Happy New Year. Hope this one is fun! Let’s talk about the ARRL Contests that are yet to come this month. You can always get a look at the contest calendar by following this link: http://www.arrl.org/contest-calendar.
January 8-9 – RTTY Roundup
From the ARRL’s Contest Website:
Amateurs worldwide contact and exchange QSO information with other amateurs using digital modes (Baudot RTTY, ASCII, AMTOR, PSK31, and Packet …
EDIT: This post has been lost due to operator error! Sorry!
Lately, I’ve been wishing that I had a better way to get out on 20-meters, 40-meters, and 75-meters. The 75- and 40-meters are a bit long for the small amount of space that I have available to hide an antenna (local residential, contractual, restrictions), but I did some measuring around, and I think I found an ok spot to try to string a dipole!
Check out these drawings I made late at night (mind I’m no artist).
Probably hard to conceptualize my diagram in your mind, but I have a deck over a patio outside of the “Shack.” There are 4 beams that support the deck that I believe I can string the dipole from! I will try to get the supplies and cut this to length very carefully–I don’t have an antenna tuner. I’m hoping I can also tune on 10-meters, as a full wave dipole. I will probably post pictures and such on the Projects page as I go.
I was tuning around this morning at about 0730 Zulu, and I flipped my radio to 5 MHz. I stopped on 5.332, where I heard a strange digital sound, rapidly pulsing. I opened up Digital Master 780, and took a couple of screenshots of what I heard. If you can identify this mode, I would be very interested in finding out what it is, so I can receive and possibly transmit it!
The two squiggley lines are non-related. The vertical lines are the signal as depicted by Digital Master 780′s waterfall display. Click the image to view larger.
I posted this on my Twitter when it came out, but I wanted to re-post it here, to share again. This is a sea water antenna that was designed and can be used in a variety of applications. I thought it was a very neat concept, and I would even like to try building one. It isn’t high on my priority list right now, but it would definitely make for a fun and interesting experiment.
SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific has developed a technology that uses the magnetic induction properties of sodium chloride (salt) in sea water to create a UHF/VHF/HF antenna.
(From http://www.southgatearc.org/news/october2010/sea_water_antenna.htm)