PI4ZLB

Everybody has a bucket list,  things to be accomplished before the day we eventually wake up on the wrong side of the grass. Many bucket-list items are far more aspirational than realistic; very few of us with “A trip to space” on our lists are going to live to see that fulfilled. And even the more realistic goals, like the trip to Antarctica that’s been on my list for ages, become less and less likely as your life circumstances change — my wife hates the cold.

Luckily, instead of going to Antarctica by myself — and really, what fun would that be? — I’ve recently been getting some of the satisfaction of world travel through amateur radio. The last installment of “The $50 Ham” highlighted weak-signal digital modes using WSJT-X; in that article, I mentioned a little about the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, or WSPR. It’s that mode that let me test what’s possible with very low-power transmissions, and allowed me to virtually visit six continents including Antarctica and Sweden-by-way-of-Alaska.

Whispers in the Noise

Ask a random amateur radio operator what’s on his or her mind at any given moment and chances are pretty good the answer will be, “How are the bands right now?” That’s shorthand for what the current state of the ionosphere is, which largely determines how well RF signals will bounce off the various layers of charged particles that wrap around the planet. These layers shift and move in diurnal cycles, and undergo longer-term cycles of strengthening and weakening that depend on the cycles of magnetic activity on the Sun.

Assessing the state of the ionosphere and finding out which bands have a path to which points on the globe used to be something that hams had to do by spinning the dial and listening for beacon stations. Beacons are stations that transmit a generally low-power signal from a fixed, know location on a regular schedule. If you can hear the beacon, chances are good that you’ve got a propagation path between you and the general area of the beacon on that frequency.

While beacons are useful, they have their limits. They depend on the kindness of strangers, who devote resources to running and maintaining the beacon station. Beacons are also subject to occasional maintenance outages, so not hearing a beacon you expect does not necessarily mean that you don’t have a path between two points. But perhaps the most limiting aspect of traditional beacons is that they operate on a pull model — you have to sit down at your radio and intentionally tune into the beacon’s frequency and decode what you hear — beacons almost always use continuous wave (CW) mode with Morse code. Add to that the fact that whatever you learn about the propagation paths available to you stays pretty much within your shack, and beacons have limited utility.

With those limitations in mind, Joe Taylor (K1JT) began working on a digital mode in 2008 specifically for exploring propagation paths. The protocol was dubbed WSPR, which of course everyone pronounces as “whisper,” which given its capabilities is an apt name indeed. WSPR is a digital mode that employs special digital signal processing algorithms to decode signals with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -28 dBm in a bandwidth of 2,500 Hz.

When transmitting, WSPR sends a compressed 50-bit message that encodes the station’s callsign, the grid location, and the transmitter power. The message is modulated using frequency-shift keying at a very low bit rate — less than 1.5 baud. This means an entire message with error correction takes almost two full minutes to send. Transmissions are synchronized by the WSPR software to begin one second into each even-numbered minute, making accurate time synchronization essential.

Propagation Made Visual

As cool as the WSPR protocol is, the magic of WSPR comes from the “R” part of its name: reporting. This is where WSPR closes the loop that traditional beacons leave open, since WSPR client software can be configured to log any WSPR signals received and decoded by a station to a central database. WSPRnet.org is the place where all the reports go; the site contains a searchable database of all “spots” reported as well as a map that shows current contacts by many, many stations.

The map on WSPRnet is admittedly a bit janky — it’s based on Google Maps, and an error dialog pops up every time you load a new view. There are other visualizations, though, but even with the issues, WSPRnet’s map is a great way to see what propagation paths may be available to you at the current time.

For example, I took a quick peek at the 20-m band just now and found that from my area, I’ve got solid paths to pretty much all of North America. More importantly, I can see that I have no paths into Europe or Asia, and very little to the south into Central and South America. But, by looking at what’s going on with paths on the east coast of the US, where the sun is currently setting and which are actively reaching several stations in and just offshore of Antarctica, I might have a path to the bottom of the planet coming up as the sun sets over me.

Doing My Part

As I mentioned in my first weak-signals article, I’ve currently got WSJT-X running on a Raspberry Pi 4 that I have dedicated to ham radio use. WSJT-X has a built-in WSPR mode, which makes it easy to switch back and forth between exploring possible propagation paths with WSPR and exploiting that information to make actual QSOs using FT8 or one of the other supported modes.

