The Official Journal of the University of Texas Amateur Radio Club

The October general meeting of the University of Texas Amateur Radio Club will be held on Thursday, October 18 at 7:30 PM in RLM 5.118 on the UT campus. The topic of discussion will be Spread Spectrum. Robert Barron (KA5WSS) will focus on the WaveLAN cards that he has been experimenting with. Talk in on the 147.18 MHz repeater.

The first meeting of the 1997-1998 school year featured a video on the recent DXpedition to Heard Island.

Welcome to the following new members:

Name                      Callsign

Robert Barron             KA5WSS

Roberto Camama            KB2CLL

Andy Chen

Lloyd Clark               AG4D

Anne Elster               KC5UQX

Michael Evans             KD5AAD

Jill Francis              KC5OJK

Ken Harker                KM5FA

Kevin Mandaville          KT5I

Mike Piskorz              KC5EMV

Gregory Reeves

Adam Tate                 AB5PO

Alexandros Theodoropoulos

Steve Tompsett

Derek Wills               AA5BT

Alex Winbow               KC5WOC

There were 9 appropriations bills submitted to the assembly by the appropriations committee. 5 or 6 bills were rejected in committee. All 9 bills presented to the assembly were approved; none were approved unanimously.

We were the only College of Engineering Student Organization to be awarded any funding. There will be another appropriations process in the spring semester for which we are also eligible.

Special thanks should go to our Student Government sponsoring representative Jacob Wilcox, and the other College of Engineering SG representative Brandon Rhymes for their support of our appropriations request both in committee and assembly.

Figure 1: Kevin (KT5I) makes a deal at Summerfest 1997 while KC5OJK, KM5FA and KD5AAD look on. The club used a swap area table to sell surplus gear and raise money

Belton HamFest

The hunt consisted of three transmitters hidden somewhere in the parking lot and the object is to be the first to locate them. We were kind of concerned about our apparent disadvantage when we saw the other hunters using more sophisticated equipment then we had. During the hunt, onlookers gave us some tips (some were useful while some were already known). I found the first transmitter (which was hidden in a light post) right out of the starting gate. The second transmitter was somewhat more difficult to find (which was hidden behind a license plate on a car) by Michael. Shortly afterward we had a young boy decide it was interesting enough to follow us around (apparently to try to help, however, he didn’t know exactly what was going on). The third (hidden in a fence) was even more difficult to find after making a wrong assumption. We were unable to find it in time for the end of the hunt, but were very close to it. When we returned, we turned in our placing on the two transmitter finds (first and third respectfully). When all the scores were turned in, we were delighted with our ranking of third place. For our efforts and coming in 3rd, an MFJ dual time clock (UTC and Local time) was awarded.

This was the second Transmitter Hunt that I have participated in. However, it is the first that was done without experienced hunters helping. This has reinforced my desire to hunt whenever possible.

Michael and I are hoping that as a club project (in the near future) we will build quad antennas and then use them in a hunt on the UT campus. This will of course depend on the members’ desire for such an event.

VHF QSO Party

This is the U.T. club's best ever September VHF QSO Party results, dramatically improving on our 1996 results, and coming just 127 points shy of our 1997 June VHF QSO Party score. We worked several "first-ever" grids for the club VUCC totals on 6M and 70cm, including our first-ever 6M QSO with any station in EM11 (which, as it turns out, was the Baylor Amateur Radio Club WA5BU!) There were no band openings, and we only worked one station outside of Texas, WB5NXD in Louisiana.

Figure 2: Michael (KD5AAD) works stations during the 1997 September VHF QSO Party. Funding from the student government means even more bands to use the next time around!

A motivating goal for this contest was to beat the score of the Oklahoma University Amateur Radio Club W5TC's contest effort. They were supposed to be active on all the VHF bands from 50MHz through 903MHz. I haven't heard what their score for this contest is yet, and we never did hear them on the air, but I assume that at some point our signals must have met in Dallas, which is of course the natural way of things.

Grid maps and a bit more commentary are available on the World Wide Web at: (http://n5xu.ece.utexas.edu/vhf/97sepvhf.html)

UTARC Helps the FCC

Several colleagues of mine along with a recent W5YI report newsletter informed us of your easy to use computer program available at your web site called rfsafety calculator. I personally have used and compared it to the equations in Bulletin 65. We here in the Office of Engineering and Technology at the FCC feel that your program is another tool that can help Amateurs across the country help to determine compliance with our guidelines.

