finally hit the bunk for a 3-hour snooze.

The new S-33 at sunrise. 40 foot elements on a 24 foot boom is
small for a 40m yagi but sure seems like a monster to me!

The next morning I got up expecting to see the K-index at 5 but it was still zero. I guess the earth managed to get out of the way before the CME arrived because the forecast had now been revised to "quiet" all weekend. Sweet! The TH6 was still pointed at Europe from the night before so I found a quiet spot on 20m away from the USA wall-of-noise and started running. And running. And running. By early afternoon the Eu run finally started to slow down so I turned the antenna stateside and started running guys on 15m. And running. And running! I didn't eat. I didn't check the packet spots. I didn't visit with the visitors. I didn't answer my phone. It was already early evening when I realized that other than a quick mid-afternoon excursion to S&P a few stations on 10m (ten meters!!), I had been running stations for twelve solid hours! The QSO count was already over 1000 and the score had even surpassed last year's final Multi-Two tally. The rest of the night was mostly spent mult hunting but I did manage a nice hour-long run in the wee hours on 40m, my first ever on that band. 80m and 160m were in much better shape than the previous night. Only two Europeans were worked on 80m but I did manage to get all of the "easy" zones (1,3,4,31) on both bands as well as a handful of South Pacific multipliers. Thanks to KL7RA for moving to 160m to get me the double-mult for Alaska/Zone 1 and then on a whim, I decided to call CQ on 160m for a little while and see if I could scare up a W6 or W7 for the zone 3 mult. Imagine my surprise when RT0C called me from zone 19 for the double-mult followed shortly thereafter by W7AT for zone 3. An hour or so after that I checked 160m one more time and found KH7U for my last "easy" one before I turned in for the night.

The next morning I poked around over the pole on 15m and 20m but never got anything big going. 15m opened early to North America and the Caribbean so I found a spot and started running again. After the 200/hr rates the day before I ran at a somewhat more relaxed pace this time. Every hour or two I'd slip away to grab a few mults on 20m and when 10m opened up (10 meters!!) (AGAIN!!!) I managed a little mini-run there to pick off all the "easy" zones on that band. Special thanks to VE8GER, still out at his cabin, for finding me to provide the double-mult on 10m. As soon as N0KE called in from zone 4 it was back to the endless run of stations on 15m. The last hour is usually tough going so I decided to just point the beam out west, find a nice quiet spot on 15m outside the US phone bands, relax and run JA's and Pacific stations for the last hour with a few quick QSY's here and there to pick up a final few multipliers. As the last minutes went by, the 15m QSO counter ticked over 1000 beating the 20m count by 150 Q's and marking the first time in my experience that a band other than 20m had the most contacts. Final numbers were 2058 Q's, 300 mults, and 1,509,300 points, breaking the 22-year old NT Multi-Single record by almost a million points.

Thanks to everyone for calling in and being there to be called.
73
John - VE8EV

Backing up the logs right after the contest ended. I haven't even turned the amp off yet.

CQWW SSB VE8EV M/S HP

2010-11-01T12:39:00.001-06:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV VE8NE
Station: VE8EV

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 40

Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 5 5 5
80: 22 12 11
40: 151 21 47
20: 846 33 88
15: 1003 25 42
10: 31 6 5
------------------------------
Total: 2058 102 198 Total Score = 1,509,300

Club:

Comments:

A few sunspots and no aurora can sure liven up a weekend; the propagation was outstanding! I spent most of the daylight hours running and the nighttime chasing multipliers. 15m was the money band during the day but 20m and even 40m were going non-stop. I even managed to get all the "easy" multipliers on 160m and 10m for the first time. Newcomer VE8NE got on for a few hours in the evenings (his first time on HF) and thanks to VE8DW for helping set up the second position.

73
John - VE8EV

Little Arrows

2010-08-07T13:30:00.015-06:00

Ham radio never gets boring for me. I don't know if there is any other hobby that has so many different avenues for enjoyment. I would encourage everyone to try something new at least once a year. Fox hunting, contesting, moon bounce, digital modes, award chasing, microwaves, antenna building, whatever you think might be a fun change of pace.

My latest diversion is portable QRP satellite operations. John, K8YSE, noticed that I spend a fair amount of time travelling to 'exotic' locations around the Arctic so he sent me up an Arrow II dual-band satellite antenna . This little antenna is an amazing piece of craftsmanship. It consists of a two-piece aluminum boom about three feet long with a 7-element UHF yagi on one plane and a 3-element VHF yagi on the other. All the antenna elements are made from aluminum arrow shafts and they thread together at the boom. The whole antenna weighs less than two pounds and fits into a two-foot long 3" mailing tube for travelling. I already had a VHF handheld (which I hadn't ever used in the three years since I got it!) for the uplink and I was able to scrounge up a UHF handheld to receive the downlink. A $20 camera tripod from a discount store completed the package and I was ready to get on the air. After a bit of practice, I found I could assemble the entire station in about 5 minutes if I was in a hurry.

Operating from Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories in grid CP27

From studying a grid square map I determined that there are about a dozen different grids that I could operate from during my travels. Many satellite operators collect grid squares to qualify for the ARRL VUCC Award. Unfortunately, my far northern location limits the time for a mutual satellite window between here and the more populated areas of the world but on the plus side I can also reach over the pole to Europe and across the North Pacific to Asia. My first 'grid expedition' was to Fort McPherson, NT which lies in the CP27 grid. Less than two hours away by road, it is the southernmost location that I visit on a regular basis. On the first pass of the HO-68 satellite that day I made a whopping 16 QSO's, including two from Europe. Unfortunately, the rest of the passes that afternoon did not favor any populated areas so I only made a handful of contacts on the other birds. I had one good AO-51 pass scheduled for the end of the day and I decided to try to operate from Tsiigehtchic, NT in grid CP37 on the way home. That too didn't work out very well. I just barely made it there with 5 minutes before the start of the pass but for some reason I wasn't hearing the bird very well and I had a bad connection on the VHF radio antenna jack. By the time I had it all sorted out the bird was already over the North Pole and no one else was heard. Not to worry though. I travel to all these places at least once or twice a year so I will be back on from there sooner or later.

Camping on the August long weekend. My little nephew thinks satellite DX is pretty cool after we worked RN0QA in Yakutsk, Russia on AO-51.

I have special VE8EV/P QSL cards on the way from the printer for all my portable operations and will be happy to QSL via all the usual methods.

73 and look for you on the birds!

The QSL Factory

2010-05-16T15:37:00.013-06:00

The first wave of 700 CK8G QSL requests ready to be answered.

I really don't mind answering requests for QSL cards. I've had several people offer to be my QSL manager but I've got a great system for processing QSL requests that really makes it a breeze. The cards for my CK8G NA-182 expedition arrived this week so it was finally time to clear the backlog of requests that had built up since the operation ended. My post office box was already full when I returned from the island and in the intervening four weeks I've amassed a stack of envelopes about 500 strong! Add to that another 100 via the on-line QSL request system and 100 more for the GDXF bureau system and it could take weeks to get caught up. In fact, it took me all day Saturday from start to finish. Here are the secrets of running your own 'QSL Factory' for your next dxpedition or special event station:

Start with a clean log. Every busted call in the log takes extra time to find and correct at QSL time. It's well worth taking an extra few seconds to confirm a call while you're on the air than to have to search for it in the log when its not correct. I try pretty hard to keep the average error rate below 1% (1 busted call in 100).
Pre-print the QSL labels. Yes, ALL of them! I export the entire log (dupes and all) into Excel, sort it by callsign, and then run a mail-merge in Word to print the labels on Avery 5160 Easy-Peel laser printer label sheets, 30 to a page. Even up here in the Arctic a box of 3000 labels only costs $65. Once they're all printed I bind them (optional) with a plastic binding bar to become an easy to use book. When I get a QSL request it literally takes seconds to grab the book, flip to the right page and peel out the sticker and slap it on a QSL card.
Don't try to do too many things at once as your workspace will get too crowded. I usually open all the mail as it arrives, check which operation it is for, unfold the reply envelopes, put the card inside the reply envelope with the IRC or return postage, and set it aside for further processing at a later date (usually when the cards arrive from the printer).
Have self-inking stamps made for return address and verification (the little circle with your callsign that says 'QSO VERIFIED' or something like that). My arm would fall off if I had to hand write my return address on every envelope!
Organize your workspace so everything you need is within reach. Blank cards, labels, stamps, tape, etc.
Find a work flow that you're comfortable with and use 'key events' to regulate the flow so no steps are missed. I use the verification stamp as the key event to file the received card and switch from QSO lookup mode to envelope stuffing mode. The return address stamp is the trigger to set the now sealed envelope aside for adding postage and grabbing the next one.
Don't waste time with distractions. Any request that needs something unusual (not-in-the-log, SWL request, requests for QSL's from multiple operations, etc.) just put it aside for later and keep going.
Get self-adhesive postage stamps! I get mine in rolls of 50 stamps and I can stick them on a stack of envelopes faster than I could run the same amount of mail through a postage meter (although a postage meter is an option if you have access to one.)
Know your postal system. You don't want any mail coming back to you or being delayed because of things you should have caught before it went out. Postal rates and requirements change often. Have a talk with the postmaster or a postal manager about what you're doing when you go to buy postage. Is there a discount for bringing it in bundled and sorted? Maybe a special deal for 'bulk' mailings that might be applicable? This would also be a good time to talk about IRC's and any specific requirements for trading them in for international postage.

Having all the QSL labels pre-printed really is the key, though. Forever more (and you will have people looking for QSL's forever) all you need to do is grab the book off the shelf and stick the label on a blank QSL card. No computers, no printers, no hand writing.

All the CK8G cards are now in a big shopping bag by the door ready to drop off to the post office in the morning. It almost didn't happen, though! I was not impressed with the quality of the QSL cards that I got from the printer. I know if I called to complain they would re-print them for me but that would mean waiting for another month and without much guarantee that they would be better the second time around. In the end I decided to send them out as-is. The color balance on the photo is a bit off but maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist...

VE8EV/P - Instant Expedition

2010-05-13T18:07:00.009-06:00

I've always put a great deal of effort and planning into my island trips. I've operated from up here for years so I know what the requirements are for success. Go when the propagation is good, take the biggest antenna you can, and run as much power as you can bring with you. Then, if you're lucky, you'll be able to fill the log with many contacts. How do I know all this? I've done it the other way before and it sucks! Low power to a dipole antenna from inside the auroral zone is next to useless except under optimal conditions.

When an emergency work trip to Sachs Harbour on Banks Island (NA-129) came up last week I grabbed my radio and the backup dipole antenna that was still packed from my Greens Island trip and set out to see what I could do with it in my spare time. The first night I was there I strung the antenna from my favorite flood light pole and spent a few hours on the radio. No huge pileups but with perseverance I was able to make a few dozen contacts on CW and SSB. It was all downhill after that.

For the rest of my four day stay I was only able to make a handful of additional contacts. The bands were crowded with no less than three contests running on the weekend (one each on CW, SSB and RTTY), the propagation got worse every day due to multiple solar flares and there was persistent local QRN that I couldn't locate. I called CQ endlessly, alternating between SSB and CW without any answers. At one point I even got up in the middle of the night and went up to the airport to try my luck during the peak midnight sun grey line hours. One contact. After a while I gave up and went back to bed.

I'm not giving up forever, though. I just need to be better prepared next time. Instead of a dipole, I'm going to build a lightweight, collapsible ZL-Special antenna for 20m. If I can find a way I'll get a little 300-400W solid-state expedition amplifier that'll lend an extra 6dB to my signal without the huge weight penalty of the FL-2100B. Then, a little Arrow dual-band yagi will get me onto the satellites to hand out the rare grid square to VHF operators. Hopefully I'll have everything together in time for my annual trip to Ulukhaktok on Victoria Island (NA-006) which I've conveniently scheduled to take place during the IOTA contest in July ;)

CK8G - The Perfect Storm

2010-04-28T20:46:00.026-06:00

I remember when I first discovered Greens Island. I had just returned from a successful solo operation to Ellice Island (NA-192) as VX8X and my trip to Banks Island (NA-129) for VC8B was already scheduled for July. The next IOTA group on my list after that was NA-182 but I had no idea how I was going to do it. Nicholson Island (around here its still called Nicholson Point, it only became an island in the 1980's after a big storm washed away the isthmus) is tantalizingly close at only 150 miles from my home QTH. It has an unmanned radar station and a serviceable runway left over from the old DEW Line days but from my perspective it might as well have been in low earth orbit. I had talked to the techs that did the maintenance on the radar site and they told me that when they go in by helicopter they always carry a full load with no room to spare. Inquiries to the airlines revealed that chartering an aircraft big enough to bring in all the equipment and supplies and pick you up when you're done would cost over $10000! Tuktoyaktuk, NT is nearby and right on the coast but by boat from there it's still about 150 miles and you'd have to fly all your gear up to Tuk first. It just didn't seem possible and I was beginning to understand why it had only ever been activated once.

On the eastern side of NA-182 was the community of Paulatuk, NT. Much more expensive to fly into than Tuktoyaktuk but it was only 23 miles away from Clapperton Island. This looked like a much more plausible scenario and as I was measuring the distances on Google Earth I noticed there were several other small islands right by Paulatuk that one could almost walk to! I carefully examined each one but found that they either didn't really exist or did not qualify for IOTA for one reason or another. As I looked farther along the coast I came across a small island only 9 miles away that seemed to meet all the minimum criteria and it had an official name: Greens Island. I sent all the pertinent info to the manager of the IOTA program, G3KMA, and received a prompt reply that yes, it does qualify for NA-182 and would be added to the official list. Now I could start planning an expedition!

Greens Island from space on Google Earth. The white spots in the water are ice.

I travel to Paulatuk on business several times a year and I started talking to the airport maintainer there, Tim Ruben, about organizing a trip over to Greens Island. Tim is very much a 'can-do' kind of guy and told me that however we wanted to do it he would make it happen for me. By boat in the summer, snowmobile in the winter, supplies, equipment, whatever it took, he'd take care of that end of it. Over the next six months we stayed in touch as the plans developed. My first inclination was to try to organize a big operation. Three or four guys, two stations, round-the-clock operation, CW and SSB. Once I started crunching the numbers, however, I realized it just wouldn't be possible. Air travel in the Arctic is fantastically expensive. A return ticket just from Inuvik to Paulatuk is $1000 and air freight is $5 per kilogram. I knew I could count on the IOTA community and a few DX clubs to provide some support but as rare as NA-182 was in IOTA circles it still wasn't a rare DXCC entity. I finally concluded that with a concerted fundraising effort it might be possible to bring along one other operator to work CW. I asked a few guys to pass the word that I was looking for a second op to go with me to NA-182 and I waited.

Summer turned to fall and then back into winter again. I was very lucky for the second time and pulled off a respectable solo operation on Banks Island (NA-129) in July and after my holiday-style operation on St. Lucia (NA-108) at Christmas I turned my attention back to Greens Island. I hadn't had any bites yet for a second op so I posted a message on an IOTA forum that I was looking for another op to join a potential expedition in April. Much to my dismay, the request got picked up by the DX newsletters and was cross-posted around the world. Surprisingly though, even after going global, there was still very little interest. I did find one guy that was wanting to make the trip but after a few weeks of planning he dropped out of sight. With the proposed trip less than two months away I had to make some hard decisions. I had never been comfortable asking for donations so I had also been counting on the second op to manage a fundraising effort. Now there was no second op, no fundraising done and no publicity. I decided it was time to go solo. Two operators would have been nice but the window for that had closed. I set the target date as April 15-20 and made the announcements that it would be a single-op expedition. With the projected cost somewhat reduced, I set to work trying to raise support for the trip. I contacted a handful of prominent IOTA chasers, explained what I was trying to do, and asked for their help. Incredibly, not only were most of them willing to help but many were willing to send significant donations in advance of the trip! I was genuinely touched at their generosity and their confidence in my abilities. I also contacted several DX clubs that support IOTA activities and was pleased to receive commitments from the German DX Foundation and the Clipperton DX Club. Of course the one source of funding that I had counted on all along was the Island Radio Expedition Foundation. They had been strong supporters of my plans since the very beginning and I knew I could count on them again. Funding was in hand and all I had to do now was wait.

The exact timing of the operation would be critical. When I say I was lucky on my previous trips I meant just that. Operating in the Arctic auroral zone is tricky. If there was any significant geomagnetic activity then HF propagation from the island would be nil. I took the target dates for my operation and worked them backwards in 27 day increments, comparing them to the geomagnetic situation on those dates. While it is difficult to project that far ahead I didn't see anything that indicated there would be any recurrent instability. The official geomagnetic forecast for the period of my trip wasn’t issued until the second week of April but when it finally came out I was relieved to see that the days I had chosen were predicted to be the quietest of the entire month! Could I really be that lucky three times in a row?

As the departure date drew near I talked to Tim in Paulatuk every few days and we made the final arrangements. My original plan was to be fully independent. Rent a snowmobile, sled, tent and generator for the week and take care of myself with only a bit of help from Tim to put up the tower on the first day. A few days before I left I found out that wasn't going to be possible as no one in Paulatuk wanted to rent out their snowmobile for a whole week. After the adventures Cezar, VE3LYC, had on NA-231 at the end of March I was somewhat apprehensive about being left alone on the island with no transportation but decided I would have to make the best of it. In addition to my satellite phone, I also had a VHF radio to talk back to Paulatuk with and, of course, my HF rig so I was well connected to the outside world.

I was busy the week before I left making detailed lists and assembling all the equipment. I was being extra cautious as I didn't want to end up in the middle of nowhere missing one critical item needed to get on the air. All the important equipment had spares or a backup. Icom Canada kindly provided an IC-7200 that I brought along as a spare radio and I even brought an emergency dipole antenna and feedline just in case there was some sort of mishap with the tower and the yagi. Everything was carefully packed because it had to survive not only the airplane ride but a bumpy sled ride across the sea ice. I shipped most of the gear to Paulatuk the weekend before I left. I didn't want any of my freight to get 'bumped' on the day I travelled.

The weather forecast when I left was for high winds and unseasonably warm temperatures, right around freezing for the entire period. The hour and a half flight into Paulatuk was uneventful and Tim met me at the airport. Our first objective was to get fuel and water before the stores closed for the day. I was surprised to find out that there is no locally bottled water available in Paulatuk and I ended up buying a case of brand-name bottled water. Tim was insistent that he could get me an empty jug and fill it up with water at his house but if I was going to live in a tent for a week I wanted the good stuff! I also needed to get gasoline for the generator. Tim only had three jerry cans so we filled them up at the fuel station and he promised to bring out more as necessary. Then he took me to meet his brother in-law.

I hold Tim in pretty high regard. His excellent work maintaining the tiny airport was just a sideline to his real job as a heavy equipment operator keeping the streets clear, which is no small feat in a community like Paulatuk. Ferocious blizzards are commonplace and they had just finished digging out from one the day before I arrived. On my last visit I had told Tim what my budget for snowmobile rental and outfitting was and promised him the whole amount if he could get the job done. Instead of taking the money and trying to put all the pieces together himself, he passed the entire job (and the substantial fee) to his brother in-law, Pat Thrasher. Pat was a local professional guide and had everything we needed to make the trip a success. Snowmobiles and quads, sleds, the tent and a generator were all provided by Pat. Between the two of them I was well looked after and they even took turns bringing extra fuel out every couple of days.

Looking across the Paulatuk airport towards Greens Island. That's a six foot high fence disappearing into the snowdrift!

We waited until late evening for the winds to die down a bit before we headed out across the sea ice. I insisted on going slowly to minimize the trauma to the equipment in the sleds so it was almost 10pm by the time we reached the island. The sun was still shining when we arrived, only a few weeks away from being up for 24 hours, but by the time we had the tent set up, the yagi put together and the tower raised it was already past midnight. It was quite dark inside the tent and the small lamp that I brought was the only thing that did not survive the bumpy ride. After Pat, Tim and his wife headed back to town I got the tent squared away by flashlight and went to bed. The wind howled all night long but I was reasonably warm in my heavy sleeping bag and the generator and electric heater ran through the night.

Digging out the tent frame after arrival on Greens Island. The local people camp here in the spring watching for whales to arrive in the bay.

Waking up in the morning was a surreal experience. Here I was, finally, on Greens Island. The wind had died down and the sun was shining brightly. The generator was still humming outside and thanks to the electric heater it was quite comfortable inside the tent. I made myself breakfast and then set up the station. This wasn't my first trip to a rare location so I had a pretty good idea what to expect. I threw out the CK8G callsign a few times and quickly had an enormous pileup. Conditions really didn't seem that good the first day but I still managed to put 1000 in the log. Once the European sunset rush died out I worked more and more North American stations until the JA's and UA0's started calling in around midnight zulu. Then I'd turn the beam west and work Asia until the Europeans started calling again around their sunrise. That was more or less the same operating pattern for my entire time on the island. I got into the habit of taking a short nap every evening as that was the slowest time and then staying up until well after midnight. Conditions improved every day and it wasn't until after I got back home that I found out there had been no sunspots at all. Go figure! I also found out that the geomagnetic forecasts had been accurate and there was no significant auroral activity for most of my time on the island.

Looking north across the ocean towards Europe.