The beauty of using WSJT-X for WSPR work is that it’s basically completely automated. Depending on how you set it up, you can either be a dedicated WSPR receiving and reporting station, or you can choose to also transmit.

When I’m going to be in the shack / office, which is almost always, I set up WSJT-X to transmit on WSPR with a 20% duty cycle — that is, one out of every five two-minute blocks will be dedicated to transmitting. That way, I can do my part contributing to the WSPR map — there generally aren’t many WSPR beacons operating in my part of North Idaho, so I figure this is my way of pitching in. Plus, I get the occasional bonus of nabbing a cool contact, like the aforementioned hit on DP0GVN-1, a German research vessel parked off the coast of Antarctica that I reached on the 30-m band using just five watts.

Sweden, By Way of Alaska

As cool as it is to know you’ve made a solid contact over a path of about 10,000 km on less power than it takes to run an LED light bulb, there’s also a lot to be said for the unusual stations you receive when you leave your WSPR station running. Case in point: the other day I glanced up at WSJT-X and noticed a strange callsign, SA6BSS. After a while of looking at callsigns you get to know which general areas they come from, and I suspected this was a “rare DX” coming from Europe, which is really hard for me to hit with my antenna from the inland Pacific Northwest. A quick lookup on QRZ.com confirmed that SA6BSS is a ham named Mikael Dagman, based in southern Sweden — cool!

I quickly spun up the WSPRnet map and was surprised to see that Mikael’s station was reporting its position as coming from Alaska rather than Sweden. I zoomed in the map a little and found that the signal was coming from a grid hundreds of kilometers south of Unalaska Island in the Aleutians. What in the world would a Swedish ham be doing in the North Pacific in February?

I shot Mikael a quick email about the contact, and he confirmed that I had indeed received a correct position report from his WSPR station, currently floating around the world on a party balloon! Since he released the balloon on Feb 23, it has traveled at around 11,000 meters altitude from Sweden to the Middle East, across Asia, and over the Pacific to just off the coast of Oregon. There it took a hook and headed back out to sea; as I write this it’s heading roughly in the direction of Hawaii.

Mikael was kind enough to include a little information on the WSPR transmitter he included on his balloon, which is completely solar-powered and weighs in at only 2.6 grams. The spareness of his design is almost comical — it’s just a GPS module, an ATMega328, and an Si5351 for the transmitter. It’s a perfect example of what can be done on a budget, which is right in line with “The $50 Ham” concept. So naturally, building a lightweight, inexpensive WSPR beacon will be the basis of the next installment in this series.

If you are a ham radio operator, the idea of sending pictures and data over voice channels is nothing new. Hams have lots of techniques for doing that and — not so long ago — even most data transmissions were over phone lines. However, now everyone can get in on the game thanks to the cheap availability of software-defined radio. Several commercial shortwave broadcasters are sending encoded data including images and even entire web pages. You can find out more at the Swradiogram website. You can also find step-by-step instructions.

WINB in Pennsylvania and WRMI Florida both have shows that include interspersed data. To play along, you’ll need a decoder like Fldigi or TIVAR. If you don’t have sufficient radio gear, you can probably borrow some from the Internet.

On the face of it, this might seem to be just a geeky hobby, but we can’t help but think that in places where data is censored, radio might be a viable way to send information. Some forward error correction codes and perhaps encryption could be a way to have a data lifeline to those forbidden from free access to the Internet. After all, history is full of stories of secret radio receivers tuned to the BBC or some other radio outlet, or examples of secret messages in broadcasts, such as Radio Swan. If you know Morse code, you might even get a warning about your impending rescue.

If you’ve got a half-hour or so to spare, you could do worse than this video trip through a Philips factory in the 1930s.

The film is presented without narration, but from the Dutch title cards and the fact that it’s Philips, we gather that this factory of gigantic proportions was somewhere in the Netherlands. In any case, it looks like something right out of [Fritz Lang]’s Metropolis and turned the rawest of materials into finished consumer products.

