A bug in KComm

Today started off with me continuing to compare the two morse decoders MRP40 and CW Skimmer in view of PC4T Paul's insistence that the latter was the better morse decoder. When I heard someone calling CQ with no takers I took pity on them and returned their call. JY4NE and C6AKQ went into the log very quickly, in fact so quickly I was left wondering if I had actually worked them. Some people moan that all digital mode operators do is exchange macro files, but in a lot of CW QSOs you barely exchange anything!

Next I replied to a Russian station who was a bit more chatty. Unfortunately my logging program KComm locked up in mid-QSO. It was embarrassing because I was sending from the keyboard and didn't even have a key plugged into the transceiver so I couldn't continue. I'm sure there will be people who would add me to a blacklist for this, but these days I tend to treat CW as just another digital mode. Hence my interest in good decoder programs. :)

KComm has a feature where you can insert the answer to a multiple choice question into the outgoing text. It is expressed like this: %?question|answer 1|answer 2|answer3? which would cause a box to pop up saying "Question" and you click on the answer you want inserted. It was this feature that was causing the program to lock up.

After a couple of hours tracing code in the debugger I could not see what the error was, unless it was a bug in the Lazarus library software. The feature had been in KComm since many versions ago, but this current version was compiled with a new version of Lazarus, so that was a possible explanation. Eventually I managed to modify my program code to avoid the error, with the result that this afternoon there is now a version 2.02 of KComm.

I tested the update by having a QSO with Mik EW8O in Belarus. Then I decided it was time for a rest - I find debugging code these days is mentally exhausting!

Best Morse Decoder

For several years now  I have been of the opinion that the best Morse decoder for Windows PCs is MRP40 by Norbert Pieper. A few days ago Paul PC4T commented to one of my posts that he thought CW Skimmer was better so I thought I would give it a try in case I was missing out.

MRP40 decoding some Morse

I ran both programs simultaneously decoding the same signal. After listening to many QSOs I am still of the opinion that MRP40 is the best decoder. It decoded text more accurately and the spacing between words was better - CW Skimmer would often run words together then insert a space in the middle of a word. Skimmer also seemed on occasion to insert an spurious E at the beginning of some words or calls when I didn't hear an extra dit.

MRP40's decoder is less laggy than CW Skimmer's - text appeared sooner after it was sent. I also found MRP40's AFC useful in locking on to signals. It could track drifting stations and would adjust itself precisely to the signal if you didn't click exactly on the trace. CW Skimmer seemed more fussy and didn't decode a signal unless you got it spot-on. This is perhaps understandable given that Skimmer is intended to be able to distinguish between multiple signals in a pile-up.

CW Skimmer is the better program if you want to decode all the calls in a swathe of spectrum and if you want to link to your logging program so as to highlight new countries or prefixes and mark stations you've previously worked. That is, after all, what it has been designed to do. But as a morse decoder pure and simple MRP40 is still the winner in my book.

Simple keyer complete

At last, I finally got the QRP keyer using KD1JV's Simple Keyer Chip boxed and working.

The completed keyer

As usual, nothing went according to plan. There must be some relative to Murphy's Law that states for any homebrew project the case will be just too small for comfort. A related rule is the one which guarantees that after you have drilled the case, the position of one of the switches or sockets will be in just the place where it fouls one of the components.

After my first attempt at getting it into the box the keyer was dead as a dodo. This turned out to be because I had forgotten to break one of the tracks on the Veroboard.

After the second attempt the keyer responded to the function button but there was no keying. That turned out to be because one of the connecting wires had broken at just the point where it was soldered. With my eyes as they currently are that took a while to spot.

When I had resoldered the connection and put the board into the case for a third time I noticed that another connecting wire was hanging on by one strand of copper. Lesson: don't use hookup wire from China, it is made from inferior grade copper.

View from the front

View from the back

This had taken me a day, so I decided to put the project aside until I felt calmer. The next day I re-made all the connections using new wire, put the board into the case one last time and it actually worked! But Murphy had one last laugh: Now I couldn't find the four screws for the Hammond case I was using. We searched everywhere. Fortunately my parts box had another Hammond case which sacrificed its screws for the benefit of the keyer. Later, Olga and I managed to find suitable replacements in the local DIY emporium so the other case won't be wasted.