Most days were very much like the first. I kept to my stated intentions to give special attention to Europe and Japan. Europe was easy. Every day I would get up in the morning and start with the antenna pointed over the pole to Europe. The pileups were big and sometimes unruly but after three dxpeditions and lots of contesting I was fairly comfortable. The important thing was to keep the rate up. By-the-numbers, split operation, whatever it took, just keep growing the log. European cluster pileups can be worked through but you have to know what you're doing. After all these years it’s nice to finally have the mental tools required to pull off this kind of operation and it was especially gratifying after the operation to look at the comments on the dxcluster and see nothing negative. In fact, the only thing even close to a negative comment was early on when one op posted 'why no split?' The answer, of course, was that I had the attenuator on and the gain turned down and I was still working the loud guys at a decent rate. Running split takes up twice the bandwidth and I'll only do it if I can't maintain a decent rate running simplex. If you ever hear me spreading the pile out over 5kHz then you can bet there's a LOT of people calling me.

From a logistics point of view the operation was a smashing success. Other than a couple of mysterious glitches on the second day, Pat's 3500W generator ran flawlessly throughout the operation and it only burned about 30 litres of gasoline per day. Camping with a big generator is totally different than 'roughing it'. I had a 1500W electric heater that kept the tent cozy and warm. I brought along my drip coffee maker which, in addition to providing a nice cup of coffee on demand, also doubled to make hot water for instant soup. I had lots of cold cuts and bread and I even brought along 8 litres of fresh milk. The four cardboard cartons almost didn't survive the sled trip and were all leaking from broken bottoms but luckily I was able to decant them into empty water bottles. Every morning I had a nice bowl of cereal and milk in my coffee right up until the very last day!

This is how I spent most of my six days on the island. Sitting in the tent with my coffee cup at hand, keyboard in my lap, and big pileups on the radio!

After the first few days I started to notice a lack of North American and Asian stations in the log. I had very good propagation to the USA and Canada so I'm at a loss to explain why it seemed so hard to fill the log with W/VE stations. I received excellent signal reports, there just weren't a lot of callers. It was the same situation with Asia. I had received a considerable amount of support from Japan so I wanted to make a good showing there but they just didn't seem to be around in large numbers. On the other side of the Arctic Ocean, the band (I only worked 20m) was open to Europe almost around the clock. Half the stations in my log were European, almost 500 from Italy alone! For the last four days I spent each night calling CQ with the beam pointed west to Asia and worked more JA's and numerous VK/ZL stations. I even found a long-path opening to Africa in the wee hours that was previously unknown to me! In the final analysis, there was a fairly good mix of stations in the log and unlike my previous trips, this time I had lots of rare DX call in including a couple of dozen African stations and a smattering of rare Pacific islands. Final breakdown was 48% Europe, 37% North America and 14% Asia.

Like the propagation, the weather also steadily improved except for the third day. It had been windy since I arrived but on that day the winds were gusting to 80km/h. I turned the antenna edge on to the wind and left it there most of the day, afraid to turn it against the wind. The tent flapped violently and I thought for sure I was going to lose the tower. I went out a few times to check the guy ropes but since there was not much else I could do about it I just hunkered down inside the tent and kept making contacts. I kept one eye on the SWR meter all day watching for signs of impending doom. The next morning dawned calm, clear, and warm. When I crawled out of the tent I was surprised to find everything was just as I had left it. The tower was still standing, the antenna looked fine, and the generator was still purring away. The band was in excellent shape that day and after a great European sunset run I continued to work a mix of European and stateside stations well past midnight zulu.

Every expedition usually has a goal. Since this was strictly an IOTA expedition (ie; not also a rare DXCC entity) I didn’t have to worry about working multiple bands and modes. My only goal was to work as many unique stations as possible. In that respect as well, the operation was a huge success. Over 4500 different callsigns made it into the log. I can’t complain about the high number of duplicates (almost 400) as most of them came while I was calling CQ and guys just wanted to say hello and let me know I was getting out ok. In fact, I had a LOT of people mention how loud I was. It’s a little bit surprising since I was only running about 500 watts to the little TH3JRS yagi at 30 feet off the ground but I’m pleased all the same. I know there were many that had no idea who, what, or where I was and made the contact with me just because I had a big signal and an unusual callsign!

The sun shone every day while I was there.

By my last full day on the island I was starting to get the feeling that I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for contacts. Outside of Europe the pileups were mostly gone. I called CQ a lot and worked many QRP and mobile stations. What had really happened was that the aurora, absent for several days, had now returned and conditions were getting back to normal. I had received a few requests for some CW operation and in reality my CW skills are not all that bad but they’re not up to running a huge pileup. Now that things were quieter I did get on CW but I was short one USB port on the computer and could not use the mouse, keyboard, and CW keyer all at the same time. It was a bit awkward but I still managed to make a few dozen contacts in that mode.

I’d been living all alone in a tent in the middle of nowhere for a week and by the end I was ready to go home. The entire operation had gone very, very well and all I needed to do now was get myself and all my equipment off the island and safely back home. With the aurora out in force on the last night I made a few more contacts in CW and then pulled the plug. First thing next morning I started tearing down the station and by the time Pat arrived on the island at noon all that was left was to lower the tower and pack up the yagi. It was still unseasonably warm and there were several inches of water on top of the ice all the way back to Paulatuk. The huge snowdrifts that had greeted me on my arrival were all but gone and we had to use a truck to pull the sled into town and over to the airport. Once again luck was on my side and there was enough room on the plane for myself and all my equipment, even the tower sections! A few minutes after takeoff we flew past Greens Island and I couldn’t resist staring as it slowly passed and disappeared from view...

CK8G Expedition News Archive

2010-04-22T07:35:00.002-06:00

Back on the mainland safe and sound, waiting for the plane home. Final QSO tally almost 5000! (21 Apr 2010)
Last day, condx not so good. Might try CW this aft. (20 Apr 2010)
Ferocious winds today, afraid to turn antenna. 2500 Q's in the log, looking for JA tonight. (18 Apr 2010)
Propagation improving, over 1000 in the log. Having generator issues this am. (17 Apr 2010)
On the air. Propagation not great. (16 Apr 2010)
Coordinates of camp: 69.3744N 124.43015W (15 Apr 2010)
Arrived on Greens Island. Making camp. QRV in a few hours. (15 Apr 2010)
Landed in Paulatuk. Loading sleds for trip across the sea ice. (15 Apr 2010)
Packing the last of the gear. Weather forecast is for strong winds but should let up by the time I arrive on the island. (14 Apr 2010)

CK8G - Countdown

2010-04-08T20:06:00.004-06:00

Less than a week until departure and all is looking good for the operation from NA-182 Greens Island. Airline tickets are in hand and I’m now starting the final assembly, testing, and packing of equipment. I had hoped to be able to ship some of the gear into Paulatuk ahead of time on a charter flight but unfortunately things didn’t work out so now I’ll have to do it the expensive way. I’m going to send in most of the non-fragile stuff as cargo on the next few scheduled flights and then bring the rest with me when I go on Wednesday. My guy in Paulatuk informs me that the tent and generator have been arranged but finding a snowmobile to rent for a whole week is proving difficult. The weather is expected to be warm (single digits) and sunny so most people are planning to go out on the land and don’t want to be without their snowmobiles for that long. Not to worry though, if necessary I’ll get dropped off on the island and have supplies delivered or get picked up as needed. I’ll always be in VHF radio contact (or satellite phone if necessary) so no troubles. Frequent visitors are also likely as locals stop by to find out what the big tower and antenna on the island is all about.

Despite the big geomagnetic storm this past week, the forecast for the duration of the operation is for quiet conditions. The operating schedule will be Asia from 0000-0400z, Europe from 0400-0700z and 1400-1700z, North America from 1800-2300z. That’s generally where I’ll have the antenna pointed but will still happily take callers from anyone that is hearing me. I’ll be operating almost exclusively 20m SSB but I will bring a 40m dipole antenna as a backup.

My plane doesn’t land in Paulatuk until 4pm on Wednesday so I probably won’t be on the air until late that evening (early morning 15 April UTC). I'll be using my satellite phone to post status updates during the trip so watch this space for the latest information.

73
John - VE8EV

Well YES, actually, this IS rocket science...

2010-03-14T22:51:00.014-06:00

OK, maybe not exactly rocket science but close enough. Ever since I started working satellites back in the early nineties I've dreamed of having a fully automated setup. A computer aims the antennas and tunes the radio to compensate for the doppler shift and all I have to do is sit back and make contacts. Doing everything manually during a pass and trying to log contacts at the same time can sometimes be reminiscent of the proverbial one-armed paper hanger, especially when it is a fast moving LEO bird like VO-52!

Learning the code...

No, not THAT code. I'm talking about the kind of code that computers understand. I taught myself to program in BASIC as a teenager back in the early 1980's. My Radio Shack TRS-80 Level II had a whopping 4K of RAM and, for it's time, could do amazing things. A decade later I decided to dust off my old programming skills and write a Windows program that would handle the doppler tuning for my satellite receiver, a Yaesu FRG-8800 with a built-in UHF converter. Much to my dismay, it was only AFTER I took the shrink wrap off my brand new copy of Visual Basic 3.0 that I found out only the much more expensive Visual Basic Professional version included the trivial ability to talk to a serial port! Dejected and thoroughly ticked off, I ended up doing the project in QuickBasic under MS-DOS by starting with a version of G3RUH's PLAN13 tracking software and adding in code to calculate the doppler shift and send the frequency data to the radio's CAT port. That worked pretty well and eventually, when the first version of ZL2TPO's WiSP came out I did finally find a way to use VB 3.0 with a serial port and wrote a little Windows application that tuned the radio based on tracking data passed from WiSP via the Windows DDE interface.

Garbage in, garbage out...

So automated doppler tuning was never that big of a deal but the real holy grail was automated antenna tracking. Back then there were a several options available (most notably the legendary Kansas City Tracker board) but they all had one thing in common. They all assumed that the operator was using a Yaesu G5500 az/el rotator setup. Pretty safe bet because I'll bet that 99% of stations were and still do use that rotator combo to this day. Now it was pretty easy to adapt the control boards to any rotators that used a 0-5V position feedback system and that was central to my problem. Expensive rotators (and for that matter, expensive computer control boards!) have always been a bit too pricey for my budget and I've always gotten by with cheap TV antenna rotators that have no positive feedback. Getting a $50 TV antenna rotator to turn a huge VHF/UHF antenna array is a tricky business and I've always figured that if it died on the job, at most I'd only be out fifty bucks to replace it. But unless I could find a way to get accurate position feedback I'd be out of luck for an automated tracking solution. In the wind and cold there was just no way to predict how far the antennas would actually turn and the indicator on the control box was almost always out of sync.

The light bulb comes on...

When I built my new satellite antenna setup last year, one of my stated goals was to find a way to automate the station. CX6DD's WiSPDDE software was quickly put to use to handle doppler tuning the TS-2000 but since I used yet another cheap TV antenna rotator I was still at square-one for automated antennas. Well, almost at square-one. One of the nifty devices I had come across in my travels was the LabJack U3. This dandy little device would plug into a USB port and provided a plethora of analog and digital inputs and outputs for interfacing to the real world. I knew the moment I saw it that this was the gizmo to solve my antenna interfacing problems. My new antennas were using an old TV dish actuator arm for elevation. This had a little slotted wheel inside between an LED and a photoresistor and when the jackscrew turned it would send pulses down the wire to the control box. Looking at it reminded me of the insides of a computer mouse and that's when I started to get an idea of how to make this all work together. If I took some parts from an old computer mouse and somehow hooked the wheel up to the antenna mast with a belt it would send pulses as it rotated in azimuth just like the elevation jackscrew. All I would need to do is brew up some software to talk to the LabJack, throw in a few relays and I'd have it made.

Inspiration...

The LabJack unit and pieces of an old mouse sat in a little box near my desk for a long time waiting for the moment when I would figure out how to physically put it all together in a way that was mechanically sound and operational in all-weather. In the meantime, I made do with manual tracking and the unreliable position indicating. Things actually worked pretty well over the summer, hence the somewhat low priority on the project. Once winter came, however, the situation deteriored. The azimuth rotator would often stick and turn sluggishly in the cold. I missed most of the EME contest because I couldn't accurately point the antenna in overcast when I couldn't see the moon. Working satellites wasn't as much fun because I was always losing the bird at some point during the pass when the indicator got out of sync. In fact, for the two coldest months (December and January) I didn't even bother to put up the antennas. It wasn't until a 'warm' spell in early February that I finally put up the antennas again. I was thrilled to work the new HO-68 satellite. Finally we had an amateur satellite with an AO-7 sized footprint and a strong, multi-mode transponder. I worked the east coast of the USA and a UA0 on the same pass! Not exactly AO-13 but still pretty cool! It also had a digital BBS mode as well. I was a big fan of the pacsats back in the old days and couldn't wait to give the packet mode a try. Unfortunately, the warm spell ended and with the thirty-below weather came all the old problems again. I decided that I had to get moving on my automatic tracking project. It was time!

Back to BASIC...

After stuffing the mouse parts into a weatherproof electrical box and rigging up a little pulley and drive belt, the next step was software. Fortunately, Microsoft now has a freeware version of Visual Basic. Unfortunately, after downloading and installing it I found another 'gotcha': Visual Basic 2008 doesn't support DDE! According to Microsoft, DDE is an antiquated way of doing things and by now all applications that need to pass data back and forth should be using some sort of COM thingys. That's nice, Bill, but all the satellite tracking software out there still uses DDE! After some Google searching I found out that I wasn't alone in my quest for DDE and there were a couple of solutions out there. The one that worked for me was a standalone DDE library written a number of years ago as an improvement on the DDE built into VB. Now that DDE is written out of VB it is quite an improvement indeed! The author has since passed away and the support group seems to have dried up three years ago but it works! Within an hour of downloading it from the dormant web site I was pulling tracking data from Orbitron into the first draft of my program.

The Mad Scientist...

With the azimuth indicating lashup ready to go, the alpha version of the software written, and the LabJack mounted in a box with the relays and power supplies, the next step was to put it all together with the antennas. Surprisingly, the elevation part of the software worked right out of the gate. A few hours of tweaking the code and testing and it was good enough to move onto the azimuth part. This was where things started to go off the rails. The biggest problem was the belt driving the little pulley connected to the optical encoder. It was a good theory but the rubber O-ring I was using got very stiff in the cold and started to crack. Furthermore, I couldn't get the tension set properly. The belt would be almost too tight at one postion and then too loose and slipping at another. Turns out that the mast is not quite centered on the carrier plate. I spent many hours and hundreds of trips up and down the ladder trying to find a solution that would work reliably. No matter what I did the belt (now a toothed microdrive belt) would still slip. I finally determined that not only was the belt slipping, but the lashup with the old mouse board was also somehow skipping pulses. By the time I figured this out I had been going at it for several days in a row. I commented on my Facebook page that I was beginning to understand how a regular scientist turned into a mad scientist! The final straw came when I accidentally broke the mouse board trying to make adjustments to how it mounted in the box. I walked away from the whole thing and decided to just leave it alone for a couple of days while I decided what to do.

A New Approach...

After pondering the situation I decided to abandon the idea of using an optical encoder. It originally seemed like a good idea and, like all ideas, it would have been fine if it had worked. In situations like this you have to know when the time is right to cash in your perseverence, admit defeat, and start looking for a new plan. In this case, I didn't need to look too far. I decided the best course of action would be to replace the encoder with a potentiometer and just do it the same way the rotator manufacturers did. Not finding anything appropriate in my junk pile I pulled up the DigiKey catalog and ordered a nice 10-turn 1K ohm pot. It took less than two weeks to arrive (no UPS in this neighborhood!) and once it was installed in place of the optical encoder things came together quite rapidly. After a couple of hours of mental gymnastics working out the math in the program to deal with the fact that my antennas drive from 180 degrees to 179 degrees (instead of the more usual 0 to 360 degrees) I was ready to give it a try.

The Holy Grail...

When it comes to writing software, eventually the eureka! moment arrives and you find that last tweak did the trick and for the first time it actually works. I had the satisfaction of standing outside and watching the antennas moving incrementally in azimuth and elevation to follow a satellite across the sky. An hour later HO-68 came up and I made my first satellite contacts ever without having to manually adjust the antenna pointing. I still have a bit of calibration to do on the elevation drive and of course the software needs some polishing but for the moment I'm going to stand back and just bask in the glory of completing a complicated project. Once this island thing is wrapped up I might even find the time to do some more work on my KW VHF amplifier...

CK8G - Greens Island NA-182

2010-03-11T17:40:00.007-07:00

It's now official: I'll be on from Greens Island NA-182 from April 15-20, 2010.

Located at 69 22' 36" N 125 25' 35" W in the southwest corner of the Amundsen Gulf, Greens Island qualifies for the Inuvik Region (East) IOTA Group, as confirmed by IOTA Manager G3KMA. The community of Paulatuk, NWT is a scant 15 miles to the east and from there the island is easily accessible by boat in the summer or snowmobile in the winter. While a summer operation would be far easier, more comfortable, and (probably) cheaper, I wanted to go in April to take advantage of the better spring time propagation. The operating plan for the trip will be similar to my other operations. I'm expecting around-the-clock propagation on 20m so I will concentrate on Europe during their sunrise and sunset, North America during their sunset, and Asia right after their sunrise. This should allow me to work a good balance between all the areas and still get a few hours sleep every night. To insure strong signals in both directions I will again be bringing my TH3JRS yagi and FL2100B amplifier.

Luckily, I am very familiar with the area and do not anticipate any problems actually making the operation happen. In fact, I will likely have an opportunity to travel to Paulatuk on business sometime in the next few weeks which will allow me to make all the final arrangements and maybe even allow for a scouting trip out to the island.

I waited for quite a long time to make an announcement as I was still trying to come up with a plan that included bringing a CW operator along but in the end it was just too difficult and expensive. Air travel costs in the Arctic are astronomical and bringing a second op would have tripled or quadrupled the costs of the operation. Even though Greens Island is only 250 miles from my house, the cost of airfare and air freight for myself and my equipment to get to Paulatuk and back is more than flying economy class from Toronto to Paris! Once you add in the cost of renting a snowmobile, generator, and provisions, this whole operation rapidly turns into a very expensive proposition.

Anyone wishing to contribute can click on the Donate button at the right side of the screen to make a donation via PayPal or credit card.

Thanks in advance for your support and I will post any new developments right here.

73
John - VE8EV

ARRL DX - Life is Like a Box of Chocolates...

2010-03-08T16:10:00.016-07:00

Now that we have a grand total of 3 (three!) active amateurs here and (theoretically) some half decent propagation I was kind of planning on this to be our first true multi-multi operation. Unfortunately, VE8DW had to go out of town and VE8GER decided he wasn't quite ready for that yet so it ended up being another single-op effort by yours truly. I didn't have the slightest idea about what to expect going in. The dramatic increase in solar activity has also been stirring up the aurora a lot more and lately I've been starting to get the feeling that overall band conditions are actually slightly worse than they were at this time last year. The forecast was also calling for active geomagnetic conditions this weekend and, with that in mind, my plan was to be ready for anything. If conditions were really lousy I'd go single-band-20m and just take whatever I could get. I also decided to stay off the spotting network for the first day in case I wanted to go unassisted.

I took Friday off from work and spent the morning getting the shack trailer all squared away for moving. The truck and the trailer hadn't moved since Sweepstakes so there was a lot of shovelling to do and I had to buy two new batteries for the truck (grrr!). Fortunately, the weather was unseasonably mild and I spent the day working in bright sunshine and wearing a light jacket. By mid-afternoon I was all set up at the contest site and plugged into the big TH6DXX tribander at 100ft and the 33ft top-loaded low-band vertical. In between trips to the store for supplies I tuned the bands a bit to see how things were shaping up. I was surprised to find that I was hearing stations from any direction I pointed the antenna. Europe and Asia were both booming in on 20m and several JA's and KH6's were loud on 15m. Even 40m already had several Europeans making it over the pole. This was my first hint that this contest would definitely NOT be business as usual!

After the opening bell I spent the first couple of hours bouncing back and forth between 15m and 20m and alternating between S&P and trying to get a run started. Conditions seemed to be pretty good out to Asia and the Pacific. A couple of rare mults (VU and E51) called in and quite a few low-power JA's and VK's but no decent rates ever developed. With just over a hundred in the log at 0400z and the jury still out on whether conditions were good or bad I popped down to have a go at 40m. Surprisingly, I was able to work almost everyone I could hear and in a half hour I picked up a dozen new mults from Europe, Asia and the Caribbean. Things were starting to look up but it was soon time for the real test. European sunrise was coming up and if the 40m conditions were any indication we were going to get a huge opening on 20m. I pointed the beam north, found a frequency and did a 100/hour run of Europeans. I should have just stayed at it but the opening was so good that the DXer in me took over and I spent the next few hours hunting multipliers on the low-bands. 40m was still cooking and I even spent a bit of time on 80m. No mainland Europe was heard on that band but I did manage to work G, GM, EI, KH6 and KL7. Because of the auroral forecast I hadn't bothered to install the 160m coil on the vertical. As a result, my only 160m contact was KL7RA. I heard KH7XS both times we tried on 160m but couldn't make the contact. If that was the only mult I missed on 160m then it was probably worth it to not having had to wade through the waist-deep snow and monkey around in the cold for an hour. Eventually I decided to try to get my head back in the game and went back up to 20m to work more Europeans. After doing another 100/hour run to Europe I just couldn't help myself and had to go up and see if anything was happening on 15m. I love sneaking over the pole in the middle of the night on 15m and sure enough I worked a few Eastern European and Middle Eastern mults. After that it was back down to the low-bands for a bit more DXing. Several more mults went into the log on 40m (including JT1CO) and I even worked JA, UA0 and LU on 80m before turning in for a much needed 3-hour nap. I set the alarm (and the timer on the coffee pot!) for 5:30am and sacked out with a smile on my face and 400 Q's in the log. Even if the bands tanked over the next two days I already had enough points for a respectable showing so anything from this point on was just gravy. Little did I know that for the rest of the weekend the gravy would be flowing like Niagara Falls!