Much of the film focuses on the making of vacuum tubes; the sheer physicality of the job is what really stands out here. The upper body strength that the glassblowers had to have boggles the mind. Check out the chops — and the soon-to-be very unfashionable mustache — on the glassblower at the 12:00 mark. And it wasn’t just the gents who had mad skills — the fine motor control needed for the delicate assembly of the innards of the tubes, which seems to be mostly staffed by women, is just as impressive. We were also surprised by the amount these manual crafts were assisted by automated systems.

Especially interesting is the section where they build the luidspreker. Without narration or captions, it’s a little hard to tell what’s going on, but it appears that they used an enormous press to form chips of Bakelite into sleek covers for the speakers, which themselves are super-chunky affairs made from scratch in the factory. We’re also treated to assembly of the radios, packaging of finished products, and a group of dockworkers who clearly didn’t read the “Fragile” labels pasted on the boxes.

One can’t help but wonder if these people had the slightest inkling of what was about to sweep over them and the rest of the world. And if they did, would they even begin to comprehend how much the very products that they were making would contribute to both the slaughter of the coming war as well as to the sparing of so many lives? Likely not, but the film is still an interesting glimpse into the creation of an industry, one that relied very much on craftsmanship to get it started.

Using circuit simulating software like SPICE can be a powerful tool for modeling the behavior of a circuit in the real world. On the other hand, it’s not always necessary to have all of the features of SPICE available all the time, and these programs tend to be quite expensive as well. To that end, [Wes Hileman] noticed an opportunity for a specific, quick method for performing impedance calculations using python without bulky, expensive software and came up with a program which he calls fastZ.

The software works on any network of passive components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) and the user can specify parallel and series connections using special operators. Not only can the program calculate the combined impedance but it can perform frequency analysis at a specified frequency or graph the frequency response over a wide range of frequencies. It’s also running in python which makes it as simple as importing any other python package, and is also easy to implement in any other python program compared to building a simulation and hoping for the best.

If you find yourself regularly drawing Bode plots or trying to cobble together a circuit simulation to work with your python code, this sort of solution is a great way to save a lot of headache. It is possible to get the a piece of software like SPICE to to work together with other python programs though, often with some pretty interesting results.

The perfect antenna is the holy grail of amateur radio. But antenna tuning is a game of inches, and since the optimum length of an antenna depends on the frequency it’s used on, the mere act of spinning the dial means that every antenna design is a compromise. Or perhaps not, if you build this infinitely adjustable capstan-winch dipole antenna.

Dipoles are generally built to resonate around the center frequency of one band, and with allocations ranging almost from “DC to daylight”, hams often end up with a forest of dipoles. [AD0MZ]’s adjustable dipole solves that problem, making the antenna usable from the 80-meter band down to 10 meters. To accomplish this feat it uses something familiar to any sailor: a capstan winch.

The feedpoint of the antenna contains a pair of 3D-printed drums, each wound with a loop of tinned 18-gauge antenna wire attached to some Dacron cord. These make up the adjustable-length elements of the antenna, which are strung through pulleys suspended in trees about 40 meters apart. Inside the feedpoint enclosure are brushes from an electric drill to connect the elements to a 1:1 balun and a stepper motor to run the winch. As the wire pays out of one spool, the Dacron cord is taken up by the other; the same thing happens on the other side of the antenna, resulting in a balanced configuration.

We think this is a really clever design that should make many a ham happy across the bands. We even see how this could be adapted to other antenna configurations, like the end-fed halfwave we recently featured in our “$50 Ham” series.

As it is generally practiced, ham radio is a little like going to the grocery store and striking up a conversation with everyone you bump into as you ply the aisles. Except that the grocery store is the size of the planet, and everyone brings their own shopping cart, some of which are highly modified and really expensive. And pretty much every conversation is about said carts, or about the grocery store itself.

With that admittedly iffy analogy in mind, if you’re not the kind of person who would normally strike up a conversation with someone while shopping, you might think that you’d be a poor fit for amateur radio. But just because that’s the way that most people exercise their ham radio privileges doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Exploring a few of the more popular ways to leverage the high-frequency (HF) bands and see what can be done on a limited budget, in terms of both cost of equipment as well as the amount of power used, is the focus of this installment of The $50 Ham. Welcome to the world of microphone-optional ham radio: weak-signal digital modes.

