Ham radio is a hobby that has something for almost anybody.  Some people like talking with local friends while commuting and others like working the high frequency bands to talk with people all over the world.  There are those for whom the attraction is all in the hardware–fiddling with the radios–and they talk on the radio just enough to confirm that their creations work.  There are contests, different operating modes, antennas to build, and special events to participate in.

One of the purposes of the amateur radio service, as laid out by the forerunner of the Federal Communications Commission, is to provide a ready source of trained operators with their own equipment who can provide emergency communications in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.  Hams from all over the country provided assistance in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita–providing emergency, priority, and health and welfare traffic in the aftermath of those storms.  Ham radio was the only reliable form of communications in large parts of rural Texas for weeks after Rita come through.  Local police and fire communications systems, cell phone towers, and standard telephones were done for extended periods.  Within hours of the storm’s passing, there were amateurs in the affected areas setting up communications systems at dispatch centers and riding in emergency vehicles.

The Amateur Radio Relay League formalizes the emergency services in ARES–the Amateur Radio Emergency Service.  ARES members attend formal and informal training sessions to learn emergency procedures and to practice operating in emergency situations.  We are “first responders,” who work closely with local agencies (cities and counties) to help with communications in the event of an emergency.  On an annual basis we get together with other groups, sometimes with our served agencies, and hold a drill:  a simulated emergency test, or SET.

Today’s SET was a simulated weather event, with heavy thunderstorms and tornadoes in the area.  This time I served as the backup net control operator, helping to pass traffic among the many served agencies (county command post, city command posts, and two hospitals) while monitoring the storm spotters’ frequency in order to notify the net of weather events.  It sounds like a bunch of old guys playing a silly game, but it’s actually a pretty good simulation.  We had to do something like this for real just a few months back when we thought Rita would be making its way through Central Texas.  The beauty of the drill is that we can work out kinks in our equipment and simulate things that might happen, like one of the command posts being taken out or our primary communications repeater going silent.

The drill went from 8:00 until 11:30 in the morning, and then we headed out to our leader’s house for food and drinks and a short critique of the exercise.  All in all it was an interesting and informative way to spend a Saturday morning.

I dislike drilling holes in my truck.  As you can imagine, that makes it somewhat difficult to mount a radio in the cab.  My solution to the problem is this industrial strength Velcro that I picked up at Home Depot a couple of years ago.  It’s plenty strong enough to support a two pound radio.  At least, the hook and loop part is.  The adhesive on the back is another matter entirely.

The radio hangs from a bracket that’s designed to be bolted to a surface.  The top of the bracket is flat, making it an excellent place to stick on a piece of Velcro.  I used sandpaper to rough up the painted surface, cleaned the surfaces with the recommended alcohol-based cleaner, and attached the Velcro pads.  Like magic, the radio was stuck under the dashboard.  Until I parked the truck outside in the sun.  I came back to find the radio on the floorboard, the Velcro pieces still stuck to the dashboard.  The adhesive backing had peeled away from the mounting bracket.

Never one to give up easily, I pulled out my trusty tube of handyman’s all-purpose adhesive and glued the Velcro strip to the bracket.  I let it sit overnight and the next morning installed it in the truck.  And that’s the way it’s worked for about a year.  Recently I noticed that the adhesive was starting to peel away again and over the weekend I found the radio hanging by a very thin strip.  This was an interesting failure mode.  My glue didn’t come off.  The adhesive backing peeled away from the Velcro strip.

That all-purpose adhesive is some sticky stuff and hard to remove from whatever surface you’ve placed it on.  I soaked the bracket and the Velcro strip in a little Orange TKO overnight.  This morning the adhesive came right off.  The laundry room smells like orange oil, but that’s a small price to pay.

My problem now is figuring out how to mount the darned radio.  I still don’t like drilling holes.  I’m tempted, now that the adhesive backing is all gone, to try again with the all-purpose adhesive.  But I’m open to suggestion.  Anybody have ideas?

Today and tomorrow mark ARRL Field Day 2005, the annual ham radio event where we all head out to remote locations, set up temporary stations, and see how many stations we can contact.  Okay, so it’s a 2-day geek fest for radio nerds.  We actually do benefit from it.  The idea is to simulate operating for an extended period in an emergency, using power other than from the commercial power lines.  Mostly that means gas powered generators.

There are many different categories of stations and many different ways to earn extra points beyond the points you get for making contacts.  There are points awarded for having an elected official visit the site, for having a press release published in the paper, making a contact via one of the amateur radio satellites, special modes, and natural power.  For the second year in a row our club’s natural power source was me riding a bicycle.

I wrote up last year’s experiment here.  That setup used a small Plymouth alternator to convert my pedaling into electrical power that was stored in a battery.  We charged the battery and used it to make our required five contacts to earn the 100 points for a natural power source.  There were two problems with that setup.  First, a lot of my pedaling effort was wasted exciting the field for the alternator.  Second, it just wasn’t very sexy.  Pointing to a battery and saying “I charged that by pedaling” doesn’t have quite the same effect as driving the radio directly from the bicycle generator.