In a short time we will be issuing Bulletin 65, and soon after we will be issuing an amateur supplement that will also help amateurs to determine compliance. If possible we would like to reference your RF Safety calculator as another means for amateurs to determine compliance. If this acceptable, could you please email or call me back with information on how you would like us to reference this site in the upcoming supplement.

Thanks for your time.

Jerry Ulcek
Electronics Engineer
Federal Communications Commission

1997 CQ World Wide RTTY Contest

Contacts were made on all of the contest bands (80M, 40M, 20M, 15M, and 10M.) Total operating time was likely less than three hours.

The following states were worked by W5EHM (as far as I know) on RTTY for the first time: Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and North Carolina. Idaho was a new state on 20M, Idaho and Iowa were new for 40M, and Louisiana and Maryland were new on 80M. DXCC countries worked (all are new countries on RTTY for W5EHM) were:

CE    Chile (new on 40M)

CT3   Madeira Is.

FS    Saint Martin (new on 10M)

HP    Panama (new on 20M)

KH6   Hawaii

KP2   U.S. Virgin Is.

PY    Brazil

VP5   Turks & Caicos Is. (new on 20M)

Even though I knew Derek AA5BT has for a while kept very similar documentation on our QSL collection (Derek is the one responsible for the club seeking and earning its DX Century Club and Worked All Zones awards) I felt an auditing from scratch might help ensure that our records are accurate, and I was certain to get a better understanding of what to be on the look for on the air on behalf of the club in addition to my own DXCC and WAS efforts.

The first thing I did was reorganize the domestic HF QSL cards to be indexed by state rather than call district. This makes much more sense given the nature of awards we might be working for, and breaks up the cards into much more manageable segments. Even with all the cards we have, we are still quite a ways off from 5-Band Worked All States, with many states confirmed on only one band. Only Texas is confirmed on 160M, and only Colorado is confirmed on RTTY. The club does not have any QSOs with domestic stations confirmed on any of the WARC bands (30M, 17M, and 12M.)

The next thing I did was turn my attention to the HF DX cards. I created new divider cards for each of the active DXCC countries for which the boxes did not already have a divider. I then went through and made sure that each card was in its appropriate place, removed several Soviet SWL station cards to their own section, and created index card "substitutes" for those cards on display on the shack wall, for easier reference. I also went through a DXCC list and cataloged each country that we have and on which bands and modes we have them confirmed (see Table 1). (Our deleted countries are Abu Ail Is., German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Penguin Is., and Walvis Bay.) As you can see, we are not all that far from confirming 5-Band DXCC, having achieved over 100 countries on the 20M, 15M, and 10M bands. Adding 19 countries to our 40M count should not be that difficult, but our biggest stumbling block is clearly 80M.

Cntys	Mixed	SSB	CW	RTTY	160	80	40	30	20	17	15	12	10
Active	241	141	203	2	8	38	81	11	144	7	116	1	112
Deleted	5	3	5	0	0	2	4	0	2	1	2	0	3
Totals	246	144	208	2	8	40	85	11	146	8	118	1	115

Also, while we have not applied for them, the club obviously meets the criteria for the CW and SSB DXCC endorsements (and is quite a ways away from a RTTY endorsement!) We are 71 countries shy of Honor Roll status.

There are some relatively common countries that the club does not have confirmed on any band, though. These include 4L Georgia, 4X Israel, 5N Nigeria, 6Y Jamaica, 9Y Trinidad & Tobago, D2 Angola, DU Philippines, FG Guadaloupe, FK New Caledonia, GI Northern Ireland, IS0 Sardinia, J3 Grenada, J7 Dominica, OK Czech Republic, OM Slovak Republic, PZ Suriname, TK Corsica, V3 Belize, YO Romania, and YS El Salvador in addition to other, rarer DXCC countries.

