Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I’ve had a OTA (Over The Air) TV antenna installation for many years. I haven’t had cable in eons and satellite for almost as long. They simply cost too much for what they give – 100 channels and nothing to watch.

OTA is free for the taking and a small investment in equipment gives as good a signal as you can get wherever you are. I live between two major markets, so I put up two antennas and combine the signals onto one line to the TVs.

I’m in the Buffalo area, so that’s my main market. The TV stations are mostly in two directions. A big ridge south of Buffalo provide a hill that has several stations located. The rest are on Grand Island with big 1000+ foot towers. Signals from the south at moderately strong and the ones from Grand Island are so strong you barely need an antenna. Continue Reading…

Well, it’s been more than a year since I mentioned Parks On The Air. It’s still a major source of Ham Radio activity for me.
I’ve been doing activations when I can. I have activated 86 times from 21 different parks. Sometimes, they are two-fers, where you find a spot that is within two parks so that it counts for both, so that inflates the count a bit. But, it’s been great fun and a good way to get outside and play with radios in the great outdoors.

I also hunt from home quite a bit. When you find and call activators in the field from your home station, it’s called hunting. I have accumulated quite a lot of awards that way. I’ve gotten Worked All States with POTA. I’ve had 4200+ contacts while hunting over 1700 unique parks. Compare that to 5700+ QSOs while in a park. Other than dabbling in Field Day or what not, it’s been the main source of fun on the radio.

I managed to get what’s called a Kilo Award at two parks. That’s making over 1000 contacts while activating. It can be over many sessions. I reached that goal at my two closest parks – K6532 Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor and K8098 Empire State Trail. They overlap for hundreds of miles across New York State, including just a few blocks from my home. I usually activate from a trailhead (parking lot) a couple miles away. But I’ve used several locations from Buffalo to Medina as well. Continue Reading…

Since getting the new radio, I’ve been participating in a program on the air called Parks On The Air. If you’re familiar with Ham Radio, it will probably make sense to you. If not, it might seems a little strange, but it’s a lot of fun and it’s given me a new outlet for my Ham Radio activity.

The POTA program is an outgrowth of the National Parks On The Air program which was held for one year to commemorate the Centennial of the US National Parks system.

Each park, is given a number which identifies it in the program. Valid parks are state and national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, forests, and the like. Local, city, county, and town parks are not eligible for the program. Many countries are included in the program and each has a list of designated parks.

There are two groups of Hams in POTA, Activators, those who travel to a park and set up a station, and Hunters, the rest of the Hams who try to make contact with the ones in the parks. There is a lot of overlap between those groups, but to understand the awards for participating in the program, you need to understand the distinction between them.

Activators keep a log of every contact the make while in a park. For an Activation to be considered successful, a minimum of 10 contacts must be made and submitted. The logs go in to the POTA group where volunteers enter them into their database. All parks are kept track of, and Hunters are given credit for the contacts they made. That in turn is used to give a number of awards to both Activators and Hunters.

There are awards for all levels of achievement and many ways to collect them. But just getting certificates isn’t the point. That would get boring pretty fast. The real fun is in activating a park. Despite it being the middle of winter, I’ve gotten out three times to set up my station in a “park” and operate from there. It’s really not hard.

There are some rules, of course. The park must be open. You must be within the boundaries of the “park,” not on private land. You must obey any rules of the park, which vary quite a bit. Some are wildlife refuges or forest preserves with their own special purpose and rules that you must comply with. But most parks, because they are public land also invite and encourage public use within those limits. Mostly, they are pretty accommodating to Ham Radio.

So far, I have been able to set up inconspicuously in parking areas and sit in my truck to operate. When nicer weather comes along, a picnic bench will be more comfortable. I have operated from three wildlife refuges and from a trailhead on the Erie Canalway Trail.

