Radio Habana Cuba: Dxers Unlimited weekend edition for December 30, 2000
By Arnie Coro, radio amateur CO2KK
Hi amigos, welcome to our last edition for the year 2000 of Dxers Unlimited, coming to you from Radio Havana Cuba. With the daily solar flux figures still a nice and healthy above 180 mark, and also a nice and low value A index planetary geomagnetic disturbance indicator, it seems like we are certainly going to enjoy an excellent year's end period of HF propagation. Today's year's end edition will be bring you a nice menu of all radio hobby related topics, first the headlines.
As you have already heard, the end of year 2000 and the beginning of year 2001 will provide radio hobbyist worldwide a period of excellent HF propagation conditions... later during next week we may see a geomagnetic disturbance, but right now and until at least Tuesday, the bands from 160 to 10 meters are going to be in pretty good shape. Ten and 12 meters will provide radio amateurs with worldwide DX during the local daylight hours and even after sunset, while 20 meters will be open 24 hours a day... During your local evenings, 40 and 30 meters will provide excellent DX, and even 160 and 80 meters will be in good shape.... High solar flux hovering above 170 units and a rather nice and low A index are responsible for such nice year's end propagation.
Headline number two: CONTACT! Yes, ground control stations have re-established contact with the OSCAR 40 amateur radio satellite, and now they are very, very carefully assessing the state of all onboard systems. There is almost no doubt that Oscar 40 did suffer some damage some time during or after the propulsion system was in use. BUT at least the 13 centimeter link between the most-sophisticated-ever ham satellite and Earth is working. Let's hope that the orbiting spacecraft can be put into useful operation sometime in the future!
Headline number three of this year's-end edition of Dxers Unlimited: Seems like Year 2001 will see the first- ever not-too-expensive digital signal processing short wave receiver! According to some sources, at least two major manufacturers are putting the finishing touches on their prototypes of tabletop short wave radios that will do the signal processing after the second mixer using DSP technology.
Stay tuned for more all radio hobby related information coming to you from Havana. I am Arnie Coro, and I wish you all Seasons Greetings, amigos... back with you in a few seconds...
This is the weekend edition of your favorite radio hobby show... yes amigos, my friends, mes amis, this is Dxers Unlimited and here is item one for today: Backyard Antennas, Peter Dodd's excellent antenna book that won Dxers Unlimited's Best Radio Book of the Year Award, has brought a lot of interest from our worldwide audience. according to the many e-mail messages that I have received here at arnie@radiohc.org asking about the book. Now let me add that Backyard Antennas is written in such a way that even beginners can benefit a lot from reading it, and the book is so well illustrated with drawings and photographs that you can actually build antennas and accessories described by Peter just by following the excellent combination of text and illustrations. For those of you who missed the world wide web site that has more information about this unique antenna book, here it is again: www.rsgb.org/books/extra/backyard.htm
And let me repeat this also... Chapter 4 of Backyard Antennas has the complete description of a BALANCED TUNER WITH PLUG IN COILS that may well be worth scheduling for your first year 2001 project! Yes, I am already getting all the parts together for mine. Again, this extremely well-designed tuner is in Chapter 4, titled "Matching and Tuning," and it spans from page 42 to page 67. In this chapter, all the most popular types of antenna matching units are reviewed, and complete details are provided to build what yours truly considers to be the best-ever amateur radio antenna tuner designed. Peter describes it as a BALANCED TUNER WITH PLUG IN COILS, and the information provided, including circuit diagrams and several excellent photos, will guide you through the construction of this antenna tuner system that includes an antenna current sampling unit, to monitor the feeder current on each leg of a balanced transmission line.
The tuner itself has INDEPENDENT TUNING for each leg of the balanced line, so you can actually achieve not only a good match and maximum power transfer between your transmitter and the antenna system, but also make the currents flowing on each leg of the balanced transmission line identical. In other words, you will be able to operated a truly balanced system with all of its advantages. The balanced tuner with plug in coils described in Chapter 4 of Backyard Antennas is power limited; in other words, with the components shown, it will work with powers that I estimate at a maximum of about 250 watts, BUT if you do run high power, you can certainly follow the design ideas and use capacitors, coils and connectors capable of handling higher power output transmitters.