The bands were still kicking when I got up the next morning so first thing on the agenda was another run of Europeans. For the next three hours I kept the rate meter at 100/hr until the aurora flared up a bit and the run came to a screeching halt. While I was waiting for the aurora to subside I S&P'd a bit, had a nap and ran home to grab a shower. Around 2000z guys finally started answering me on the first call so I went down to my usual watering hole at the bottom of the band. I did another 100/hour to Europe and then after that took a quick spin around the globe and Worked-All-Continents. I left the beam pointed out west for Asian sunrise and did a 100/hour of JA's and Pacific stations. Band conditions were great and only getting better. By midnight zulu the DXer in me was screaming to be let off the chain so I made the call to go single-op-unlimited and pulled up the cluster on the internet. A flurry of Caribbean and South American mults followed and I even made a successful pass from 15m to 10m with LT1F for my only 10m contact. For two solid hours virtually every needed spot on 15 and 20m made it into the log and I even worked a handful of Europeans on 40m (early!). It was a very strange situation but by that point I didn't know what to do with myself anymore. In all my previous contesting experience I had always reacted to conditions. If conditions were good, I'd run. When they weren't then I'd search and pounce. When they got really bad, I'd take a nap. Having outstanding propagation, for so long, on so many different bands was a situation that I just wasn't prepared for. I sat back and was listening to a very loud JT1CO running stateside stations on 20m while I ate my supper and after some thought I decided not to worry about strategy and just enjoy it while it lasted. I always knew that if the sunspots and the aurora ever cooperated our unique geographic location could be huge advantage instead of a disadvantage. It seemed like this was that weekend and being a rare multiplier in the contest was just icing on the cake! By 0600z the greyline had finished tracking across Asia and now the Europeans were again booming in on 20m. I worked TL0A in Central Africa and then did yet another 100/hour running Europeans. Once the run slowed on 20m I spent the next couple of hours DXing on the low-bands. After that, even with all the excitement, I was getting pretty tired. With almost 1000 contacts in the log and closing in on 'weekend-DXCC' I decided to turn in and grab a few hours of sleep.

In the week leading up to a contest I always plan to get plenty of rest. I know that if I'm well rested I can do a 24-hour contest non-stop and a 48-hour contest on 3 hours sleep each night. Unfortunately, life always seems to conspire to prevent me from getting the rest I need before the contest and this time was no exception. Several busy days in a row at work (including a 12-hour day on Thursday) and several late nights meant I was running on empty even before the contest started. When I woke up Sunday morning at 1300z the bands seemed only marginal (aka: normal) so I decided to go back to sleep and try again in a half-hour. Two hours later when I finally got going, the bands had bounced back and I jumped right onto 20m and started running Europe. It's easy to calculate how many Q's I missed by sleeping in because my operating pattern was pretty much the same all day long: run for an hour then play DXer for an hour. 15m never really opened to anywhere except Japan (around their sunrise) but there was just enough weak African and South American stations to keep my attention on that band in between runs of Europeans on 20m. D4C (Cape Verde) was audible on 15m all afternoon and every so often someone else would pop up out of the noise. Despite all the time and knob spinning the end result of my Sunday afternoon efforts on 15m were less than a dozen multipliers. I was also religiously checking 10m every half-hour or so but never heard anything.

The last few hours of the contest were the most fun of all. After the final 100/hour run of Europeans on 20m I was up on 15m digging out a few more South American multipliers when I kept hearing (and easily working) loud JA's off the back of the beam. I decided a good strategy might be to try to run JA's on 15m with the beam on South America. I did that for a little while but with no takers from South America I eventually just turned the beam to Japan. In a half-hour I worked about 50 very loud JA's, most reporting power of 50 watts or lower, many with 10 watts and even a few QRP stations! With the time running out I turned the beam back to the southeast and spent the last 30 minutes picking up the remaining Caribbean and Central American multipliers on 20m. The band was wide open and everyone was incredibly loud. Every continent except Africa and Australia was booming in, even with the attenuator on and the gain turned down. Most of the stations had huge pileups going but one way or another I managed to get through to most of the ones I needed. The last one went into the log at 2358z and then it was all over.

As one might expect, there were LOTS of high points on this outing:

Setting up Friday afternoon in the unusually warm early spring sunshine.
Working a handful of stations on four bands. The exclusive club: D4C JA1ELY JA1YPA JA3YBK KH7X KL7RA RT0C
Working DXCC in a single weekend. Back in the day it took me three years to work 100 countries!
Working several all-time-new-ones for DXCC: New Caledonia (FK8IL), Central Africa (TL0A), India (VU3DJQ), Cambodia (XU7ACY).
Making the 10m contact with LT1F.
Eating supper on Saturday night while listening to JT1CO run a huge pileup of stateside stations on 20m when suddenly he announces that he's going to 15m and gives the QRG. I hit the bandswitch and was the first to work him for a new mult on 15m (I had worked him the night before on 20m and 40m).
Working Antarctica (again!). I caught VP8DMH Saturday night on 20m. I get a big kick out of making 'inter-polar' contacts and I've only ever done it twice before.
Having almost all the bands open to somewhere at the same time. In the middle of the night, during the 0800z hour on Saturday, my log has four contacts in a row that go 15m-20m-40m-80m (Africa, Europe, Hawaii, Japan)
Spending five futile minutes near the end of the contest shouting into a humongous pileup on YN2EA when a W2(?) gets through and after his contact tells the guy to 'listen up for the VE8 calling you'. I was so surprised I didn't have a chance to remember who it was but thanks for the multiplier!
Having the presence of mind right after the contest to take advantage of the excellent conditions and the big antenna to work Maine and Rhode Island on digital for my Triple Play Award. I still need 2 more on CW and 3 more on digital but propagation-wise they're all easy ones (ND, SD and NE).

The only low-points:

Spending almost an hour on Sunday morning calling V51YJ on 15m for an all-time-new-one. He never did hear me. Once again, that's for all the guys that spent time in the pileups unsuccessfully calling me this weekend. It usually goes both ways...
Demobilizing the station during a surprise blizzard on Sunday night.

From up here you never know what you're gonna get...

This will likely be the last 'serious' contest effort from here until Field Day and Canada Day this summer but we should be able to dabble in a few events between now and then. Also, listen for me in April as CK8G from NA-182.

73
John - VE8EV

ARRLDX SSB VE8EV SO Unlimited HP

2010-03-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

ARRL DX Contest, SSB

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: SO Unlimited HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 36

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 1 1
80: 16 9
40: 68 39
20: 984 96
15: 149 27
10: 1 1
-------------------
Total: 1219 173 Total Score = 631,661

Club:

Comments:

The short version: Wow!

Long version at http://ve8ev.blogspot.com

73
John - VE8EV

Fun in the Sun From J6

2009-12-22T12:46:00.012-07:00

Getting permission to operate from St. Lucia took many months of negotiating and cost me a lot of money. However, once the XYL finally agreed to it the rest was relatively easy. Since this was going to be a holiday trip I didn't plan to spend a lot of time playing radio. The RAC Winter Contest was going to be the held the weekend before Christmas. It's one of my favorite contests and would make the perfect opportunity for a little DX operating adventure. VE8 is a rare multiplier in the contest but J6 is only a 2-point "DX" contact. Signing J6/VE8EV from the sunny West Indies in the dead of winter would be a hoot!

I had almost given up even before I started. Back in the spring I started looking around for a station on the island to operate from. A few inquiries were made but by October I still hadn't confirmed anything. Since all available information said it took several months to get a J6 license I was pretty sure my time had run out. I mentioned the situation to Tree, N6TR, during our SS CW operation and within an hour he came up with a couple of contacts for me. Soon I was corresponding with Lionel, J69KZ. His contact at the St. Lucian National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission led me to believe that if I acted quickly there was a chance I could get a license in time for my visit. With that in mind, I downloaded the application forms and had all the required documents couriered to the island.

The licensing process in St. Lucia is somewhat complicated. The main problem is that the process is much the same no matter whether you are applying for a temporary amateur license or a commercial broadcasting license. All applications have to be personally signed by the Minister of Telecommunications and of course they have to negotiate several layers of bureaucracy both before and after they hit the Minister's desk. Fortunately, the islanders are the friendliest people on earth and there was certainly no lack of will on their part to get me licensed in time for the contest. A special thanks, though, is reserved for Bill Schmidt, K9HZ. His detailed information on how to obtain a J6 license was invaluable especially the 'Amazing Race' directions to navigating the several different St. Lucian government offices that have to be visited to complete the final paperwork.

Concurrent with licensing was the issue of finding a place to operate from. The original plan was to operate from Lionel's QTH however this was complicated by the fact that his rental suite was unexpectedly occupied and his family was also in from Canada for the holidays. He suggested that while he'd squeeze me in somewhere if it became necessary, he also had a well-equipped suitcase portable station containing an IC-7000, tuner and power supply, and a G5RV antenna which perhaps I could operate from the resort? I scoped out the resort and found the perfect spot to string up the G5RV from a 4th floor stairwell window over to a convenient tree in the courtyard and our 2nd floor balcony was exactly half way in between. I thought long and hard about how to ask about putting up the antenna. In the end I decided it sounded better to describe it as 'a wire aerial for my radio' instead of a 'hundred foot long ham radio antenna'. I shouldn't have worrried. The resort specialized in catering to their guests needs and the best line I heard on the whole trip was 'Are you sure you wouldn't like us to have the maintenance workers put up your antenna for you?' Now that's service!

With the license in hand (it's actually a very official looking 10-page document, printed and bound!) and the G5RV hung in the garden it was time to get on the air. I had never used an Icom IC-7000 before but I knew what I wanted to do so after an hour of flipping through the manual I had the mic gain, ALC and compression set up and programmed the voice memories. I didn't bring a keying interface for the computer and Lionel didn't have a key so I was going to give the CW part of the contest a miss. It wasn't long before I changed my mind. I'm not a big CW operator but the RAC contests (Canada Day and RAC Winter) are two of the few where the exchange is simple and the operators don't seem to feel the need to send CW at 40wpm. On a hunch, I dug a bit deeper into the IC-7000 manual and sure enough, the internal memory keyer had a serial number function. Within a few minutes I had the front panel buttons programmed for the basic exchange information and working VE multipliers on CW was the highlight of the whole contest.

I wanted to do a full 24-hour effort but it didn't work out that way. I got a decent six hour sleep that night and moseyed on down to the buffet table whenever it was required. Propagation wasn't bad but it also wasn't as good as I was expecting given the location and the solar flux. Still, I managed to work all the provinces and only missed VY1, VE8 and VY0. I heard Wally VE8DW with a good signal on 20m right around my sunset but 100 watts and the wire wasn't enough to get his attention. I spent most of the afternoon running on 15m but the rates weren't that high. The biggest Canadian signals in the contest all came from VE6RAC operating from the VE6JY superstation. I heard them on four bands and worked them in both modes on three of them.

The dichotomy of the J6/VE8EV callsign wasn't lost on anyone, especially with the snow and cold spreading across North America. I got lots of comments along the lines of 'I wish I was there' and, not surprisingly given the contest, a lot of 'I wish you were at home'. All in all, I had a ton of fun in the contest but once it was over I was anxious to get back to the sun and surf. I left the antenna up for an extra day and ran a couple of skeds but that was it. Two more weeks and I'll be back to the 40 below zero and 24 hour darkness. I need to soak it all up while I have the chance!

Sunset across the harbour at Gros Islet, St. Lucia.

73 and Happy Holidays
J6/VE8EV

NA-108 St. Lucia

2009-12-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

All is looking good for operation from J68. Still waiting to hear on licensing, I'll either be J68/VE8EV or J68EV. If all else fails I'll be able to use the call of my host on the island, Lionel J69KZ.

I'll be operating mostly during the RAC Canada Winter Contest. The contest starts at 0000z Dec 18 (Friday evening in North America) and runs until 2359z. Everyone can work me during the contest. If you are outside of Canada (like me) send RS(T) and a serial number. Canadian stations sent RS(T) and province or territory.

Look for me on all bands but I'll be mostly working 40m and 20m SSB. If 15m is open to Canada you can bet I'll be up there as much as possible.

73 and Season's Greetings
John - VE8EV

SS PH - Making the Grade!

2009-11-23T17:10:00.015-07:00

I've always come away from Sweepstakes with a vague sense of having let everyone down. Knowing that there are several thousand stations all needing that NT multiplier but only a couple of hundred in my log somehow meant I just hadn't measured up to the task at hand. This year, however, was different. Somewhere between the experience gained in the past year of contesting and expeditioning, incremental improvements to the station, and ever-so-slightly better propagation, I walked away satisfied that I'd put in a pretty good effort.

It's surprising how all the little things just keep adding up. Some might just call it experience but there's an old saying along the lines of "First, you need to know what it is you don't know." Knowing when to run, when to search and pounce, and when to grab some rest for later. Keep the rate up! If you're running then RUN! Go as fast as you can without getting a lot of requests for fills. Always come back to something as fast as you can so stations don't start calling out of turn. If you can't run then S&P as fast as you can. Know what multipliers you need and when they're likely to be around so you can assign a mental 'value' to every station you hear. If they don't come back to you after a certain number of calls then move on and try them again on the next pass up (or down) the band. If everyone is answering on the first call then you should be running. Keep track of where stations are and what they sound like so you don't have to wait around for them to ID to find out you've already worked them. If nobody is answering you at all except for the one really loud guy who needs twenty fills to complete the QSO then it's time to go take a nap! Those and hundreds of other little things that all come from study, practice and experience. Subtle little lessons from here and there that make a big difference when they're all in play at the same time!

VE8DW was going to be out of town for SS this year so I was on my own. Fortunately, we got all the hard work at the contest site done before CQWW in October so all I had to do was pull the shack trailer up there and plug it in. Even so, it took several hours of hard work at 25 below zero to get all the snow shovelled, stow all the antennas and get the trailer hitched up to the truck. I thought I had everything in place and ready to go an hour before the contest but only 10 minutes before the bell I realized that I hadn't recorded the exchanges for the voice keyer. I scrambled around for 15 minutes with sound cards, microphones, inputs and outputs before I got it all working and then dived into the contest.

With an ongoing geomagnetic disturbance I was planning for conditions to be lousy, at least on Saturday. Being exactly 28 days after CQ WW, the optimist in me was hoping for a repeat of those conditions where a solar flux in the low 80's gave enough of a boost to the bands to push the signals through the aurora. Even though the flux didn't get quite as high this time, it still made a big difference. Shortly before the start of the contest there was even a 10m opening to the west coast, literally the first contacts I've made on that band in years. After that I wasn't quite sure what to expect at the start of the contest. I decided to start on 15m and managed to average over 60/hr for the first 3 hours. I even managed to do a 105/hr between 2220z and 2320z but when that band died suddenly I had to QSY. 20m was still shaky from the aurora and for the next two hours the rate meter was stuck at 24/hr. I knew once 20m was closed it was going to be a long, difficult night. The K-index was still at 2 and between 0200z and 0700z, while all the stations down south were filling their buckets from a seemingly endless well of contacts (or so I've heard), I struggled on 40m to put a dozen contacts in the log. By 0700z I'd had enough. I set the alarm for 1200z and went to bed.

20m was already open when I got up. I heard lots of DX and a handful of east coast DXers so I grabbed a spot and started calling CQ while I drank my coffee and had some breakfast. Apparently I had set my alarm an hour earlier than everyone else because a few minutes after 1300z the rate jumped up to 75/hr and stayed there for almost 2 hours. After the morning rush was over I spent the next several hours looking for multipliers. I knew I had to find NL, MAR, and as many New England sections as I could early because they just wouldn't be workable later in the day. I did pretty good with New England and worked VY2SS and KP2M. Late in the morning I found VO1HE running stations high up on 15m. It was a bit early for 15m from here but I hung in there and kept calling. At first I thought it would be easy because I couldn't hear anyone else calling but soon realized that there were lots of stations that I just wasn't hearing. After a half hour I decided to move on. I kept coming back to his frequency every five or ten minutes but after a little while he was gone. For all the guys that spent a long time in the pileup unsuccessfully calling me this weekend: I feel your pain!

After missing out on NL, I knew a sweep was unlikely so I decided to just concentrate on rate for the rest of the day. The aurora was still flaring up occasionally but by 1800z I was hitting 15m hard and just stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. Every time I got knocked off my run frequency I'd S&P the band until I found a new spot and started running again. After an hour or so I had a stroke of luck. I had just worked one of the east coast big guns down at the bottom of the band and had left the radio on his frequency while grabbing another cup of coffee. He wasn't getting very many takers and then he disappeared! After a minute of silence I practically dove for the F1 key and a few minutes after that the run started. I knew the aurora must have let up because I got lots of comments that I was loud and no one crowded me off frequency. For the next five hours I kept the average rate steady above 60/hr even during a QSY from 15m down to 20m at an opportune moment when 15m started going out.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. Just like clockwork at around 0100z the 20m propagation followed the grey line off the west coast and out to sea. With KH7XS and a few JA's the only ones left on the band I knew it was time to head back to 40m. Conditions were better than the previous night but only the big stations were audible and almost all of them were already in the log. I did get spotted by a KL7 station which resulted in a little mini-run of eight stations but after that I was back to kilowatt QRP again. In the next half hour I worked two stations and both of those required lots of calling and fills. Even though it was only 0130z I knew that it was over for me. I saw the QSO count was at 749 so I thought I would try to get one more to make it an even 750. After about 5 minutes of searching I found W0CN and after 5 more minutes of calling and fills he was in the log and I was done.

As always, lots of highlights:

Working former co-worker and local operator VE8GER for the first time. I was very happy to hear him on the air doing his first SS!

The long Sunday afternoon run that seemed like it would never end.

Working 16 QRP stations. I love it when a QRP op cracks a big pileup of high powered stations!

Hearing the whoops and hollers in the background at multi-op stations when I work them.

The only lowlight was missing the sweep. In addition to NL I also needed ND but I'm sure if I hadn't missed on VO1HE I would have put a bit more effort into finding someone from North Dakota.

That's all from here for this year. I was going to run SO2C (single-op, 2 contest) during the ARRL 160 and the ARRL EME contest but it would have been only one night due to a prior commitment. Now that the geomagnetic forecast is calling for disturbed conditions during the contest weekend (again!) I'm not going to bother. I leave right after that for J6 and hopefully I'll be on from the island during the RAC Winter contest as J68/VE8EV.

73 from the frozen Arctic
John - VE8EV

SS SSB VE8EV Single Op HP

2009-11-23T09:41:00.001-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 22

Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160:
80:
40: 23
20: 338
15: 387
10:
------------
Total: 748 Sections = 78 Total Score = 116,688

Club:

Comments:

This year's SS was a personal best for me and I'm finally starting to feel like I know what I'm doing. I was expecting the auroral activity on Saturday to keep me out of the game until Sunday but the high (not zero!) sunspot number compensated somewhat, at least on the higher bands. I managed to get over 200 into the log before before 15m and 20m closed up. I wasn't expecting much on the low bands Saturday night and I sure wasn't disappointed. Between 0200 and 0700 my score increased by only 24 points! Sunday morning the rate waxed and waned with the aurora as I alternated between running and hunting for mults. I knew the sweep was lost after spending a half-hour calling VO1HE without success. Things finally picked up mid-afternoon and I even managed back-to-back runs on 15m and then 20m until it closed up around 0100. 40m was slightly better than the night before but practically everyone I could hear was already in log so I pulled the plug and went home.

I'll post the usual in-depth write-up to http://ve8ev.blogspot.com later on today.

73
John - VE8EV

SS CW - Like Tornados and Trailer Parks...

2009-11-09T17:45:00.011-07:00

I don't know what it is about ARRL Sweepstakes but for some reason it always seems to cause spectacular displays of aurora borealis. With everyone looking for that elusive 'Clean Sweep' of all 80 ARRL and RAC Sections this is the one contest where everyone wants to work a station in the far North but it always seems to be the one contest where we struggle the most with active geomagnetic conditions. This year's CW version of the event was no exception.

My rudimentary CW skills just aren't (yet) up to running with the lengthly SS exchange and after last year's somewhat meager results from my searching and pouncing, this year I invited CQ Contest Hall of Famer N6TR, Tree, to guest-op via a remote internet connection. Although we had planned to work the August NAQP contest as a test-run of the remote control set-up, various scheduling conflicts conspired to reducing us to a few quick connectivity tests in the weeks right before Sweepstakes. Of course there were a few minor glitches in the hour before the contest that raised our pulse rates a bit but in the end we had it all ready to go in time for the opening bell.