There are a dozen or so designated parks within a short drive from me. As the weather improves, I hope to get out to activate more of them. It’s a blast! It’s like Field day, but in small, easy chunks. You can do it however you like. You can drive to a lot in a park. or you can hike deep into it. It’s perfect for QRP operation and is viable for CW (Morse code) Voice, and Data modes. It’s good for HF, VHF and UHF bands. Or, you can set up in a shelter and operate high power. Antennas can be as simple as a portable compact vertical, or a wire dipole, or a high mast with an elaborate antenna, as long as you don’t violate park rules and can manage it yourself. Simple is often the best.

So, this post is getting long. Where am I going with it? I hope to share a little of what goes into this activity and what about it appeals to me. Isolation due to COVID-19 has limited some of the things we used to look forward to, but with this I can still get outdoors, get some fresh air, and play around with radios. It has me back experimenting with some portable antennas that I’ve had on the back burner for quite a while. It’s a good way to promote our various parks, nature preserves, forests and wildlands, and do it in a low-impact, nature friendly way. It will only be more fun as the warm weather approaches.

As you may know, I am a Ham Radio operator and that, among other aspects of the hobby, of which there are many, I do two things. I operate QRP (low-power) operation, mostly CW (Morse code) and I like to build electronic kits.

Ugly on the left. Beauty on the right.

Sometimes those things cross over.

A while ago, probably more than a year, I became aware of a neat little QRP radio kit called the QCX. It was offered for sale by a German Ham, living in Turkey, for only $50. It was a single-band, 5 watt CW radio that was pocket-sized. Slightly bigger than a pack of Canadian cigarettes.

There have been many small, inexpensive QRP radios before. I have a few. But this one was built around the little microprocessor chip found in the Arduino boards. It had a display, and the chip allowed it to do a lot of neat things that usually took place in outboard boards. For $50 buck, I had to try one.

So I did and I wrote about it before, so I won’t get into it too much. Once it was done, it needed to be put into an enclosure. So I decided to fit it into one. I got an extruded aluminum box that seemed to be the right size to do justice to the small size of the radio and I started doing what needed to make it fit inside.

Let me tell you, it might be aluminum, but extruded aluminum is tough. Tough to work on. drilling holes wasn’t too bad, but cutting big openings for the display was hard. Then there was the challenge of making the controls work. The push buttons were tiny and needed some kind of extension to reach out of the case. The two knobs – one encoder and one potentiometer, were at different lengths as well. I had to fabricate extensions for all those with my limited machine shop. (Hand tools.)

When it was done, and working, it was crude, but did the job. I built it for 40 meters. Naturally, I wanted another, so I bought on and built it for 20 meters. This time though, I bought the matching case from another company that made them for Hans.

It took a while to arrive, but came after I had completed building the second kit. It looked fantastic. I was happy that I spent the extra money rather than struggle with making my own case.

Fast forward a year. Hans, being ever busy and industrious, improved his radio and replaced the QCX with a new model called the QCX+. He also came out with a even more compact version called the QCX-mini. The plus is bigger and easier to build. The mini is smaller, comes with many surface mount components pre-installed and to make it smaller, he came up with a scheme of nesting circuit boards that increased the density while still being easy to build.

The writing on the wall, though, was the the company that sold the cases probably would not sell them forever. I decided to order one and put my original kit in a proper case to match the second one.

I ordered it in November. Then COVID hit and disrupted the world’s shipping. The first one was slow to arrive, but not unreasonably so. I patiently waited for it, but I began to fear it had gotten lost. They were shipped without tracking to save cost, so there was no way to tell. I emailed the maker, Markus, but received no reply. I imagine he got so many inquiries that he stopped responding.

So, I gave up on it. I actually went ahead and ordered two of the QCX-minis with matching cases and planned to build one of them to replace the 40 meter QCX. But they won’t be available for a while.

Then, out of the blue, the case arrived today. Hallelujah! Heere’s some photos of the transformation from my ugly box to a beautiful QCX that matches my 20 meter version.

Out of the old case. Seeing if it fits the new one.

Front. Board. Rear. Almost ready.

All done! I decided to keep the oversized knob I added. Maybe I’ll get one for the 20m version.

Almost twins!