Soon it will be the first RaDAR Challenge for 2019. The have heard of and seen a few large snakes sailing around the area, some pretty dangerous too, like the BOOMSLANG!
So I decided it’s time to clear the RaDAR training ground a little to make it a little safer to walk around and at least have room to deploy an antenna quickly without the wire getting tangled in some thick bush.
I started on Friday afternoon …..
140cc four stroke engine
I started by making a new road …..
I’m pretty impressed with the power of this motor!
So I started cutting the path …. It didn’t take too long considering.
The wild fowls liked to scratch around here afterwards.
Where possible I want to clear the grass around the natural trees. Most trees are of the thorny kind, the worst being the “Haak en steek” but a beautiful tree nevertheless and the bees love them!
A prime example
I used a nearby overgrown gravel road to make up the last few meters of a full kilometer loop but needed some cutting too.
The gravel road
My grandson did some trail running on the route.
A sharp turn it seems A brief piece of shade
Tomorrow I’ll need to take a half days leave to clear an area next to the fence my immediate neighbour thinks needs cutting. I can’t agree more. The previous owner of this area never, ever bothered ….
Just being naighbourly ….. the task that faces me.The RaDAR Playground – Alias E-Trail
RF Space’s SDR-IQ in action using Spectravue software
It wasn’t a bad idea to start up a QRP CW beacon here in South Africa.
I might add that it is Region 1 policy, “It is recommended that HF Beacons may be established on the 1,8, 3,5 and 7 MHz band in the regions of Africa south of the Equator. (REC/99/LH/C4.1 – Lillehammer 1999)”
I had discussed the matter with the Region 1 HF Beacon Coordinator, Dennis Green ZS4BS. The SARL also suggests the following frequencies for beacons on 40 metres : 7 039.000; 7 039.200, 7 039.400, 7 039.600, 7 039.800
During a discussion with Raoul ZS1C and Roger M0ORD (Ex ZS6RJ) on our local SARL Forum, suggestions were made to rather set up a reverse beacon network as none were pesently running in South Africa or AFRICA for that matter! Roger ran one before moving to the UK a few years ago.
Roger had just what was needed, an unused RF Space SDR-IQ receiver. He donated the SDR for the cause and even paid the courier costs too! It arrived on my doorstep within a week. I will do my part to make ZS part of the RBN now too.
Trying to figure out the software was initially running around in circles starting on Windows 10. I wasn’t sure what was the norm. I tried Spectravue and the lED’s on the SDR showed “something”. I couldn’t resolve any stations though with a simple wire antenna plugged in. My XYL is using my laptop since I still need to replace the internal battery of her ASUS 555 so could not have too much access to my computer!
I had an old XP tower machine in the back room and fired it up. There were a few hiccups, almost like an engine that had not been started in years. This was similar but it seemed to settle down after a while. Fortunately it has working USB ports so I copied what I found on the Net to it’s hard drive via a USB stick.
Somehow, when plugging in, the SDR’s lights would momentarily flash and then “die”. I imagined maybe the SDR was drawing more current than these old USB ports could deliver so I put a powered USB hub in line. The result was the same.
Then I tried on my grandson Eduan’s old windows 7 laptop and did the Spectravue installation according to the instructions and eventually got the LED’s to light up and it appears that this happens only when the PC and SDR start talking to each other – via a driver no doubt!
Back to the Windows XP machine. I followed the instruction for the driver installation and after the while the SDR LED’s lit! I now know what the “Norm” is. I plugged in the same antenna.
After a while I started to figure out how the Spectravue software works and started browsing the HF spectrum. I could find no amateur radio activity but found two reasonably strong AM stations around 3 MHz. One was the BBC world service and the other a local broadcasting station.
The weekend has arrived and time to play (After the normal chores have been done). The next goal is to find some ham activity and then starts the real software setup challenges to get the SDR working with CW Skimmer, the RBN “Aggregator” and get some spots gated to the RBN via the Internet.
For a permanent solution, I have an idea to “fix” my old HP 210 netbook which runs three lightweight versions of Linux and return it to a windows 7 environment seeing the RBN software support exists only on Windows. I have an old hard disk that came from one of my damaged laptops from many years ago that has a Windows 7 image on it. Looking forward to seeing the history that was once stored on it too!
