First off, I managed to pick up Arkansas and Alabama for my Worked All States award. This means I have less than 10 states to go before I have WAS knocked out. Not bad for spending a little over seven months working on it!
W0CXX Pileup. I recently joined the Collins Amateur Radio Club. It is our company club at Rockwell Collins where I work. We have a full array of Collins gear along with a IC-756Pro, several 1KW+ amplifiers and a TH7 beam. Earlier this week, a few of us Collins employees decided to go up and see what we could dig up on 20 meters. Within 15 minutes, we had a huge pileup. We estimated that we worked 120-150 contacts that evening and it was very exciting to be on that side of a pileup.
I walk past the club station on my way out of work, and sometimes I will go up and operate CW for a few minutes before leaving work. I really enjoy having such a nice station that is virtually vacant 99% of the time available for use.
Field Day is this weekend! I will be operating from my parent's house up in Waterloo, Iowa. Tentatively, we will be operating three transmitters off of battery power using an array of verticals, dipoles, and other random antennas. We are going to go for the maximum number of contacts and hope to operate 24 hours straight! Listen for our signals!
73 Joe N0NS
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
The Iowa Flood of 2008
The Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa created a major mess in my home town. The water peaked at the 500 year flood plane and many friends who do not own flood insurance (because they lived outside of the 100 year flood plane) were flooded. I drove across the only open bridge over the river (Interstate 380.) The other roads (as you can see in the pictures) are under water. Ironically, I drove over the 1st avenue bridge about four days ago and the water was high, but not this high!
Our drinking water supply is down to one active pump for the city because the other pumps were flooded out. This means that the city will be running out of water by this Monday or Tuesday. Our two neighbor cities, Hiawatha and Marion are pumping water from their cities via fire-truck into our city water grid. I spoke with one of the Marion Firemen who was pumping water, and he said that Marion was giving Cedar Rapids 4,000,000 gallons a day and it was not going to keep up with the demand. It sounded like the other pumps will not come online for at least three weeks. We are saving our "gray water" from the dehumidifier to flush toilets. Right now we use water very sparingly, but when the water is shut off, I'll tell you how it really feels to be in this situation.
The radio at my house has been very active. Almost no HF, all VHF and the Police scanner. The VHF amateur nets have been active constantly, but are showing signs of slowing down. Now that everyone has been rescued and are in shelters, there is not much to do besides wait for the water to go down. The Police lost their main trunking system and had to go to a backup. It was interesting to listen to the traffic but they did an excellent job dealing with the situation.
I had the 2 meter radio on doing homework and hear a call at midnight this week that they needed urgent sandbagging help at one of our local hospitals and they ran out of sandbag ties. I called in and said I had bailing twine and wire wraps. They told me where to go and in 10 minutes, I was throwing sandbags. I estimated I threw 300-500 bags, and at times was in water 2 1/2 feet deep. It felt very good to be able to help. They did evacuate the hospital which was very interesting to see. There were ambulances from all over Iowa that came to help with the patient move.
I had a very strange emotional event happen that night that I don't think ever happened to me before. The ambulances were waiting in a long line to pick up the patients for transport. While waiting, the paramedics were watching us throw sandbags. You could tell that they were a bit shocked at the sight, but at the same time, were amazed at all of the people helping out in the middle of the night. We, helping sandbag the hospital were reading all of the different hospital/city/county names painted on the ambulances and could only think that these people cared enough that they would drive from miles away to help those of us in need. I can only hope that the rest of you get to experience this kind of "love for your fellow man" yourself.
Notice the blue barrel floating down the river? The center buildings you see are our city government buildings. When there is not flood water, these building are on an island that is perhaps 15-20' above the river.
Yes, your cereal used to come from here. Quaker had to shut down because they were flooded.
My brother and I found a street that had the water recessed. I noticed this fresh spray paint, and it looks like it meant High Water point or something like that.
I helped to build this sandbag wall.
It's hard to see but there is a blue boat that is partially submerged.