The remote control system was genius in it's simplicity. My Kenwood TS-2000 has a built-in software keyer. Send the radio plain text through the serial port and it will happily convert it to morse code and send it over the air. Various other commands sent through the serial port will do everything that can be done directly by pushing buttons or turning knobs on the front panel. By using the remote serial port software included with Ham Radio Deluxe, Tree's computer in Boring, Oregon had no idea that the serial port it was sending data to was on the back of my computer 1,600 miles away. SM5VXC's simple IPSound software routed the receiver audio and CW sidetone from my radio back to Tree's headphones. Other than the custom version of TRLog contest software that Tree whipped up to handle the logging and radio control, it really was almost as simple as it sounds. The rest of the station, however, was sorely lacking in electronic automation. It was my job to switch antennas, run the amp and the tuner, and (mostly for my own amusement) keep an eye on who we were working and what multipliers we needed.

The contest started with a bang Saturday afternoon. Conditions were great and Tree kept the rate at 80/hr for the first few hours. When darkness came, though, things started to slow down. Not so much because of band conditions, either. Tradition dictates that once it gets dark everyone QSY's to the low bands and spends the night working all their neighbors with low dipole antennas. Not so great for us guys on the edge of the world but we hung in there. My new, residential-area friendly (read: small) vertical antenna did a passable job on 40m given the distances involved. Our QSO total for both days on 40m was 45 contacts, which isn't bad considering that a) the antenna is only a 23ft whip, b) almost all of the contacts were 2000 miles+ and, c) conditions definitely were not the greatest. Our best DX on 40m was KP2M right around local midnight but it was also around then that the rate meter started sticking to the bottom peg so with almost 300 in the log we called it a night.

I knew 20m would be open for East coast sunrise so we were up 'n at 'em at 1130z the next morning. Sweepstakes Sunday is always a big deal from VE8 and I didn't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to put over 1000 in the log between now and the end of the contest. At least I didn't see any reason until I looked at the space weather. The K-index was at 4 and the NOAA auroral activity map showed a big, fat, red, angry-looking auroral oval on top of the world and it was right over our heads, stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. The very few signals that could be heard were all weak and watery but in the true VE8 spirit Tree forged ahead and started scraping up whatever could be found. We could count all our contacts that morning on our fingers until 20m finally started to open a little bit around 14z and then the rate slowly crawled up into the double-digits.

Tree had done an excellent job collecting multipliers the previous night so despite the dismal conditions on Sunday we were only needing a handful of sections for the sweep. Slowly over the course of the morning the remaining mults trickled in with the last two (RI and UT) calling within a few minutes of each other late in the morning. With a sweep in hand I had even less to do except watch the meters bouncing and commiserate over the chat link with Tree about the painfully lousy conditions.

I had hoped the electric overcast would settle down later in the afternoon but it was unrelenting. The last few hours of Sweepstakes is always painful but by 0145z the rate was down to 2 or 3 per hour and we decided it was over. By sheer force of will Tree had managed to put 200 Q's in the log over the past 15 hours through an Arctic geomagnetic storm that would have had most hams looking for a new hobby (or at least watching TV all afternoon).

This 3-day geomagnetic activity chart for November 7-8-9 is pretty
self-explanatory. The first 27 hours on the chart was Sweepstakes CW.
We live on the northern boundary of the 'AURORAL' area.
Most of Canada and the USA is in the 'SUBAURORAL' area.

I dream of a someday having a Sweepstakes weekend with double-digit sunspots and K=0 but I've never seen one yet. Maybe one of these years it will happen. Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's the geomagnetic activity forecast for the rest of the month. Sweepstakes Phone is on November 21st ...

SS CW VE8EV Multi-Op HP

2009-11-09T17:40:00.000-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV N6TR
Station: VE8EV
Class: Multi-Op HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 0
80: 0
40: 45
20: 411
15: 21
10: 0
------------
Total: 477 Sections = 80
Total Score = 75,520
Club:
Comments:
Many thanks to John, VE8EV, for letting me operate the SS CW from VE8. It has always been a fantasy of mine to do this. Thanks to the internet and HRD software, and a little software of my own, I was able to operate the contest while sitting in Boring, Oregon. HRD provided a serial link to John's TS2000 and some enhancements to TR Log let me use the keyer in the TS2000 to send CW with. IPSound took care of getting the receiver audio back down to me. The delay from pressing F1 to hearing my CQ start in the sidetone was about 300 milliseconds - not bad at all. Sometimes the internet sound would hiccup which would do strange things to exchanges. I bet my error rate is a bit higher than normal as a result. Conditions at the start of the contest were FANTASTIC. First three hours were 85, 83 and 50. Around that time, things started happening with the aurora and the best hour I ever had afterward was 35. There were times the band had a funny "breathing sound" and most of the signals were all gone. Was very happy to get a clean sweep. Thanks to Eric, VY1EI for calling in for my only NT QSO. Was lots of fun giving some of the big guns their clean sweep!! Even more fun when they no idea who was behind the "key". 73 Tree N6TR

CQ World Wide - The Big One

2009-10-26T09:55:00.017-06:00

We had so much fun in CQ WW last year that I've been eagerly anticipating this one for a whole year! With the new antennas permanently installed at the contest site there was no more field-day-style operations. Just tow the shack trailer up to the site, plug in the big TH6DXX yagi and the low band vertical, pop up the little TH3JRS on the trailer mast and away we go!

I was fully expecting this year's event to be a dismal failure. The geomagnetic field was predicted to be active all weekend. At this latitude, active geomagnetic conditions and low solar flux means no contacts on HF. Fortunately, Gabriel (the patron saint of ham radio) was still keeping an eye on us after our antenna raising last weekend and arranged for a flurry of sun spots to make up for the aurora.

Our only goals this year were to break the VE8 M/2 record we set last year and to make over a thousand contacts. Even with eight hours of auroral induced 'off-time' early Sunday morning conditions were otherwise very good and by Sunday afternoon both items were in the bag.

Lots of highlights over the weekend, here's the Top Ten List:

1. Starting the contest with a 100-hour on 20m. Now that's hitting the air running!

2. The excellent conditions on 40m Friday night. I worked all continents in the same hour just after midnight local time.

3. The surprise opening on 15m to Europe at 4am local time Saturday morning.

4. Working SU1KM in Zone 34 on Saturday morning for my LAST zone for the CQ WAZ award.

5. Working not one but TWO other VE8 stations (VE8DAV and VE8NSD) and VY0HL. Zero points for the contest but still cool and unusual!

6. Pushing the rate meter past 200 running stateside and JA stations late Saturday afternoon.

7. Having Wally ask me to work a Brazilian station on 15m that he'd been calling for 10 minutes with no success. He meant for me to use the big yagi and my amplifier but instead I just picked up his headset and made the contact with my first call. I told him the secret was "timing, tone and annunciation" ;)

8. Working several all-time new ones for DXCC. I've got to comb through the logs to find out which ones but I know for sure Tonga and Fiji and I'm pretty sure there's one or two more.

9. Working DP1POL in Antarctica on Sunday afternoon. I came across him CQing by himself and didn't even realize where he was until I put his call in the computer. We both said "Wow!"

10. Hunting multipliers off the cluster on Sunday afternoon I dialled up the QRG of some Caribbean station and the very first thing I heard was "who's the station with Victor?" I quickly threw out my callsign and into the log he went!

VE8DW shows off the broken record after finishing up on Sunday.

That's all until the next one. Thanks for all the Q's and we'll see you in Sweepstakes!

73 de VE8EV

CQWW SSB VE8EV M/2 HP

2009-10-26T09:45:00.001-06:00

CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV VE8DW
Station: VE8EV
Class: M/2 HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 40
Summary:

Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 1 1 1
80: 5 4 4
40: 73 17 34
20: 850 33 106
15: 130 16 22
10: 0 0 0
------------------------------
Total: 1059 71 167 Total Score = 624,036

Comments:
With active geomagnetic conditions predicted for the whole weekend I thought this was going to be a total washout but the unexpected sunspots compensated nicely for the electric overcast. The bands were great for the first 30 hours followed by 8 hours of zero-rate diode propagation when the K-index spiked overnight Saturday. More-or-less normal conditions after that for the rest of the contest.

Our goals were to get over 1000 Q's and break the VE8 record, both of which we accomplished. Full write-up http://ve8ev.blogspot.com/

73 and see you all in Sweepstakes!
John VE8EV Wally VE8DW

Thanks, Gabe!

2009-10-23T07:39:00.017-06:00

We finally finished putting up the big yagi last Sunday. In typical fashion, the one weekend job ended up taking two full weekends to complete but we were taking our time and doing things right.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the tower is on the local water supply storage tank at the same location we do our contest operations from. The tank is 60 feet high and the tower is another 40 feet on top of that so a perfect perch for the big TH6DXX.

While I did most of the aerial gymnastics, VE8DW worked the ground end and snapped some great pictures.

Day 1. The old tower had not been used for many years.

Day 2. Tower is down and now mounting a gin pole to stabilize the
old 18 foot long fiberglass VHF antenna as it comes off.

Day 3. Top section with rotator back on and assembling the yagi.
I put the boom on first then rotated the mast to install the elements.

Day 4. Up she goes! The winds had been gusting all morning but right
before we were ready to start the lift the wind stopped and the sun
came out. Once we were done I Googled 'patron saint of ham radio'
and found out it was Gabriel we needed to thank for the warm
sunshine and the respite from the wind at the critical moment.

We'll find out how well it works this weekend during the CQ World Wide SSB Contest!

73 de VE8EV

Better Safe Than Sorry!

2009-10-13T20:58:00.005-06:00

I should have known better. I service high voltage equipment all the time at work and the safety precautions are thoughtfully and carefully layered so no one gets hurt. High voltage insulating gloves, voltage sensing wands, locking/grounding disconnects, rubber floor mats, etc. Exacting procedures tie together all the safety apparatus. You do things EXACTLY correctly because you don't want your children to grow up without a father. So why should things be any different with amateur equipment?

My amp has issues. Nothing major, but it's old and sat in an oceanside warehouse for many, many years before I rescued it. Just little things. Like all of a sudden it wouldn't bandswitch properly on any band except 20 meters. Now that I was putting up an all-band vertical antenna I was pretty sure I was going to want to use the amp on other bands. So, while I was putting up antennas and dabbling in the California QSO Party, I decided to take a look at the bandswitch. Oh yeah, and while I'm at it I need to have a look at the meter. The HV metering also seems to have quit...

This is not a decision to be taken lightly. First of all, the amp is mounted in the equipment rack. I can just squeeze in along the side of the rack and reach behind to unplug the amp and disconnect the coax and control cables. The next trick is getting it out of the rack. This ain't no 30 pound Tokyo Hy-Power solid-state wonder. This is a piece of heavy-duty, mid seventies commercial equipment and it weighs 350 pounds! Fortunately, the procedure is fairly well developed. Slide it out of the rack onto a piece of carpet and from there, with a bit of grunting, you can slide it to where you want it. Now that its all disconnected and clear of the rack you can open it up. Two dozen screws to get the top cover (with electrical interlock) off then several more screws and pieces to come off to be able to slide the bandswitch control out a bit to take a look at it.

So I'm happily disconnecting wires and removing screws in the RF compartment when *WHAM* something bites me AND HARD! I'm sitting there rubbing my hand and starting at the amp with the same sort of disbelief as when the loving family pet up and bites you. What the heck? It's not plugged in. The cord won't even reach the outlet unless it's all the way into the rack. The capacitors couldn't STILL be charged. The HV hasn't been on for hours! But obviously, that's exactly what was going on. Fortunately, I only had one hand in the works or I might not be telling this tale.

I pulled out the schematics and started looking at the power supply diagram. Oh, the HV metering is in series with the bleeder resistors. Starting to make sense now. No bleeders, no HV meter, no discharging the capacitors. Oh, and the interlock on the cover only short circuits the primary (low voltage) side of the HV transformer. I sacrificed a few high value 1/4 watt resistors to discharge the capacitor. This thing has an 8 uF oil-filled capacitor which would easily discharge enough current to blow the end off a screwdriver if you shorted it directly to ground when it was fully charged. After I had blown up a few small resistors then I felt I could safely zap it to ground with a screwdriver. Just as a final precaution, I checked it with a meter. The voltage was rising again! There must be another capacitor in the circuit that was back feeding this one and slowly charging it again. It was rising at almost 50 volts per minute. I discharged it again and quickly clipped a ground wire onto the capacitor to hold the voltage down and bleed off the other cap. Once I was sure everything was finally dead I proceded to change out the open bleeder resistor and all was well. The metering worked properly and when you shut the switch off the HV would go from 4000 to zero in 10 seconds.

So, the moral of the story? DO IT RIGHT AND BE SAFE.

EVERY time you open up an amplifier or other piece of HV electronic equipment ALWAYS ASSUME that the high voltage lines are still ENERGIZED until they are SAFELY and SECURELY grounded.

Oh, and the bandswitching problem? I had band program card plugged in upside down!

Ex Luna Scientia

2009-10-13T20:34:00.006-06:00

Well, I didn't quite make my deadline of getting it done before summer was over but now it's a done deal. This weekend, in between all the HF antenna work, I did find the time to point the VHF/UHF antenna array at the moon and make a contact. The ARRL EME Contest was running and from this far north the moon was above the horizon for the entire 48 hour period.

Like many things, I have procrastinated for months now on building a computerized antenna positioning unit. The pointing is plenty accurate for satellite work but leaves much to be desired for EME. Fortunately, it cleared up Saturday night and I could adjust the antennas by sighting the moon along the antenna booms. The ferocious winds made it difficult to keep the antennas aimed and the moon actually clips across the sky faster than you might think!

I spent quite a bit of time tuning between 144.000 and 144.100 listening for CW but didn't hear a peep. After a while I fired up the WSJT software and started looking for JT65 signals. It didn't take me long to find KB8RQ. Gary's station in Ohio has two dozen 13 element yagis with 1.5kW on VHF and Saturday night he was RUNNING stations off the moon! Of course not quite the same rate as an HF contest (it takes five minutes to complete a JT65 QSO) but he had a steady stream of callers with few unanswered CQ's. Once I had everything dialed in I could easily hear his tones in the headphones and he was registering -17dB in the software. I had only tried calling a few times when he came back to my pair of 13 element yagis and 100 watts.

I spent another hour or so after that tuning around but never heard anyone else calling CQ. I copied a few stations calling other (unheard) stations and lots of distinctive '73' tone pairs but didn't make another QSO. Hopefully this is the motivation I need to get the 2m linear amplifier built and finish the computer antenna controller!

MFJ-1025 Noise Cancelling Signal Enhancer

2009-10-13T20:04:00.004-06:00

If you're anything like me you're sometimes troubled by noise. At my home QTH I only get two kinds of noise: man-made and natural. S9 noise on all the low bands and sometimes troubling on the upper bands too. I finally decided to try one of the MFJ-1025 "Noise Cancelling Signal Enhancer" box. All the online reviews seemed to generally agree that this was one piece of MFJ gear that did what it was supposed to.

The theory behind it is actually quite simple. Take the signals from two different antennas and adjust the phasing to null or enhance signals from different directions. One thing that needs to be emphasized is that the more closely matched the antennas are the better it will work. I used a 23 foot vertical as the main antenna and an 18 foot vertical whip about 30 feet away as the noise sensing antenna.

Does it work? Well, it doesn't work miracles but it does sometimes work wonders. As long as the noise that is troubling you is from a single direction it WILL be able to reduce it. How much depends on many factors, mostly how well you are receiving the noise on each antenna. One thing I did do right away was to replace the little light bulb used as an RF 'fuse' on the noise antenna input with a relay to ground the input when I transmit. The light bulb would probably be okay if I was only running 100W but a kilowatt into the main vertical popped the little bulb in short order.

It definately takes a bit of practice to get used to operating it but the procedure is pretty straight forward. Adjust the gain controls for each antenna so the noise is at the same level on each antenna and the carefully adjust the phase control for a dip in the noise level. A little tweaking of one level control, adjust the phase control for minimum noise level and you're done. It really helps if you set your radio AGC control to 'fast' during the adjustments.

This little gizmo is aleady on my indispensible list. For more info, Tom W8JI has a nice description of the theory on his web page at http://www.w8ji.com/mfj-1025_1026.htm

Winter Wonderland

2009-10-13T19:46:00.004-06:00

The snow is on the ground and the temperatures are below freezing. That traditionally means it’s time to start doing antenna work. I don’t really know why we (actually me) can’t get our (my) act together and do it during the summer. There’s always so much going on when the weather is nice and a never ending litany of excuses. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s raining, there’s too many bugs, there’s better things to do, etc, etc. Once October hits, though, the situation seems to reverse itself. Yeah, it’s 5 below zero outside -BUT- it’s only gonna get COLDER. And DARKER. And WINDIER. And CQ World Wide is only a few weeks away now… Better suck it up and get onto the antenna work before it’s REALLY miserable out there.

So I spent last weekend up on my roof putting up a 23 foot vertical antenna for the low bands and an 18 foot vertical antenna for the noise sensing antenna to use with my MFJ-1025. Before I got started, I modelled several different rooftop antenna and radial configurations in EZNEC. It’s quite amazing what little things make a big difference and what things make very little difference. The end result of the modelling was to put the vertical on a tripod mount at one end of the roof with two 18 foot radial wires down to the eaves and one 33 foot radial wire along the ridge of the roof. This gave a reasonable performance and efficiency on all bands. I modelled it with a few more and different length radials but it didn’t seem to make much difference. I fed the antenna with a chunk of LDF2-50 hardline I had handy and it loads up quite easily with the internal tuner on 40-10 meters. I can load it for 80 and 160 meters with the external tuner but I really don’t expect too much on those bands. Judging by the contacts I’ve made so far the modelling seems to be valid. I haven’t had a chance to play with it too much yet but I have made a few contacts on several different bands and on 17 meters I even got a 10-over-S9 report from a JA station and worked the TX5SPA expedition in the Austral Islands.

The weekend after the vertical went up it was time to start on the big project. Originally scheduled for late June, Wally and I had planned to permanently mount the TH6DXX yagi up at the contest site. The setting for that is a 40-foot guyed tower on top of a 60-foot high water tank. We had hung temporary wires from the water tank last winter during contests but hadn’t exactly figured out how we were going to get the big yagi up to the top of the tower. I’ve done enough tower work to know there was no way I was going to climb it. I don’t like climbing towers to begin with and old, rickety, light duty guyed towers are a non-starter with me. However, one day last spring when we were taking down the wire beam after the ARRL DX contest, I noticed that there was a hinge on the bottom edge of the steel pocket that the base of the tower sat in. Looking more closely, I realized that if the bolts were removed from the bottom plate it would swing open and allow the tower to drop through along the side of the water tank.

So this weekend we went up and bolted a small winch to the edge of the base frame and eventually got the tower lowered down, the old un-used VHF antennas off, and the top section removed. We might have actually pressed ahead and installed the yagi but even though it was only a couple of degrees below zero the wind was howling all weekend. Once all the demolition was completed we decided to call it a wrap for the weekend and enjoy the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday.

Today I got the rotator mounted in the top section and we should be all ready to put the yagi up on Saturday. Wally, VE8DW, has been taking pictures so I'll post the results of our efforts next weekend when we're done.

VC8B Write-up

2009-07-28T17:10:00.021-06:00

I had my doubts about how successful this operation was going to be. I was concerned about the cost of getting all the equipment up to the island and back but mostly it was propagation that had me worried. At 72 degrees North the community of Sachs Harbour on Banks Island is well into the geomagnetic polar cap area and I had no idea what kind of conditions to expect. The forecast was for unsettled conditions (the aurora is always unsettled to some degree or another at that latitude) and coming off of the geomagnetic storm a few days earlier I had visions of calling CQ all weekend with no takers.

As it turned out, I was able to get all my freight onto a cargo plane hauling groceries up to the tiny settlement so I only had to pay shipping on my return flight back to Inuvik. With 200 pounds of radio equipment (not including my work tools) that cut $600 off the total cost of the expedition. I probably could have gotten the gear home for free as well but that would have likely meant leaving it behind and I was not about to do that. I had a warm fuzzy feeling watching my equipment being carefully loaded onto an airplane and then two hours later watching it get gently unloaded straight into the back of my truck.

So far I'm the luckiest guy in the world when it comes to expedition propagation. On my April trip to Ellice Island as VX8X I was blessed with 48 hours of extremely quiet geomagnetic conditions that exactly coincided with the timing of my operation. This time as well I had just missed the biggest geomagnetic storm in months and the aurora afterwards was relatively calm for all four days on Banks Island. To top it off there was a even a weak sunspot group to help things along.

My biggest problems turned out to be totally unanticipated. The first glitch was mosquitos. Banks Island is a very windy place and mosquitos are not usually much of a problem but on the Thursday afternoon when I arrived they were swarming en-masse. Now don't forget, I live in the Arctic so I know all about mosquitos but these ones were something else! Of course I didn't bring any bug dope and the only store in Sachs Harbour was closed Thursday afternoon. Fortunately, I managed to scrounge up a bottle of Off! For Kids. Not exactly the heavy duty, 30% DEET stuff that I'm used to but it did get me through the assembly and raising of the antenna without too many bites. I set up right at the airport in Sachs Harbour and had the convenience of a 30-foot high tilt-over lighting pole to mount the antenna and rotator. A pair of ratchet straps were used to secure the 10 foot long piece of pipe I had scrounged on my last visit to Sachs and surprisingly it didn't slip or twist all weekend, even with winds that gusted to 60 knots.

Once again the little TH3JRS baby yagi did the job almost as well
as a full-size tribander but at half the cost and a third the weight.
The little blue equipment shack was my home for four days.

