UTARC News
The Official Journal of the University of Texas Amateur Radio Club
September 1996
The Official Journal of the University of Texas Amateur Radio Club
September 1996
The September meeting of the University of Texas Amateur Radio Club will be held on Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 PM in RLM 5.124 on the UT campus. Talk in on the 147.18 MHz repeater.
The topic of discussion this month will be digital communications. An ARRL video on the various digital modes used in Amateur Radio will be shown.
Your club officers for the 1996-1997 school year are:
President: Tom Orzechowski SQ9DDZ Vice Pres: Kenneth Harker N1PVB Sec/Treas: Collier Cook N9IWD Newsletter: Robert Barron KA5WSS
Please assist the officers this year by offering to help when needed and always offer your suggestions and advice! Officer phone numbers and email addresses can be found at the end of this newsletter.
The following people have already joined UTARC for the 1996-1997 year:
Name Callsign Curt Black WR5J Kok Chen AA6TY Kevin Mandaville KG5KI Brian McMinn N5PSS Trevor Smith AB5EU Derek Wills AA5BT
Welcome aboard! If you have not yet joined UTARC get in touch with one of the club officers soon. The shack combination will be changing shortly.
de N1PVB
W5EHM successfully worked 2 stations during the 1996 Perseids meteor shower on August 10-12. We worked AA7A in the Phoenix, AZ area (DM43) and W2CRS in Colorado (DM78) both on 144.133 MHz SSB. These are, as far as I know, W5EHM's first ever QSOs using meteor-scatter propagation. These are also the club's first 2M QSOs outside of the state of Texas.
We can improve our results during future showers using software that will enable us to predict optimal paths during the showers, making more and better skeds, and maybe using a voice-keyer or voice-keying software and a soundcard to help prevent fatigue. Additionally, we worked two new grids in central Texas on 144.200 MHz using non-meteor propagation during the shower period.
de N1PVB
I participated in Field Day this year for the first time. Taking them up on their invitation to UTARC members, I joined the 3M ARC at their Field Day effort. It took place in the parking garage on their campus out on FM 2222 west of town and east of Lake Travis. The station setup was fairly impressive (at least to me.) The parking garage has three levels, with the electric generator located on the lowest level, the radios and computers located on the middle level, and the antennas mounted on the top level. We had the entire garage to ourselves, and the setup worked very well, especially when it decided to rain. There was plenty of room to spread out equipment, and we even had a grill running in one corner with hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage, and barbecued chicken and ribs.
Two HF rigs operated 40M/20M/15M phone and CW respectively. Another HF rig was used exclusively on 10M novice-privilege SSB. One member of the club had a notebook computer running 2m packet with which at least one Field Day contact was made. It was also running APRS for part of the day, just for fun. Finally, a Kenwood 2M/70cm all-mode base station rig was used for 2m SSB contacts and several attempts at satellite contacts.
For antennas, two three-element HF beams were put up, as well as an HF vertical. I got to help put up the larger beam, which was at the top of a twenty-foot mast, and was secured into a corner of the garage walls by wedging it into place with a golf cart-sized platform vehicle and using numerous guy lines. The 2m and 70cm antennas were home-brew verticals. But, the really impressive antenna was put up before I got there - a 450 foot longwire! It stretched across a road and a grove of trees over to the main building on campus. Using an antenna tuner, an SWR reading of 1:1 was achieved on all of the HF bands, and very soon after putting it into service, the Marshall Islands were worked.
Figure 1:
Beth (KC5OLB) and Derek (AA5BT) at W5EHM during Field Day 1995
I spent most of my time (the first 10 hours) at the HF novice/tech station working 10M SSB, alternately operating and logging. It's quite possible that I showed up in the background of an interview taken by KEYE 42 that aired at 5PM that day while operating at this station. We worked 200 Field Day stations in those first 10 hours, outperforming the other two HF stations, which had around 75 phone and 60 CW contacts respectively around midnight. Late into the night, I worked 2M SSB, my personal first efforts at 2M SSB, resulting in 11 contacts in EM10 and EM11. Several efforts during the day and night to work satellites were unsuccessful - even though we could hear the downlinks of RS-13, RS-15, and several of the Pacsats, our uplink power was apparently insufficient to make it through.
I had a really good time, and enjoying chatting with the other participants between operating stints. I think my contesting skills improved somewhat, and I'm certainly getting better at copying callsigns. I would highly encourage anyone who's never participated in Field Day to try it out next year.
de KA5WSS
The summer contest season for UTARC was closed by an effort in the phone North American QSO Party during August 17-18. While conditions were not great the club managed to work more QSO's than last year's SS effort in half the time.
Once again, the club's radio and antennas worked well and everything that could be heard could be worked. The emphasis was on HF but with Tom running stations on HF Kenneth was still able to pick up two new grids for the club on 6M.