This Simple Keyer is just what I need for the simple QRP rigs that only work with a straight key. The code speed is easily adjustable and there are two memories, one of which can be repeated as a beacon. I don't need more sophistication than that for QRP work.

Trials and tribulations

I'm sorry if you are one of the many people who have sent me email expecting a reply, but unfortunately answering emails is one of the things I very often never get around to. Although it might seem from the blog that I am getting back to normal, everything I do still takes me a lot longer than it did when I was fit and well and I'm more prone to making stupid errors. I'm happy that I'm still able to do some of my ham radio activities but what I achieve is often accomplished only after a lot of frustration.

Today the Simple Keyer Chip from Steve Weber arrived in the post. I verified the behaviour of the chip I'd programmed, then replaced it with the new one. I was pleased to find that it now operated at the correct speed - the sidetone was now audible to humans rather than bats and the default speed was rather more sensible. Obviously I'd messed up some setting of the programmer - but the keyer still ignored the dot paddle. I began to suspect that this meant there was something wrong with my wiring, but between my limited field of focus and my shaky hands it took the entire morning - culminating in a lot of bad language - before it eventually dawned on me what was the trouble.

To cut a long story short, the cause of the problem was the 3.5mm socket I was using for a key jack. It had three terminals which I thought were for tip, ring and sleeve, dash, dot and ground. But it was a mono socket! There was no ring connection. One of the three terminals was linked to the other and disconnected when the plug was pushed in, intended to silence a speaker when phones were plugged in. It took me an entire morning including checking the wiring of two morse keys before I discovered my stupidity.

I hunted in my parts drawers and eventually discovered a proper 3.5mm stereo socket. After connecting that in place of the other one I confirmed that the keyer worked as expected. But the frustrating search for the solution had made me tired so I decided to leave the task of drilling the box and finishing the keyer for another day, thereby adding to the list of unfinished tasks alongside the unanswered emails.

Another thing that annoys me is my Rapid Electronics HY3003D bench power supply. It has a rather inconvenient fault for a power supply that is used in a radio shack. The voltage regulation circuit suffers from RFI. If any of my radios transmits, the voltage increases. In some cases it could increase to a level that could damage the circuit I am testing, though fortunately that hasn't happened yet.

I don't always remember to put my APRS gateway or the WSPR (or Opera, which I have been testing today) beacon into receive-only mode whenever I'm working on something. (I've tried clamp-on RFI suppression ferrites on the mains lead and they made no difference.)

Lost treasure

Earlier in the year I was hunting through some folders on my hard drive and discovered an unreleased version of my Morse training program MorseGen. I had no memory at all of having updated it so I had no idea whether I had finished or tested the update. The main changes from the last released version 1.4 appeared to be that there was now a batch mode for creating recordings to play on an MP3 player and a "Common words" mode. This jogged my memory as to the reason for updating the program. A couple of years ago in QST there was an article which suggested that in order to be able to copy Morse at high speed you should learn to recognize the sounds of complete words not just individual letters. So I had added the ability to play random selections from a list of some of the most common words and CW abbreviations.

Today I placed this new version of MorseGen on the G4ILO's Shack website. The previous version is still available to be downloaded in case the new one has problems. My interest in programming has now fallen to absolute zero and I no longer even have the development tools used to compile MorseGen so this is definitely, without argument the last ever version.

This is actually a bit of a nuisance as the new version seems to have a small bug. Occasionally, in Random QSO mode the program will halt with an error message "List index out of bounds." You have to close the error message and continue. I'm guessing that I added some QSO templates and the random number generator sometimes generates a number that is more than the number of templates. If so, this would be easy to fix if I still had the development tools. But I don't, so I can't, so tough luck! But no-one has any grounds for complaint because MorseGen is free!

Despite the bug, I still think MorseGen is a useful program. I often use  it whenever I get the urge to try to improve my Morse reading skills. Admittedly it hasn't done me any good, but I think that is more due to something peculiar to my brain that is just incapable of mastering the code. Over the years since I wrote the first version of MorseGen I've had many emails thanking me for it so it appears that it does work for people less Morse-resistant than me!

Microlight QRP

Keen followers of SOTA will have read about this on the SOTA Reflector, but during the last couple of months Richard G3CWI has been activating summits using a 30m transceiver powered by a 9V PP3/MN1604 battery. This apparently is in response to a challenge set by another keen SOTA activator: Kjell, LA1KHA (who visited us in October 2009.)

