What’s happening at SBARC? Here you will find the latest club news, events, projects, net activities, and news from our special interest groups (SIGS).
Be sure to check in frequently so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting things going on with the club and its members!
We have moved content for the Technical Mentoring and Elmering Net here, and content for the Digital Modes Net here.
Orville Beach, W6BI spoke at SBARC’s February General Club Meeting. Orville is a member of the Simi Settlers Amateur Radio Club of Simi Valley, Calif. who says he is now All Digital, All the Time! Orville spoke to the group about the success of digital mesh networking in Ventura County and encouraged Santa Barbara-area hams to join in the the fun of using 0ff-the-shelf wireless networking gear to create private IP networks using the exclusive ham allocation in the 2.4 GHz band.
Listen to audio from his presentation below and learn more about the software his is using that is coming out of the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) Project.
I thought this was a kind of fun and easy hack I did the other afternoon…
I hope the idea can possibly be useful to others.
This is the finished “Weather Information Netbook” mounted on the wall in our living room.
I was told by the Wife I could do this “if there were not cords hanging everywhere”.
Well, they aren’t everywhere…
Our January meeting featured a presentation from Theo, KK6YYZ. Theo’s presentation included a slideshow that illustrated the installation of a home emergency power generator and he went over all the various considerations necessary for proper installation. His presentation was also punctuated by some lively discussion on electrical equipment grounding, electrical codes, and other good questions.
You can listen to the audio part of the presentation below:
Post expires at 11:12am on Friday February 12th, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.
For the first Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club meeting of the year, the January 15, 2016 meeting will be a good one! One of our own members, in fact one of our Board members, Theo Howe, KK6YYZ, a local electrician by trade, will be giving us a wonderful presentation on “Installing a Home Generator system.”
Theo will be explaining:
How to choose a system with features that are right for you
Correctly sizing your Generator
Permitting and Covenants
Can I install this myself or do I need an electrician mckinney texas to sort this out?
Choosing fuel type
Interconnecting with your home electrical system
There will be a Question and Answer period with Theo and Al Soenke, WA6VNN, a Past President of SBARC and one of Theo’s customers, who can speak from experience and will give valuable insight from the owner’s perspective.
Our Club meetings are held at the Goleta Union School District, 401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta, right across the street from the Goleta Library. Doors open at 7:00 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Bring a guest. Join SBARC or re-join SBARC. If your membership expired at the end of the year, this is the time to renew it for another full year of Amateur Radio fun! You may join or re-join SBARC by downloading the Membership Application or by filling one out at the meeting. Our annual dues are still only $24 per year.
Post expires at 11:51pm on Friday January 15th, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.
Hello All,
I decided to share the details of my HF station here on the SBARC website for a couple of reasons. The primary reason is that maybe someone out there would find my setup useful in building their own station. I am very limited by budget and space so I have to figure out ways of making the most of a little bit of everything. For you HAMS that have $10,000 or more invested in your station, my little station will not compare to your capabilities. Of primary interest in this article is my all-mode HF radio and the Pan-adapter setup.
The first piece of the puzzle came into place about 2 years ago when I purchased the SDRPlay SDR (Software Defined Radio). I got this before I even got my first ham license. The radio itself is a marvelous piece of engineering. It is a receiver that covers the range 100 KHz to 2 GHz continuously. It has a great front end filter bank for anti aliasing. It samples at rates between 2.0 and 10.66 MSPS. It has a 12 bit native ADC with a 60 dB SNR.
Impressive specs for $150. I originally was using this radio as a super scanner. Its great for being able to browse around and see an 8 MHz band at a time. It works well with all the popular SDR software packages out there, but it is married well with HDSDR. The free HDSDR software can control the radio and performs all the demodulation you can imagine. It handles AM, FM, SSB and Digital modes all in software. It provides some impressive filtering capabilities including point and click notch filters. You can read more about both by clicking on the following links; http://www.sdrplay.com/ and http://www.hdsdr.de/
After being a ham for about a year, I decided I wanted to play with HF. Needing to stay small, in money and footprint, and after some missteps, I finally ended up with a neat little radio in the form of a Yaesu FT-857D. This little radio does it all. It is an all mode ham band 160 meter to 6 meter transceiver with 2 meter and 70 cm thrown in for good measure. It puts out 100 watts on 160 to 6 meters and 50 watts on VHF/UHF. Its small footprint made it an ideal choice for my needs.
So, having these radios meant that I needed an antenna and a matching system. I played around with various vertical antennas with and without loading coils as well as wire antennas flopped over the trailer and attached to the trees. Had some success, enough to keep me interested, but my range was limited to about 800 miles on a good day. So, I finally ended up with a simple inverted V made from 18 gauge stranded wire, each side 33 feet long. The apex is up about 27 feet on my cell antenna mast, and the ends are held up by telescoping poles, mounted to my walkers, about 15 feet high. The wire is fed with 450 ohm open ladder line cut to about 46 feet long. I originally was using scalped parts from the vertical to tune this antenna, but I finally ended buying an MFJ-969 Tuner. I love this tuner. Makes life much easier. The ladder line is fed into the connectors that expect open ladder line and provide a balun for it. I can tune this wire system for 40, 20, 17 and 15 meters. Of course, it is best on 40 meters but I just talked with a guy in Missouri for about 20 minutes with great signals on 15 meters.
