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HAM SIGNAL

Thoughts,observations,experiments, and ramblings in Amateur Radio by N1DAY and KC4SIT.

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Ernie's Enigma

08/16/2017

I have been thinking about an observation on 630M that I call Ernie's Enigma after the discoverer of it - KC4SIT/WI2XQU of the Up[ward Signal Acquisition and Radio Wave Research Center. Basically, what Ernie discovered is the 'If your can hear them yo can work them' rule does not apply here in Western North Carolina and other parts of the United States when it comes to transmissions on the 630M band. This whole phenomenon has had a lot of people scratching their heads and creating quite a few
Toroid transformers and 630M

08/05/2017

Over my time as a ham I have built quite a few toroid core baluns and transformers. Toroids come in a variety of Ferrous oxide, Nickel, Magnesium, Zinc and other mineral mixes for use at different frequencies of operation and applications. I will let it go at that without getting into the specifics of permittivity, permeability, saturation etc. When I started building these things, my research led me to the conclusion that a toroid mix #43 would suit all of my transformer needs, and that is
The case for a single loosely wound inductor on 630M

08/03/2017

Let's start out with a disclosure: I am not going to reference all of the information in this post simply because getting WI2XQU and WI2XUF stations at peak performance for this fall's 630M activity has been somewhat of a mad dash on gathering of concepts and incorporating into our stations. There has been and continues to be A LOT of sorting through scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) articles on 630M and what goes into making a station work. When I got my 630M license, I agreed with the FCC,
Experimentation to Begin on New Antenna Design - The Dripper

07/24/2017

At this time of the year in Western North Carolina, the best way to describe the weather is 'unsettled'. It has been kind of interesting this year in that we have been experiencing routine afternoon thundershowers followed by a day or two of hot and dry and then more thundershowers. And I have been chasing SWR on my 630M antenna. Up until now, I have used a Variometer inductive loading system on my antenna. Almost every time I went out to adjust the loading to reduce SWR, I discovered that
Marconi Tee or Inverted L?

07/14/2017

After comparing my Magnetic Loop antenna to my Marconi Tee on both transmit and receive operations, I got to wondering how much of an advantage my Marconi Tee with all that extra wire up in the air was giving me compared to my inverted L? I do know that the Marconi Tee is providing added TX performance on 630M (see earlier post), but as I am also now using the antenna for the HF bands, I was curious to see if an improvement could be had there as well with the Marconi Tee over my old standard
A Magnetic Loop Observation

07/11/2017

Yesterday I was out in the garage looking at my MFJ 1786 10-30M magnetic loop that I used back when solar conditions were much better than they are these days. I remember how 5 watts could get me a solid copy Phone QSO to Eastern Europe with little effort. At the time, I thought that Mag Loops were the way to go because they required only a couple of feet of height off the ground to work well. For the better part of 2 years I spent my time studying and designing Magnetic Loops as the sun
Dog Days and the Marconi T Antenna

07/05/2017

With the dog days of summer fast approaching, I wanted to finish up a few parts of my 630M station to be ready for low band activities this fall. Nothing here is new or innovative and all I want to do is capture, in one place, some learnings on 630M. Until 4 days ago, I was using a three element inverted L antenna with a base loading coil of about 250-300 uH to load the antenna at 474 kHz. After multiple attempts at a homebrew transverter with a max power out of 10watts, I broke down and
Killing DC Ripple and Drift on 630M

04/14/2017

One thing I learned from my guitar amplifier days is that DC ripple must be reduced if you want a good output from the amp. Typically DC ripple is reduced at input, first by rectifying AC current (if that is your source power), and then running the resultant DC current through an electrolytic capacitor. However, after running current through a capacitor, there will still be some ripple on the output....minor ripple, but still ripple. The way to get rid of this ripple is to continue to
Digital listening with SDRPlay

04/11/2017

Sooner or later, everyone who gets bitten by the digital operations bug realizes that a big part of successful digital communications with modes like WSPR, JT9, J65, PSK etc relies upon the ability to receive other's signals. This is normally not a problem with domestic contacts, but starts to become a challenge with DX when low power transmission is being used by the station you are trying to listen to. Over the course of the past year, I have tried and abandoned a number of methods for