I couldn't find many details of the challenge, so I'm just assuming that it was simply to see how many activations could be made using a radio powered by one of these small batteries. Kjell is believed to be using a Small Wonder labs RockMite but Richard built his own transceiver especially for the challenge. The receiver uses a two-crystal ladder filter at the signal frequency, an NE602 mixer, a low noise AF amplifier and active lowpass filter using CMOS op-amps. The transmitter has a crystal oscillator, bipolar buffer, bipolar amplifier and FET class E PA giving 300mW output and an internal Tick1 keyer.

With this transceiver Richard has now activated 10 summits making more than 100 contacts, still using the original PP3 battery! Having established that a PP3-powered transceiver is adequate for reliable activating Richard is now looking for ultra-lightweight HF antennas to get the weight of his portable station down to the absolute minimum.

I think this is a fascinating challenge and hope that Richard will write up the experience in more detail one day, perhaps in his RadCom Portable column or in the G-QRP Club magazine Sprat. This is really what QRP is all about, reducing the equipment to the bare essentials. It also shows the value of CW as the only mode that allows you to use such simple equipment.

Morse USB keyboard

This is a really cool little project.

It isn't clear what it does from the picture, but it's a device that makes a Morse key look to a computer like a standard USB keyboard. So you can type into your word processor, blog or whatever by sending Morse.

I want one of these. If I had to type all my blog posts using Morse I'm sure I would really get my speed up! Shame it isn't available as a kit.

Wobbly memory

Kevin, GW0KIG, has just written in his blog about struggling to brush up his Morse. He first learnt the code at the age of 19 and has "memories of a Morse code tutor program on a borrowed ZX81 computer (remember those?)"

I remember the ZX81 and its wobbly 16KB RAM pack very well. In fact, a Morse tutor was one of the first programs I wrote for it. I wrote an article for Short Wave Magazine which described the program, together with a Morse keyboard with programmable memory and a high-speed Morse sender for meteor-scatter work. It is amusing today to read my conclusion that "it is possible to program the ZX81 to create sophisticated memory keyers." These primitive programs would hardly seem sophisticated today.

The article was published in the August 1982 issue of Short Wave Magazine. I kept a copy and you can see it here. I wonder if my program was the one Kevin used to learn Morse when he was 19? One of these days I might try downloading a ZX81 emulator and see if these old programs will run on it.

New Year's Resolutions 2010

It seems that everyone is making New Year's Resolutions for 2010. I've never been much of a one for making resolutions, since I've never seen the point in promising to do things that I know I won't, but just for the heck of it here are my ham radio resolutions for 2010, most of which are the same as they were for 2009.

1. Use CW more. I have always appreciated the benefits of CW as an efficient mode that helps compensate for the inefficiencies of my attic antennas. But I rarely make CW contacts except to play in the occasional contest. Given the choice between using a mode where my brain has do do the work and one where I can sit back and let the computer do the decoding I always pick the easy option. If I could make myself use CW more then perhaps I'd get to a stage where it didn't seem so hard.

2. Do more walks on the fells. I started Wainwrights On The Air last year mainly to give me more of an incentive to get out for some exercise on the fells. But I always seem to find reasons not to go. Either I've had health problems, or I was put off by the weather (I'm definitely a fair weather walker and that isn't likely to change.) It doesn't help that my wife Olga prefers walking on the level rather than sweating up mountains, which means that I'm only free to go on occasions when she doesn't mind being left at home. But a walk on the fells literally leaves you feeling "on top of the world". It's something I really want to do a lot more of this year.

3. Build more stuff. I really would like to construct more radio items. Hopefully I will finish and get working the SoftRock that I hope to use as a panadapter for my Elecraft K3. Last year I also planned to make a Pixie II transceiver - mainly as an exercise to get me back into building projects from scratch rather than a kit. I have accumulated all the parts, but that is as far as it has got.

I'd also like to make a G3XBM Fredbox transceiver for 2m, though I was thinking of making one to transmit FM rather than AM. I have a couple of reasons for wanting to try this: I tried to make a hand-held 2m FM transceiver back in the early 70s and didn't succeed, so it's unfinished business. And it was building a superregenerative 2m receiver that enabled me to discover 2m and made me want to get my ham license after years of SWL. Anyone got any crystals for 145.500 or other simplex frequencies from defunct 2m FM radios that they would like to get rid of?