This year my friend Steve Cowell (KI5YG) got hold of a 24 volt electric scooter motor and wired up a voltage regulator.  If you turn an electric motor, it acts like a generator.  We attached the motor to the bicycle using the same V-belt we used last year, put a 22,000 μf capacitor in-line to insulate me from the transmitter load, and attached the radio to the voltage regulator.  32 minutes of medium-hard pedaling later and we had our five contacts.  That was a whole lot easier than the hours and hours of pedaling I had to do last year in order to charge the battery.

I don’t have a decent picture of it yet, but Thursday Debra bought me an early Christmas present:  a Kenwood TS-450S transceiver.  It’s a high frequency (HF) radio that covers all of the amateur bands from 160 meters to 10 meters, and supports AM, FM, SSB, CW, and FSK operation.  The unit has an automatic antenna tuner that appears to work quite well with my horizontal loop.  The only drawback being that the tuner doesn’t work on the 160 meter band.  I hadn’t planned on working that band for a while anyway, so it’s no great loss to me.

Over the weekend I installed the permanent feed line from my operating position out to the loop around the garage, and I’ve been playing with it as I have time.  On Friday and Saturday I managed to contact 22 out of 108 National Weather Service stations that were participating in SKYWARN Recognition Day.  Not bad for a modest station, an inexperienced operator, and only a few hours’ effort. This evening I made my first contact with a station in South America: a Brazilian station that was booming in on the 20 meter band.

This coming weekend is the ARRL 10-meter contest, where stations try to contact as many others as possible.  I won’t be able to work the entire contest, but I’ll spend some time trying to fill out my Worked All States card.  Who knows?  I might even reach out and touch a long lost friend.

I continue to be surprised by the generosity of the people I’ve met since getting involved in ham radio last year.  As I noted last Saturday, I’d passed my General license exam but had no radio with which to exercise my new privileges.  I mentioned that to a fellow club member on Sunday and he offered to let me borrow his HF rig:  a Kenwood TS-450S along with a very nice antenna tuner.  It took me a couple of days to get it all hooked up and operating correctly, time being at a premium for the short work week, but by Wednesday night I was able to make some contacts.  I’ve talked now to people in New York, Maryland, Wisconsin, Arizona, and on Anguilla Island in the Caribbean (just east of Puerto Rico).

Until I actually started operating on HF, I really couldn’t understand the attraction.  I thought it might be a cool novelty, but it’s more than that.  I was incredibly excited today when I was able to talk to the guy in the Caribbean.

Now to sharpen up my Morse Code skills…

I spent every night this past week studying to upgrade my ham radio license from Technician to General.  Upon getting home from work, I’d spend an hour reviewing FCC rules, basic circuits, operating procedures, and other such things that I’d be tested on.  Then I’d spend 30 or 60 minutes listening to sample conversations in Morse Code.  It made for some long nights, trying to get the studying in and also finish up a few articles that I’d committed to.

Today I passed both the Morse Code test and the General theory test, which means that now I am a General Class amateur radio operator, with privileges to operate on the high frequency (HF) bands that make it possible to talk long distances:  all the way around the world if I have the proper equipment and conditions are good. 

And there’s the problem.  I don’t have a working HF transmitter.  I have a receiver and an antenna, but I’m missing the transmitter and a few other critical pieces of equipment.  I have a non-working transmitter, my grandfather’s old Hallicrafters HT-37, but it needs some work before I can put it on the air.  I’m asking around to see if anybody has a loaner, but no luck so far.  I’m hoping that I’ll find a new radio under the tree next month.  Until then, I’m like a little kid waiting for that Christmas that seems like it’ll never get here.

I know the picture’s not all that great, but it’s about the best I can do with this little Creative PC Cam.  What you’re looking at is a code practice oscillator that I build from a schematic I found on the Web.  The thing is incredibly simple, but I managed to have quite a bit of trouble putting it together.  But I was fairly impressed, considering that it was my first electronics project.  I managed to get it working without smoking any parts or burning anything important with the soldering iron.

The heart of the circuit is a 555 timer chip, that performs some kind of magic that normally would take a transistor and a few other parts.  I’m still trying to understand exactly how the circuit works.  My knowledge of resistors, capacitors, and the like is limited to their theory of operation.  I can kind of explain what one of these little do-dads does, but I can’t really say what it’s good for in a circuit.  I keep learning.

I like the circuit except for a couple of things.  First, the sound is very high pitched.  I lowered the value of the 150 K ohm resister in the circuit to lower the tone, but it didn’t seem to help much.  That’s a minor problem, and I might try an even lower value to get the squeak out.  The more annoying problem is that the thing “chirps” after it’s been resting a while.  That is, I’ll press the key and the speaker will output a tone and then quickly transition to a higher tone.  It sounds almost like the “boo-BEEP” of a video game.  I think the problem is that the battery isn’t a very well regulated supply.  That’s the theory.  One of my ham radio friends suggested I install a voltage regulator chip to see if that solves the problem.