Aside from the mosquitos (which disappeared after the antenna was up and weren't seen again until it was time to take the antenna down on Monday morning) my biggest pain in the butt (literally!) was my operating position. I had originally planned to take a folding canvas lawn chair with me but it got cut at the last minute to save weight. That left whatever I could scare up on site which turned out to be a cushion and some foam rubber on top of a big cable reel. At first it seemed more than adequate but after a few hours I was quite sore and no amount of adjusting the number of pieces of foam or layering with cardboard helped the situation. I ended up only being able to operate for four hour stretches with a four hour rest in between. With a comfortable chair I probably could have spent 50% more time on the air. Fortunately, I did manage to borrow a rather comfortable folding cot to put my sleeping bag on so I didn't have to sleep on the cold steel floor!

As I mentioned, band conditions were not too bad at all. There were a few periods where not much was heard but more often the band (I only operated 20 meters) was open to anywhere I chose to point the antenna at. On top of that there was tremendous gray line propagation 'overnight' (the sun never quite set there) with very strong signals into Europe around 0600z and then Asia a few hours after that. Once again I confirmed that a small yagi and an amplifier is an unbeatable combination for this kind of operation. I got many, many reports of 20db-over-S9 and was able to turn the antenna to whichever part of the world would generate the best rates (or to whichever part of the world suited me at the time).

As usual, I tried to make sure to cover all areas of the world as equally as possible. Looking back at the log I actually spent more time on Europe and Asia than I did on North America but ended up with 50% of the stations worked being W/VE. Every evening I was able to work 200-300 stations during North American sunset. The rest of the time I spent alternating between Europe and Asia. Propagation to both areas was good but the Asian stations just didn't seem to be around in large numbers and the European stations were just plain hard to work. Three times over the course of the operation I had to give up on Europe and turn the beam elsewhere. Call, then listen. It sounds so simple. Everyone else in the world doesn't seem to have a problem with that so why is it such an issue with some European stations?

One of those times was around 0600z Saturday night during the IOTA contest. I had sacked out for a few hours in the evening so I could get up for Eu sunrise and then work Asia until morning. I pointed the antenna over the pole and tuned through the band working the few stations that were calling CQ. After receiving several comments about how loud I was I easily found a clear spot and started calling CQ myself. I worked several stations in short succession when 'the packet spot heard round the world' went out. Now I'm not sure exactly what happened but I imagine that 95% of the European stations were happily working away on the lower bands when they saw the 20m spot for VC8B come up. At that moment they ALL clicked on the spot, flipped over to 20m and started calling. And calling. And calling. I was reminded of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where all the animals are fleeing from the Tazmanian Devil and Bugs is trying to find out what's going on but no one will stop to talk to him. I tried to call a couple of stations back but it was just no use. I laughed out loud and just sat back and listened. After two full minutes of non-stop, 20-over-S9 mayhem I finally shook my head and turned the beam to Asia (which from here is 90 degrees to Europe), found a new frequency and just stayed there for the rest of the contest.

Now, in all fairness to the Europeans I also have to mention what happened Sunday evening. The NA sunset peak was winding down and I had just finished putting the last few hundred North American stations in the log when someone mentioned there was a Russian station trying to get my attention from off the side of the beam. I turned the beam and started running Europeans. Now usually I'll run Eu for about 5 minutes before I have to go split frequency and another 5 minutes before I have to start going by the numbers. This time however was totally different. All the stations were perfectly behaved and no one was calling out of turn. I didn't have to go split, I didn't have to go by numbers, it was just smooth sailing. In an hour I put over a hundred Europeans in the log, by far my best run rate to Europe ever. What was so different this time? Beats me. Maybe the professional ops get up early and the lids like to sleep in. Either way, it was a very pleasant way to wrap up the operation.

I shut down after that and went to bed as I still had some work to complete Monday morning in addition to tearing everything down and packing up. Final QSO tally was somewhere over 2000. Logs should be online tomorrow and I hope to have the cards ready to start sending out by the second week of August.

73 and thanks for all the contacts,

John - VE8EV

IOTA VC8B SO24SSB HP

2009-07-28T16:07:00.006-06:00

Call: VC8B
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station:
Class: SO24SSB HP (DXpedition)
QTH: Banks Island, NT

Operating Time (hrs): 15

Summary:

Band CW Qs CW Mults Ph Qs Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
80: 0 0 0
40: 0 0
20: 0 0 683 53
15: 0 0
10: 0 0
----------------------------------------
Total: 0 0 683 53 Total Score = 222,441

Club:

Comments:
Fairly decent propagation on 20m but of course no
other bands available due to the extremely high
latitude and 24hr daylight.

Full write-up at http://ve8ev.blogspot.com

73
John - VE8EV

VC8B - No News is Good News

2009-07-20T09:15:00.004-06:00

Everything is still on track for Banks Island this weekend. I'm watching the geomagnetic conditions closely but you can't do anything about the weather down here, let alone the weather on the sun. Let's hope for quiet conditions and maybe a sunspot or two...

I expect to be QRV for a few hours Thursday night (Friday morning UTC) and then more-or-less continuous operation from Friday evening (Saturday morning UTC) until Sunday night (Monday morning UTC).

73
John - VE8EV

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2009-07-03T10:17:00.003-06:00

With Canada Day this year falling in the middle of the week right after the Field Day weekend and my kids coming back from school for the summer right after that I decided it would be fun to take a few extra days off and go camping. Camping ham radio style, that is. We had planned to set up for Field Day at the local campground so I just stayed there until the July 1st holiday. Ever since the warm weather arrived I’ve been perfecting the mobile shack and this would be the first outing for the new configuration.

First up was a new HF antenna and mast. After a whole winter of raising and lowering the thirty foot DMX tower with the TH6DXX on it I finally concluded that just wasn’t a practical solution. On the air it was great but it was just too big and heavy to safely and conveniently set up and tear down. It took every bit of muscle from two strong men to get it all into the air and at every step of the operation there was the potential for something to go disastrously wrong. Instead, I decided to go with a MUCH smaller and lighter TH3JRS mounted on a 30ft. two-piece aluminum pole. As I have written before, I think the TH3JRS is a great design, it’s just a shame that MFJ has put their trademark stamp of cheapness on it. I used to have one of the ones built by Hy-Gain before they were bought by MFJ. The original construction was heavier and of superior manufacturing quality. The second-hand one that I had was up for years without any problems before it was taken down and sold when I went QRT in 2000. What the new ones do have going for them, though, is that they are very light. So light that they can be easily installed by one person and that is what I needed for island expeditions and for the mobile shack. A lightweight (and low cost!) TV antenna rotator completes the setup for an easy-up HF yagi installation. I also have a 4-element yagi for 6m fixed-mounted lower down the mast and pointed SE that I’ll have up during the summer E-skip season.

Next order of business was VHF/UHF antennas. I remember the first time I learned that the aurora was more than just pretty lights in the sky. I’d been happily DXing away for a few months with my new license hanging on the wall when the first spell of active geomagnetic conditions occurred. I thought my radio was broken! After hearing nothing on HF for two weeks I decided to give amateur radio satellites a try and found they were the perfect solution for getting out under all conditions. Once I got back into the hobby it didn’t take long to remember my original rational for the satellite gear. A new lightweight aluminum tower was mounted in place of the original DMX tower and I built all the workings of the az/el mechanics out of aluminum to save weight. The only compromise to the weight situation was the use of a cheap and available ex-TVRO dish actuator for the elevation drive. I built a sturdy but lightweight 10-turn helix antenna for UHF and resurrected the pair of 13-element VHF yagis from my original station. While that may sound like overkill for LEO satellites, I need the extra gain for horizon-to-horizon coverage. Most high elevation satellite passes here don’t have anyone else in the footprint! The entire apparatus folds down for service and transport and is easily tilted with a small hand-winch mounted at ground level.

Antennas all stowed, hitched up and ready to roll.

Not much more was needed to be done to the interior. All the operating positions, bunks and the mini kitchen were all completed last year and worked well over the winter. The only additions were a natural gas heater installed in January (my XYL is STILL ticked off about the $1000 power bill from running the electric heater in December!) and an exhaust fan to keep the interior comfortable when running the amplifiers. I rewired the AC power system in conduit with lots of outlets, fluorescent lighting, dimmable workstation lights for the operating positions and a 120/240V 30A electrical panel. I installed a special plug on the house and one up at our contesting site so there’s no shortage of power. It can also plug directly into the 6kW generator that I borrowed for Field Day.

VE8EV at the controls wearing my Canada Day contest shirt.

The main operating position is centered around a Kenwood TS-2000 and an ex-commercial CMC BH30 1.5kW amplifier. An old airfield lighting control panel handles bandswitching the amplifier, audio and keying I/O between the radio and the computer, antenna relays and anything else that might need a button or a selector switch. A 35A 12V power supply, a trio of 40aH gel-cell batteries and a PowerPole distribution panel handles all the DC power requirements. The second operating position has a Yaesu FL2100B amplifier and space for Wally (VE8DW), or anyone else to set up their equipment for a multi-op situation.

Composite shot of the second operating position, bunks and the 'kitchen'

I wrote separate posts about our Field Day adventures and the RAC Canada Day contest. HF band conditions were generally lousy due to the elevated K-index but outside of the contests I did manage to catch a few band openings including one to Africa where I worked TN5SN (Congo) for a new one and heard TL0A (Central Africa) for a moment with a good signal but he QRT’d before I even got a chance to call him. Between HF activity I worked the satellites and kept an ear out on 6m. I heard a few VE6 and VE7 beacons but CQ calls on 50.125 failed to drum up any activity.

At the campground with all the antennas up except the 6m yagi.
I ended up waiting until it started raining do that part...

The weather was a mixed bag. Cold and raining on Field Day weekend with temperatures just above freezing to hot and sunny at mid-week with a temperature of 21C (72F). Through it all the shack was perfectly cozy and comfortable. The amplifiers kept it warm during Field Day and the exhaust fan kept it cool during the Canada Day contest. In between I only had to run the electric heater for an hour or so on Monday to take the chill off. All in all the camping trip was a nice break from the routine and the perfect way to start the summer.

Look for me this month from Banks Island during (and on either side of) the IOTA contest as VC8B.

73 from the Canadian Arctic
de VE8EV

RAC Contest: B-I-Triple-CQ-L

2009-07-03T09:26:00.007-06:00

I knew going into it that conditions were going to be lousy. The geomagnetic forecast was for active conditions at high latitudes so I wasn't expecting much but this is one of my favorite contests so I thought I would give it a shot. VE8DW had other commitments so this was also going to be a solo op. The fact that it was on a weekday made it challenging to find people that weren't at work or sleeping. I was constantly juggling gray line and local times to find the best places to point the beam at.

I was still set up at the campground from Field Day but running on 'shore power' instead of the big generator so I could only run 400W from the little amplifier. With the poor conditions I decided the best strategy would be single band 20M and B-I-Triple-CQ-L or Butt In Chair, Call C Q Lots. I set up the voice keyer, loaded up on coffee and sugar and settled in for a full 24 hour stretch. If figured if I just kept at it I should be able to scrounge up a couple of hundred contacts and make sure all the deserving got the VE8 multiplier.

As it turned out, conditions weren't great but not as bad as I expected. The first hours were spent on NA and generated a surprising number of contacts. By 0230z I already had all the phone multipliers (except VY0) and that alone motivated me to keep filling the log. When the rate dropped into the single digits I swung the beam north and for several hours kept running a slow trickle of central Asia and eastern Europeans. European sunrise brought a couple of hours of big pileups and I even spent about a half hour running split trying to pick up as many stations as I could before they headed off to work for the day. I must have been the only NA station making it across as the log is filled with 59-001 contacts. Once the Eu stations started drying up things were pretty slow for the next few hours. I had the beam out to the Pacific and worked a dribbling of VK's and JA's. I don't think the rate ever went over 20/hr but at least it kept me awake. I was anticipating a big run of JA once their work day ended but it never materialized. At one point I was sitting there in the middle of the night listening to my unanswered CQ's and suddenly had a flash that the next station to call in was going be an HL. Sure enough, 10 minutes later a weak Korean called in, the only one in the log!

At east coast sunrise I swung the beam back to NA and started the long, slow push to the finish. I don't know what the aurora was doing but other than a lone VE1 and a VE3 there was nothing heard. I was still getting the occasional JA and European calling so I just kept at it. I checked the CW part of the band and heard quite a few stations so for the rest of the contest I would tune through every hour and work 10-pointers and mults with my rudimentary CW skills. Conditions finally started picking up a little bit around noon and for the afternoon the rate hung in around 20/hr.

By mid-afternoon I was down to just needing four mults (not including VY0) on CW to have a full set. I had worked VY1RAC and VE9RAC the night before in the first hour and was kicking myself for not moving them to CW when I had the chance. I did get a lucky break when VE8NSD stopped by to say hello. I had also worked him the night before on phone and now I had a second chance to ask him for a CW contact. He said he wasn't set up for CW but he'd see what he could do and get back to me. About 10 minutes later VE8RAC called in for the double 20-pointer and NT mult on CW!

In the late afternoon I was hampered by auroral-QRN coming in from the east and west. I desperately wanted to keep the beam on the east coast but signals were still weak and the noise was up to S-5 in that direction. I tried to find the best spot I could with a tolerable noise level and kept at it. As the aurora would go up and down I'd get little mini-runs of four or five stations then nothing for 10 or 15 minutes. By 5pm I was just about wiped and somewhat relieved that it was over. I turned off the radio and called VE8DW to share my results and coordinate a teardown of the station later in the day. I was looking at the computer screen while I was talking to him and realized that the contest wasn't over for another hour yet! I quickly jumped back into the fray, found a clear frequency and started calling CQ again. After a little while conditions picked up for about half an hour, the noise went away and I finally got a decent run going. I only needed VE9 on CW and surprisingly I had about a half a dozen VE9's call in during the last hour but no amount of begging and pleading would convince any of them to do a CW contact. The highlight of the last half hour was working Bob, VA3QV. He had blogged extensively about his long quest to work a VE8 station and I'd been keeping an ear out for him the entire time. He was thrilled to make the contact and I was pretty happy about it too.

Once it was (really) over I was shocked to see how well I had done. Even with the lousy conditions I managed to make 609 Q's and collect 22 mults. The breakdown was 203 VE (11 RAC) and 406 DX.
Final score was 65,120 which is not at all embarrassing given the conditions.

73 - John

CQ Field Day!

2009-07-02T18:25:00.006-06:00

I've been looking forward to Field Day for a long time. I can't even remember the last time I participated but it was definitely more than 10 years ago. We tried hard last year but weren't able to get the trailer ready in time. This year not only were we ready but we were ready to do it in style! All the work we've done on the mobile shack was about to pay off and after practicing all winter with portable operations I was looking forward to being able to set up in sunshine and mosquitoes instead of snow and darkness.

We had everything prepared. I printed out pamphlets about ham radio to hand out. I made some signs for the operating positions so guest operators would remember our callsign and the exchange. I dug up some extra headphones and splitters so interested visitors could listen in on the action. I coordinated with the family to come out Sunday for a picnic and barbecue afterwards. Even the geomagnetic field was predicted to quiet so we'd be able to work all the weak ones running low power and dipoles strung in trees. It was going to be the start of a classic Field Day tradition.

As usual, things didn't work out the way we planned. Well, most things anyways. Saturday morning 'dawned' (the sun never goes down this time of year) cold and miserable and rainy with more of the same in the forecast for the whole weekend. Undaunted, we finished battening down the hatches and got ready to leave. The only stop we had to make on the way was at the shop to put some air in the trailer tires. We pulled out of the driveway right on schedule at 11:15 but when we got to the shop I couldn't find my key for the door. I knew I put it in my pocket before we left. Then I discovered the hole in my pocket! Back to the house we went for 10 frantic minutes of searching before I finally found the key in the lining of my jacket.

Things ran pretty smoothly after that. We made it out to the campground by 12:15 (1815z) and by 12:45 we had the generator running and the HF and the satellite antennas up. VE8DW jumped on the air to start making contacts while I put up a vertical and strung some radials. The forecast was for quiet geomagnetic conditions but instead ended up being unsettled all weekend long. We had diode propagation on all bands. Lots of stations were heard but it was difficult to get them to hear us even though we were running power. A short run on 20m RTTY in the early evening was the only bright spot. 40 meters was a total loss. Saturday night I could hear stations from all across the US and Canada but even running a full kW I couldn't even get a QRZ? out of any of them. After an hour I gave up and focused on listening for a 6m opening and working satellites. The satellites were all busy but only produced a steady trickle of contacts. The single channel FM satellites were so slammed it that took all weekend to make the allowed single contact through each one. 6m opened to northern BC and Alberta shortly after midnight but I didn't hear any stations and at about 2am we decided to call it a night and grab a few hours of sleep.

The next day started early at 5am with eastern US sunrise and an International Space Station pass the first things on the agenda. The aurora was even heavier on Sunday morning and 20m was very slow going for the first several hours. The ISS pass was exciting and frustrating at the same time. We only had two passes during the Field Day period, one with a maximum 1.8 degrees elevation and another an hour later with 0.7 degrees. Amazingly, we heard Canadian astronaut VA3CSA calling CQ with no takers during both opportunities but he didn't reply to our calls! After the second pass I jumped on the internet (did I mention we had a wireless internet connection to the mobile shack?) and found out that the ARISS station was using the VHF/UHF repeater mode. I knew it had that capability but I didn't know they also used it for space-to-ground voice contacts. All the official information I found online before Field Day clearly stated that 144.49MHz was the only uplink frequency to use for voice contacts with the ISS. Oh well, live and learn.

Due to the inclement weather, the campground was deserted all weekend and we didn't have a single visitor, none of our invited guests showed up, and even the family barbecue was cancelled. Better luck next year! At least Wally and I had fun.

The final results were 87 contacts on HF (26 RTTY, the rest SSB) and 31 contacts on satellite.

RAC Canada Day

2009-07-02T18:23:00.001-06:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV
Class: SOSB/20 HP
QTH: Inuvik, NWT
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs CW Mults Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 20 589 10 12
15:
10:
6:
2:
----------------------------------------
Total: 20 589 10 12 Total Score = 65,120
Club:
Comments:
203 VE (11 RAC) and 406 DX
Wasn't expecting much given the heavy electronic overcast but managed to scrapeup enough Q's to keep me awake all night.
Full write-up at http://ve8ev.blogspot.com
73, John - VE8EV

ARRL Field Day

2009-07-02T18:20:00.003-06:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV VE8DW
Station: VE8EV
Class: 2A HP
QTH: Inuvik, NWT
Operating Time (hrs): 23
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Dig Qs
----------------------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 54 26
15: 6
10:
6:
2: 31
222:
432:
903:
1.2:
2.3:
3.4:
5.7:
10G:
24G:
----------------------------
Total: 0 91 26 Total Score = 143
Club:
Comments:
plus bonus points: 100% emergency power, public place, W1AW message, satellite

Typical Arctic Field Day conditions: high K-index, cold and rainy
Full write-up at http://ve8ev.blogspot.comJohn - VE8EV

CQ Satellite

2009-06-02T08:33:00.005-06:00

I finally got the steerable VHF/UHF array put up on the weekend. It is pretty much a copy of the very successful arrangement I had back in the nineties. A pair of Cushcraft 13B2 yagis for 2m, a homebrew 10-turn helix antenna on 70cm and all mounted on the shack trailer with a 20ft. fold-down tower with rotators for azimuth and elevation. I still have to build and install the mast-mounted VHF preamp and switching arrangement and put in the permanent feedlines (1/2" hardline) but so far everything seems to be working great. I made a bunch of contacts on AO-51, SO-50 and FO-29 and listened to myself calling CQ for a whole pass each of AO-7 and VO-52.

I think AO-7 is going to be my new favorite. Launched in 1974 (!) Amsat-Oscar 7 came back from the dead in 2002 after a 21 year sleep. The altitude is high enough that from my QTH I get coverage (at various times) to all of North America, Europe and Japan. Last night my downlink was audible right to the horizon so hopefully I'll be able to work a good bit of DX on this bird.

Once the preamp and new feedlines are installed the station should be EME-capable and I'm also working on automating the antenna tracking to allow for complete 'hands-off' operation. Tuning the radio, adjusting antenna azimuth and elevation, logging and operating all at the same time is pretty challenging but I'm starting to get the hang of it again.

I'll post more as things get completed but suffice to say that working satellites is BIG fun!

73

VC8B - Banks Island NA-129

2009-05-26T12:31:00.002-06:00

The special callsign VC8B was authorized today for the Banks Island expedition. I'll be operating from Sachs Harbour, NT from July 24-27 (UTC) including the RSGB IOTA Contest. Activity will be exclusively SSB, mostly on 20m which, aurora permitting, should be open round the clock. Will watch for openings on 15m and 10m as well.

I'll post any updates here but I'm not anticipating any problems unless there is delay for weather, likely fog, which is common that time of year.

73
John - VE8EV

QSL, QSL.

2009-05-25T22:26:00.024-06:00

With the torrent of VX8X cards finally slowing down to a steady trickle I thought I'd write a bit about QSL cards. When you stop and think about, exchanging cards is kind of a strange addition to a hobby that's mostly about radio and electronics. Now that contacts can be confirmed by ARRL's Logbook of the World and e-QSL I wonder how much longer hams are going to exchange paper through the mail (or bureau)? My guess is ...forever! Here is my perspective on this fascinating aspect of our hobby.