QSO by candlelight

On Thursday evening my wife and I were settling down to watch a film on TV when the lights went out. Because of heavy rain Cockermouth was on flood alert and unknown to us as we had not been out the river Derwent had burst its banks and flooded the town centre. I suppose the water had caused a short somewhere and the power had been cut off.

While my wife lit candles I got out the QRP K2, which by good fortune I had only recently charged up its internal SLA battery - which like the K2 is ten years old this year. It was very pleasant to listen to HF bands free of the awful electrical noise I am normally afflicted with.

Only 40m and 80m were open (of the bands I can use) and with only QRP there was not much chance of making an SSB contact. Although I have a battery powered laptop, using digimodes wasn't practical by candlelight since I could hardly see the keyboard. So I had to use CW.

Finding someone to have a contact with proved harder than I expected. When I called someone either they didn't hear anyone at all or replied to somebody else. I called CQ periodically as well. Eventually Peter G0KOK from Dover heard and replied to my call on 80m. Just as I was replying to him my candle went out so I was literally sending in the dark.

Peter gave me a 529 report, with a 559 from me. Peter was running an IC-7600 and presumably 100W so I'm not sure how much he copied from me and whether he realized he was in QSO with someone from a place that was making the news headlines. I had trouble copying him at times, though the QRN was from emergency services sirens and RAF Sea King helicopters hovering overhead not the usual interference from various neighbours' electrical devices.

I signed with Peter just before 10pm, and at about 10 minutes past the lights came back on again. It has been years since we last had a power cut here. If it happened more frequently I'd probably be better prepared for it.

Black Widow paddle for the HB-1A

A few weeks ago I emailed Jerry, W5JH, who makes the Baby Black Widow paddle kits for the Elecraft KX1 and QRP Kits PFR3 to ask whether he had considered making one for the very similar HB-1A. He asked for some measurements which I duly sent and he produced a prototype which attaches to the steel case of the radio using magnets.


The cost will be $42.50 plus shipping. However, Jerry needs at least 10 HB-1A owners to commit to purchase. He posted some information about the key in the HB-1A users Yahoo group but there is no evidence so far of any interest from members (though it's possible some emailed him directly.)

I think that a paddle that attaches to the HB-1A would be a great accessory for use in the field and it would be a shame for this product idea to be stillborn for lack of interest.

An Italian for lunch

Just after lunch today I had a tune around on the little guy, the HB-1A QRP CW transceiver. On 10.116MHz, the 30m QRP activity frequency, I heard Steve, IK6NHA calling CW at about 18wpm with long gaps between the characters, so I gave him a call.

Conditions on 30m this afternoon seemed very unstable. Steve's signal was hitting S9 on the little Chinese radio's meter but with sudden QSB down to the noise level. Steve gave me a 229 report and asked me to repeat my call, though he did get it right the first time. He got all the other details I sent too, which is good going as it turns out he was running 100W. I was running about 4W to the MFJ magnetic loop with the HB-1A on batteries and I was struggling to hear him at times.

Steve's QTH is a town called Tolentino, which I guess is up in the mountains somewhere as the temperature was 7C, colder than it is here (and it's a grey, rainy day today.)

I love Italy. The whole place looks like it is falling down, nobody has heard of DIY and nobody seems to care either. What a great attitude! So different to England where the sound of lawnmowers and pressure washers is never far away and people seem to spend the whole weekend painting and cleaning instead of relaxing and enjoying the rest they've surely earned.

First HB-1A contacts

I made a couple of CW contacts with the HB-1A QRP rig today. It was harder going than I expected, as no-one replied to my CQs, and I couldn't use 20m because the noise level is so high I have to use the MFJ-1026 noise canceler, and that requires a radio that provides a TX switching signal, which the little QRP rigs don't do. So I had to hunt around for people who were not calling CQ DX and also sending at a speed that is comfortable for me.

On 30m I worked Vlada, OK1FLK who was running a 40 year old pair of ex-Army transmitter and receiver and 150W into a long wire. Then I went down to 40m and found Fred, DL3AMB near the European QRP frequency of 7.030MHz. Fred was using an Icom transceiver but only running 2W so this was a two-way QRP contact.

