Let's talk QSLs

We broached the subject last weekend so let's do some ... instead of calling it brain-dumping, I'll call it experience dumping. 

First, my usual message to people who stop by for non-radio stuff: thanks for coming by and I should be  back to my usual tech topics tomorrow.  

As for the main question, I don't know how far toward the front of your mind this concept is, but your call sign is a much stronger identifier because while names can be very commonly repeated in your city, your call is the only name you have that uniquely identifies you. For example, there may be many (dozens? hundreds?) of people in the US named Joe Walsh, but only one on Earth who goes by the call WB6ACU (and played guitar for the Eagles). The call conveys what country you live in, generally conveys what part of the country for most nations, although not so much in the US for several years. That excludes virtually all of the people who have the same name as you.

A lot of bloggers use their real life names. Clearly, Silicon Graybeard is not my legal, that you can read on my birth certificate, name. I'm not going to use my call here because there are several freebie websites that allow you to search on a call and get the person's mailing address. In this "information age" that opens doors to unscrupulous actors being able to get into your life. In many places, strangers can look up photos of your home, as well as financial details, county tax assessments and other details you may not want widely looked at. I recommend keeping our calls out of the discussion.  

The oldest way I know of getting QSL cards is having a company printing cards do that for you, and it's still as valid as ever.  Those can be single-sided, so mailing address on one side with QSO details on the other. They're marginally cheaper than first class mail in envelopes, 65 cents vs. 82 according to the US Postal Service. Also in this day of home printers as good as any printer you can get, you can print your own.

But I don't think that's what most people are curious about. They're curious about electronic QSLs.  And maybe that brings us to a question we should have started with. 

What do you want your QSL for?

If you want your QSL for "the final courtesy of a QSO" anything from a paper postcard to anything you printed on a color printer will do. There's a host of companies that have sprung up based on the idea of an electronic QSL or eQSL. Many of them work by generating pretty image files, like the typical jpegs, png, or other file formats you see all the time. They then email the file to the other side of the QSO. I have had a dozen or two from a place called https://qslworld.com/, and another, smaller amount that are more clearly homemade. 

The first company that started a parallel business of doing online QSL exchanges that I knew of was eQSL.cc. and that was in the early 2000s. I started an account with them back then and have been a "member" for (guessing) over 20 years. They have a system called Authenticity Guaranteed (AG) that they started to remove the suspicion that computer pictures generated. If I wanted to use an eQSL for some award that another company issues, I'd ask how to do that. 

The problem with these is that if you want the QSL toward any sort of award you need to find out from the place that does the awards what they'll accept. The more popular awards appear to be Worked All States and DX Century Club - both are from the ARRL. Mailed cards are acceptable, but I don't really know if doing something like printing out a jpg QSL card that you got in an email is acceptable. Or how they'd tell. The thing that electronic QSLs face is the same thing online payments face: fakes. If you apply to the ARRL for DXCC sending them a box with 100 QSL cards in it - or 500 like I did in 2009/2010 -  it's more secure than 100 jpgs. 100 paper cards look distinctly different from 100 pictures on a monitor. 

I guess it was last year that I added eight band endorsement to my 5BDXCC. That was done entirely with contacts confirmed by the ARRL's Log of The World (LoTW). That was the cheapest and easiest way to get an endorsement for (at least) 300 QSOs I've ever come across. 

Well, since I have no idea what the majority of people want to know, maybe I should leave it here and say fire away and leave whatever questions you have. Hopefully there's something that's useful or could spur looking around more.  

An illustration of what the LoTW shows you any time you want it. There are options for what you want to display and I did this a little after I got the 8BDXCC endorsement. I've worked DXCC on 6m, but it'll be a while before I cross the 100 confirmed line and apply for 9BDXCC.

Weekend wrapup

As I mentioned in Friday's post, this weekend was the CQ Worldwide VHF Digital Contest, only I described it incorrectly. Or incompletely. 

CQ Magazine has been running a July VHF contest for years, but with the rather amazing rise in popularity of the digital modes (which I know I've talked about before) a group of hams who prefer the "good old" analog modes like voice, mostly single sideband (SSB), with a small amount of FM, along with CW (Morse code) have been finding the contests much less interesting, and I've read that a noticeable number of these operators have stopped participating in the contests. This year, CQ introduced a new concept: a second contest.  Enter the one you prefer or both of them, your choice. The "CQ Worldwide VHF SSB/CW Contest" was held in the first weekend of July with the same 24 hour interval as yesterday's VHF Digital Contest 1400Z, Jul 4 to 1400Z, Jul 5. No, I didn't participate in that. 

So how did it go? Miles better than contest I keep comparing to, last year's ARRL VHF Contest. With the start and end times for this contest being in the morning, it tends to help to remember that propagation will be toward the sun, with paths in the sunlit part of the day. In the mornings, we'll hear the eastern part of the US, and as far as into Europe we can (if we're lucky), while in the evening we'll get more openings to the west. My perspective on open to the west is that from here on the east coast of Florida, pretty much everywhere is "toward the west." That's how it went, only the opening toward the west coast was over pretty early, long before it was sunset on the left coast.

The two pieces of software I'm running and depending on the most are a second-source of WSJT-X, called "WSJT-X Improved," and a program that helps with human interfacing to WSJT-X improved called JTAlert. Describing how to connect them and even get started is "beyond the scope of this paper" (as they used to say). JTAlert's default display puts up a box where incoming messages are tagged so that we can tell at a glance if we've worked that station before, the station's grid square designation, notes if they're calling CQ or a few other things. When that display window contains a lot of calls, it can be hard to read what I need to get out of it in the 15 second intervals FT8 uses. For much of the contest, that window contained 40 to 60 calls in every 15 seconds. Somewhere in that 40 to 60 second interval is where I'd run out time to read it all.

So how good was the weekend?  During the 24 hours of the contest, I only worked two new grid squares (where New simply means I haven't worked them before). That's more or less a "Meh" result. This morning, while 6m was open to Europe, I nudged my number of countries worked up to having worked my ninth band DXCC (100 countries worked on each band). Needless to say, I haven't got 100 confirmed, and can't apply for that wallpaper until I get the 100 QSLs. In my work toward the 8 band DXCC I have now, I've just come to know I need to work a bit more than the 100. Five or 10 extra is generally plenty. 

This afternoon, with the contest over, I worked two more new grids, making the weekend total four. That's not remarkably great, but it's a good day. Certainly more than average. I'm trying to work new ones all the time and I know I've gotten two or three in one day several times. Of course, the more you have worked already, the fewer there are left to get in one day. 

This story about 9BXCC fits nicely with the idea of a post about QSLing, which seemed to get a positive reaction.  

And since this needs a picture here...

Spread that ketchup around

Some catching up on things.

Flight test 13 correction: 

FT-13 is currently set for Monday evening July 20th at the same launch time of 6:45PM EDT so you can correct for your own time zone. That time has been posted since first time I looked for it, around 8:00 AM this morning (EDT), so I assume unless something major happens, it will probably be shown at least until midday Monday unless something really bad is found - or happens - this weekend.

The launch window is 90 minutes long, but as we learned yesterday, that's for holds that might be needed early in the countdown. A hold at an earlier time might be able to use that hour and a half window, but I think it's the fuel loading - which starts at about 45 minutes before the planned liftoff - that says they're done for the day.  

Could be another touch and go weekend here

Back in June, I let all my fellow hams who don't keep track of this know that the annual ARRL VHF contest was coming and I'd be trying to play it hard in the radio room. It turned out to be pretty much a waste of time. 

It's not-so-instant replay time. This weekend is CQ Magazine's big contest, and WA7BNM's Contest Calendar shows it this way:

CQ Worldwide VHF Digital Contest: 1400Z, Jul 18 to 1400Z, Jul 19
	Geographic Focus:	Worldwide
	Participation:	Worldwide
	Mode:	Digital
	Bands:	6, 2m
	Classes:	Single Op All Band (High/Low/QRP) Single Op Single Band (High/Low/QRP) Hilltopper: Single Op Low Power Portable (6hrs) Rover Multi-Op
	Exchange:	4-character grid square
	Work stations:	Once per band
	QSO Points:	1 point per 6m QSO 2 points per 2m QSO
	Multipliers:	Each grid square once per band
	Score Calculation:	Total score = total QSO points x total mults
	Submit logs by:	2359Z July 24, 2026
	E-mail logs to:	(none)
	Upload log at:	https://cqww-vhf.com/logcheck/
	Mail logs to:	(none)
	Find rules at:	https://www.cqww-vhf.com/

You'll note that the times are very unusual. The contest starts and ends at 1400 UTC, or 10:00 AM EDT. Starting at 10:00 AM would have been great today, so it looks like propagation might be better than the ARRL June contest - at least it looks that way at the moment. On the other hand, ending at 1400 UTC, making it a 24 hour contest, could well be shutting down before propagation gets good on Sunday. 

QSLing used to be quite a bit simpler in the "old days."

For non-hams that statement is as useful as if I spoke it in a strange language, while the hams will understand it. Q-signals are three letter messages that all start with letter Q, and are a shorthand way of transmitting common questions and answers, borne out of having to transmit every letter in Morse code. There's a couple of handfuls of Q signals in common use, and QSL has got to be one of the most commonly used Q signals. The precise definition is a little wordy, but a common reference says. 

I am acknowledging receipt. - ("QSL" as a statement)
Can you acknowledge receipt (of a message or transmission)? ("QSL?" as a question)

From acknowledging you received what another ham sent you, it evolved into a postcard or even letter confirming the contact, and what became known as "the final courtesy" of a radio contact. I remember sending and receiving QSL cards long before I got my ham license ("ticket") as a postcard with a 5 cent stamp on it. 

As with so much else in so many aspects of society, the computer age changed QSLing greatly and while 20 years ago, all options involved sending a physical piece of mail (postcard or paper) now we're flooded with options for electronic QSLs or eQSLs. 

I was considering writing a little summary on what options I see and what I think of it. Does anyone want to see something like that? 

It was BIC intensive weekend

I really have very little to write about since I spent a lot of time living up to the observation that there's nothing quite like staying BIC to get the best out of time in front of the radio. 

I spent most of Saturday and today BIC and striving to get "new" things on 6m.  My final total was 

• New grids contacted for FFMA credit: 4
• New countries contacted for 6m DXCC credit: 2

While I don't qualify for either, I'm far closer to DXCC than the FFMA. 

The band conditions (propagation) were better from Saturday morning through about 0000 UTC or Saturday evening around 7:30 PM local time, when I came out here to write the "It's Field Day" article.  Sunday morning meant continuing with our search for a new church, but the conditions from lunch through most of the day were pretty poor compared to yesterday.  

Even sitting here now and looking at it, it looks like a lot of BIC time for those amounts of increase, but, there are plenty of times when I spend days in the chair and only get one or two new credits, or nothing new at all. 

Since I've been watching for this, I should update that the SWIFT rescue launch to on the "last" Pegasus rocket has been delayed until Tuesday at 6:23 AM EDT, but it's not from here or Vandenberg. It's from the Marshall Islands.

Northrop Grumman's Pegasus launch vehicle on the belly of their Stargazer heavy lift airplane. Image Credit: Northrop Grumman

It's Field Day Weekend '26 - Remember your BIC

As I write, it's Saturday evening the 27th, both EDT and UTC. It's the last weekend in June and that marks the weekend of the year when American ham radio operators conduct the biggest operating event of the year that isn't a contest: Field Day. Strictly speaking, Field Day (or FD) is an event organized by the American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, so people who are opposed to the ARRL for whatever reason look down on the event. Saying it's not a contest is one of those things that's technically true, by definition, but people submit scores and their logs for bragging rights. FD runs from 1800 hours UTC on Saturday (2PM EDT) to 2059 Sunday ( 4:59:59 PM EDT). 

But that's not why I'm here. I've written about Field Day before, and this previous paragraph is almost word for word from last year's post.  The only edit I remember is changing the date in first sentence from last year's June 28th and I wrote that one in the afternoon. 

The main point of this post is something I haven't written about before. I've mentioned being a paper chaser, with several pieces of wallpaper earned and others that I'm actively working on today - 6m DXCC and the FFMA. As I said before, one of the first few posts (post #6) on the blog was about what I called my Lifetime Achievement Award in Ham Radio, 5BDXCC, short for Five Band DXCC (5BDXCC), and now that stands at 8BDXCC. I'm closing in on my ninth band, 6m  (50-54 MHz). I've told myself that my chances of achieving the FFMA approach zero simply because of the geography. The FFMA is an award for contacting all 488 of the Maidenhead Grid Squares, (1 degree in latitude by 2 degrees in longitude) in the lower 48 states. I'm far closer to the geographic SE corner of the CONUS than the center. Only one station in Florida has earned the FFMA, and that was someone in the NW-most corner of Florida, around 500 miles from me. 

So how does one work toward this? And what's this BIC I mention? 

I'm not going to insist this is the only way to get there, but the First Law for working countries, states or grid squares you've never worked before is simple.  Listen first. Listen, listen, listen and then listen some more. There are other sources of information. The easy one is something I've mentioned dozens of times, websites that allow hams to report hearing other stations, and present a graphical display like this one from DXMaps. 

It's important to point out how you should use something like this, because I've sat in the station many times with a red blob of reported contacts like that and heard almost nothing. The important thing about this is that every line on it has two ends on it, it's either a contact between the two calls, or one end of it is being reported by their computer on its own because the computer can do that on its own. 

Your best chance of knowing you'll hear someone is if someone near you is either reporting working or hearing the call on the other end of the red line. If you see a call that's near you on the map and they have a better station than you do (they can hear weaker signals than you), you may not hear the same station they do. Look at Florida on this plot an you'll see several red lines going toward the NE, perhaps New York, or Pennsylvania, maybe even New England. You'll also see a smaller couple of red lines headed more northwest into the middle of the blob. Someone in that part of the country might be heard as well. 

None of those red lines going east to west across the middle of the country mean anything to us down here in Florida.

This is where BIC comes in, which is an acronym for Butt In Chair. Sit in the chair and listen. If you're using one of the digital modes implemented in software that displays every call it's demodulating, read that like it's the most important contract you've ever gotten.  

One of the things about 6m that's striking is openings can be really specific. Over the years, I've seen times when I'll get a cross county opening to one grid square; sometimes for one 15 second transmission ( common in FT8) sometimes for a few minutes, then it jumps to another grid square, or disappears for some time, then appears again to a different square.

Let me show you a real example. I modified a map of the US showing all the grid squares to show where my central Florida signal popped into the Pacific NW. 

The red lines are supposed to be showing the first square I contacted was CN84 in Oregon and worked a station there. A few minutes later, it went silent, and then I heard CN86 and worked another station. Again, it went silent after a few minutes, and then opened to CN85, where I heard and worked the third station of that day. The details like "how long was it open? then how long did it close?" and more are long gone, but I think the whole thing lasted around 30 minutes. I've since heard similar things with closer grids, enough for me to think that it's actually not a rare thing.

If I wasn't BIC, I wouldn't have heard any of that. Similarly today, there were two guys in two different grid squares that I've never worked yet, DM86 and 96. If it weren't for monitoring closely I wouldn't have gotten both of them. BIC, watching the signals being copied out of my computer on my desktop instead of reports from places like DXMaps. 

Knowing where and when to transmit is another "listen, listen, listen" thing and it varies with the mode you're operating. On CW and voice, they'll generally tell you something like, "listening up 5" or "up 10 to 15". The important part is not to transmit when they're transmitting, but when they're listening. Saying "up 5" or that sort of thing doesn't happen on the new digital modes because those modes don't give enough bits of information. You have to pay attention to when the station is transmitting and choose to not transmit when they are. On WSJT-X's FT-8, which seems to be the most popular mode, I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen someone calling the DX while the DX is transmitting, not listening. 

All DXers have heard this many, many times.

So far the weekend is a dud

I mentioned this weekend's ARRL VHF contest a few times and that's where I was all of Saturday - at least until 11:00 PM local (eastern US) time.

It's hard to know this is correct, but yesterday, I thought it might have been the least active, and least interesting of these contests. Ever. Compared to the activity I heard last weekend, it was very low activity and very poor propagation.

Naturally, if I say it was bad, the obvious reply is, "how bad was it?" 

As I've said many times, I tend to use a software package called WSJT-X and a mode called FT8. The "JT" is for Joe Taylor, the physicist who developed the mode and puts the software out for free and I believe the whole name reduces to Weak Signal by Joe Taylor - eXtended (more than just the original few features). The big picture overview is that the FT8 software transmits and receives in alternating 15 second intervals.  And now I can finally answer the "how bad was it?" 

Last weekend, during the busy periods, I would see that in 15 seconds, the software had demodulated and put on screen over 50 different transmissions. For perspective, most of yesterday, I saw four to six. Sometimes it would show two and I don't recall ever seeing the incoming calls get to even 10. The only good part is that while I didn't catch any new stations or new areas I haven't contacted (worked) yet, I did get propagation openings into southern parts of Arizona and California.  

It's practically impossible for me to read over 50 call signs going by in 15 seconds and recognize any I need to respond to. Yes, I have some software that helps with that, too. 

Well it's just after 9AM here, and the band looks even slower than yesterday, but I'll go turn the station on. 

 

 

OK Hams, you've got a week to get ready

I write about this every year because the best VHF contest of the year is pretty much always the June VHF contest put on by the American Radio Relay League or ARRL. As always, the contest starts on the second Saturday of the month, with the peculiarity that it doesn't start at midnight UTC - as the vast majority of contests do - which would be Friday night, June 12th at 8:00 PM. Instead, it starts Saturday afternoon at 1800 UTC which is 2:00PM EDT and goes until 0300 UTC or 11:00 AM Sunday night, which is Monday morning the 15th in UTC. 

WA7BNM's Contest Calendar shows it this way: 

ARRL June VHF Contest: 1800Z, Jun 13 to 0259Z, Jun 15
	Geographic Focus:	United States/Canada
	Participation:	Worldwide
	Mode:	All
	Bands:	50 MHz and up
	Classes:	Single Op All Band (All Modes/Analog Modes)(Low/High) Single Op Portable (All Modes/Analog Modes) Single Op 3-Band (All Modes/Analog Modes) Single Op FM Rover Limited Rover Unlimited Rover Unlimited Multi-Op Limited Multi-Op
	Max power:	(see rules)
	Exchange:	4-character grid square
	Work stations:	Once per band per grid square
	QSO Points:	1 point per 50- or 144-MHz QSO 2 points per 222- or 432-MHz QSO 3 points per 906- or 1296-MHz QSO 4 points per 2.3 GHz (or higher) QSO
	Multipliers:	Each grid square once per band
	Score Calculation:	Total score = total QSO points x total multipliers
	Submit logs by:	0300Z June 24, 2026
	E-mail logs to:	(none)
	Upload log at:	http://contest-log-submission.arrl.org
	Mail logs to:	June VHF ARRL 225 Main St. Newington, CT 06111 USA
	Find rules at:	https://www.arrl.org/june-vhf

 

Almost a month ago, I ran a post called, "Did it just turn into summer?" because suddenly, the VHF bands, in particular 6 meters (50 - 54 MHz) where I do most of my VHF operating these days suddenly came alive like it hadn't been so far this calendar year. Well, the answer was "no" because that 6m opening wasn't long enough lived. As the calendar flipped into June,it started being more like summer, with the sporadic E "red blob" over massive parts of the country happening more like every day. 

I just took another screen copy of the DXMaps site and it's noticeably bigger and wider than the one I posted in May, so let me post the new one and talk a little about what to look for. This plot was grabbed at 0018 UTC on June 7th.   