It's Better to Give Than to Receive (or is it?)

I've sometimes had mixed feelings about QSL cards. When I first started out years ago, I diligently QSL'd most contacts direct. I remember the thrill of seeing the envelope in the mailbox coming back from some far off country and adding cards to my collection. Then the bureau cards started coming. Every few months another big bundle of cards would arrive and I would laboriously reply to them all. It didn't take me very long to pare down my own QSL requests to only needed DXCC entities or other rare contacts and after many years I've finally perfected a system so that replying to cards isn't a chore.

Bigger is Better...NOT!

I think that a good question for exam pools around the world would be "What is the size of a standard QSL card?" The answer, of course, is 5-1/2" x 3-1/2" (or 140mm x 90mm). In every bundle of cards I receive there are always a few that are larger than all the rest. These are the ones that get all tattered and dog-eared during handling, don't fit in the card holders, don't fit into small envelopes, make it difficult to flip through the pile looking for a specific card, etc, etc.

Keeping Score

There's lots of info out there on the right way and the wrong way to send a QSL request. I don't really think there's a 'wrong' way to QSL but sometimes I wonder what people at the other end are thinking when they post their request. Here are the things I think about when I'm processing cards:

Plus: SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope)
Minus: SASE with US postage stamps. Hello, US postage only works in the US!

Plus: Reply envelope with peel-and-stick or self sealing flap.
Minus: Reply envelope with no adhesive at all requiring tape to seal. WHY!?

Plus: Reply envelope one size smaller than the original envelope, tucked neatly inside.
Minus: Reply envelope folded in half.

Plus: Reply envelope with my return address already on it.
Minus: Reply envelope with identical To and From addresses. Does anyone really think that if I forget to apply enough postage the post office is going to send the letter overseas just because the return address says so? Doubtful.

Plus: Request with SASE or IRC or greenstamps
Minus: Overseas QSL request with no postage and no reply envelope.

Covering the Costs

QSLing is expensive. Last month I spent close to $1000 on cards and postage (mostly postage) replying to QSL requests. My direct cost to reply to a QSL is $0.14 for the card and $0.98 for postage to USA or $1.65 for overseas. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for at least 1 or 2 greenstamps or an IRC to cover the costs. The 'Final Courtesy...' thing was invented by US hams back in the days when a stamp cost a penny and a really busy station made two or three hundred contacts a year. Every contact was special and it was no big deal to swap cards afterwards. I'm in the position that everyone wants a VE8 card but I really don't need another W6 or W7 card for 20m SSB. So, I'll spring for the cards (and the time!) but you guys buy the stamps, ok?

Keepers

OK, so now that I've let it slip that I have Washington state confirmed on just about every mode and every band from DC to daylight, let's talk about what cards really are special. There's a lot of factors that make any one contact more special than others. I think to be really special the contact represented by the QSL card has to be irreplaceable. I guess QSL's from deleted entities would qualify although the actual land is still there, just called by a different name. If you're getting on in years (as many hams are) that rare DXpedition contact could be the last chance you'll get but it might come around again. When I looked through my own collection, I was surprised that the most precious cards have nothing to do with DXCC. Here's the ones that I drag out to show people whenever the subject comes up (mouse over the images to see the backside):

The Space Shuttle

Back in the 80's and 90's NASA flew the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment (SAREX) on many shuttle flights. With the exception of Challenger (which was lost before I was licensed) I managed to work all four of the remaining orbiters (Columbia, Atlantis, Endeavor and Discovery) before SAREX was cancelled in 1999 and changed to an ISS based program. The really special part for me is that from this latitude (68 degrees N) only a few high-inclination shuttle flights were even visible from here and then they only scraped across the horizon once a day for few minutes at a time.

Wow, I coulda had a VE8!

Just because I live here doesn't really make VE8 stations that much easier to work. They're still rare as hen's teeth. In all the time I've operated from up here I've only worked a handful and only managed to pry a QSL out of even fewer. My favorite from the VE8 collection is VE8RCS, the now-QRT club station at Canadian Forces Base Alert on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island.

You did WHAT !?

Hams and non-hams alike are always wowed by this one. It was my first (but hopefully not my last!) contact via Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) or moonbounce. Dave, W5UN did most of the work. I was only running 50 watts to a pair of 13-element yagis on 2 meters.

That's all from the Arctic for now. Expect a formal announcement this week for my July expedition to Banks Island, NA-129 and I'll do my very best to get my QSL into your special collection.

73 de VE8EV

VX8X - Cards in the mail.

2009-04-29T10:31:00.004-06:00

QSL cards arrived from the printer yesterday and all direct requests received to date will be in the mail by the end of the week.

The link for the on-line QSL request is up and working (see previous post).

73
John

On-Line QSL Request

2009-04-29T10:06:00.029-06:00

OQRS page is now here.

VX8X Write-up (Part I)

2009-04-07T15:40:00.015-06:00

It's no secret that the key to a successful dxpedition is planning. The first step after you have picked a destination is to decide on what kind of operation it will be. Multi-op DX juggernaut, single-op casual, or somewhere in between. After that you just need to figure out all the details and make it work. Our plan for Ellice Island was simple. Jump in the truck with a couple of radios and an amplifier, drive the ice road up to the drilling site on the island, put up a little tribander on the roof of the camp and go at it. Office space and power to operate, comfortable beds and first-rate food would all be provided for us at the camp. Everyone calls it a 'camp' but it's really more like a 50-room motel complex with a restaurant, phones, internet access, and all the creature comforts you would expect to find anywhere.

The first hiccup in the plan came the week we were scheduled to go. We had always intended to arrive just as the drilling operation was winding down and the best estimate for that was March 20th. As it turned out, the company made a very significant natural gas discovery, the camp was full and operations were expected to continue for another couple of weeks. We rescheduled for April 2nd and waited. Geomagnetic conditions would be critical to a successful operation and the long-range forecast was for little to no auroral disturbance on those dates. Things were looking good.

Fast forward to Wednesday, April 1st. I called to make sure they were still expecting us and found out that not only were they not expecting us, they were GONE. Over the past weekend they had wrapped everything up and moved the rig, the camp, and all their equipment back to the mainland. All that was left was the ice road, a compacted snow pad the size of a soccer field and a little well-head sticking out of the ground. I was disappointed but not totally surprised. I'd worked in the oil industry before and an operation like that in the Arctic costs about a million dollars a day. The minute they finish what they came there to do is a mad scramble to get everyone and everything back to where they came from. It was time to switch to my backup plan.

The backup plan wasn't really a plan, more just a vague notion that if the camp shut down before we got out there we would have to take a generator and my portable contesting station out there. The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked the idea. My shack trailer is comfortably appointed with two operating positions, two bunks and a tiny little kitchen. It's just fine to tow up to our operating location on the edge of town but I was leery of pulling it over 100 miles of bumpy ice roads. There might be nothing left of it when we arrived!

The next blow was operators. We'd already lost Gerry, VE8GER. I hadn't even talked to him but I knew he was working out at the camp and would have been happy to spend some time on the radio. With the camp gone, so was he. That just left me and Wally, VE8DW. When I first told him of the change in plans he thought it was an April Fool's joke. After I convinced him that, no, the camp was really gone and we were going to have to rough it, he decided that making a trip like that was outside of his comfort zone. His gut was telling him that he had to pass and I didn't blame him one little bit. It's one thing to take a little afternoon cruise in the truck and sleep in a warm bed with three hot meals a day but quite another to travel out to the middle of nowhere in the Arctic Ocean and camp all alone for three days. The icing on the cake came from outer space. Based on solar activity observed by the STEREO satellites, NOAA was now predicting a chance of unsettled to active geomagnetic conditions at high latitudes. I was not at all pleased with the situation.

I stewed all afternoon on Wednesday wondering what I should do. I knew a lot of people were counting on us to activate the island. The Island Radio Expedition Foundation had graciously agreed to cover the cost of the little triband yagi that we purchased, provided, of course, that we actually made the trip. The special callsign was all arranged and the pending operation was plastered over all the DX bulletins and IOTA web sites. If we cancelled now there would have been a lot of disappointment all around.

I certainly wasn't very keen to go up there alone. It's a pretty forbidding place. Polar bears aren't common at this time of year but they do show up from time to time. The abandoned ice road was still in good shape but it wouldn't take much wind to blow it in and you'd be stranded. Furthermore, doing any kind of work alone is dangerous. One silly little slip off a ladder or the back of the truck and you'd freeze to death before anyone even started wondering where you were.

So what to do? I started cataloguing the assets that I had available. I had my big, diesel truck which, in addition to being six-wheel drive and very dependable, also had a huge back seat that folded down into a cozy bunk. Add a foam mattress and a sleeping bag and I would at least have a warm place to sleep. I knew where I could borrow one generator and another to have as a spare. That took care of the electricity situation. Some jerry cans for gasoline and extra diesel for the truck and I knew I'd be able to stay safe and warm for twice as long as I planned to be on the island. I also had a satellite phone that I could use to call in several times a day to let everyone know I was ok. Things were starting to look a bit brighter. All I really needed now was some place to operate from and a way to raise the antenna. The answer to both items came from my former employer, New North Networks. When I worked there we had built several portable communications trailers for use at remote sites. Each one had an 8'x8' shelter with an equipment rack, lights and electric heat and a 50-foot fold-over crank-up tower with a rotator on top for aiming a microwave dish. Since all the oil and gas activity had wrapped up for the season the trailers were all sitting in a neat little row waiting for next year. A quick phone call was all it took to secure the use of one (always stay on good terms with former employers!).

Things were falling into place now. The weather forecast was good and I decided that I'd just have to deal with the aurora if and when it happened. The only item left on my list was the problem of working alone. I wasn't worried about operating by myself but I wanted to bring someone along to be there while I was setting up. But who could I find that would want to take a day off work on short notice and drive out to the ocean and back? The light from the little bulb that came on over my head was blinding when I came up with the answer: my mother! My mom also lives in Inuvik and is the senior manager at the local housing authority but she is also an accomplished semi-professional photographer. No stranger to wilderness adventures (she spent two weeks last summer with a group of other artists at a remote camp in Ivvavik National Park) she jumped at the chance for her and her camera to make a day trip up the ice road. In addition to the wildlife and nature pictures she would also be able to get some shots of the dxpedition setup. Sweet!

With a new plan fully realized, I pushed the departure back 24 hours and spent all day Thursday collecting equipment and supplies. I had a lengthly checklist and methodically went through it to make sure I had everything I needed. By 11pm Thursday night everything was loaded and ready to go for first thing Friday morning. My mom had to be back in town by 5pm so that meant we'd have to hit the road early. Three hours for the drive up there with the trailer and all the gear, a couple of hours to get set up and test everything, two hours back to town to drop off my mom and two hours back out to the island. It would make for a lot of driving but with any luck I'd be on the air early Friday evening. VX8X was GO!
Click here to continue...

VX8X Photos

2009-04-07T15:37:00.004-06:00

It turned out to be a beautiful day for a drive. The sun was shining, there was very little wind and the temperature was around minus 20C. Here are the pictures from the first day:

Hitting the road ...err... ice.

On blue ice about half-way to Ellice. That's Richard's Island in the background. Oh, and don't worry about the ice. At this time of year it's about 12 feet thick.

Magnificent desolation. On the ocean heading north to Ellice Island.

On arrival at the island the first order of business was getting the
Ellice Island Light & Power Company operational.

On the snow pad putting the baby yagi together. Not much to see in the background. Ellice is a pretty low lying island.

Mounting the Hy-Gain TH3JRS. The manufacturing quality is abysmal (malformed swaging, missing parts, sub-standard materials) but the performance is outstanding AND you can hold it with one hand!

Up she goes, just a small pause to untangle the 40m inverted vee.

World's lonliest ham shack, Ellice Island, Northwest Territories

I fit all the equipment into three rack shelves. Upper shelf had the tablet PC and the FL-2100B amplifier, the middle shelf held the TS-2000 and wattmeter and the lower shelf had a keyboard and an antenna switch. Off to my left out of view is the spare generator with a small piece of plywood on top holding my coffee maker. That was all, if I wanted to change my mind I had to go outside first. But at least it was warm!

Shot for a future CQ Magazine cover, hi hi.

Click Here to Continue...

VX8X Write-up (Part II)

2009-04-07T14:16:00.028-06:00

After all the trials and tribulations, ups and downs, and driving back and forth, by 0300z Friday night I was back on the island and ready to hit the air. I had committed to IREF to make at least 500 contacts to qualify for their generous grant and secretly I was hoping to put a 1000 in the log. Even as a multi-op station in recent contests we had never managed to make more than 600 QSO's but I knew that between the IOTA chasers and the prefix hunters I had a pretty good shot. My operating plan was pretty straightforward. Work Asia and Oceania in the evening then hit Eu sunrise and work Europe for as long as I could. If I ran out of propagation on 20m I would have to drop down to 40m and take what I could get. Grab a few hours sleep and be onto Europe again until their sunset then switch to North America until 20m opened to Asia again. Repeat as necessary. As it turned out, this was one part of the plan that never had to be revised.

I pointed the beam WNW and only had to call CQ two times before the first JA's, UA0's and UA9's started going into the log. A few minutes after that I was spotted on the cluster and we were off to the races. The VFO's were all ready to go split because I was anticipating a big pileup and I wasn't disappointed. Within ten minutes of getting on the air I was already operating split and keeping the rate at over a hundred an hour. By 0500z there were more Europeans than JA's calling so I swung the beam around straight over the pole. There were a LOT of early risers in Europe this weekend! The pileup was huge. I was already working split so I decided to try going by numbers. The pile didn't seem to be getting any smaller and the rate was starting to slip as I needed more and more fills to complete the contacts. I've worked European pileups before and I knew how to keep things moving but around 1:30am local time I decided to throw in the towel. I'd been on the go for two days straight and I knew I'd need to be in top form the next day. I fueled up the generator so it would be ready to go in the morning, warmed up the truck and crawled into my sleeping bag for a few hours of sleep.

I was up with the sun the next morning at 8am and it took almost 45 minutes to get coffee made, grab some breakfast and, most importantly, warm the shack up. At 1430z I took a spin through the bands to see how propagation was shaping up. Europe was coming through but I was still sleepy and a bit gunshy from the night before so I decided to beam North America to get warmed up. The first station I worked spotted me on the cluster and the rate took off instantly again. After only 20 minutes on Saturday morning I realized I had this thing beat. It was only the first hour of the first morning, the total QSO count was already approaching 500, and I was only getting started. Relieved that the pressure was now off, all warmed up and with the first cup of coffee starting to kick in I decided it was time fulfill my promise to give special attention to Europe. Shortly after 1500z I turned the beam back to Eu and for the next few hours I slogged it out with the Europeans. Fortunately propagation was good, and I was running split so they had no trouble hearing me.

No offense intended to anyone but pileups from different areas of the world are very different . I find pileups of Russian and Japanese stations to be very orderly. If you return a call and you get a letter or number wrong you sometimes have to coax the station into giving his call again so you can correct yourself. Everyone calls then everyone listens, just like it's supposed to work. The Europeans are a little more, uh, let's say 'free spirited'. I find the best way to run a European pileup is to be as polite and firm as you can, never reward bad behavior and keep repeating instructions over and over until everyone knows that they have to behave. As long as you can keep a decent rate going no one will get too frustrated. But its a lot of work, especially if propagation is good and there's a gadjillion stations calling.

After a couple of hours I needed a 'break' so turned the beam back to the southeast and started to pick up more W/VE stations. I stayed there all afternoon until 2130z when I hit QSO number 1000 and decided to stop for a bite to eat and tend to the Ellice Island Light and Power Company. I had already been already starting to get a few JA's calling in so I turned the antenna around to Asia and had an instant JA pileup. Unfortunately, it was still a bit early there and after an hour I started running out of callers so turned back to the south to work USA and pick up some South American and VK/ZL stations. As midnight zulu approached I was once again getting more and more JA's in off the side of the beam so it was back to the land of the rising sun to start over from where I had begun almost 24 hours ago. With the QSO count past 1500 there was no pressure at all now and the evening flew by with good rates and stations calling in from all over. After a weak ZL called in I decided to beam Oceania for a while and see if I could get some VK/ZL's or a few Pacific islands but didn't hear any. Around the same time, the other good news I came to realize was that I had plenty of fuel for the generator. I really didn't have much of an idea about how much fuel it would require and I had only brought 25 gallons. Now passing the halfway point knew I had enough to last for the duration (and then some).

The best part of the whole trip was just after sunset that night. I took some time-off to do a few housekeeping tasks (oil and fuel in the generator, warm up the truck, call home on the satphone, etc) and I paused to take stock of where I was, what I was doing, and how things were progressing. The sky was pink and purple in a typically beautiful Arctic sunset. There had been no equipment problems to date. The weather was still the same and, most importantly, I was pretty confident that unless the bands totally gave out on me, I'd be able to push past 2000 contacts before I wrapped things up the next day. I took a look through the log and it seemed to be split about 30/30/40 between Europe, Asia, and North America which sounded like a reasonable balance (the actual numbers ended up being 33/20/47). Propagation had been excellent so far. I had no idea what the flux or K-index were doing but as long as I kept putting contacts in the log I decided it didn't really matter. Life was good and I was very pleased at how everything was turning out.

Then I remembered 40 meters. There had been a bit of hew and cry for 40m during the original planning so I (somewhat reluctantly) included it in the plans. I decided to take some time to get on and see if I could work anyone. I called CQ on 7.160 for about 5 minutes with no takers so decided to try higher up the band in the US General class portion. After a while I worked a W1, a W8, a W5 and couple of VE7s. Then nothing. I thought to myself 'I gave up a pileup for this?' If I had been spotted I probably could have put a couple of hundred contacts in the log but given the way things had been going I decided that I would get back onto 20m and work Asia until European sunrise then call it a night. Propagation was great and for the next few hours I had a strong signal into Russia, Khazakstan and Ukraine as the greyline tracked across the Urals. Once the Europeans started calling in I quit for the night. I wanted to be fresh and hit Europe in the morning.

The last day dawned bright and early and first thing on the agenda was the final run of Europeans. Propagation wasn't as good as the previous night. The band was also crowded with contesters and rag chewers. I called CQ on 14.260 and found out that there was already another expedition on. I finally got a spot with enough space to work split and called QRZ? VX8X. As I had become accustomed to, an instant pileup ensued. This time though it was much, much harder to make a good rate. All weekend long I had been riding the RF gain and the attenuator to help sort out the callers but not today. The whole pileup was only registering about S-5 on the meter. Even split I was having a hard time picking out callers. Given the moderately crowdy conditions I was hesitant to start spreading the pileup out but I didn't have much choice. It was still slow going but once they were spread over 5 kHz the rate picked back up again.

Just like the previous runs, three or four hours of a huge pileup like that was all I could take. As conditions picked up late in the morning I started getting more and more W/VE's calling in off the side of the beam. Finally I decided to just turn the beam and run stateside. And run I did! I never had a big pileup but instead was blessed with a continuous flow of callers that I worked as fast as I could. For the last three hours my rate was over 150/hr as I ran stations like my hair was on fire. I even had one guy, thinking I was a contest station, give me a report of 59-001! Not only that but, despite the fact that the beam was pointed to the East coast, I was still getting lots of callers from Europe and even had several Middle East and African stations call in. I blew past 2000 contacts around lunchtime without even slowing down.

Shortly after 2pm I started thinking about how much work I had to do before I could leave. Everything had gone splendidly up to this point. The operation went better than I could have imagined so why push it? I was pretty tired and I didn't want to wait too late to tear down and then have to make the three hour drive back to town running on mental-empty. With just over 2200 QSO's in the log I decided to stop right then and there. I thanked the guys in the pileup for their patience but I had to go QRT. I turned off the radio and walked outside into the sunshine. I was surprised to see a very large silver fox nosing around the edge of the pad. He seemed completely unaware of the miracle that had just taken place in his frosty little backyard.

Final QSO tally: 2228
Breakdown is 1027 NA, 721 EU, 430 AS, 22 AF/OC/SA

VX8X a Success.

2009-04-06T08:58:00.005-06:00

Got back from the island last night safe and sound. All went according to plan, the weather was good and propagation was excellent. Final QSO count was 2,228.

Thanks to everyone that took the time work me. I'll post a detailed write-up with more pictures tomorrow.

73
John - VE8EV

The lonely little shack on Ellice Island.

VX8X - On the way!

2009-04-03T07:21:00.004-06:00

All the equipment is checked and loaded. Should be on the road by 1400z.

VE8DW cancelled at the last minute due to a stomach condition so its now a solo op. I expect to be QRV around 1800z for an hour then off until 0000z as I have to drive back into town to pick up more supplies and drop off my assistant. Spent all day Thursday running around arranging for generators, towers and fuel and carefully collecting and testing all the equipment.

Geomagnetic forecast is now iffy but will have to make the best of it. Look for me on 14.260 and 7.160 (listening up/down as necessary).

73 es Good DX!

VX8X is GO!