During lunch I set the HB-1A to 10.1387 USB and fed the output to my Samsung NC-10 netbook to see what WSPR beacons I could receive. I returned to find a whole screenful of decoded stations. The HB-1A is certainly sensitive and stable enough to use as an WSPR receiver but of course it has no audio modulator so it can't be used to transmit.

One problem I have found is that the audio starts to clip on any station whose strength exceeds S9 on the HB-1A meter. This distortion is evident using different headphones and earpieces, and even feeding the audio into a computer soundcard so I can look at it using a digimode program as an oscilloscope display. From the comments received so far on the HB-1A Yahoo! group this isn't a common problem so I guess I'm just unlucky. I don't have much in the way of test equipment so I can't troubleshoot the problem, but hopefully it's just a matter of adjustment and someone will tell me what to tweak.

New arrival from China

A knock on the door this afternoon heralded the arrival of my latest QRP radio - an HB-1A 3-band (40/30/20m) CW transceiver from China.

Shipment had taken just over a week and, unlike products ordered from the USA, there was no customs charge or VAT to pay, so the radio cost me a total of £165.

Opening the box revealed the radio extremely well packed in expanded polystyrene, plus a photo-printed card with a picture of BG2FX in his lab - presumably the builder. There was no manual, but the eBay listing had linked to an English language manual in PDF form that I could print out.

The radio itself seems very well made, the impression of solidity created by the heavy steel case which is well-painted in a black crackle finish. As this is intended to be a portable radio, an aluminium case would have saved a bit of weight.

Unscrewing two screws and removing the bottom of the case revealed a bit of a surprise - the two 4 x AA cell battery holders were not connected together or to the plug that connects them to the circuit board. I will have to solder together and insulate the wires myself. Four rubber stick-on feet were also inside the case, which I fitted to the bottom of the case before reattaching it.

Applying 12V DC from my shack power supply I was pleased to find that the HB-1A worked perfectly. There is no loudspeaker, output is headphones only, and best results were obtained using a pair of MP3 player style ear buds. The receiver is no match for a K2, but it is quite lively. Selectivity is reasonable and adjustable in three steps - 900Hz, 700Hz and 400Hz for CW - but stopband performance is quite poor: I could hear strong CW signals a few kHz away.

Although this is a CW-only transceiver it can receive LSB and USB as well. Tuning is continuous from below 40m to above 20m so you can even receive shortwave broadcasters by zero-beating the carrier. There is no bandswitch, but the HB-1A has 20 programmable memories which are pre-loaded with useful frequencies in each band such as the QRP CW frequencies - and the broadcast frequencies of Radio China!

The front panel key jack can accept either a straight key or a paddle. This is detected at power-on. However, for a straight key to be detected the center contact of the stereo jack must be grounded. Other radios I have go into continuous key-down unless this contact is open-circuited. Why can't there be a standard?

I was pleased to see that I got a genuine 5W output for 12V DC input. At 9V DC I measured 3W output. I haven't tried batteries yet as I have not yet wired up the internal battery holders.

The battery holders are a tight fit between components on the circuit board and there is no facility for charging rechargeable cells whilst they are installed. I will find removing the bottom of the case, removing the batteries to recharge them and then reinstalling them a bit of a nuisance, so I will be looking to install a socket so that they can be charged in situ.

Despite calling CQ on both 20m and 40m I haven't managed to have any contacts yet - I guess conditions aren't all that good right now.

With a power consumption less than half that of the FT-817 the HB-1A should give decent battery endurance on a set of rechargeable NiMH cells. This is going to be used as a portable HF rig, so the search is on for a small and equally robust Morse key for it. I'm trying to think how I can adapt the DinKey - which turned out to be such a disappointment when used with the FT-817 - so it can be plugged in to the 3.5mm key socket of the HB-1A.

That's all I have to say about this little Chinese radio for now, but I'm sure you'll be hearing more about it once I get everything set up for operation in the field - assuming that the weather plays ball!

1000 miles per watt with an indoor antenna

Congratulations to John, N8ZYA for receiving the eQSL confirming his contact with LZ2BE on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, made using 5W of CW to an indoor Isotron antenna. At 5,219 miles, that works out at more than 1,000 miles per watt, so John can now claim for the QRP ARCI 1000 Miles Per Watt award to hang on his shack wall.