People seem to like putting these little circuits in Altoids tins.  Just to be different, I gutted an old two-button mouse and mounted the thing in there.  The tail consists of the two wires going out to the code key.

A code practice oscillator, by the way, is basically a box that beeps when you complete the circuit.  It’s used for practicing Morse Code.

I finally managed to get everything together to mount a 2 meter vertical antenna on the house. This is one of those projects that should have taken just a couple of hours, but ended up taking weeks.

The antenna is a Cushcraft Ringo Ranger (that’s a PDF file) that I obtained from a fellow member of the Williamson County Amateur Radio Club. It is attached to a piece of 1″ galvanized pipe that I picked up at Home Depot. The pipe is attached to the chimney with chimney mount straps that I found at Radio Shack. The feed line is 100 feet of RG-8 coax that I bought at a ham swap meet in Belton last spring.

The full story of the antenna’s installation isn’t quite Alice’s Restaurant Masacree, but it did have its moments. I’ll spare you the sordid details and just mention the most difficult part (beyond convincing Debra that it wouldn’t look too bad):   routing the coax.

The coax runs from my desk, behind the book cases, and through the wall into the water heater closet. There I poked a hole into the attic and shoved the 100 feet of coax through it. Crawling into the attic, I used a hook on a long piece of PVC to fish the coax from the very narrow area where it came up. The really fun part was pulling the coax from there to the other end of the house–something that I’d not recommend doing on a 90 degree day.

Getting from the attic to the antenna turned out to be kind of tricky. I had originally intended to mount the antenna on the peak of the house, but that would have made the ugly mounting hardware visible from the road. With the chimney mount, all you see from the front of the house is the antenna sticking up. There’s a nice big hole in the side of the house where I could pass the coax, so I went ahead and attached the connector. When I decided to mount to the chimney, I found that I didn’t have enough coax to route it through that hole. After examining my options, I decided to punch a hole in the throat of the attic turbine. A 3/4″ chassis punch and I’m in business, right?

You know you’re in the wrong place when you walk into an auto parts store looking for a chassis punch and everybody in the store says “What’s a chassis punch?” I mentioned this to a friend on the radio last night and another ham, somebody I’d never met or even talked to before, chimed in and offered to let me borrow his chassis punch.  Monday morning he dropped by Debra’s office with the chassis punch and also an antenna analyzer that I used to tune the antenna. What a great hobby that has such friendly people.

The antenna is up and working now, the installation complete except for attaching the permanent ground. It’s amazing how well the thing works. I’m able to hit most of the repeaters in the area on low power (5 watts), although I need to set the radio to its medium setting (25 watts) to communicate reliably. It’ll be interesting to see what I can do when atmospheric conditions are right. I frequently pick up repeaters in College Station (about 100 miles away) from my mobile rig in the truck. I wonder if I can work them from here.

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve Boy Scout camp outs.  The whole Scouting experience gave me the opportunity to learn things that most city boys aren’t exposed to.  Along the way I learned a thing or two about responsibility and self reliance, as well as little bits of information about astronomy, radio, woodcraft, model rocketry, bicycling, whittling, fire making, hiking, camping, and many others that I don’t remember.  I lost my merit badge sash, one of my most cherished possessions, during a move somewhere along the way.

What makes Scouting work is the involvement of parents and other interested adults who are willing to spend time with the boys and impart their knowledge on young interested minds.  Debra’s boss is one such:  father of two boys and assistant Scoutmaster of a local troop.  Knowing that I am involved in amateur radio, he asked me if I could put together a Radio Merit Badge class for his troop’s camp out this weekend.  This coincided with Jamboree On the Air, an annual event in which Scouts from all over the world join up with amateur radio enthusiasts and make contact with each other.

I’m not qualified to teach the merit badge class, nor do I have a license to operate on the HF frequencies that JOTA uses, but I put out the call and got help from another ham who is a merit badge counselor.  He packed up his portable station and met us out at the camp site on Saturday morning, where we set up a dipole antenna, went over the merit badge course work, and proceeded to contact stations all over the U.S., as well as in Japan, Australia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Great Britain.  We even heard, but were unable to contact, a station at the Palmer Station in Antarctica.

I camped overnight on Friday, and got to sit around the cracker barrel stargazing.  It was a perfectly clear night, the moon set early, and being 60 miles away from the city reduced the light pollution.  The sky was brilliant!  One of the other adults had a star chart, so we were able to point out the major constellations.  (Which, by the way, are much more difficult to pick out when the sky is full of so many stars.)  Boys being what they are, we got on the topic of interstellar travel.  We had a difficult time impressing on the boys just how far those stars are.  100 million light years doesn’t mean much to kids who’ve been exposed to television and movie portrayals of instantaneous interstellar travel.

The boys had planned an “adults versus kids” game of capture the flag for Saturday night.  Unfortunately, I had to leave Saturday afternoon.  I would have enjoyed teaching those kids a thing or two about that game…