Finally got my first REAL HD camcorder. I tried one of those flip cameras from a Black Friday deal at best buy back about 3 years ago. I think I used that particular camera 4x before it just died. The battery worked fine the camera when you turned it on just didnt power up.
anyhow.. back to the JVC Everio Camcorder. GZ-E200BUS.
And now I present my first time lapse video with it.
Not too bad for out a side window of my house. Through a dark screen and about 10 minutes after removing it from the box.
A couple observations.
1. Wow the sun goes down fast when it gets to a certain point.
2. Didnt know the neighbor was going to cut the grass, sorry Mark.
Not too bad for 150 dollars shipped off a random Woot.com deal.
I have been using a random wire antenna for quite a while now. The first one I created was for Dayton Hamvention where my son and I camped at Buck Creek which is an Ohio State Park. At Buck Creek we threw up the antenna about 30 foot into a tree close to our camping site and with about a s2 noise level we had probably the best radio experience to date. Taking a look back at the geography of the area it is easy to understand why. The camping area is surrounded by lake on 3/4 sides and the whole camping area is about 30 foot above the land surrounding the camping sites. This almost entirely made up for the prevalence of Poison Ivy.
That was the first experience with the "not so random wire" The second was field day. Same results here. The noise was higher being that we were down at the USS COD downtown Cleveland but we still got out fine and made plenty of contacts. The Ohio QSO party was done with the same random wire in my back yard operating "picnic table" portable. This "not so random wire" operated better than my 80m center fed dipole at the home. The location was the same but performance was now. This year we joined the Ohio State Parks on the air competition and activated Punderson. Another location just like Dayton Hamvention. The spot we picked was a good 500-600 foot above most of the surrounding area. So anyhow. because websites come and go I locked this stuff for my records. Here it is. The document I used to create the cheapest.. AND the best antenna I have ever used.
The "Best" Random Wire Antenna
Lengths Random wire lengths you
should and should not use!
Updated 06-29-2012
The random
wire antenna is probably one of the least expensive, easiest and
cheapest HF antennas to use if you have a tuner and you want to
get the "most" out of a length of "random" wire without having to
pull out that calculator, doing the math, getting the center
insulator built or bought, running the feedline, and all the
rest that goes with putting up a more elaborate antenna. All you
need for a random wire antenna is some wire, your tuner, one or more
supports up as high as you can get them to string the wire from the
supports to the tuner, at least one or two insulators and a
little time.
One single wire, no solder
connections, very simple.... all the way from the tuner to
the end support. That's it in a nutshell.....or
is it?
Many hams have tried till they are blue
in the face to install the random wire antenna that works on most;
if not all of the HF bands with terrible results.
Swr usually is all over the place and the
tuner will just not do it's job. You can get good loading and low
swr on sometimes 2 or 3 bands, but one or more of the bands
that you want, just will not cooperate with an swr that can be
adjusted with the "tuner".
So after much frustration..down it comes
and you go on to a totally different type of antenna....all that
time just wasted in your opinion.....until now!
We recently found some good information
about random wire lengths that you should and should
not use.
Jack,
VE3EED, hopefully has solved a major headache we all have when we
attempt to go thru the trial and error and frustration with getting
the random wire to work where WE want it to work.
He knew that in order for the tuner to
"see" a fairly low swr to work within it's range, that the
antenna had to be NOT A HALF WAVE ON ANY FREQUENCY that we
wanted to us, because a half wave will give us a very high impedance
and the resulting swr into a 50 ohm transmitter!
So Jack took most of one day, did the
math with the aid of his trusty calculator, several cups of coffee
and came up with...............................
In Jack's own words....
"Here's the word on random-wire
antennae."
Presented for your
consideration by Jack, VE3EED. The table below
represents half wave lengths and multiples that you DO NOT WANT TO USE!
You have to stay away from a
half wavelength on any frequency. Therefore, we came up with the
following numbers to avoid (IN FEET):
These lengths in the table below are
the culpritsthat cause all of
the trouble when using random lengths.
Frequency MHz
1/2 Wave
2nd Multiple
3rd Multiple
4th Multiple
1.9
246
492
738
984
3.8
123
246
369
492
7.2
65
130
195
260
10.1
46
92
138
184
14.2
33
66
99
132
18.1
26
52
78
104
21.3
22
44
66
88
24.9
19
38
57
76
28.5
16
32
48
64
So those are the
numbers above that we have to stay as far away from as possible
when building a long-wire antenna.
REVISION NOTE: We had a note from James,
KB5YN, pointing out that one of my so-called GOOD numbers was 220
feet. That is the 10th multiple of a half wave on 15 meters. Well, I
didn't think it would make any difference at that many multiples.