I suspect it may be easier, perversely enough, to make 1,000 miles per watt using only one watt of power, because then you only need to make a contact of over 1,000 miles, which can be done in a single hop. Looking back in my log, the contact I made with George, KZ1H near Boston, MA on 6 April 2009 using my MFJ Cub must surely qualify. I never even mentioned the contact at the time, as I'd spent the day putting a huff and puff VFO stabilizer into the Cub, and had made the contact simply to test it.

The distance from Boston to the west coast of England is over 3,000 miles, so even though the Cub put out getting on for 1.5 watts into my attic dipole, that's a comfortable 2,000 miles per watt. I only received a 419 report for my signal, compared to John's 559. However, KZ1H isn't a member of eQSL so I'm still waiting for a confirmation of the contact.

DinKey Disappointment

If I take a radio when I go out for a walk, it's usually a VHF handie. That's partly because my wife Olga always comes with me and I think it's more polite to make contacts she can hear than sit with headphones on sending Morse while she twiddles her fingers. But it's also down to all the extra bits and pieces you need to take if you're going to operate QRP HF, like key, ATU, cables and antennas, and the difficulty of actually sending Morse sat on a rock with the radio and key perched on your knee or wherever. There are portable keys available but they are rather expensive. So when I came across the DinKey a few weeks ago I thought it would be a useful and affordable addition to my FT-817 that would encourage me to use it more often out in the field.


Olga collected the DinKey from the Post Office for me yesterday, after paying the £10.72 import tax (about $18) which made it a rather more expensive accessory than it would be for American amateurs. I thought that I would now be regaling my readers with details of my first contacts made using it, but I haven't made any, because I find it almost impossible to send with!

The keyer seemed to be missing dits when they follow dahs within a character, so that "CQ" came out as "KO" or "GO" or sometimes even "MO". I found that the keyer was set to 12wpm so I increased the speed to 16wpm, which is as fast as I can send or receive anyway. That didn't make any difference. Eventually I turned the speed down to 8wpm and I could then send reliably. But that is too slow even for me. The FT-817 batteries would probably be exhausted before the contact was finished!

I spent several hours trying to find the cause of the problem. To cut a long story short I believe that it is because the DinKey uses the FT-817 microphone jack and exploits the option the 817 has to send Morse using the up and down buttons on the microphone. It is not a bad contact or fault in the DinKey per se.

From what I am able to determine by observation, when the FT-817 is busy sending a dah (or a dit) as a result of a closure of one of the mic button contacts it checks for new button closures rather infrequently - perhaps no more than four times a second. This means that when a paddle is closed to send a dit at any normal speed, from 12wpm up, the contact is often closed too briefly for it to be detected. The only way to send reliably is to wait until a dash has been completed before pressing the dot paddle, which results in rather long inter-symbol gaps and rather stilted sounding Morse. When using the microphone buttons it's hard to send very fast anyway because the buttons are quite stiff and any missed dits or dahs would probably be blamed on finger trouble.

Iambic operation is impossible. And although I have never managed to learn true iambic operation - keeping one paddle closed while I briefly close the other to insert a dot into a sequence of dashes or vice versa - clearly my sending style takes advantage of the fact that all electronic keyers support iambic operation which allows me to key slightly ahead of what the radio is sending and let the keyer sort out the spacing. This is not a habit one can easily un-learn, nor do I particularly want to, so I find the DinKey to be just about unusable.

Fred, KF6HQC, the maker of the DinKey, appears to agree with my findings, though he puts it down to "lazy" sending - which I don't agree with - or sending too quickly. He claims that only about 2% of his customers have written to him about this, which I find surprising, though I'm equally surprised that none of the three pages of positive reviews of this product on eHam mention it either.

But perhaps they all send faster than I do. Following Fred's email I tried increasing the speed to 24wpm and found that the DinKey was much more usable because it is harder to key faster than the keyer is sending. The occasional dit was still missed, though.

So it would appear that the DinKey is more or less OK for very proficient CW operators who can send at 24wpm and up (as long as they don't expect iambic operation) but no good for those of us who are only comfortable at slower speeds. I don't send at 24wpm because the keyer runs away from me and adds extra dits and dahs that weren't intended. And I can't receive at that speed anyway. I send slow because that's the speed I want people to come back to me.