Our drinking water supply is down to one active pump for the city because the other pumps were flooded out. This means that the city will be running out of water by this Monday or Tuesday. Our two neighbor cities, Hiawatha and Marion are pumping water from their cities via fire-truck into our city water grid. I spoke with one of the Marion Firemen who was pumping water, and he said that Marion was giving Cedar Rapids 4,000,000 gallons a day and it was not going to keep up with the demand. It sounded like the other pumps will not come online for at least three weeks. We are saving our "gray water" from the dehumidifier to flush toilets. Right now we use water very sparingly, but when the water is shut off, I'll tell you how it really feels to be in this situation.
The radio at my house has been very active. Almost no HF, all VHF and the Police scanner. The VHF amateur nets have been active constantly, but are showing signs of slowing down. Now that everyone has been rescued and are in shelters, there is not much to do besides wait for the water to go down. The Police lost their main trunking system and had to go to a backup. It was interesting to listen to the traffic but they did an excellent job dealing with the situation.
I had the 2 meter radio on doing homework and hear a call at midnight this week that they needed urgent sandbagging help at one of our local hospitals and they ran out of sandbag ties. I called in and said I had bailing twine and wire wraps. They told me where to go and in 10 minutes, I was throwing sandbags. I estimated I threw 300-500 bags, and at times was in water 2 1/2 feet deep. It felt very good to be able to help. They did evacuate the hospital which was very interesting to see. There were ambulances from all over Iowa that came to help with the patient move.
I had a very strange emotional event happen that night that I don't think ever happened to me before. The ambulances were waiting in a long line to pick up the patients for transport. While waiting, the paramedics were watching us throw sandbags. You could tell that they were a bit shocked at the sight, but at the same time, were amazed at all of the people helping out in the middle of the night. We, helping sandbag the hospital were reading all of the different hospital/city/county names painted on the ambulances and could only think that these people cared enough that they would drive from miles away to help those of us in need. I can only hope that the rest of you get to experience this kind of "love for your fellow man" yourself.
Notice the blue barrel floating down the river? The center buildings you see are our city government buildings. When there is not flood water, these building are on an island that is perhaps 15-20' above the river.
It's hard to see but there is a blue boat that is partially submerged.
Monday, June 9, 2008
QRN available for free!
QRN is the amateur radio's shorthand way to say natural interference, static or otherwise noise. This weekend in Iowa had a tremendous amount of QRN. The main culprit was a gigantic storm system that dumped a lot of rain. Many cities are flooded and the flood waters will hit Cedar Rapids on Wednesday. It is expected to be the highest river levels since the big flood of 1993.
So, back to radio. The QRN turned 80 meters and 40 meters into a pile of garbage. I can copy a weak CW signal, but when lightning is causing S9+10 in noise, the weak CW signal goes away. That being said, I managed to work a station on 30 meters who was at the noise floor. It took several tries and I finally got his information. I let him go after that because it was not fruitful to have a standard QSO with so much difficulty.
The neat thing was that I switched up to 20 meters and heard a guy call CQ not more then 3 minutes after the 30 meter QSO. 20 meters was open to California and I had a nice QSO with K6STA. The band was absolutely quite and he was 589 the entire 30+ minutes. We talked about old tube radios and the flooding in Iowa. Sure, since we were using morse code our speed was much slower then having a simple voice conversation, but it was almost more enjoyable because we were using a "foreign" language and were both perfectly fluent in it.
I also worked a few stations in the Alabama QSO party. Thank you guys! That is another state I need for my WAS certificate.
More to come, I am going to modify my picokeyer circuit and will post pictures and schematics. It's a really neat mod that the creater of the picokeyer suggested I try.
73 Joe N0NS
So, back to radio. The QRN turned 80 meters and 40 meters into a pile of garbage. I can copy a weak CW signal, but when lightning is causing S9+10 in noise, the weak CW signal goes away. That being said, I managed to work a station on 30 meters who was at the noise floor. It took several tries and I finally got his information. I let him go after that because it was not fruitful to have a standard QSO with so much difficulty.