2009-04-01T10:03:00.003-06:00

Today was good news / bad news time. The bad news was that the drilling operation shut everything down and left the island yesterday. Mighty unkind of them to not to keep their multi-million dollar operation going a few more days to accomodate our expedition! The good news is that the ice road is still in good condition and I've had a back-up plan all along just in case this happened. So instead of operating in the lavish comfort of the drilling camp we're going to have to rough it and bring along our own food, fuel, generators and towers. The communications contractor that was supporting the drilling operation has graciously offered us the use of one of their comm trailers which comes equipped with a 50 foot crank up tower and a comfy little shack to operate from. A couple of generators and a few drums of fuel and we'll be all set. The only changes to the operating schedule are that we're now going to arrive on the island Friday morning (N. America) instead of Thursday night and it will only be VE8EV and VE8DW so likely SSB only.

I'll post a final update before we hit the road Friday morning. Wish us luck!

John - VE8EV

CQ WPX - The One That Got Away

2009-03-30T12:57:00.009-06:00

One of the very few advantages we have from our location is virtually unlimited real estate for an antenna farm. All the seeds are in place and by next fall we should have permanent towers and multiple antennas for all bands. At the moment, however, we're still doing it 'Field Day Style' and it's a HUGE amount of work to get set up for a contest. Then, even with all the antennas up, we haven't yet had decent conditions on more than one band at a time. Tearing everything down after the ARRL DX contest two weeks ago we decided that for WPX we'd pass on the multi-op, big gun station and just run from the driveway with the little tribander. A nice, casual, no-pressure operation was just what we needed. My only goal for this contest was to fill up the little multiplier window on the contest software (N3FJP) and maybe work a few new ones. By lunchtime Sunday I had both of those items checked off so I pulled the plug and walked away. But... I can't shake the feeling this would have been a great weekend to go big. Instead of closing down around 0200z like it usually does, 20m was open into the wee hours. The aurora came up a few times but for the most part the K-index was close to zero for the duration. Saturday night I accidentally clicked on a 40m cluster spot and the Europeans were booming in through the little tribander. I didn't hear anything on 15m all weekend but maybe with the big yagi up on the hill things would have been different. I think if we had set up the big station we could have finally made a 1000 Q's in a single contest.

Still, the contest was a lot of fun and best of all it was interesting. Lots of propagational quirks to add to the mental database, refined a few operating tricks, worked some new ones, and got some good feedback from other stations.

It's All About the Grayline

Sounds like a simple concept but the more I operate the more I see how it works. The best paths are always around our sunset to wherever the sun is rising. A month ago our sunset was around 6pm local time and coincided with JA sunrise. Not surprisingly, I could work JA's by the bucketful at that time. Now, our sunset is already pushing past 10pm which is sunrise in East Asia and the Middle East. Saturday night at that time I worked a couple of Khazakstan stations who both told me I was loud. I started CQing, had a few callers, got spotted on the cluster and BOOM. Instant pileup. The main reason this is really significant for us is that being on top of the world we have long sunsets for most of the year . In summer time the sun never quite sets and in mid-winter it never quite rises. You can sit there all day long and just track the gray line by who's loudest. Being at the equinox right now the sun sets pretty quick but in another month or so it will be skimming the horizon for hours at a time. I probably could have milked that opening all the way across the Urals into Eastern Europe but I had been up since 5am and...

Working Really Weak Stations is Exhausting

My guess is that the ratio of small stations (100W and wires) to big stations (yagi and amplifier) is probably about 10:1 if not more. This means that if you're getting out well you're going to have far more weak stations calling you than loud ones. Digging weak signals out of the QRN and QSB is hard work and even more so when they're DX stations that speak with an accent. Once I got spotted on the cluster I had lots of guys calling me who were barely audible. Throw in the accent, some QSB and a non-guessable contest exchange and it was hard work to complete the contacts. I didn't enjoy it at all. After half an hour of that the first time I called twice in a row with no answer I pulled the plug. I was too tired to worry about it at the time but the next day I actually felt guilty. I spend 90% of my time (or more) on the other end of that stick, shouting at guys that can barely hear me. Like the 3V8...

Spring Must be Just Around the Corner Because I can Hear Africa

March is the only month I have ever worked Africa. Maybe now that I'm running a bigger station in contests that might change but with the little tribander Africa only comes calling in March. Of all the countries I'm missing, most of them are in Africa. From here, Africa is straight over the pole and then all the way down the other side. No oceans to bounce off, just aurora, ice, and Europe. I was surprised to hear 3V8BB with a reasonable signal (the meter was twiching a bit). I had never worked Tunisia and he didn't have too many callers so I decided I was going to work him. It took about 10 minutes before he finally got a partial. Then another minute to get my full call. Then we came to the exchange. We tried about 10 or 15 times but he didn't get it. Then he gave up and called QRZ! I shouted the exchange at him a few more times but he had obviously moved on. Why didn't I just give him a ROGER ROGER when he came back with the wrong number? He'd lose the mult but I'd still get the card. Well, that wouldn't be very sportsmanlike, would it? So I hung in there for another twenty minutes and kept calling him. Finally he heard me again, recognized the call right away, and managed to catch my exchange. It was time for...

The Dance of DX

Come on, don't tell you've never done it. You're sweating it out in a pile-up for a new one. Propagation is going down hill, you know you might not get another chance. Then you get a lucky break. The DX calls again when everyone else is still shouting. You wait a second or two for the pileup to die down and you throw out your call with every decibel you can muster. You're rewarded with "Who's the Echo Victoria?" or some variation like that. Right after I got the 3V8 I was feeling cocky so I punched up the spot for the C91TX Mozambique expedition. I was hearing him pretty well and after the fourth or fifth call he came back with "Who's the Victor Echo Eight?" That's usually a show-stopper in a pile-up because right after that is always "Everyone standby, just the Victor Echo Eight station". The new one goes into the log and some obscure force of nature compels you to get out of your chair, pump your fist in the air and lead a little imaginary conga line around the shack. Note that for some reason, this only happens when you're calling them. If you're running and a rare new one calls in there is no dancing. If you're in a multi-op though, you can at least turn to one of the other guys, point at the screen and give a thumbs-up and a big grin.

Everyone Likes Positive Feedback

Another one of the very few perks of operating from up here is after a while people start to recognize your call. Every time I get on in a contest I get a few comments from other operators. Most of them are "Hope to work you in Sweepstakes!" but every now and then I get a compliment along the lines of "You guys are doing a great job up there, keep it up!". I even had OH2BH, Mr. Martii Lane himself, pause to say hello from OG8X when I called in. My favorite one all weekend though was from Bob, KQ2M, who said he really enjoyed reading the blog, keep it up. Who would have thought? The propagation on the Internet is excellent from here!

Next weekend we'll be on NA-192 Ellice Island in the Arctic Ocean as VX8X. Please drop by and say hello.

73,
John - VE8EV

WPX SSB VE8EV M/S HP

2009-03-30T12:51:00.000-06:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV VE8DW
Station: VE8EV
Class: M/S HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 22

Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 260
15:
10:
------------
Total: 260 Prefixes = 209 Total Score = 136,059

Comments: Just a casual op from the shack trailer in the driveway and the little tribander at 35 feet. VE8DW dropped by and worked a few so entered as M/S.

Conditions were generally good all weekend. 20m was open late and I had a nice little run on Saturday night into Western Asia and the Middle East at their sunrise. Clicked on a 40m spot by accident and Europe was booming in but didn't have any low-band antennas set up. I would have bet money on a 15m opening but not a peep all weekend.

It probably would have been a good weekend to set up at the contest site but doing the 'Field Day' thing in the winter is starting to get old. We'll be raising the permanent antenna farm as soon as the snow is gone. As usual, the long winded write up is at http://ve8ev.blogspot.com

Thanks to everyone that managed to pull me out of the QRM.
73, John - VE8EV

Look for us next weekend from NA-192 Ellice Island as VX8X.

VX8X Delayed Two Weeks

2009-03-17T12:58:00.005-06:00

The subject line says it all. The NA-192 Ellice Island expedition will now happen the weekend of April 02-05. Our hosts on the island have extended their drilling program for another two weeks and requested that we hold off on our trip until then. In a lot of ways, this is actually good news. VE8DW has been dealing with some family issues that was putting his ability to get away this weekend in doubt. Also, the latest geomagnetic forecast is predicting unsettled high-latitude conditions this coming Saturday and Sunday. The forecast for the weekend of April 2nd is 'quiet' for all four days. Also, the weather will hopefully be that much better in a couple of weeks.

In other news, based on the predicted propagation (and requests from island hunters) we have revised the operating plan to include more 40m and 17m operating time in addition to the planned 20m activity. Expect to hear simultaneous operations on two bands during peak hours. Special attention will be given to Europe (which is the most difficult path from here) and Japan, where I have been informed that a grand total of only three stations have confirmed NA-192 to date. We're expecting to have an easy time working North and South America and the Pacific.

Any further updates will be posted here first.

ARRL DX SSB VE8EV M/2 HP

2009-03-12T08:10:00.005-06:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV, VE8DW
Station: VE8EV
Class: M/2 HP
QTH: Inuvik, NWT
Operating Time (hrs): 39

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 2 2
80: 6 5
40: 60 31
20: 280 73
15: 13 7
10: 0 0
-------------------
Total: 361 118 Total Score = 127,792
Club:
Comments:
I thought this was another mediocre contest result from our geomagnetically-challenged part of the world but after seeing some of the west coast scores I'm starting to think our score was at least non-laughable, if not almost respectable.
Conditions on Friday and Saturday were great. Worked a bunch of Europeans overnight on 40m, had some nice little runs on 20m and we even picked up some mults on 15m. Saturday night was a lot slower as the aurora came out and I slept through most of the 40m opening to Asia.
With the K-index up Sunday was mostly a write-off except for the last half hour. For a whole 30 minutes I think I heard what 20m sounds like for you guys down south. Loud and clear with layer upon layers of audible stations and I could work anyone I wanted with only one or two calls. I raced up the band from one end to the other trying to work as many as I could before time was up. It was just amazing and made up for lots of the single-digit rate hours.

Full write-up is at
http://ve8ev.blogspot.com/2009/03/arrl-dx-you-cant-run-and-you-cant-hide.html

ARRL DX: You Can't Run and You Can't Hide!

2009-03-09T14:57:00.016-06:00

Another interesting 'Field Day' style contest experience from the high arctic. We spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings before the contest getting the 40m HGEB array strung up at the contest site. This gigantic antenna consists of three 5/8 wave elements driven in series in front of three 1/2 wave reflector elements, essentially a trio of 2-element yagis side by side. It models at 13dBi in free space but we're probably lucky to be getting 6 or 7 dBi with it only up 1/4 wavelength high. I had hoped we could get it all done in one night but after slogging through the bush and waist deep snow getting the reflector half up it was too dark and we were too tired to keep going. The next night was exactly the same story hanging the driven elements. I had Friday off from work and spent the morning getting the new TH3JRS baby yagi put together and the rest of the afternoon getting the shack trailer and all the equipment up to the contest site. We had the mobile tower and the TH6DXX up just in time for Wally to get on 20m at the starting bell while I ran around finishing up the low band antennas and running feedlines.

VE8EV and VE8DW putting the TH6 together.
"Quit taking pictures and come help me!"

After a two hour 'run' of forty JA's and UA0's the amp blew up (filament to grid short in a brand new tube!) so we had to spend an hour fixing that and then another hour out in the wind, cold and dark tuning the big low band vertical. Finally got going on 40m around 0400z and over the next couple of hours I worked the two dozen Eu stations I was hearing. The 40m wire array beaming over the pole seemed to play well and most answered on the first or second call but every time I tried running I had no takers. Wally waited patiently for an Eu sunrise opening on 20m but only got a single caller. Went to 80m at 0700z and worked everyone I could hear there including KH7X who was hearing us well enough to QSY to 160m and then back up to 40m for the triple mult. After that I managed another two dozen Q's on 40m before a much needed 90 minute nap.

VE8DW running on 20m the first night.
"What the heck is a Four Bravo Two ...?"

We got off to a slow start at 1030z but after getting a pileup of Europeans going on 20m around I handed it over to Wally so he could get some more practice running. I felt like a proud father watching him work the opening with the rate meter over 100 the entire time. I poked around on 40m and 80m but didn't find anyone that wasn't already in the log. The Eu run fizzled at 1700z and we went back to S&P. The afternoon didn't produce any rates but we traded back and forth between 15m and 20m and put a bunch of Caribbean and South American mults in the log. I just barely heard KL7RA on 10m but by the time I spun the beam around to see which end he was strongest on he was gone. At least we got them on all the other bands. I was envious as I ran across them all weekend long running stateside stations like crazy. We had excellent propagation to the rest of Canada and the lower 48. So much so that it was impossible to try and run inside the US phone segment because we kept getting called by Americans. I tried to run on 15m but had to give up. Even calling "CQ DX contest, CQ DX South America" I was getting a pileup of US stations trying to call me. I couldn't figure out what to do because whether I was working them or not I doubt any DX stations would stick around in a pileup of USA stations. Even outside the phone segments I still had US stations calling. A polite "Ur out of band, OM" sent most of them on their way. For the few VE stations that called I just gave them a quick five-nine and they moved on. One US station even called me on CW for a cross-mode contact. Him I logged, you just have to admire the combination of determination and ingenuity.

Late Saturday afternoon we took an hour off to put up the baby yagi. It was originally planned to go on the tower on top of the big water tank that shadows our Eu path from the mobile tower. Unfortunately it was 33 below and the wind was howling so we opted to put it on a 12 foot step ladder on a small platform over a nearby fuel tank. It was only up about 20 feet but at least it had a clear shot to Europe and JA. As it was we froze our butts off and we were only outside for about 15 minutes at a time.

VE8EV putting up the baby yagi on Saturday afternoon.
"Boy, I'm sure glad we didn't try to put this on the big tower today!"

The late afternoon opening to Asia was almost non-existant on Saturday as the aurora was starting to come up. Wally CQ'd away on 20m but only had a trickle of JA's and UA's call in. We slogged it out until the wee hours but between 0000z and 0600z we could only manage 40 contacts, half on 20m and half on 40m. I gave up and crashed until 0800z, got up and worked a VK, a ZL and OX on forty and went back to bed for another 3 hours.

On Sunday we got up bright and early at 1200z (remembering to deal with any time change issues) and got back to work. The high latitude geomagnetic field was at active levels but the six hour forecast was calling for quiet so we hoped for the best. Amazingly, we were still able to make a few scattered contacts. Wally stayed on 20m and I waited in case 15m opened again. All morning and afternoon I checked every 15m spot to no avail while Wally poked away on 20m. By late afternoon we were getting nowhere. Propagation to the US was coming up nicely but not much DX to be heard. The K index was headed in the right direction (down) so we decided to just CQ on 20 meters and hope for the best.

Trying to run stations up here is always hard. First, the signals are weak in both directions. We're doing everything we can (within reason) at our end without resorting to 150 foot towers and stacked monobanders. The far end stations have a hard time hearing you over all the QRM and QRN. At our end it usually works out like this: First, you find a clear spot and start calling CQ. If anyone answers you they're usually weak but readable. If you're lucky, they'll spot you on packet. When that happens its an instant pileup and you run them as fast as possible. Spotted or not, you carry on until a much stronger (like S-7 or better) station fires up close to you. You're weak down there so you aren't bothering him at all and his QRM wouldn't be a problem except now you can't copy all the weak guys calling you. Since usually they're all weak, you're done. Close down and move on. It's a fundamental fact that there just aren't a lot of strong signals that are heard here during a contest. If your station is big enough to be loud up here then you'll probably already be calling CQ and working nearer stations that are loud enough to be heard over the QRM. The other thing that happens a lot is you'll be happily CQing away in a nice clear spot with few or no takers. Then all of a sudden the aurora quits, the band comes to life, and you're right between two stronger stations and sometimes a third station is already right on top of you. Its frustrating at times and for me, figuring out how to effectively run in a contest is right up there with understanding propagation.

VE8EV trying to run on 14.148
"You're out of band, old man!"

For a while I was thinking that maybe the answer was just sticktoiteveness. Just keep calling CQ and you'll work more stations than you would by search and pounce. And while this might be statistically true, like all stats it breaks down at small sample rates. If your rate is going to be 4 or 5 Q's per HOUR calling CQ vs. 3 or 4 per HOUR of S&P then all else being equal I'll have way more fun (and get way more multipliers) by spinning the dial. So the last couple of hours we decided to call CQ on 20m just outside the US phone band with the beam to the west for the rest of the contest and hope for the best. CQ CQ CQ for 20 minutes. A weak JA finally calls. CQ CQ CQ for another 10 minutes. Nothing. Turn the beam south east. CQ CQ CQ. An XE1 calls. CQ CQ CQ for 10 minutes. Then the W/VE's start calling. CQ CQ CQ for 10 minutes. A PY calls. CQ CQ CQ for 10 minutes. An EA8 calls (mult!). CQ CQ CQ. While this is going on, Wally is on 40m shouting at a few Europeans who are S-7 but can't hear him. After an hour of this and with only 20 minutes left in the contest I decide to take one last spin up the band. What I heard on 20m in the last 20 minutes of the contest was just unbelievable. The band was open to all of the Americas. Wide open. Not only that, the dynamic range was like nothing I had ever heard before. What I mean by that is usually during a contest 20m has strongish signals every 3 or 4 kHz and everything in between is a muddy, swishy sounding mix of QRM, QRN and signals that are just under the noise floor. This time I could hear thousands of stations. I bet if I had a wideband SDR radio that could record an entire band at once I would be able to go back and pick out a thousand call signs. Strong signals on top of weak signals on top of stronger signals. Huge pileups of guys working Caribbean and South American stations. W/VE's calling CQ. DX stations calling CQ. I swear I could hear every single station clear as a bell. It was amazing. And they were hearing me just as well. In just over 15 minutes I S&P'd my way up the band and worked six stations. They all had pileups of one size or another and I cracked each one in less than 3 calls. I did pass on one Caribbean mult I still needed as his pileup was absolutely enormous and way out of control but the others went into the log one after the other. As I worked my way up to the top of the band I got KP2M for a mult with 2 minutes to go. Right at the top end was XE1L and I worked him with only seconds to spare right at the bitter end. Behind me on 40m, Wally had two Europeans in the bag and on the hook with one more who was trying to fish him out of the noise but didn't quite get it before the bell rang.

Overall we had fun and that last 20 minutes on 20m made up for a lot of hours spent without logging anything. I've never listened on HF from outside of the auroral zone so I can't help but wonder if maybe that's what it always sounds like down in the real world...

Contest Summary:

Band QSO Mults
160 2 2
80 6 5
40 60 31
20 280 73
15 13 7
10 0 0
-------------
TOTAL 361 x 118 = 127792 points

VX8X - Ellice Island NA-192

2009-02-25T11:41:00.006-07:00

Ellice Island operation is a go! Callsign will be VX8X and we have worked out an arrangement with the contractor providing communications support to the drilling operation that is ongoing at the island. March 12-17 is a no-go due to expected geomagnetic activity so we're hopeful that March 20-22 will work out for all parties. If necessary we can slip the date to the following weekend and run in conjunction with the CQ WPX contest.

Our plan is to operate in shifts so we can be on the air continuously during the expedition. 20m is likely to be the most productive band but we will bring along a vertical for 40m as well. Gerry, VE8GER, may be available as he is working out at the island right now. Expect to see us on CW if he's around while we're there but most of our focus will be SSB on 14.260.

I'll post details here if anything changes. No updates means things are still on track for March 20th.

My call is VE8EV... and I'm a DXer

2009-02-19T20:05:00.019-07:00

I've been in denial for along time. "I don't chase DX" I'd tell people. The whole concept of DXCC kind of annoys me because VE8 isn't considered "real" DX. And DXing from up here is incredibly difficult. According to the ARRL there are only two VE8's with a DXCC certificate hanging on the wall. I remember getting my cards checked at Dayton back in '96. The card checkers were snickering at the signal reports! 53, 51, 44. Working and confirming 100 countries from inside the auroral zone, at the bottom of the solar cycle, without packetcluster or internet access, barefoot and with a little tribander at 30 feet was damn hard! It took me a year to work the first 50. The next 50 or so took almost three years. I wasn't fussy, either. I'd work any band, any mode, any time. By the time I got DXCC I was burnt out. I hardly got on the air at all for the next four years and eventually the antennas came down and the shack was turned into a kid's bedroom.

Fast forward to 2007. DW wants to be a ham and I'm keen to get back into it and be the Elmer. I read about the BS7H expedition to Scarborough Reef and thought that would be a good place to start. So I put up a small vertical, dusted off the old rig, and got up at 4:30am for a week straight trying to catch them. I didn't hear them at all on any band except 15 meters. We had a short, weak opening every morning at their sunrise. The only day they were actually strong enough to work the 15 meter op spent the entire opening ragchewing with a buddy back in Finland. Oh well, there'll be another expedition there someday... right?

Lots of guys complain about the "midwest black hole" but I live for the days when the propagation here is as good as an average day in the midwest. CQWW last year was one at those days. It was the first time out with the new contest station. We were QRO for the first time and Saturday night 40m was wide open. DW sacked out around midnight but I stayed up til 3:30 chasing DX on forty. The smart thing to do would have been to find a clear spot and run run run but spinning the dial and hearing all those rare mults was mesmerizing. We worked 109 band/country mults, 57 on forty meters alone. Now THAT was a good day!