Because of what I've had to pay in tax, I shall be out of pocket even if I take up Fred's offer of returning the DinKey for a refund. So I'll keep it and either see if I can use it in another QRP project, rewire it so that it uses the FT-817 mic jack just for support, but plugs into the rear key jack for operation, or wait until I can manage 24wpm - though the latter isn't very likely to happen.

SSB a struggle

There is an IARU contest on this weekend and the thought occurred to me that this might be a good opportunity to try to make some SSB contacts with the Wonder Loop and FT-817ND. It started well enough on 20m when S53M came right back to my call and completed the contact without difficulty. A few minutes later DJ1AA was in the log - I had to repeat the exchange a few times and make sure he logged my call as ILO not LLO, but he got it in the end. But after that, nothing. One station copied me as G4LLO and gave up after failing to get the year of my license. Another heard that a G4 was calling, but that was all.

I think conditions must have been extremely poor. I cannot recall a contest where no stations were above S9 on the FT-817 meter.

I then decided to try my K2 to get a bit of extra power - 10W instead of 5W. But it was as if I was not there. I started to wonder if something had gone wrong with the Wonder Loop so I took the feeder from my multi-band dipole and plugged it into the K2's other antenna socket. But there was very little difference in signal strengths between the two.

While tuning around 40m I heard DJ2OD calling CQ on CW, so I plugged my Russian straight key into the K2 and called him on the Wonder Loop using 5 watts. He came straight back to my call, gave me a 579 report and we completed a QSO. No hassle, no frustration!

CW Rules!

Young people and ham radio

Roger, G3XBM, writes about a talk he gave last night to a local radio club, and notes on how few young people were there. He comments that this is an issue we have to address, and concludes: "Even after 50 years, radio still is magical for me."

When I first got interested in radio, the idea of communicating with distant places by bouncing waves off the ionosphere was magical compared to the alternatives: expensive international phone calls or posting a letter. But I fear that to today's younger generation, brought up on reliable worldwide communication using the mobile phone and internet, the unpredictability of radio communication may look less like magic and more like a dull old trick. We have to try and put ourselves in their shoes and ask "what's in it for us?"

There have always been geeky types who are interested in how radio works for its own sake, but these days many of those people will find even more interest in doing clever stuff with computers. What's more, computers don't need getting permission from your parents to festoon the house with aerials, nor do they interfere with Mum's watching Coronation Street or brother's computer speakers.

To sell ham radio to young people you need to promote it as cool and fun. I'm probably completely mad, but perhaps the answer is right under our noses, something that has been written off as outdated by many amateurs: morse code. There have been several stories recently about young people who got interested in radio by hearing code transmissions and wanting to understand what was being said. They pick the code up quickly, too, at that age.

So perhaps you could get youngsters interested by allowing them to use QRP CW on, say, 20m or 30m, in a narrow frequency range? All you'd need is a VXO transmitter and direct conversion receiver, which could be manufactured for very low cost. A couple of watts and a simple wire antenna such as an end fed dipole, even indoors, would produce some surprising contacts. When I was a kid, reading about ham radio and thinking "gosh, you have to be rich to be able to do that" I'd have loved to be able to get on the air with something so simple.

Stuart Makes His First Contact

Thanks to Larry, W2LJ, for mentioning this wonderful story in KB6NU's blog. Read it, it will probably be the most heartwarming thing you'll read all day.

Morse Machine

Due to the fact that Tech-Pro.net will be closing its software downloads site, G4ILO's Shack has become the download page for Morse Machine.

Morse Machine is a Windows version of the Morse Code Teaching Machine designed by Ward Cunningham which was first described in an article in the May 1977 issue of QST. It teaches Morse code using the Koch Method. Right from the start, it sends quickly enough that you have to learn to recognize the sound of each letter. The slowest speed it will send at is 20wpm, so after a few weeks of practise you will be able to receive at that speed.

When I first discovered this program I was extremely impressed, and made huge improvements in my Morse receiving speed. However, the Windows version of the program on the original site is not a true Windows program, and it caused 100% CPU usage while it was running, which made my laptop overheat. That is not a problem with this version (which also runs very well on Linux using wine.)