The neat thing was that I switched up to 20 meters and heard a guy call CQ not more then 3 minutes after the 30 meter QSO. 20 meters was open to California and I had a nice QSO with K6STA. The band was absolutely quite and he was 589 the entire 30+ minutes. We talked about old tube radios and the flooding in Iowa. Sure, since we were using morse code our speed was much slower then having a simple voice conversation, but it was almost more enjoyable because we were using a "foreign" language and were both perfectly fluent in it.
I also worked a few stations in the Alabama QSO party. Thank you guys! That is another state I need for my WAS certificate.
More to come, I am going to modify my picokeyer circuit and will post pictures and schematics. It's a really neat mod that the creater of the picokeyer suggested I try.
73 Joe N0NS
Monday, June 2, 2008
School and Radio
Well, I have been pretty busy this week. I am taking an online class at Regis University and have been really tied up in studying for a test and writing a paper about a microprocessor. That being said, I get lots and lots of time to listen to my radio, but not much time to transmit.
As of late I have been monitoring the digital modes and have made a few PSK31 contacts, and a Hellscriber contact. I built an interface box between my rig and my computer that will allow the serial port on my computer to control the TX on my radio. It is a huge improvement and it always feels good to build something that works and saves you $25 over the commercial version! I found the schematic and guide for this interface from N2UHC's website. Check it out here: http://www.geocities.com/n2uhc/interface.html If you need to order parts, the best place to go is Digikey. They will have your order to your door in a few days and they have hundreds of thousands of parts. In fact, I ordered everything for this kit at one time on Digikey and had it built in a long evening! Pictures to come soon.
The DX on CW has been very good lately. I managed to work a station in New Zeland, the Fiji islands, England, and a few others. Since I have had a lot of time to monitor while doing homework, I can park on an open frequency like 10.105MHz and listen. When DX pops up, I can work them within a few CQ's. Once the station gets on the dx cluster (DX Watch is my favorite) and other stations jump in, my dipoles don't stand much of a chance. The cool thing is my furthest QSO was something like 8,500 miles on a $15.00 home made dipole. Not bad!
Last night I worked a station in Fargo, ND on 30 meters (CW)... I have often heard how hard it is to work North Dakota and South Dakota on the HF bands because of the relative lack of hams in those two states. I personally have had very good luck working ND and SD, and have worked three or four from each state. If you are looking for ND or SD, stay encouraged, you will get them, they are out there!
See you on the air! Joe Paricka N0NS
As of late I have been monitoring the digital modes and have made a few PSK31 contacts, and a Hellscriber contact. I built an interface box between my rig and my computer that will allow the serial port on my computer to control the TX on my radio. It is a huge improvement and it always feels good to build something that works and saves you $25 over the commercial version! I found the schematic and guide for this interface from N2UHC's website. Check it out here: http://www.geocities.com/n2uhc/interface.html If you need to order parts, the best place to go is Digikey. They will have your order to your door in a few days and they have hundreds of thousands of parts. In fact, I ordered everything for this kit at one time on Digikey and had it built in a long evening! Pictures to come soon.
The DX on CW has been very good lately. I managed to work a station in New Zeland, the Fiji islands, England, and a few others. Since I have had a lot of time to monitor while doing homework, I can park on an open frequency like 10.105MHz and listen. When DX pops up, I can work them within a few CQ's. Once the station gets on the dx cluster (DX Watch is my favorite) and other stations jump in, my dipoles don't stand much of a chance. The cool thing is my furthest QSO was something like 8,500 miles on a $15.00 home made dipole. Not bad!
Last night I worked a station in Fargo, ND on 30 meters (CW)... I have often heard how hard it is to work North Dakota and South Dakota on the HF bands because of the relative lack of hams in those two states. I personally have had very good luck working ND and SD, and have worked three or four from each state. If you are looking for ND or SD, stay encouraged, you will get them, they are out there!
See you on the air! Joe Paricka N0NS
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