Unlike the IARU HF Championships, the Dominos pizza had trouble finding the shack this time as it took over an hour with Kenneth tracking the delivery person down. It seems the delivery person tried twice to reach a penthouse in the Biology building instead of WRW.
Towards the end of the contest we checked out 160M just to see if we could hear anyone down there. We quickly switched down to pounce on all the stations to be found there, including two multipliers. The most exciting part was scrambling around the back of the desk looking for the longwire cable to hook up to the antenna tuner!
Band QSOs Mults 160 5 2 80 27 16 40 31 20 20 230 47 15 42 14 10 68 18 total: 403 117 Claimed score: 47,151
The club continues to gain experience and operating skills. At this rate W5EHM will be well suited to perform well in Sweepstakes and the Collegiate Championship. There's still more practice, and fun, to be had before November though. The Sept. VHF, Worked All Europe, CQ WW and the JA DX contests all come before SS. Please join the club for these efforts so that we can all be ready for SS.
The contest was composed of a few different phases. First, Derek (AA5BT) scanned the CW bands for interesting stations and the World Radiosport Team Championships (WRTC) 1x1 callsigns. Eventually both Derek and the club worked all 52 official and 2 unofficial stations of the WRTC competitors. Your editor called CQ for about an hour to push up the QSO count. Then Kenneth (N1PVB) and Tom (SQ9DDZ) were ready to operate and they both called CQ and hunted and pounced around the bands.
The new Force 12 antenna performed well during the contest and presented no problems. For the most part W5EHM was able to break through any pileup after at most a few calls. 5N0T (Nigeria) answered the second call from W5EHM in a large pileup.
Band QSOs Zones HQ 80M 4 2 0 40M 34 7 2 20M 274 27 8 15M 101 8 3 10M 4 3 0 Total: 417 47 13
Score: 75,900 points
Kenneth spent much of Saturday operating the CQ WW VHF contest and managed to work some new grids for the club. While the HF rig did hear the VHF transmissions slightly every now and then, for the most part both stations were able to operate at the same time without bothering each other.
Domino's Pizza delivery is fairly flexible. Their delivery person found the shack and presented N1PVB and KA5WSS with dinner
on Saturday. According to the delivery person it was one of the most unusual delivery locations he had ever encountered.
UTARC had two alumni participating in this year's WRTC event. Both held officer positions during their stay at UT. Randy Thompson (K5ZD) and Trey Garlough (WN4KKN) were selected to compete. Their teams achieved 6th and 32nd places respectively. Trey's team (including Tree, N6TR) had the second lowest unique QSO percentage. A low unique rate is a rough indicator of logging accuracy.
For more information on the WRTC results, with photos, check out their web page at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/n6ip/wrtc96.htm
de N1PVB
W5EHM participated in the CQ World-Wide VHF Contest conducted from 1800UTC (1PM local time) 13 July 1996 to 2100UTC (4PM local time) 14 July 1996. As far as I can tell, this was the club's first VHF contesting effort in at least seven years. We operated as a single-op class II station (one operator, using fewer than four transmitters on all authorized amateur bands.) We were active on both 6M and 2M. All QSO's were SSB except for one FM simplex contact on 2M.
Band conditions on 6M were VERY poor. We had a few small Sporadic E openings to Arizona and the higher elevations in California on Saturday afternoon and then again on Sunday morning, but with the exception of two stray contacts within the first half hour of the contest, no grids to the northeast of EM10 were ever heard on 6M. Naturally, with such poor 6M E's, the 2M bands never opened up to outside of Texas. All in all, the band conditions were way below my expectations - especially considering the two days before Sporadic E openings from Missouri to Europe on 6m were reported on the VHF Internet reflector.
We had 49 QSOs during the contest, fairly evenly distributed between 6M and 2M. We worked several never-before-contacted grids on both bands. The most impressive contacts were DM63 on 6M (our first New Mexico VHF contact and a pretty short skip) and EL17 on 6M (our farthest line-of-sight contact on 6M.) One big disappointment was not working EL19 on 6M.
Band QSOs Grids 6M 26 15 2M 23 10 Total 49 25
Score (unofficial): 1225
And for those of you with grid maps at home (there's one in the ARRL Handbook):
Grids we worked on 6M: DM05, DM26, DM33, DM34, DM43, DM44, DM45, DM63, EL17, EL18, EL29, EM00, EM10, EM81, EM90
Grids we worked on 2M: DM81, DM91, EL09, EL17, EL18, EL19, EL29, EM00, EM01, EM10
Figure 2:
UTARC's 1990 West Mall Demo table (l-r KB2CLL, KA5WSS, N5SNN,
Ruhi)
de N1PVB
At 12:48PM local time on July 24, operating as W5EHM in the shack, I made a successful 2-way SSB QSO with Bob Dannals W2GG (QTH in Maryland, FM19) on the RS-15 satellite. It was brief as the 2M rig started misbehaving (switching to the factory default frequency on transmit) after we exchanged RST and grid squares, but it did work!!