I started making plans for Desecheo as soon as the dates were confirmed. We put up the big tribander on the portable tower in the driveway and I started getting a feel for the propagation to KP5. The bands were in great shape leading up to the expedition. I'd usually spend 45 minutes or so each day after work swinging the beam back and forth between South America and the Caribbean and Asia. I even worked about a half dozen all-time new ones including XW1B and a very short 59-both-ways rag chew with PJ2DX on the same day the K5D crew landed on Desecheo. With visions of all the different band/mode combinations I was going to work them on I even took that Friday off so I could make sure to get in their log before the propagation went sour. Unfortunately, that happened all too soon. I heard the 17m station when it went on the air. 4 by zero all afternoon with too much QSB to even bother trying. Just before sunset they were peaking S-5 on 20m CW but they were calling for JA-only. And then the bands tanked. All we got after that was a weak opening on 17m in the early afternoon and another one on 20m at sunset. Every afternoon for an hour I'd listen to them on my scanner at work on 17m. S-nothing but Q5 copy. After work they'd be just barely workable on 20m CW but only calling for JA's. Uh oh, wait a minute. JA sunrise is the same time as MY sunset peak. What can you do? Nobody ever says "OK, everyone standby, just stations from the Arctic please, Arctic only, call now." Yeah, right. After a week of this I was starting to get worried. I was actually planning to take the rig to work with me to have a try at getting them on 17m during the afternoon. That's when I knew the jig was up. There's no point in trying to deny it anymore: yes, I am a DXer.

So what happened? The same sort of thing that always happens with the crazy propagation here. I came home from work today, went straight out to the shack, turned on the radio and checked the K5D spots. They had six bands and three different modes on the go. Nothing to be heard on 15 or 17. I could just barely copy them on 20m SSB "JA only". The pileup on 20m RTTY was outrageous and I couldn't hear them anyway. I didn't even bother to check the low bands. There I was slumped in my chair listening to static and watching the spots go by when I saw they were also on 30m. I switched to the 17 foot whip antenna, dialed up the QRG and there they were, peaking about S-3 on CW. And the first thing I hear is: "KL7-- 5NN TU K5D" That sounded promising. I hit the autotuner button on the radio but the whip is too short for 30m. I switched in the big manual tuner and loaded up the whip, then picked a transmit frequency about 1.6kHz up and set up the split. I was in such a rush that I momentarily forgot I wasn't the best CW op but I instantly recognized my call coming back from Desecheo. All that time, effort and frustration and it was over in two calls with 100 watts to a short, non-resonant whip. Go figure!

Now that I've admitted I have a problem I can start to do something about it. I think the first step is going to be getting some QSL cards in the mail. Then I need to go find some new ones. I'm only about a dozen short of having 200 worked!

Seeing the Magic

2009-01-29T09:25:00.007-07:00

If you're like me, antenna theory has always been firmly in the realm of the occult. Oh sure, I know the basics. 1/4 wavelengths, dipoles, ground planes, building antennas following instructions in an article, etc. But when you get beyond the most basic designs I'm always mystified about WHY it works (or more likely why it doesn't work). At long last, however, I have found the wisdom. Perhaps not so much understanding but at least now I can actually see what's going on. The two-part solution is fairly simple. The first requirement is a decent antenna analyzer. VE8DW and I went in together to purchase an MFJ-259B analyzer. Ever since we got it (well, actually, since we got it back as it had to be returned to MFJ to fix a defect) it has revolutionized antenna work around the shack. All the unseen things that a simple SWR meter won't tell you are right there in front of our eyes. Did putting out all those radials under the vertical work? Obviously they did because I can see that our resistive component on 80m is about 30 ohms. How did we make out with that trap? Yup, the meter says its an open circuit at the design frequency and low resistance everywhere else. Being able to see the R and X components makes a huge difference! I can't even imagine how much time and effort I had wasted in the past doing things by trial and error.

The other piece of the puzzle is antenna modelling software. For a long time now I've wanted to be able to design and analyze antennas on the computer. After trying the demo version of EZNEC by W7EL I was instantly hooked. $89 and a quick web download later I had the full version. The learning curve wasn't too bad and after some heavy reading both of the online manual and the antenna modelling sections of the Antenna Book and Low-Band DXing I think I've got a pretty good idea of how to do things and, more importantly, what the limitations of the underlying NEC2 software are. With EZNEC you can actually SEE the magic. Antenna patterns are displayed in 3D. You can see the RF currents flowing in individual conductors. You can sweep the antenna with a virtual antenna analyzer to calculate feedpoint impedance and design matching networks. The best part is that you don't have to learn the theory to begin understanding how stuff actually works. For example, I was playing around with a multi-element wire antenna. I've seen antennas before that had multiple driven elements connected in series by a section of ladder line so I just tried it. By adjusting the length of the virtual ladder line I could instanly tell what sort of effect it had. I was quickly able to optimize the length to produce the highest gain with a reasonable antenna pattern. Which works best, a director or a reflector? It only takes a minute to evaluate both and decide which has the advantage. How will the antenna perform in the real world? I was looking for a DXpedition antenna that would be able to slope down from a single 30 foot high support. Several of the first designs I tried had good pattern and gain when they were straight and level but tanked when I brought one end close to the ground. An other design worked better but had an unrealistic feedpoint impedance. Every trick I tried to fix the feedpoint would distort the pattern. A guy could mess around FOREVER with real wires and never find the right combination that was actually useful as more than just a dummy load. I finally found a design that doesn't get all squirrely when one end gets close to the ground, has a nice 50 ohm match, a flat SWR across 20 meters and lots of gain. One thing that I did note in my research is that actual gain predictions tend to be somewhat inflated as the program doesn't take the far field ground into account. It is useful though for comparing one design to another. The next step will be to build some of these designs and see if they perform the same in the real world as they do in the virual one.

No Man is an Island

2009-01-19T12:51:00.027-07:00

I remember back in the early days being called by an Italian station who excitedly asked me "Are you an island?" followed by "Are you a zona 1 or a zona 2?" John Dunne's Meditation aside, the op seemed somewhat crestfallen when I replied that no, I was on the mainland and no, I'm in zone 1. Never mind that there are less than a dozen active VE8 stations spread across a million or so square miles of remote Arctic wilderness. It doesn't matter how rare you REALLY are as long as you count for some sort of major award. DXCC? Nope, we're just 'Canada' and who hasn't confirmed that? Worked All Zones? Maybe somewhat rare on some bands but Zone 1 also includes 5000 KL7 stations in Alaska so no luck there either. I suppose there's a few 'Worked All Canada' type awards from RAC but I don't think they're that popular. If you're not a distant DXCC entity, rare state or rare CQ zone then you're worthless as DX. Some won't even consider any VE station DX! Hmmph. It's ALL DX from here!

So what about this island thing? One of the more popular awards, especially in Europe, is the 'Islands on the Air' program sponsored by the Radio Society of Great Britain. The general concept is to work as many worldwide island groups as possible. Many of these numbered groups have NEVER been operated from at all. Even more have only had small operations that made a handful of contacts. As it turns out, there are several very rare island groups that are within reach from here. Here are the ones that I think we (VE8EV and/or VE8DW) might be able to activate:

NA-192 Inuvik Region West Group #15 on most wanted NA island list*

I was on the first expedition that activated this group back in 1994. We went to Hendrickson Island which is just off the mouth of the Mackenzie River in the Beaufort Sea. The winter 'ice road' to Tuktoyaktuk passes within a couple of miles of the island and so we (David VE8NC, Carl VE8CF and myself) drove as far as we could and then snowmobiled the rest of the way. Even with low power at the bottom of the cycle I still recall the huge pileups of Eu stations wanting to get the 'new one'. We made several hundred contacts and no one has been back there since.

This winter there is a drilling operation exploring for gas on Ellice Island which is in the westernmost part of the group. If I play my cards right we may be able to drive up there on the ice road in March right before they shut down and see if we can't knock this group right off the list.

NA-129 Nunavut Banks Island Group #14 on most wanted NA island list*

This one is a no-brainer. Actually located in the Northwest Territories, I travel to Sachs Harbour on Banks Island several times a year. My current plan is to schedule my next trip to coincide with the IOTA Contest weekend in July.

NA-182 Inuvik Region East Group #6 on most wanted NA island list*

The East Group is a little trickier but it appears that Nicholson Island was the site of a former DEW Line station and now hosts an unmanned North Warning System radar site. This means that there is occasional helicopter traffic there to support the NWS station as well as a runway for fixed wing aircraft. Not sure what sort of landing permissions are required but I'll check into it and we can pencil this one for next year maybe.

NA-193 Yukon Territory Group

Already claimed by 15% of the IOTA programme participants this one isn't on the most wanted list but it is semi-rare and located nearby. Lots of summer tourist flights to this island which is administered by Parks Canada. Might be a worthwhile destination if we could catch a free ride there and back.

NA-006 Nunavut Victoria Island Group

Another one that isn't so rare (claimed by 24%) is Victoria Island, home to Cambridge Bay, a town about half the size as Inuvik. For many years it was the QTH of Ken, VE8KM (now a VE6 I think) and many visitors since then so it is fairly well represented. That notwithstanding, there's a little town on the far western corner of Victoria Island called Ulukhaktok. It's in the Northwest Territories as well and another of the communities that I visit on a regular basis. Safe to say you'll hear me on from there sooner or later.

For those island chasers that are drooling all over their keyboards now, let me mention a few last things. First and foremost, these places are difficult to get to on a fixed schedule. Planes are frequently cancelled due to weather and other issues. Another big problem is propagation. They're all in the auroral zone so there's always the chance of being there but having no propagation to anywhere. That said, I will try to advertise in advance as soon as we have a firm date for an expedition but nothing is for sure until it actually happens. I will also try to get special callsigns as well. 73 and cu in the logs!

* Not including the 11 'Mostest Wanted' North American island groups that have never been activated at all.

North American QSO Party SSB

2009-01-19T12:41:00.006-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV VE8DW
Station: VE8EV
Class: M/2 HP
QTH: Inuvik, NWT
Operating Time (hrs): 6.5

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160:
80:
40: 2 2
20: 65 29
15: 3 1
10:
-------------------
Total: 70 32 Total Score = 2,240

Comments:
Got on for a few hours to hand out the multiplier with the transportable station parked in the driveway. Also wanted to test out a new amp and antenna switching so went QRO and submitted as a checklog.

UK DX Contest RTTY

2009-01-19T12:39:00.003-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: Inuvik, NWT
Operating Time (hrs): 8

Summary:
Band QSOs Pts Mults
------------------------
80:
40:
20: 19 44 7
15:
10:
------------------------
Total: 19 44 7 Total Score = 308

Life in the Digital Age

2009-01-12T12:16:00.006-07:00

When I was first licensed back in the 90's one of my first additions to the shack was a TNC. I spent many happy hours making contacts on RTTY, Pactor, and AMTOR with my MFJ-1278 multimode controller. I dabbled a bit with HF packet but only rarely managed a decent connection even with the "local" nodes in Alaska. With the addition of a 9600 baud modem board I was able to connect with orbiting packet radio satellites. I seem to recall that UO-22, KO-23 and KO-25 were the birds of choice back then. At the time it was all pretty cutting edge stuff. Nowadays everyone uses text messaging over the internet and cell phones but I like to remind people that hams have been communicating that way for over fifty years.

Right around the time I had to dismantle the shack in 2000 the first of the new "soundcard" modes were becoming available. Instead of an expensive box that used the computer only as a dumb terminal these new modes used the sound card and the computer to digitally process and generate signals. I remember experimenting briefly with the first generation of PSK31 software and the resurrection of the Hellschreiber mode. Ever since I got back on the air last year I've been intending to get back into the digital modes and see what has changed since the turn of the century. I'd been reading about the outstanding weak signal performance of some of them and thought that they might hold the key to communicating under the harsh HF conditions we experience in the far North. So, with that in mind, this past weekend I warmed up the shack and set out to get connected.

The first thing that had changed was the software. Instead of dedicated software for each mode now there are several "all-in-one" packages that do many different modes. I tried a few different ones but for the moment I've settled on MultiPSK by F6CTE. This versatile package includes all of the common modes (PSK31, RTTY, etc), all of the nifty new weak signal modes and some of the more esoteric stuff that I'm into like SSTV, HF FAX and HF SELCAL decoding. Thanks to a few sunspots I was able to make contacts in all the modes I wanted to try even with heavy QSB from the aurora.

First up was PSK31. Lots of activity on this mode but it suffers badly from the phase distortion of the aurora. Strong signals (S2 or better) were solid copy but weaker signals frequently produced gibberish. Still, I had no trouble to complete a couple of contacts. I'm sure I'll be spending lots of time here once conditions pick up a bit more.

Next was good ol' RTTY. It also requires even stronger signals than PSK31 for good print. Furthermore, it is also very succeptable to QRM. My opinion is that RTTY has outlived its usefulness. I just can't see any advantage to using this mode any more. Outside of contests I haven't seen much RTTY activity and once the major contest sponsors start allowing PSK31 and other digital modes in "RTTY" contests I think it will seldom be seen on the bands.

One mode that I had experimented with before was Hellschreiber. Invented in 1929 by Rudolph Hell, this mode uses the human brain to perform the signal processing. Very similar to HF facsimile, Hellschreiber (the most popular variation on HF is called FeldHell) transmits and receives individual pixels of letters that appear on a scrolling strip on the screen (originally it printed on a paper tape). Even in the presence of noise it is easy for the brain to discern the exact text received. I found that I could copy signals that were up to 10 dB below the noise floor (according to the MultiPSK software). Even better than that is the fact that the transmitted signal is very low duty-cycle. This means you can run full QRO without hurting anything. All the other modes I tested are 100% duty cycle so even though my radio and amplifier are both rated for continuous duty I always back off 3dB (50%) in continuous transmit modes just to be on the safe side.

The most unusual mode I tried was JT65. Originally developed for weak signal VHF work it has also become popular on the HF bands. Using a very narrow bandwidth and some heavy-duty computer processing this mode can be used to exchange callsigns and short (very short) messages in a timed sequence. I was able to make contacts easily with stations that were 20dB below the noise (again, according to the MultiPSK software). On the downside, at a minimum 7 minutes to exchange only calls, grids, signal reports and a trivial message (like 73 NAME IS JOHN)... I just dunno. I'm undecided on this one. It'll certainly never catch on for contesting, hi hi. Of course using it for something like EME work is a whole different ballgame. Or is it? Like I said, I still can't quite wrap my head around this one but I just know I'm going to be making a bunch of JT65 contacts (mostly off the moon, I hope!).

I saved the best for last. Olivia. This is my new favorite digital mode. Olivia uses MFSK (Multiple Frequency Shift Keying) and two layers of Forward Error Correcting to enable error-free copy at up to 13dB below the noise. Of the several Olivia contacts I made, one was a 30 minute rag chew with VE2FSK (2500 mile path). His signals were -11dB S/N (not even moving the S-meter) the entire time but 100% copy in both directions. I also had a 10 minute QSO with LU6DLL (8000 mile path). Again, signals hovering around -13dB S/N, barely detectable on the speaker (never mind moving the S-meter!) and still perfect copy. If I hadn't overheard a stronger station signing SK with him I don't think I even would have noticed he was there. Wow! It is for this reason that Olivia (and JT65) by convention use dedicated 'channels' on the amateur HF bands. Info on Olivia, JT65 and the HF channel plans can be found at HFLink.com.

So I guess my old MFJ-1278 is relegated to junk box now. My Kenwood TS-2000 even has a built-in TNC for 9600 baud packet so I don't even need the MFJ for satellites anymore. Ahh, progress!

2009 Contest Calendar

2009-01-07T09:03:00.004-07:00

Here is the list of contests we (VE8EV and/or VE8DW) intend to operate in this year:

North American QSO Party SSB, 1800z Jan 17 to 0600z Jan 18
ARRL International DX Contest SSB, 0000z Mar 7 to 2400z Mar 8
CQ WW WPX SSB, 0000z Mar 28 to 2400z Mar 29
ARRL Field Day, 1800z Jun 27 to 2100z Jun 28
RAC Canada Day Contest, 0000z Jul 1 to 2359z Jul 1
IARU Contest, 1200z Jul 11 to 1200z Jul 12
RSGB IOTA Contest, 1200z Jul 25 to 1200z Jul 26 (from Banks Island NA129)
North American QSO Party SSB, 1800z Aug 15 to 0600z Aug 16
CQ WW RTTY, 0000z Sep 28 to 2400z Sep 27
ARRL International EME Competition (2m only, dates TBD Oct/Nov/Dec)
CQ WW SSB, 0000z Oct 24 to 2400z Oct 25
ARRL Sweepstakes Contest CW, 2100z Nov 7 to 0300z Nov 9
ARRL Sweepstakes Contest SSB, 2100z Nov 21 to 0300z Nov 23
ARRL 160-Meter Contest, 2200z Dec 4 to 1600z Dec 6 *
ARRL 10-Meter Contest, 0000z Dec 12 to 2359z Dec 13 *
RAC Winter Contest, 0000z Dec 19 to 2359z Dec 19

* Subject to encouraging propagation forecasts

You're Not in Kansas Anymore

2009-01-06T08:42:00.012-07:00

When I first got started in Amateur Radio back in 1993 it was quite the learning experience. Without an experienced Elmer for guidance I had to figure it all out on my own. The ARRL Handbook and the occasional magazine was the source of most of my information. Unfortunately, it took years to figure out that a lot of that content didn't really apply to my situation. Why doesn't my dipole work? How come I can't hear anyone on 80m? I didn't understand why many of the situations and ideas wouldn't work for me. With 20-20 hindsight I now understand what the main differences are. Here's what makes Amateur Radio from up here a whole different ball game than from "down South":

1. There's No One Else Out There

Draw a 500 mile radius circle from your location and take a guess how many active hams there are within that circle. On HF? On VHF? 6m? More than 1000? Maybe more than 10,000? Short-hop skip is the bread-and-butter of ham radio. You can load up the rain gutter on the house as an antenna and make LOTS of contacts. QRP can be fun! Every night on 40m and 80m there are hundreds of 20-over-S9 signals. It's easy! From here my circle is pretty barren. There's a few KL7's and a couple of VE8's and VY1's. That's all. And the next 500 miles after that are almost the same. I coined the phrase "It's All DX From Here" because it's true. Almost everyone I work is long-haul, double-hop skip. And that's hard to do from here because:

2. We're Right in the Middle of the Aurora Zone

You know those days when you can't work over the pole because the K-index is up? For us that bright orange auroral band around the North Pole is right overhead. ALL THE TIME! When the K is high we hear nothing on the radio. That's right, NOTHING! No shortwave broadcast stations, no WWV, zippo. And the K is high a lot. When it's not high things change from impossible to just difficult. Signals are still attenuated like crazy. It's a lot like using a VHF handheld inside a big building. When I first started it didn't take me long to figure out that if I could see the Northern Lights outside I wasn't going to be able to hear much on the radio. To make matters worse, for some reason (likely to do with wave angles) it seems to attenuate my transmitted signal much more than it affects received signals. This contributes to:

3. Diode Propagation

It's the November Sweepstakes contest. Everyone is looking for the elusive Northern Territories (it's NOT Yukon!) multiplier for the Clean Sweep award. I'm on 20m listening to two ops discussing the contest and lamenting that there's no VE8's on to give them the Sweep. And I'm calling them over and over and over but they don't hear a thing. Diode propagation is one of the more frustrating aspects of operating from up here. It's caused by three main factors. First and foremost is the auroral absorbtion. The second is the lack of noise. The noise floor here is extremely low. Very little man-made or natural noise is propagated here mainly because of (1) and (2) above. The end result is we can hear VERY weak signals. I've made many, many contacts where a true signal report would be five and zero. In most cases "down South" the noise floor is much higher so they just can't hear me over the noise. The third factor is directional antennas. Yagi's, four-square arrays, beverages, all work wonders to improve signal-to-noise in a particular direction. Unfortunately, "Northwest" is not a direction that people usually listen to. I can't count how many times I've struggled to make a contact and finally the guy at the other end says "Let me turn the beam" and SHAZAAM! He's 10 over S9. And when guys ARE pointing up here they don't want to talk to me. They're working Asian DX or West coast to Europe.

So what's the answer? Just accepting it for what it is helps a lot. Being diversified is also a good solution. Nothing on HF? Work satellites! Try different modes. CW is a good one. The Coast Guard radio station here is the last one in Canada that still operates CW because many times it is the only mode that can get through. My CW skills are sorely lacking but it is something I'm working on. One solution I've found is to operate during contests when there's lots of activity. The best answer, though, is to adopt a "Go Big or Go Home" philosophy. High-gain, low angle antennas and lots of power help a lot. QRP is NOT an option.

Note: The above piece was written at the bottom of the solar cycle based on experiences at the bottom of the previous cycle. I missed the last solar maximum and I'm looking forward to seeing what its like.

Stew Perry TBDC

2009-01-05T20:37:00.005-07:00

Call: VE8EV
Operator(s): VE8EV
Station: VE8EV
Class: Single Op HP
QTH: Inuvik, NT
Operating Time (hrs): 8
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 26 Total Score = 212

Comments:
With the K-index at zero I was hoping for better but I ended up spending most of Saturday in the RAC Contest. I did manage to get on for a bit in mid-afternoon and worked a few Europeans. Saturday night there were many good signals (including GM3POI for several hours after Eu sunrise) but once I worked them I didn't hear anyone new. My CW still isn't up to calling CQ but maybe soon. I got up early on Sunday hoping for JA's but the aurora was back and I couldn't hear them. K7RAT was S-9 all the time. Did they hijack a 100kW broadcast station for the contest?

posted to 3830 Mon, 29 Dec 2008