Just a Regular Joe

First things first, let me make it clear that there are a ton of modes available to amateur radio service licensees that don’t require talking into a microphone, going right back to the beginning of radio with continuous wave (CW) modes. Banging out dits and dahs with a straight key is perhaps the original digital mode, if we stretch the meaning of the term just a wee bit from its current modern connotation of transmitting and receiving encoded messages using computers, either built into the radio or attached as a separate component. I’ll use that as my definition of “digital mode” for the purposes of this article.

But even with that stricter definition, there is still a huge ecosystem of digital modes that have cropped up over the history of ham radio;  the desire for communications without the need to be a conversationalist goes way back, it seems. But for this article, I’ll be focusing on a couple of modes within the “weak signals” family of modes, mainly because I find them fascinating and incredibly useful, and I get a real kick out of seeing what kinds of contacts are possible using less power than it takes to light up an LED light bulb.

When you get into the weak-signal space, one name keeps popping up: Joe Taylor (K1JT). Joe is a ham based in New Jersey, and when you first start hearing about him, you figure he’s just a, well, regular Joe, an old school ham who has come up with some clever software to make low-power signals easier to pull out of a high-noise environment. And while that’s certainly true, it quickly becomes apparent that Joe is a lot more than that. Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1968. He joined the physics faculty at Princeton in 1980, and has won pretty much every major prize in physics and mathematics, including the Draper Medal, the Wolf Prize, and in 1993, the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Magic of WSJT-X

For all these lofty achievements, in many ways Joe is very much a “ham’s ham”, and since his retirement in 2006 he has turned his considerable experience in digital signal processing toward an all-encompassing weak-signals package called “WSJT“, for “weak signals, Joe Taylor.” Actually first written in 2001, the program has undergone nearly constant revision and updating by Joe and a cadre of digital-modes enthusiasts, with the latest incarnation, WSJT-X, which implements ten different weak-signal digital modes.

We’ll skip a deep dive into the DSP techniques underpinning WSJT-X — although it’s fascinating stuff and probably worthy of an article all by itself — and suffice it to say that the package implements various multiple frequency-shift keying (MFSK) modulation methods, each of which is optimized to work under different propagation conditions. The ten modes currently implemented cover everything from high-noise ionospheric propagation to tropospheric scatter, with modes that support bouncing signals off meteor ionization trails or even listening to your own signals bouncing off the Moon.

Even though WSJT-X modes are separated into broad “fast” and “slow” categories, by modern networking standards, they’re all pretty slow. Typical bit-rates range from a dozen characters per second to 400 baud or so. The low-throughput nature of these modes is entirely by design; by not attempting to achieve blazing speeds, WSJT-X makes very efficient use of the spectrum. Some modes only need a few hertz of bandwidth, with the tradeoff being that even very short messages can take multiple minutes to transmit.

The mode that I’ve been playing with most lately, FT8, is a relatively recent addition to the WSJT-X suite. FT8 was written by Joe Taylor and Steve Franke (K9AN), hence the “FT” in the moniker. The “8” refers to “8-FSK”, which means that the modulation scheme uses eight different tones spaced 6.25 Hz apart. Each FT8 signal therefore occupies 50 Hz, a huge chunk of bandwidth when compared to other weak-signal modes, but still pretty compact. All that extra bandwidth means that FT8 transmissions can be much shorter than, say, a 30-minute transmission on JT9. That makes FT8 suitable for quick QSOs and contesting, which is sort of the contact sport of amateur radio.

Speed Dating for Hams

While FT8 is fast, the tradeoff is message length. Each FT8 transmission encodes only 75 bits, with a 12-bit cyclic-redundancy check (CRC). That and the rapid turnaround time means that most operators rely on automation built into WSJT-X, as well as standardized messages, to make their FT8 contacts.

Setting up WSJT-X and getting a transceiver ready for FT8 is highly dependent on your computer and your radio. In my case, I built a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 to run my ham radio operation, using the excellent Ham Pi image by Dave Slotter (W3DJS). I also attempted to use KM4ACK’s equally excellent Build-a-Pi image, but I had trouble getting my Icom IC-7200 transceiver talking to WSJT-X, and rather than devote a lot of time to troubleshooting I just tried the Ham Pi build. Both images have outstanding communities that will help you get spun up, as does WSJT-X, which has a forum where you’ll often see Joe Taylor pop in to answer questions. A community that has a Nobel laureate as a frequent contributor is a strong community indeed.