In the process of adding the new dividers and integrating recently-arrived cards, I decided it was time to migrate the JA Japan cards to a separate box, as we have far more Japanese cards than any other DXCC country (possibly more than all of the European Union countries combined) and needed the space in the two existing HF DX QSL boxes. The Japanese cards are now organized by prefecture, the Japanese equivalent to a state in their political structure, of which there are 47. Like the United States, Japan organizes geographically clustered groups of prefectures into call districts 0-9. To my surprise, even with as many Japanese cards as we have, we do not yet qualify for the Worked All Japanese Prefectures award. Of the 47 prefectures, we have only 38 confirmed, and still need JA4 Tottori, JA5 Kagawa, JA5 Ehime, JA6 Saga, JA6 Nagasaki, JA6 Kumamoto, JA6 Miyazaki, JA6 Kagoshima, and JA6 Okinawa. These are all prefectures in the southern regions of Japan, those most distant from us. Not surprisingly, the prefecture from which we have the most cards is JA1 Tokyo, with JA1 Chiba, JA1 Kanagawa, and JA8 Hokkaido also well represented. I guess that about 65% of the cards confirm 10M SSB QSOs, 15% confirm 10M CW QSOs, and 15% confirm 15M CW QSOs.

I also cataloged the various bands and modes on which we have worked each Canadian province. So far, we do not have any QSOs confirmed for Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, Prince Edward's Island, or the Northwest Territories. To earn a Canadaward from the RAC, we need to show confirmation of QSOs with each province or territory on a particular band. In this accounting, we are even farther off from an award, being closest on 10M, with 7 of the 12 provinces and territories confirmed. We have no confirmed 160M or 80M QSOs with any Canadian province or territory.

Finally, I cataloged our CQ Zones totals on each band (Table 2: these are totals out of a possible 40 Zones):

160	80	40	30	20	17	15	12	10
6	17	30	8	39	4	34	1	36

On 20M, we are only missing zone 27 (Philippines), and on 15M we are missing, of all places, the Australian zones 29 and 30. There are only two zones which we only have confirmed on one band, zone 2 (Northeastern Canada) and zone 22 (South Asia, India.)

Finally, for the VHF QSL card collection, the cards are now indexed by grid field (i.e. ..., DL, DM, DN, EL, EM, EN, etc...) on each band. Index divider cards exist for the 6M, 2M, 1.25M, and 70cm bands (even though we don't yet have 1.25M equipment, I figured it couldn't hurt.) We are still a long ways off from earning a VHF/UHF Century Club (VUCC) award on either the 2M or 70cm bands yet, having confirmed less than a quarter of the grids necessary for the 2M award and less than a fifth of the grids necessary for the 70cm award so far.

More detailed information about both W5EHM's HF and VHF operating activities, including a complete HF DXCC worked-countries list and VHF grid maps can be found on the UTARC WWW page at:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/utarc/

Operating Notes

I heard the Mir Packet Message System during the station's 31 degree pass today around 5:30PM (October 8 - ed.). I didn't actually see it on the computer screen as we do not (yet) have a cable to hook up the 726R to the TNC and the 227R doesn't have the right frequency resolution for where Mir is on the air (145.985 MHz simplex over North America.) But, the packets were there only during the pass window and they definitely exhibited the right Doppler shift. 5:30PM is actually during the cosmonauts' "sleep period." For the middle five minutes of the ten-minute pass, the packets sounded every bit as loud as terrestrial packet around Austin.

So, there is hope for us to work them yet!

Contests

The CQ WW DX Phone contest can serve as a great opportunity to improve your contest skills before Sweepstakes and the Collegiate Championship. There is also the hope of good conditions and interesting DX to work. Please plan on joining other club members during the weekend of October 25-26 in operating the club station. Everyone who shows up will get to operate!

Shack Status

Special thanks go to Trevor AB5EU for doing this for the club, and to Derek AA5BT for handling the logistics of the repair.

Members on the Move

UTARC Officers

President:           Kenneth Harker KM5FA   467-8724 kharker@cs.utexas.edu

Vice President:      Jill Francis   KC5OJK  448-1263 kc5ojk@mail.utexas.edu

Secretary/Treasurer: Michael Evans  KB5AAD           mlevans@mail.utexas.edu

Newsletter Editor:   Robert Barron  KA5WSS  837-4051 ka5wss@qsl.net

UTARC Web Page URL:  http://www.utexas.edu/students/utarc/

Mail Reflector:      utarc-l@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu