Appendix D: Ham Radio: Past, Present, and Future

On our family vacation in the summer of 1994, I finally fulfilled a dream of taking full-up ham radio, short wave and VHF, with me on a long driving trip. This had continued with modifications and improvements every year …

John’s thing really isn’t radio but this seemed like another of those trips where it would be appropriate.

Most of the transmissions were APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System), HF (High Frequency, 10.15 MHz) and VHF (Very High Frequency, 144.39 MHz). HF didn’t work.

I did not have much interest in other HF operating and made the fewest contacts on this trip as on any comparable one past. Partly, it doesn’t seem fun anymore. Partly it was just not wanting to interrupt the time with John. Mobile hamming is appropriate to many situations. One is where the driver is alone and needs companionship. That would be counterproductive here. Another is where the hobbyist is just curious about what can be worked from this place and configuration. If John had been more interested in radio that would have been appropriate. (John and the rest of the family do have licenses. See

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2001/12/13/1/?nc=1#California )

Radio is part of what I am all about, however, and as such its place in this trip was another facet of reasonable exposure.

There was a great opportunity for John to simultaneously see the past and the future of ham radio on this trip: Bob Larkin in Corvallis, Oregon.

Bob is the inventor of the DSP-10 which is the sort of thing that the future of ham radio, if there is one, should consist. I built one, used it non-trivially, and wrote a paper for the AMSAT conference in October 2006 (San Francisco). In this paper

http://cbduncan.duncanheights.com/HamRadio/Dsp10/PhaseFive/SDR_AMSAT_2006_Submitted.pdf

I had discussed experiments that could be done if the user or operator had software control over the equipment, applications such as moon and planet radar reflections, satellite tracking by one or two way carrier phase or other techniques, detection of weather phenomena, “in the noise” low rate signaling, and so forth.

Bob was running a daily net on 75 meters for the DSP-10 people in Washington/Oregon. Knowing I would be up there I had asked for the schedule and frequency and joined them from a few campgrounds and hotel parking lots. This is an activity from the past.

Bob invited us to stop by Corvallis for lunch if we were nearby. I asked John if it was OK and he said “sure,” as he did to most requests. I made it happen, but not at the expense of anything John and I were doing together except for a little time on the road.

When the day came, Bob talked us into his house on 2 meters simplex, another strong tradition from amateur radio past. I told John while it was happening that this was possibly the last time I would ever do something like this and it was kind of like visiting a museum exhibit for him to be able to watch it happen. I told him other stories about being “talked in” or “talked through” a town where a local could easily direct you by landmarks (as opposed to street and highway names. John can now repeat these stories.

Bob is a half a generation older than me. He was there in the glory days of the hobby when talk-ins and “eyeball QSOs” (in-person get-togethers) like this were normal and communications from moving vehicles didn’t really exist except in public service and amateur radio. I was so young I’d nearly missed it myself, but being retro, had been there as a teenager at the tail-end and could rarely demonstrate it to the next generation.

Bob and his colleague Johann had shown us Bob’s boat and his DSP-10 lab in his basement, which was like my ham radio area in my house but five times bigger and more cluttered, then had taken us to lunch at their favorite eating place in downtown Corvallis. We talked over every subject in my paper and a few more. John and even Johann were getting more and more bored with all this. After we got back the visit ended and we pulled away from Bob’s house, 2-meter rig off, at 3 p.m., bought gas and ice, and went on down the road to a campsite at what would be Oregon Dunes. As we got out of town I told John I’d had enough ham radio for the day (maybe the whole trip) at that point. John said he’d had enough by about the time I had finished eating. I imagine this was true with Johann too, as he had his own flavor of interests.

I had tried to check in with them the next morning, Friday, so as not to look too glad to get away but no one was there. After arriving back at home the next week, tried listening on the net frequency but 75 meter propagation was never that long, and had it been it would not have been useful to the net regulars.

I had rewired to use the big 2-meter rig for the talk in and an HT (Handi-Talkie) for APRS. This had not worked so well. Bob’s wife Janet was nice, clearly in touch with her crazy husband but with good boundaries about it all.

In fact, APRS on 2-meters didn’t work well the next two days (through Arcata) even back on the bigger radio. This had me worried for a while. Had I made some error in the reconfiguration? Finally I decided it wasn’t me, it was the topology of APRS on the coast in the central Oregon to far northern California region.

Eventually ended up putting HF on 20 meters and just listening around, mostly on 14.295. No QSOs. HF was off entirely while I tried using the big 2-meter antenna and the rig at 65 watts out to try to get APRS to work in and around Arcata. For no real reason, put it back to 20 meters when leaving San Francisco.

John liked to turn the radio on, unlock it, and spin the dial to see the numbers change and the range they would go through. It was not really his thing though and that meant that it should be minimized for this trip as it was. The visit with Bob, which he took to calling “Bob Corvallis” (after “Billy Covina,” Katy’s friend Bill of unknown last name who lived in Covina) was the big ham radio event of the trip. The talk in and the nets were exposure for John to things that were thirty to fifty years old, like the old railroad telegraphs.

For just me, the visit was fun but for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on yet, it didn’t seem as cool as this sort of thing used to be. Am I just older? Have I done it all and moved on? Am I too sad about this phase of life, indeed, my whole own mortality, to want to major in this anymore? The little ARRL Continuing Education Credit magnet on my filing cabinet here seemes totally un-motivating. Do I get interested in ham radio things only when the rest of life is really boring? Is it really boring? I can’t think of a facet of my life that is really boring.

