RADIO HABANA CUBA
DXERS UNLIMITED
MID-WEEK EDITION
TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2002
By Arnie Coro CO2KKSend your comments, questions and ideas to: arnie@radiohc.org
Hi, amigos radioaficionados! You are tuned to the mid-week edition of RHC's Dxers Unlimited, the one and only radio hobby program that fully covers the more than 64 ways you and I enjoy this wonderful hobby.... I am Arnie Coro, radio amateur CO2KK, your host here in Havana... join me for about sixteen minutes of all radio hobby-related information!!!
Here is item one: Solar activity now moving DOWN, after the big solar flares, an X1.5 that caused a coronal mass ejection of charged particles that will hit the Earth's magnetosphere very soon, causing yet another geomagnetic field disturbance. Already, as I was starting to gather all the information for today's show, the solar wind data was showing an increase in the number of protons per cubic centimeter, a very positive indication of the stream of particles now starting to reach us, and by the way, this was as early as 1200 Hours UTC on Tuesday, 8 o'clock in the morning local time here in Havana, where, by the way, the weather is simply gougeous, with temperatures reaching about 30 degrees Celsius around local noon, and a nice and low relative humidity. The daily sunspot number has now gone down to around 170, and that will take its toll on the daily maximum useable frequencies, which should take a downward dip during the rest of the week....
Item two: Explorer, researcher, scientists and promoter of amateur radio Thor Heyerdahl passed away recently; he was 87, and achieved worldwide fame when in 1947 he crossed the Pacific on a raft made of balsa wood logs. Heyerdahl trusted amateur radio so much, that he included two ham operators aboard the Kon Tiki. Today I will have the pleasure of reading to you an article written by Daniel N0BN, about the Kon-Tiki Scientific Expedition and Amateur Radio. I hope you enjoy this nice and well-written account of how a 6 watt transmitter and makeshift antennas raised by kites or weather balloons kept explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his crew aboard the Kon-Tiki in touch with the world while sailing across areas of the Pacific Ocean far off the shipping lanes....
Item three: As promised, a report from my shack about amateur radio beacons, that I also hope you enjoy... And as always at the end of the show, Arnie Coro's Dxers Unlimited's HF plus 6 meters propagation update and forecast...
Margarita Delgado is my sound engineer and producer here at RHC studio 7, standby now for a few seconds, I'll be back after this brief musical interval.
This is the mid-week edition of Dxers Unlimited, coming to you from Radio Havana Cuba, and here is item two... I want to thank Dan N0BN for this nice article that follows... Daniel wrote:
THE KON TIKI EXPEDITION AND RADIO Many of us in our youth were thrilled to read about the voyage of the Kon Tiki in 1947. Thor Heyerdahl and his band of adventurers built a balsa raft in Peru and set sail for Polynesia to prove the South Pacific Islands could have been populated from South America. How many of you remember the radio connection?
The group wanted to be able to communicate with the outside world and thus recruited a couple of seasoned radio operators. One crew member, Knut Hoagland, had been caught by the Gestapo in occupied Norway with a clandestine radio and barely escaped in a hail of bullets. Another, Torstein Raaby, had been smuggled into Norway and for ten months transmitted reports about battleship activities using a German officer's receiving aerial.
The "Radio Amateur League of America" (probably the ARRL) arranged to have amateurs listening for reports from the raft. The Kon Tiki's radios were built both from scratch and also from "secret sabotage" sets from World War Two.
An NC-173 receiver was also used. It appears only Morse was used as there is no reference to phone operations and only keys and "peculiar clickings" were mentioned by Heyerdahl, who apparently did not understand code.
The only references to power and frequency were to a maximum of 6 watts and the frequency as being 13,990 kc so this was definitely a QRP operation.
The expedition used call sign LI 2 B. Constant attention and tinkering was needed to keep their equipment operational. For instance, the batteries were kept charged with a hand-cranked generator.
The small craft's aerials also needed special care as they were raised by kite and balloon. No one anticipated the group's pet parrot would bite through and eat portions of the wire antenna. And water, water, everywhere, meant keeping their gear dry was no little task. The Kon Tiki's initial transmission when it completed its journey was delayed while they dried out their equipment. That first contact happened to be with an amateur in Colorado named Paul (whom I tried to identify further but unsuccessfully), who thought someone was trying to pull a fast one on him when Torstein told him they were with the Kon Tiki and stranded on a desert island in the Pacific! Nightly they sent out reports and weather observations which were picked up by random hams who relayed the messages to various destinations. Eventually skeds were developed by which fairly regular reports could be made, both officially and to friends and family.
One evening a contact was made with a Norwegian station which at that point was completely on the other side of the globe from the Kon Tiki. Congratulations on King Haakon's 75th birthday were relayed and the next day the King responded by wishing the crew good luck and success.
I first read Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl in the '50s or '60s as a kid, and was delighted to read it again recently in my 50s and discover the radio connection!
73, Daniel N0BN
Well, amigo Daniel, I also read Kon Tiki, the book by Thor Heyerdahl, when I was a very young kid and, my friend, reading it made amateur radio still more attractive to me -- so much so, in fact that I sound found my mentor's antennas two and a half blocks away from my home and started to be a regular visitor to CM2DK, Dr. Ignacio Diaz Perez's amateur radio station... But that's another story...
Thank you, Dan, for this nice piece describing how the Kon Tiki scientific expedition used amateur radio in such a relevant way to the hobby!!!
Dxers Unlimited's mid-week edition is coming to you Tuesdays and Wednesdays UTC days, and our weekend edition is on the air Saturdays and Sundays UTC days...
Now here is item three: Tuning the amateur 10 and 6 meter bands you will often pick up signals coming from automatic beacon stations that operate typically 24 hours a day and unattended. The purpose of such beacons is to provide operators with information that propagation is open to that specific location... Lets hear how one of those ten meter band beacon sounds.... [TAPE] And now, here is the special report that I taped last Saturday at my amateur radio station explaining how beacons work. [TAPE]
Ok amigos, I hope you enjoyed it, and that soon you will start monitoring the 10 meter band beacons for signs of DX... I can assure you that the 10 meter band is open a lot more time than propagation forecasting software tell us!!! And that we know it because of the meritorious work of hundreds of amateur radio clubs and individuals around the world that keep those automatic propagation beacons operating. You can program your receivers' or transceivers' memories to the most commonly heard beacon, and just by scanning the memories, catch a very good idea of how propagation conditions are at that very specific moment....
And now that we talk about propagation, here is Arnie Coro's Dxers Unlimited's HF plus 6 meters propagation update and forecast: WARNING -- we may already be well into yet another propagation disturbance caused by the ejected particles erupting from the recent X1 solar flare reaching the Earth. Solar activity will now take a dip, and we may see ahead a period of much lower solar flux than during the previous two weeks. The summer sporadic E season is about to start here in the Northern Hemisphere, and that will bring joy to FM Band and TV Dxers, as well as regular 6 meter band amateur operators...
Send your comments about the program, QSL requests, radio hobby-related questions and ideas for the show to arnie@radiohc.org or VIA AIR MAIL to Arnie Coro, Radio Havana Cuba, Havana, Cuba.... See you on the ham bands, amigos!!! Ten meters: 28.5, Six meters: 50.110, Fifteen meters: 21.295!!!
Prepared 23-Apr-2002; received by NY Transfer News 24-Apr-2002, 13:42 EDT
Arnie Coro CO2KK
Havana, Cuba
April 23, 2002Postal address:
Arnie Coro, "Dxers Unlimited"
Radio Havana Cuba, Havana, CUBA
e-mail: arnie@radiohc.org
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