If you've never seen a plot like this, you might be overwhelmed by the number of contacts shown. Every red, brown or other color line on the map is a contact between two hams. Most, but not all, of those contacts have the call for both ends of the line. That is, if both ends have the call, when you click it will tell you if that station contacted the other or just monitored (heard) the other end.  For example, in the upper left of the USA, there's a station with a white background called N7DNF and it you hover your mouse pointer over the white area, the live DXMaps would display "N7DNF (DN55RS) last reported by" - the call of the station reporting it (so not N7DNF) with the time reported, the frequency it was heard on and modulation mode. The DN55RS is the grid square N7DNF reported being in. If you were doing this "live" on your computer, you'd see somewhere in the blob, another one of those white or yellow rectangles would change its appearance a little to help you find the other end of the QSO.

First important note: you may look at that and think if you turn on your radio, you'll hear all these calls. With luck you'll hear one or two stations that others living near your end of the line will hear. One of the things that still impresses me after decades of observing it on 6m is how "oddly specific" the targeting is. A maidenhead grid square is one degree of latitude by 2 degrees of longitude which is approximately  70 × 100 miles in the continental US. I have seen grid squares open for a contact while the adjacent square north or south is as dead as if it was on another planet; minutes later it would jump over the adjacent square which still wouldn't be audible, and minutes after that it would jump down to the one it had previously jumped over.  

When the map looks like this, I've heard two adjacent - or just "close to each other" - squares and not another station in the country. I've been operating FT8 the majority of the time, which operates in 15 second intervals so that stations alternate which 15 second interval they transmit in: 0 to 15 and 30 to 45 seconds or 15 to 30 and 45 to 60 seconds. I'll hear, for example, two stations in New England on the first (0-15 and 30-45 seconds, called the even intervals) and somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska in the odd intervals.  

There are other sources of maps like this other than DXMaps, and totally different ways of presenting the information. There are other contests besides the ARRL June VHF contest, and July has one I've played around in a couple of times - the CQ magazine contest. And, of course, one of the biggest events of the year is the ARRL's Field Day, the last weekend of June. 

Those Pico Balloons Again

I can sense the "what are you talking about?" questions in the air. 

Three years ago in February, after the headline Chinese Balloon Incident, I started looking into the responses, starting from the question, "Did The USAF Shoot Down a Ham Radio Balloon?" and first encountered the idea of hobbyists that made small or downright tiny balloons that they'd let ascend into the atmosphere and transmit a low power signal with some information that could be monitored wherever they happened to be. It eventually turned into a fairly long introduction to the topic of hobby balloons that go around the world. 

Again, that was over three years ago, and groups like the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade are still online, and growing. 

Earlier in the week, I came across an article on one of the forums I read where a guy, working on his own, had found a way to get a very lightweight balloon into the upper atmosphere - above most airline traffic - and it made me want to do a post about what he did. Maybe to encourage you, or maybe to encourage me. Let me show a map he posted showing the travels of his cheap little balloon. 

What I really want to show about this is the information in the upper left hand corner. I'll enlarge it, and add it here. 

While the big picture shows what appears to be around 3 laps, this says 3.821 laps - and much more impressive to me: 68 days and 8 hours floating around the world. Just above the bottom of the summary, it says the last altitude was 13.70 km - which converts to just under 45,000 feet: 44,948.

Now here's the embarrassing part. I dutifully saved this image but I apparently didn't leave myself a link to the source where he shows off the heart of the balloon, a folded piece of paper with a few solar cells to power it, and a few small printed circuit boards. They look professionally done, not hobbyist level, and that's telling me that they're probably among the many professionally designed and produced boards used by hobbyists for many things that the developers never dreamed of people doing. Which means I can't say "just do this" and you can launch your own pico-balloon.

I'll keep looking for that, and hope to be able to round it up soon. 

Did it just turn into summer?

Not weather-wise, or at least not the weather at the ground level. I'm talking about a difference in how the ionosphere's E layer is behaving. 