The video above shows why I call FT8 “the speed dating of ham radio.” The waterfall display at the top shows about 2,500 Hz of passband — the transceiver must be set up to allow as wide a possible band of frequencies through to WSJT-X (tip o’ the hat to Josh KI6NAZ for the help getting that right.) The FT8 algorithm decodes every 50-Hz wide FT8 signal in the passband at once; that along with the fact that each transmission is 15 seconds long followed by 15 seconds idle results in the characteristic checkerboard appearance on the waterfall display.

Decoded messages are displayed in the left window of WSJT-X, with operators generally looking for stations calling CQ. Clicking on an entry in the Band Activity window starts a series of automatic messages, with WSJT-X keying up the transmitter and sending a minimal QSO — basically just the two call signs, a grid square locator, and the received signal strength. It’s important to note that the two sides of the conversation don’t have to be, and in fact shouldn’t be, on the same frequency — the other operator’s copy of WSJT-X will decode the entire passband if it can. Once the acknowledgment of the CQ is received by the other station, the exchange of messages is entirely automatic, until the final 73s are sent and WSJT-X gives both sides a chance to log the QSO.

Since I’ve set up my end-fed half-wave antenna for the HF bands and gotten WSJT-X installed, I’ve made quite a few contacts. Most of them have been in the continental US and Canada, but I did manage to bag Japan on 30 meters last week, which was a treat. The fact that I could do all of this without once picking up the microphone, struggling to think of something to say, is a godsend to me, and the fact that WSJT-X is able to decode signals that are so far down into the noise floor is an intoxicating technical feat.  It’s also really nice to sit down for a half-hour or so before dinner and bang out a couple of low-effort QSOs without having to invest too much in the process.

As mentioned, FT8 isn’t the only weak-signal mode that Joe Taylor and his collaborators built into WSJT-X. Next time on The $50 Ham, we’ll look at the equally addictive WSPR mode, and see how you can actually work HF bands for far less than $50, transmitter included.

You don’t normally think of a 3D printer as a necessity for an antenna project. However, if you are interested in making a handy portable antenna, you might want to melt some plastic. [N2MXX] has an end fed antenna winder design that also contains the necessary matching toroid. This would be just the thing to throw in your backpack for portable operation.

The end-fed configuration is handy for portability too, because you can easily secure one end and feed the other end. Compare that to a dipole where you have to feed a high point and secure both ends.

Of course, you also need wire and some other components — we don’t know how to 3D print a usable ferrite toroid. Honestly, there is some controversy about how these antennas actually work, but people swear that they work well.

There are quite a few ways to operate a portable station, depending on your definition of convenient is. Verticals are popular, although laying out ground wires can be painful. A dipole isn’t that hard to erect, especially if you are staying in one place for a while. However, we really like how small this design is and it should be easy to clip one end and just play out the wire to operate. Our only concern is how plastics will fare in the elements over the long term. Then again, if it wears out, you can just print a new one.

Our own [Dan Maloney] has made these sort of antennas and had good luck. If you want to go really tiny, try surface mount.

It sometimes seems as though antennas and RF design are portrayed as something of a Black Art, the exclusive preserve of an initiated group of RF mystics and beyond the reach of mere mortals. In fact though they have their difficult moments it’s possible to gain an understanding of the topic, and making that start is the subject of a video from [Andreas Speiss]. Entitled “How To Build A Good Antenna”, it uses the design and set-up of a simple quarter-wave groundplane antenna as a handle to introduce the viewer to the key topics.

What makes this video a good one is its focus on the practical rather than the theoretical. We get advice on connectors and antenna materials, and we’re introduced to the maths through online calculators rather than extensive formulae. Of course the full calculations are there to be learned by those with an interest, but for many constructors they can be somewhat daunting. We’re shown a NanoVNA as a useful tool in the antenna builder’s arsenal, one which gives a revolutionary window on performance compared to the trial-and-error of previous times. Even the ground plane gets the treatment, with its effect on impedance and gain explored and the emergence of its angle as a crucial factor in performance. We think this approach does an effective job of breaking the mystique surrounding antennas, and we hope it will encourage viewers to experiment further.

If your appetite has been whetted, how about taking a look at a Nano VNA in action?