Details:
I decided to use the 2M vertical rather than the beam, as it had been suggested to me on USENET that the narrowness of a 13-element beam's pattern might decrease the chances of actually hitting the satellite's antenna. To compensate for the loss of gain using the vertical, I had to use the amp (I tried both with and without, and I could only hear my own downlink using the amp.) The biggest problem I seem to have is hearing my own fifth harmonic in the range of the satellite downlink and differentiating it from the downlink signal itself (which is much less loud.) Using the vertical seems to make the harmonic a little less loud and obnoxious than using the 2M beam.
Awards
Over the summer Kenneth (N1PVB) spent a number of evenings at W5EHM testing out the new 50 MHz antenna. He soon got hooked by the "magic band" and started increasing W5EHM's grid count. Thanks to Kenneth the W5EHM grid total now stands at 96 confirmed, including 30 states. When the club confirms 100 grids it will be eligible for the VUCC certificate a DXCC equivalent certificate for VHF operations.
The club now has QSL cards from all 50 states for its Worked All States award.
Contests
N1PVB, SQ9DDZ and KA5WSS operated the club station during the 1996 International HF Grid Location Contest in April. They made 297 contacts in 138 grid squares and achieved first place in the multi-op category!
AA5BT operated the club station for the April 1996 Internet Sprint. He placed 16th overall by making 110 QSO's in two hours. The Internet in Internet Sprint's name comes from the location from which the idea for this Amateur Radio contest first came about.
Derek also operated the August 1996 Internet Sprint. This time around he used his own callsign though. When using W5EHM on CW he encountered, "too many callsign busts, plus at one point someone thought Whehm was a name rather than a callsign and it got passed around from one person to another with all sorts of permutations."
Donations!
Work Done
Work To Be Done
Here's your chance to help improve the club station. If you would like to help with some of these items, contact one of the club officers.
George (WB5VZL) organized the multi-op effort at W5KFT for the June VHF Contest. On 6M the group made 1160 QSO's in 267 grids! George said the E-skip conditions that weekend were the best he has ever heard. W5KFT made the record books. They have the 5th highest 6M grid count of any effort in June VHF Contest history and their score on 6M alone of 309,270 was the highest ever reported.
For the second year in a row a night hawk set up a nest on the roof of WRW. This time the mother laid two eggs but right next to the door that opens up from the east stairwell onto the roof. Derek intended to place a sign on the access door warning people of the bird but never got a chance. The bird and both eggs promptly disappeared. Last year a night hawk laid a single egg in the middle of the roof.
Kenneth (N1PVB) has created a new web page which has been added to the UTARC homepage. It details the W5EHM VHF setup and the grids worked so far. It's now on-line and a link to it can be found on the UTARC home page.
The UTARC web pages contest results list has been expanded. Links are now in place for some contests to more detailed information. For some contests this includes the summary sheet, rate sheet, breakdowns and even the entire log!
UTARC alumnus Paulus (N5SNN) was in Austin in June and July working on some research for his Ph.D. He took some time away from the lab to have dinner with UTARC members on July 2 after helping to install the club's 2M Yagi.
Kenneth Harker (N1PVB) has donated a 4 CD collection of Linux distributions and programs. He hopes that the club will soon have a machine on which it can install the UNIX clone. Kenneth has also donated a copy of the ARRL's Your VHF Companion. The CD's and the book may be found in the club station. Remember that materials may not be taken from the club station without officer approval.
The Austin chapter of the American Red Cross is having an open house on Sunday September 22. They would like to have the W5KA Amateur Radio station set up for demonstrations of what ARES does for the Red Cross. If you would like to help with this effort contact Stuart Rohre (K5KVH) at 255-3932.
President: Tom Orzechowski SQ9DDZ 440-7026 orzech@cs.utexas.edu Vice President: Kenneth Harker N1PVB 467-8724 kharker@cs.utexas.edu Secretary/Treasurer: Collier Cook N9IWD 495-5015 ifcv645@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Newsletter Editor: Robert Barron KA5WSS 837-4051 barron@liant.com UTARC Web Page URL: http://www.utexas.edu/students/utarc/ Mail Reflector: utarc-l@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu
UTARC News is published by the UT Amateur Radio Club, a registered student organization. UTARC News is not an official publication of The University of Texas at Austin and does not represent the views of The University or its officers. This newsletter was not printed with state-appropriated funds.
Newsletter Contributors: N1PVB, AA5BT
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The University of Texas ARC
Box 170, Texas Union
Austin, TX 78713