Radio Habana Cuba: Dxers Unlimited Weekend edition for October 14, 2000
By Arnie Coro, radio amateur CO2KK
HI amigos, join mefor 15 minutes of all radio hobby-related information, coming to you from Havana. I am Arnie Coro, radio amateur CO2KK, and here is item one: Expect rather nice HF propagation conditions during the rest of the weekend... Amateur radio operators are going to be able to work some nice DX on the 6, 10, 12 and 15 meter bands!!! SOLAR FLUX is moving UP!!!
Item two: Amateur radio repeaters provide many useful community services, including the handling of emergencies when commercial telecommunications are either overloaded or simply fail. Installing and providing maintenance to an amateur radio repeater are not easy tasks. Keeping those machines going can also prove to be expensive, and that's why in many cases ham radio repeaters are owned and operated by radio clubs. The most popular bands for repeaters are two meters and seventy centimeters, followed by ten and six meters. With a small hand-held transceiver, a handie talkie, you can keep in contact with other stations within the repeater's coverage area. If you own an FM scanner receiver, you can try listening to your area's ham repeaters; I'll give you the HOW-TO information later in today's show.
Item three: The MOXON rectangle is a very interesting antenna.... It is small in size for the frequency it is cut to, and easy to match; more about the MOXON rectangle antenna in today's edition of your favorite radio hobby show, the one your radio is now tuned to... Dxers Unlimited, from Radio Havana Cuba. My sound engineer and producer is Margarita Delgado, I am Arnie Coro, radio amateur CO2KK, back with you in a few seconds.
You can pick up Dxers Unlimited on SSB, yes, we do broadcast using single side band in parallel with our regular AM frequencies. During our 0100 to 0500 UTC English language broadcasts to North America, we use 11705 kHz UPPER SIDE BAND... give it a try and send me a signal report to arnie@radiohc.org.
Now item two in detail: If you happen to own an FM scanner receiver, look for the local amateur radio repeaters, first on 2 meters -- the most popular ham band worldwide according to recent statitstics. Scan from 145.110 up the band... the typical 2 meter repeater uses 600 kiloHertz separation, with the input either to the low or high side of the repeater's output, depending on what part of the band the frequency pair is located. In other words, you will find repeaters every 20 kiloHertz from 145.110 all the way up to 145.490, let me repeat this, in the first two megaHertz of the two meter band, repeaters are allocated starting at 145.110, and every 20 kiloHertz there is another repeater channel. This is valid for North, Central and South America, as Europeans have to deal with a 2 meter band that is only 2 megaHertz wide instead of 4, and they have a different arrangement for their 2 meter repeaters, starting with 145.600 kiloHertz as their first repeater channel... Sounds a bit complicated, but no, it isn't... If you are in the Americas, start scanning from 145.110 up, all the way to 145.490, and again, run another scan starting on 146.610 khz, all the way up to the top end of the band, which here in the Americas is 148 megaHertz. Monitoring local 2 meter ham repeaters with your scanner will help you get familiar with the local amateur radio community and perhaps you then may want to join one of the nearby radio clubs that operate the repeaters.
Seventy centimeter band repeaters use, again here in the Americas, the segment between 440 and 450 megaHertz and run much wider separation between transmit and receive....So another frequency range to explore to find local seventy centimeter band repeaters is from 440 and 450 megaHertz.
You are listening to Radio Havana Cuba, the name of ths show is Dxers Unlimited and here is our popular QSL on the Air section of the show... QSL on the air to Rusty in New Mexico; Rusty's callsign is KA0HPK and he enjoys operating on the 10 meter band, now that it is open practically every day. QSL on the air to Walt in Detroit, Michigan, Walt's ham radio callsign is AB8EU and he told me that he has been listening to Dxers Unlimited for year;, we met on 10 meters Friday, while yours truly was checking the day's HF propagation forecast. By the way, we had a nice QSO near 28.500, my favorite 10 meter band spot for working SSB. QSL on the air to Josh in Virginia, who today will probably be listening from his home QTH in W8 land. Josh is N8CFS, a college student, and he has his rig installed in the dorm, using a 25-foot end fed wire for working on 10 meters. We had a nice QSO that lasted about 40 minutes. Josh N8CFS is a good example of the new generation of amateur radio operators who are enjoying the peak of the sunspot cycle by operating portable. QSL on the air from Dxers Unlimited to all of you who have sent nice e-mail messages to arnie@radiohc.org with signal reports, comments about the show, requests for the popular free-of-charge technical INFO PACKAGES and also providing an almost-endless stream of valuable ideas for the program!