This is Radio Havana Cuba, the name of the show is Dxers Unlimited and here is item two: a visit to Arnie's workshop! About half of the main workbench is now in use for a project that should come to an end before the year 2000 is over. Yes, I am upgrading my radio room computer once again. This time the old 386 motherboard was replaced with a rare and unusual motherboard that runs at 100 megaHertz and calls itself when it boots up a 586 machine... Sure, it is three times faster than the 386 which, by the way -- following our Cuban radio amateur's standard practice -- will go to another ham who is now running an XT. Ah, and this radio amateur will then give his XT motherboard to a newcomer to start learning about computers and how they relate to the radio hobby.
Well, my 586 at 100 megaHertz with a rather small hard drive is now almost ready, except for a hard-to-fix problem: Its onboard serial ports simply refuse to work, so the machine is perfectly operational for MS-DOS version 6.22, but can't be used with WINDOWS 95, because there is no active serial port to which the mouse can be connected... I will be spending some time Sunday morning trying to add a card with two serial ports into an ISA slot, and see if this approach will work. Now, is this radio hobby-related or not??? Well, sure, nowadays computers are very important for the radio hobbyist... even old machines like 286s, 386s and 486's can be used very effectively by the radio enthusiast. This 586 machine is of 1994 vintage, and it's already up and running a lot of very useful radio hobby-related software, from a very well-written and accurate short wave propagation forecasting program to VE3ERP's set of ham radio software that runs in MS DOS mode.
So, if you happen to have an older computer on hand, it can be used very effectively for radio hobby-related items, from running software to actually operating the digital modes. YES... an old machine connected to a terminal node controller or to a simple computer-to-radio interface can receive and send standard radio teletype, cw morse code, packet radio, and if your monitor is of the VGA type, then you can also work slow scan television and receive weather fax systems. It is really amazing to see how even a rather old machine can operate reliably for many years when properly maintained. My 386 motherboard was in use with the radios since 1995, when it was already obsolete, and when removed for the upgrade, was in perfect shape. By the way, let me add that if you use the computer with a TNC, or terminal node controller, the machine will not be required to work a lot, as much of the actual interfacing is done by the TNC, but even when you use a program like the ever-popular HAMCOMM, that requires just a simple interface, a 386 or 486 machine with not too much RAM memory will work beautifully. See you soon on the digital communications modes... and remember that amateur radio need not be an expensive hobby at all; you can enjoy this hobby a lot using low-cost equipment, like recycled computers!
And now, amigos, as always at the end of the show, here is Arnie Coro's Dxers Unlimited's HF propagation update and forecast: Solar flux is hovering very near 180 units, and the latest K index I monitored here at CO2KK was also a nice and low 1.
Six meter band propagation was a reality last Tuesday morning from Venezuela and Aruba to Europe. Yes, a brief opening around 1300 hours UTC Tuesday, and we may see more of the same this weekend, too... So far this year's northern hemisphere winter solstice Sporadic E season has proven to be the worst of them all in many, many years, so it might be a good idea to tell ionospheric researchers about this fact, to see if they come up with a possible answer. For short wave listeners the best nighttime reception will be from 6 megaHertz all the way up to 16 megaHertz... First hop skip will be better between 6 and 10 megaHertz during your local evenings, while double hop F propagation will provide long range DX on the 41, 31, 25 and 22 meters international shortwave broadcast bands... See you next Tuesday and Wednesday UTC days at the mid-week edition of Dxers Unlimited amigos, and if you are already an amateur radio operator, go to ten meters, tune your radio right on 28.5, 28500 kiloHertz and let's have a nice years end QSO there!
prepared 12-30-2000; transmitted 01-04-2001
Arnie Coro CO2KK
Havana, Cuba
December 30, 2000Postal address:
Arnie Coro, "Dxers Unlimited"
Radio Havana Cuba, Havana, CUBA
e-mail: arnie@radiohc.org
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