However, the radio didn't tune up very well on 15 meters.
So,
having nothing better to do one day, I re-did the calculations going
out to 500 feet. That meant calculating all the way to 32 multiples
of a half wave on 10 meters. I won't bore you with all that so the
first portion of this still only shows up to the 4th multiple. There
are so many new frequencies to stay away from, that it gets pretty
tricky for the longer wires. However, the list has been revised and
is good for wires as long as 500 feet. 73.... JACK, VE3EED
This year camping at Buck Creek State Park was fantastic the weather was 70 during the day and high 60s at night. Absolutely perfect.
Gave me an absolutely perfect time to operate portable in the best radio enviroment I have ever been in. S1 noise levels because if you look at the map. There is literally NOTHING around you there.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
North American QSO Party.
This contest snuck up on my quite quickly. I didnt really know about it until the friday before when it was mentioned at my West Park Radio Ops Meeting. A contest! excellent. I figured I would go for it. No stress just an easy contest to do. I talked to my friend Mark NB8I and he was going to operate from his shack so I decided to go over and see what he was up to. When I got there I finally got to see it live. His Yaesu FT-950 his 50 foot tower and his beam antenna. What a cool setup. I took a video of him spinning the beam around. (This was totally staged by the way)
Now that was cool to see that in real life. It was intestesting to hear him operate too. He has the Yaesu Ft-950 and a bunch of other equipment too like the "LP-PAN" adapter. Now this thing was something cool. Something so cool that it makes me want to upgrade my rig now to get one of these. Basically it looked like the coolness of SDR without your rig being a featureless dumb metal box.
I am sorry that to me doesnt look like a radio. I dont like it. I wont buy it especially how expensive it is. However get a ft-950 and lp-pan and this is what you see
Look at that. How cool. So take your nice ft-950 and make it act like a SDR all for a couple hundred dollars. (The hardware is what costs the software is free) That was cool to see that. Now I can justify the need for a FT-950 in the future. Anyhow cool shack and some interesting equipment. Mark also is able to share comports with multiple devices. I tried the software on mine so I could use N1MM and HRD at the same time. I even got a special comport sharing software. None of it worked.
That is what I did after I left Mark's I was all enthusiastic about participating in the contest so I ran home with the new comport program idea and thinking I woudl be able to use N1mm to log the contest results and then HRD to control the rig.
I spent about 4 hours of contest time trying to mess with the program and it never wound up working the radio would send crazy data to N1MM and the frequency would go to .356 or something. Anyhow abandoned that project went straight N1MM and finished off the contest.
Final results for the North American QSO party was this.
QSO: 14000 PH 2012-08-18 2105 NA8Y John OH NB8I MARK OH QSO: 7266 PH 2012-08-19 0054 NA8Y John OH NT8Z SCOTT OH QSO: 7250 PH 2012-08-19 0056 NA8Y John OH WW9R PAT WI QSO: 7270 PH 2012-08-19 0100 NA8Y John OH N8BV BRUCE OH QSO: 7263 PH 2012-08-19 0101 NA8Y John OH K4RO TOM TN QSO: 7254 PH 2012-08-19 0103 NA8Y John OH KF4GDX ROBERT SC QSO: 7244 PH 2012-08-19 0106 NA8Y John OH W9IMS BILL IN QSO: 7234 PH 2012-08-19 0108 NA8Y John OH NW3H BILL PA QSO: 7229 PH 2012-08-19 0110 NA8Y John OH WX3B JIM MD QSO: 7226 PH 2012-08-19 0114 NA8Y John OH W0IW JOE IA QSO: 7223 PH 2012-08-19 0116 NA8Y John OH K9CT AL IL QSO: 7203 PH 2012-08-19 0121 NA8Y John OH NN3W JACK VA QSO: 7200 PH 2012-08-19 0122 NA8Y John OH AB9H JOE IL QSO: 7197 PH 2012-08-19 0124 NA8Y John OH K4YP ED NC QSO: 14283 PH 2012-08-19 0132 NA8Y John OH NX5M BOB TX QSO: 14265 PH 2012-08-19 0136 NA8Y John OH VE3PUX JOHN ON QSO: 7183 PH 2012-08-19 0146 NA8Y John OH K0RH JIM KS QSO: 7192 PH 2012-08-19 0156 NA8Y John OH NX5M BOB TX QSO: 7201 PH 2012-08-19 0200 NA8Y John OH W4DXX ERIC GA QSO: 3779 PH 2012-08-19 0234 NA8Y John OH WW9R PAT WI QSO: 3773 PH 2012-08-19 0236 NA8Y John OH KS3D JIM DE QSO: 3824 PH 2012-08-19 0237 NA8Y John OH VE3PUX JOHN OH QSO: 14264 PH 2012-08-19 0248 NA8Y John OH W0BH BOB KS QSO: 14250 PH 2012-08-19 0411 NA8Y John OH WO4DX GARY GA QSO: 14253 PH 2012-08-19 0415 NA8Y John OH KL7RA RICH AK QSO: 14220 PH 2012-08-19 0451 NA8Y John OH KK7PR RALPH OR QSO: 3802 PH 2012-08-19 0455 NA8Y John OH WX3B JIM MD QSO: 3794 PH 2012-08-19 0503 NA8Y John OH WB4OMM STEVE OH QSO: 3784 PH 2012-08-19 0511 NA8Y John OH K0EA TERRY MN QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0515 NA8Y John OH KK9V MIKE IN QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0516 NA8Y John OH K4HTA TED VA QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0520 NA8Y John OH KD9MS CRAIG IL QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0521 NA8Y John OH WM9Q RON IL QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0527 NA8Y John OH W8TM PAUL OH QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0528 NA8Y John OH VE3KP KEN ON QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0530 NA8Y John OH W8TOM TOM MI QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0535 NA8Y John OH W9AV CLINT WI QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0536 NA8Y John OH W0IW JOE IA QSO: 7000 PH 2012-08-19 0543 NA8Y John OH K7RL MITCH WA QSO: 7000 PH 2012-08-19 0548 NA8Y John OH N2BJ BARRY IL
40 contacts only and
CLAIMED-SCORE: 1320
Not to shabby. Not my best performance but I had some fun. The dipole is really limiting me here. The noise level on 80 and 40 is really high.. sometimes as high as 20 over. I am not sure if that is where I live (inside the city) or some flaw with the antenna. I will have to figure that out here sometime soon.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
APRS on the Cheap. My next project for the motorcycle.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Learning Morse Code as an Amateur Extra Class "No-Code" Operator
I have been a Amateur Radio Operator for over 2 years now and while I have enjoyed the phone parts of the bands I hear things in the morse code section way more frequently than than the phone bands. I have done the digital modes before too but I yearn to understand the simplicity of CW. I dont need a computer all I need is my radio gear and my straight key.
I set out on this quest over a year ago. The target was Dayton Hamvention 2012. Why? because when I went to Dayton Hamvention 2011 two friends I was with K8VIT and W8ZIP were at a display of morse code keys and playing around with them. They were sending morse on the keys and then laughing hysterically at themselves. I didn't understand what they were keying out but I was definitely intrigued. I set a goal for Dayton Hamvention 2012 as the date where I would become 'functional" with Morse Code.
To accomplish this goal I downloaded the app from "JustLearnMorseCode.com"
http://www.justlearnmorsecode.com/
I set the pitch for 900. I set the words per minute to 5/18. Everything was fine up until I hit about 15 characters. I tried this method 3 times and each time around 15 characters they would start all sounding the same. I would get frustrated and stop again. This program was a great app but it just seems like I am repeatedly hitting a wall for some reason. I am not making progress and I stop. The period between stops gets longer and longer too.
To that end I am looking for other programs to learn morse code. I am going to try some different methods too, to see which if any work better for me and my learning style. It sure is great having the computer to aid me in my quest for CW "ability".
I have downloaded an application called Morse Machine today, the difference in this application is that it waits for you to type the character before proceeding.
I think I like that more. I dont like letting them pass me then hitting delete and trying to type in letters. I realize that you just are supposed to skip the ones you miss, I just have trouble at this point thinking that is good for learning since I am 100% new. I also know that my Yaesu FT-2900s all have morse code training inside them.
I have never tried the "cassette tapes" method either which I am sure would be enhanced by the ability to use the computer or play MP3s.
I am going to keep plugging away and try to remember that learning this new language is supposed to be fun and I should enjoy the process. I am not learning for a test or a deadline. I am learning for my own enjoyment. At 41 years old today I have a lot of time left to enjoy Amateur Radio and morse code, with all these solar storms affecting phone conversations in the Amateur Bands CW still gets through. Onward and upward I say.
If you have any hints or ideas I would love to hear the other methods that can be used. I am not sure the Justlearnmorsecode.com way works for me. The jury is still out on the "Morse Machine" way of doing things. I could easily be convinced to listen to recordings too.
Finally got my first REAL HD camcorder. I tried one of those flip cameras from a Black Friday deal at best buy back about 3 years ago. I think I used that particular camera 4x before it just died. The battery worked fine the camera when you turned it on just didnt power up.