I’ve been working on building this trail for a few weeks now going out for an hour or so each Saturday with the bush cutter. I’ve already used up a blade and a half but the trail has now been cut.
I have a link dipole out there about hundred meters from home where I occasionally go out and make a QRP contact or two with my Xiegu X5105 or YouKits HB1A.
Today my grandson and I took on the challenge of doing five laps each at his own pace. He lapped me at 2.25km and finished his 5k in a good time, way ahead of his granddad 🙂 My time according to the Forerunner 305 was 43:51 an average pace of 8:53 minutes per kilometer. Very slow – It’s a rough route and so it must be.
Soon I’ll try a little on foot RaDAR here. The bush is quite dense in places which makes quick deployments of antennas rather challenging but hey we don’t get to choose the environments in an emergency or RaDAR Ops.
Now it’s just a matter of a little upkeep of the trail environment. Soon I’ll be able to use a petrol lawnmower in place of the bush cutter!!! At every opportunity I move those rocks that can be moved to the side and out of the way.
Conditions on HF have not been good for quite some time now. If you’ve ever played with WSPR your signals may be heard worldwide even with conditions as they are but WSPR is not a QSO and doubtfully would be quite as successful if a SSB or CW QSO was taken into account. I think of it much like that as heard during meteor scatter pings.
So I proposed a QRP beacon on 40m to alert human communicators to possible NVIS (Local communications) openings. Calling CQ for hours on end running QRP delivered few results even after alerting other operators to the fact via our WhatsApp groups. It becomes quite demoralising!
Let’s face it, QRP stands no chance when even a 100 Watts get’s you nowhere and on occasions even a few hundred Watts!
The proposal for “another” beacon on 40m was met with mixed results and I know the politics on this. The belief is that the beacons could, and probably do, interfere with rare DX opportunities even when the beacon uses a mere 200 Hz within a few tens of kilohertz bandwidth. There are also no official beacon frequencies that I know of for 40m?
Some found value with the proposal during the past weekend of tests where it was started on the Saturday morning and stopped on the Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, some time during the day on Sunday, one of the two 7A/Hr SLABS in parallel went short circuit limiting the voltage to 6.8 volts. On fault determination it was cut away and normal recharging of the second battery was successful. This was an eye opener, I’d never seen this happen before with a SLAB!
A YouKIts HB1A was used as a transmitter on 7.037 MHz pushing around 3W. The predefined keying sequence was done using a programmed Arduino NANO driving a relay board to generate morse code sending “ZS6BNE KG34AC PWR 3W” at around 16 w.p.m. It was just a matter of wiring the relay contacts to the key input of the HB1A through a 3.5mm jack. The Arduino performed pretty well and was still operational even at 6.8 v supply through a dedicated voltage regulator regulating a 5 v supply.
The antenna was a linked dipole in inverted vee form held at around 4.5 m at the apex by a dual back to back painters pole mast. The beacon performed relatively well but more human reports are required to prove it’s viability which was not quite as forthcoming as one would expect. Nothing was heard from the RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) proving DX conditions to be as bad!
The beacon was heard by Dennis ZS4BS in Bloemfontein but the signal was rather weak. Other reports received via WhatsApp were as follows:
Werner in Namibia – “Hearing CW”.
Andy ZS6ADY – “Sig about 449 with qrn…”
Jannie ZS3CM – “Morning Eddie. Can still hear beacon in De Aar. Same as yesterday. Clouds building again. Looks like more rain!!!!!!!!!”
Jannie sent a recording and the signal in my opinion was rather good!
Mike ZS6MSW/p (Natal) – “Moving camp on Wednesday to Northern Berg, hopefully RST noise will be less than 9 plus. THAT beacon was a tremendous assistance to guage our conditions. 73’s”
Eric ZS5EL – “Nothing on 7037 here this morning, I’ll keep monitoring”
The battery failure occured some time on the Sunday.
Eddie ZS6BNE – “Sunday 3rd Februrary 14:15 – Shutting down the beacon.
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