Maybe by the time I write this for real and edit it, probably well after the October 2006 AMSAT Symposium and whatever develops from there, including my talk, I’ll be able to say more.

[Editing note: No, I can’t say more today. I leave the introspection in place as an accurate reflection of how I felt at the time and the facts haven’t changed much, but I am less concerned about cosmic significance now and am thus less worried. The fascination with technology, the angst for meaning – these are both just parts of who I am and that’s fine. 2/27/10, cbd]

But, during the trip we had our two cellphones. That is where the real communications was happening (like with family). I had very little interest in hamming beyond that. Even the killer instinct to keep all the stuff working was muted. I told John that this might be the last trip in which I take radios at this level. I know what it would take to really wire the car but don’t even know if I have the interest, motivation, and utility to set up the equipment I have right now for any such future trip. A ham radio trip is one thing, but just a trip is something else. And I’m unlikely to have the time and motivation for a ham radio only trip.

I thought about impulse buying a new, much more compact, radio when I got home, then, per the last paragraph, thought “why?”

APRS

It was my intention to track the trip by the Amateur Position Reporting System, APRS. A worldwide network of stations using agreed frequencies, modulations, and formats forwards position information from mobile stations and weather information from anyone who wants to provide it to a unified search system called “findu” on the internet.

We were equipped for two frequencies, the standard VHF one, 144.39 MHz FM at 1200 bps, and the shortwave one 10.14760 MHz USB at 300 bps. The former had been in continuous use in our car as WD5EHM-3 for nearly a year and I had tested (struggled with) the latter from my home station as N5BF-10 for several weeks. I had moved the VHF equipment to the van, changing only the callsign to N5BF-2 to distinguish this trip from other operations. The mount and feed for the big 2-meter antenna had broken during installation so I went with the mag-mount, wire run out the window, threw the broken mount back in the garage and stowed the big 2-meter antenna for possible later use.

The idea was that the 144.39 infrastructure was like a superset of cell coverage. In populated areas it would be pretty good. Some remote places might be blocked from a relay or spotty for other reasons. 10.14760 MHz, on the other hand could work anytime the ionosphere was open to a relay station. My testing at home had shown that this could happen for a few hours a day. The radio network was much more sparse, however. On the first long driving day we had gotten zillions of packets (position reports) from N5BF-2, as expected, but only five from N5BF-10, the last one way down near Sacramento.

I would listen on the 30-meter (10 MHz) frequency and hear activity other than my own. Sometimes we would hear transmissions right after ours indicating that we might be getting repeated (see Ham vs. Real: Yay! Darn! in Chapter 3

http://cbduncan.duncanheights.com/Family/Adventures/JohnOnPch/jpch_3northbound.htm .).

In Weed, I was hearing a station with a strong signal (S-8) and wondered if it might not be another mobile, relatively local.

John would sometimes unlock the dial on the shortwave radio and tune it around to see the numbers changing. Sometimes he’d ask questions about what it was doing, what it meant, or what we were hearing. I’d answer. Sometimes he would just put it back, lock it, and turn attention to something else.

This annoyed me at first and probably ended up causing some automatic 300-baud transmissions off frequency, maybe even out of band. The system wasn’t working, however, possibly due to running only ten watts, so I didn’t start a fight about it. Through Seattle we registered no more 30-meter packets. The night at Mt. Rainier, I got out the laptop, hooked it up, and changed the TinyTrak3 transmission parameters to be briefer, knowing that I couldn’t complain about the network not working unless I followed the directions. What I had wanted was longer packets of ASCII that a human could read off the internet but the so-called Mic-E binary packets were much shorter and allegedly had a much better chance of getting into the network in the first place so I switched to that and we drove on into Seattle, monitoring 30 meters all the way and hearing other activity. I was optimistic, but that night at the hotel on the internet there were still no more new N5BF-10 packets since that last one down near Sacramento. This was the last time we tried transmitting on that frequency and, later that week in an equipment shuffle, I disconnected all of the 300-baud equipment and stowed it. For the rest of the trip, the shortwave rig was used only for other (more conventional) things.

A discussion was engaged online with Ralph, W0RPK, about how this really ought to be done. The setup should support full 100 watts and should not tie up other rigs. It should be dedicated equipment, kind of like N5BF-2. He started working with a manufacturer on possible products. Particularly culpable in my problems was the TinyTrak3. I was forming the opinion that it was mostly a software project and not really well engineered for the analog and RF interfaces. It had a 300-baud setting that worked but driving my TS-680 to more than ten watts led to some sort of distortion that ruined the packets. Was TT3 incapable of driving the microphone input? Was there an RF feedback problem? I tried different tests without good conclusion including wrapping the TT3 in aluminum foil. Setting it to exactly ten watts (not zero, not twenty) was very tricky. This contributed to non-performance too.

For the TinyTrak3 to work even on VHF had required a hefty power line choke. I was using one of these chokes on the whole station in the van. Like I said, N5BF-2 did fine.

Configuration

Only used the big HF three-band resonator adapter on the first day, and only used it on 30. After switching to 75 for the DSP-10 net, went to just the 30 meter resonator for APRS, retuning it for solitary use. From then it was 75 stopped for the net, 30 in motion, and after giving up on 30 APRS, 20 just for tuning around. Usually heard some activity, but sometimes nothing. Even though dusk ran late in the northwest, the band would still be closed to the east where it might already be midnight.

Selected APRS Results

Entire trip from N5BF-2 (VHF).

Crater Lake.

Cape Flattery.