Ok so far. I borrowed an antenna switch from Dennis (WB6OBB) and connected both the Yaesu and the SDRPlay radio to the wire through this switch. At this stage, I was finding signals with the SDR receiver then tuning the radio to the frequency I wanted and switching the radio on the antenna to transmit. Eventually, I figured out how to get the HDSDR software to control the Yaesu radio, so when I found something interesting, and switch over the transmitter was already tuned. Doing it this way was alright but as soon as I switched to the Yaesu, I had to use the Yaesu receiver as well. A major hit in receiver performance, no comparison. And all a bit clunky as operations go. I missed more than one contact fumbling around with my gear.
The last piece of the puzzle was the purchase of the MFJ-1708 RF Switch. I connect the Yaesu transmitter, SDR receiver and tuner to this switch. During normal use, when power is on and no RF power is presented by the transmitter, the switch connects the receiver to the antenna. When I press the PTT button on the transmitter, the switch connects the transmitter to the antenna and yanks the receiver to ground. In addition, I have it so that during transmit, the SDR radio mutes the audio. Now, because isolation is not 100% it sometimes gets into the amplified speaker system if the gains are set too high and gets ugly real quick. To solve this, I got a nice pair of headphones with a big mute button on the left side and let the AGC do its thing. Only rarely now do I need to hit the mute button on the headset, but its there in case.
Now that I’ve got it all working together, I can quickly switch between bands, tune and select a signal and start transmitting immediately. Its really working nice, and I’ve made contacts all over the country as well as two in Japan. I’m getting good signal reports from New Mexico, Arizona, Missouri and Florida from the 7155 group in the mornings. Its only been up for a short time and the bands have been horrible, but I’m having a good time with it and it is now a pleasure to operate as I can concentrate on the contact and not fumble around with the gear so much.
This setup cost me about $1,400 to buy the Yeasu FT-857D (Used for $650), MFJ-969 Tuner ($200 new), USB SignaLink ($80 new), MFJ-1708 RF Switch ($80 new), Beats Studio Headphones ($200 new) and SDRPlay SDR ($150 new). I already had the computer and the power supply ($120 new).
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Best Regards,
Jim – N6SXB
The old Chino Hills Swap meet is being replaced with other venues. The first one will be held at:
Granite Creek Community Church
1580 N Claremont Blvd
Claremont, CA 91711
The swap meet will be held in the parking lot adjacent to the Church, and the sole sponsor is the Claremont Amateur Radio Society. Please be respectful of your surroundings because this swap meet is in a residential location.
Date: Saturday, January 16, 2016
Time: 6AM – 11AM
NO Entry Before 6AM
$10.00/space
All Participants must have vacated the area no later than 11:00AM, No Exceptions.
As a result of the retirement of Dave – K6HWN, I recently volunteered to take on the Wednesday night Swap Net duties. The Swap Net comes on every Wednesday night at 8:00 pm after the Club Net. Then Hayden – KK6OYV, expressed an interest in helping with the nets, so now I share this responsibility with him. We trade off every other week. I get to the 146.79 K6TZ repeater using the remote link through the 224.08 repeater on La Cumbre peak. My only 1.25 meter radio is a 5 watt HT from Wouxon, model KG-UVD1P. Ok, so why this article?
If you were listening to my net control debut last November 25, 2015 you would have heard a very well prepared novice net control operator. For about 20 minutes. Unlike most other nets, the Swap Net is a net that has the control operator reading for 30 minutes, with occasional breaks for other traffic. That means I was asking my little hand held to do the job of a base station with all its heat sinks and fans and the like. It did not like that one bit and expressed its displeasure by shutting down due to overheating. I was frantic trying to figure out what to do. To those listening, I just went silent in mid sentence.
So, I had a choice. I could go out and buy another mobile radio that covers 1.25 meters for about $150 to $250 or figure out a way to cool my little HT. Since I’m trying to scrape up the money for a decent antenna analyzer, I decided to try to stretch my radio’s capacity for handling excess heat.
I had a “battery saver” device from Wouxun that allows me to plug the radio into a cigarette lighter socket. It was already becoming unusable because overheating caused warping of the plastic that supports the contacts. This device supplies 12 volts to a circuit that converts 12 volts to 8 volts as well as conditioning to protect the radio. Computer CPU fans use 12 volts DC to run them. When I remove the battery from the radio there is a big magnesium body with two power connectors and several labels. So, I thought a big heat sink and fan stuck on the back might do the job. So, off to the local computer repair store to look for parts.
CompuWest on Hollister, near Turnpike in Goleta has a lot of older computer repair parts and the guys that run it are really helpful. Turns out that a standard CPU fan with heat sink for the old Pentium processor fit just right in the back of my radio with just a little play side to side. I carved up the “battery saver” and used everything except the case, which is now a pile of plastic chips. I plucked the 12 volts from the cigarette lighter cable and provided a little connector to the fan. I then soldered up two alligator clips, with insulating booties, to supply the 8 volts to the radio.
I removed the labels from the back of the radio and cleaned the bare metal with acetone. I then applied a good amount of thermal grease to the area where the heat sink will interface with the radio. Clamped it all together with tie wraps and electrical tape. The photos below are the result. I tested it on the Digital Modes net on Tuesday night to see if the fan acoustic noise was too loud or if electrical noise was getting into my signal. All reports were that I sound OK, and the fan acoustic noise is barely a whisper. The real test will be tonight when I run the swap net and hold down the transmit button for 30 minutes. These modifications can be completely undone in minutes to return the radio to standard use. The main issue will be cleaning the thermal grease out. Not too bad on flat surfaces.
I’ll update this after the swap net tonight. Wish me luck! Jim – N6SXB
Update: Worked like a champ! Did the entire net using 5 watts and the radio barely got warm. Jim – N6SXB
Photo 1
Photo 2