Now item three in detail: The MOXON rectangle is a very interesting single band antenna that -- according to my good friend and topmost antenna expert L.B. Cebik, W4RNL -- should be ideal for improving 2 meter band repeaters' coverage areas, as well as providing an effective way of reducing adjacent channel interference from repeaters that are near to each other. One of the most desirable characteristics of the MOXON rectangle antenna is that it provides a very high front-to-back ratio, something that helps to cancel signals coming from the back of the antenna very effectively. The MOXON rectangle is a two-element antenna with a very broad beamwidth and again, it has a very high front-to-back ratio, while providing the user with a gain similar to a two-element YAGI. I have used a MOXON rectangle here for the 10 meter band. My 10-meter MOXON was installed beaming approximately to the North, and all I can say is that signal reports from practically the whole USA and Canada were excellent, and I simply could not hear South American stations at all. Although I could not measure the antenna gain or front-to-back ratio using professional instruments, I can say that it worked very well indeed. If you want to know more about the MOXON rectangle, I can send you the URL for L.B. Cebik's website, where you can find a very interesting 8-page article devoted specifically to the MOXON Rectangle on the 2 meter band. Send your request to arnie@radiohc.org, or via Air Mail to Arnie Coro, Radio Havana Cuba, Havana, Cuba....
This is Dxers Unlimited's weekend edition, and here is item five: From Arnie Coro's electronic workbench... Never install an electronic component when you are building either homebrew equipment or a kit without testing it to the best of your test equipment possibilities and your electronic abilities... YES, I know, you cannot test some IC's etc., but you can certainly measure resistors, capacitors, test bipolar transistors for leakage and gain before soldering them in place. The last thing you want to happen is that a faulty component leaks into your new project. Just to show you how important this previous testing of components is, Friday I was finishing the new audio amplifier module for my REGENERODYNE receiver. I took a brand new 470 kilo-ohms resistor from a sealed package which I opened at that very moment, and guess what happened? I routinely checked the resistor with my digital multimeter, only to find it measured not the 470 kilo-ohms, but 4.7 mega-ohms. Obviously, this was a factory sorting error, as the second resistor I took from the plastic bag measured an almost perfect 472 thousand ohms!!! Had the wrongly marked resistor gone into my audio amplifier modules, some rather funny things would had happened, and it would have taken a lot of time to figure out.
By the way, if you want to see the circuit diagram and building instructions for the very interesting REGENERODYNE vacuum tube receiver, just drop me an e-mail to arnie@radiohc.org; I'll send it to you as an e-mail attachment, and I will add the 4 Field Effect Transistor Regenerative receiver circuit too, an easy-to-build solid state radio that works very nicely and uses just one single type of low-cost FET, or Field Effect Transistor.
And now, amigos, as always at the end of the show, ready to copy Arnie Coro's HF plus 6 meters propagation update and forecast. It is, as always free of charge, in the public domain, and you can forward it around to wherever you think will be useful to short wave listeners and radio amateurs... First 6 meter ALERT: high probabilities of 6 meter openings during the local morning hours in the Americas, local afternoon in Europe; this is valid for the next 10 days. The present solar flux is very near 170 units and moving UP... it will soon reach 200 solar flux units and that will keep the 10 and 12 meter bands open during most of the local daytime hours. Solar active region 9169, the SUPER SUNSPOT, is about to return after it has completed its rotation, and if it is still active, something we don't know yet, this may lead to some very interesting increase in solar activity. Expect several solar flares to occur during the next 10 days, and if they do erupt, then we may see some magnetic storming here later. Propagation conditions during the rest of the weekend will be excellent and the peak activity for this rotation is expected to be from the 17th to the 22nd of October; after that, solar activity will start moving slowly down again. But, due to the above-200 solar flux peak expected, the higher bands will continue to be good until at least a week past the peak, that is until the end of the month.
See you on 10 or 15 meters for a nice QSO if you already have your amateur radio license and the your station up and running. Now many countries only ask for an easy 5-words-per=minute CW Morse Code Test and the theoretical questions are not much more difficult than the ones asked at the driver's license test, believe me!
See you at 28.500 plus or minus 5 kiloHertz on 10 meters and when 10 meter closes down, I'll be on 15 meters 21.295 plus or minus 5 kiloHertz... Enjoy radio, propagation is good and ionospheric absorption is low!!!
Arnie Coro CO2KK
Havana, Cuba
October 14, 2000Postal address:
Arnie Coro, "Dxers Unlimited"
Radio Havana Cuba, Havana, CUBA
e-mail: arnie@radiohc.org
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