I've written about Sporadic E propagation, often referred to as Es, many times and I've talked about how Sporadic E showing up at 50 MHz (the 6 meter ham band) is more common in summer than winter.  This one is probably the most read introduction. Several times, I've shown screen captures from a site called DXMaps and the density of "red blob" tracks of contacts visibly goes up as summer arrives and gets going. Here's one I took several minutes ago:

I've mentioned several times that I'm somewhat of a paper chaser in ham radio, spending most of my radio time on 6m pursuing the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award); this post (from November of '25) has the most info and I'll borrow some of it for here. 

Along the same line, the only accomplishments I’m actively “chasing” on the VHF six meter band are both in the category of “difficult to practically impossible.” The easier one is probably 6m DXCC (100 recognized countries worked and confirmed). I currently have 90 confirmed with another three “waiting for confirmation.” I’m closer to DXCC on 6m than any of the other major awards. Easy or obvious one first, DXCC is more likely than Worked All States - WAS. 

WAS is practically impossible from my location. I’m pretty sure last November (‘24) was the closest I ever came to even hearing Alaska, and that was hearing other stations in the southeast calling the guy in Alaska. I saw him “spotted” on some of the sites online that report that, but never actually heard him. I was hoping for this year, but it hasn’t been good so far.

The hardest one, the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award – the first person to achieve this award) is for working and confirming all 488 Maidenhead grids in the continental US. "Continental" means I don't need Alaska or Hawaii. I have 345 grids confirmed with another five that I’ve worked but can’t get confirmed. To be brutally honest, the FFMA is practically impossible from here, too. Unsurprisingly, when your goal is to reach every place  in the country, you're most likely to get everyone from the center of the country, and it turns out there has been one issued in Florida, in the northwestern most corner of the state. That's about 500 miles away - near Pensacola.

All of that is to set up that, to some degree, I can look at the map of contacts being reported on DXMaps and have a pretty good idea if areas I need to work are being heard and reported. I don't see any on that display map. 

While that's a bit of a downer, the number of Es openings should be going up with the highest numbers showing up in mid-June through mid-July. It's not coincidental that two of the biggest 6m contests of the year are the in this interval. Contests are good ways to get lots of stations on the air for quick, short contacts. 

Summer is a good time of year around here for staying inside the house. At least I have things to chase on the radio.

A remarkable and old Ham radio accomplishment

This is actually old news, it happened in March of 2009, 17 full years ago but I just learned about it recently and was embarrassed that I didn't know about it. 

A couple of members of the German AMSAT, a club dedicated to working satellites and more difficult modes, such as Earth-Moon-Earth (EME or Moonbounce) successfully bounced signals off the planet Venus and heard their own signals.  For comparison, the moon is many times closer than Venus and if you're listening for your own signals bouncing off the moon, they take around 2.6 seconds (based on one way distance to the moon of 250,000 miles and the speed of light being 186,000 miles) per second or 1.3 seconds each way.  

It took the signals to and from Venus "a round trip delay of about 5 minutes."  Sounds like Venus bounce isn't very practical for conversation, but I think doing Venus bounce will be like Moonbounce with an automated software system the sends a signal report and another small piece of info, maybe taking a minute to reply, we're talking 2-1/2 minutes there, the message time, and 2-1/2 minutes back, maybe a Venus bounce contact (QSO) could take place in under six minutes. 

I'm full of questions about this, and the source article at the American Radio Relay League has almost no technical details. The ARRL reports, "According to an AMSAT-DL press release, the team's transmitter was generating about 6 kW CW on 2.4 GHz," and that's about all.

I've written about moonbounce and trying to hear my own signal reflections from the moon before; several times. So let me play with some numbers. The first hurdle is how far we're trying to send a signal to. At it's closest, Venus is 24 million miles while at its farthest, it's 162 million miles. Both Venus and Earth are in elliptical orbits around the sun and we're both constantly moving around the sun. There are more complications there, but I'll skip them for now and use a number that isn't the closest or farthest. Since it's a nice round number, let's say 100 million miles. 

The big concern is the same as every communications link everywhere else: the amount the signal attenuates - weakens - over that 100,000,000 miles. The term for this is path loss, and many times I've used a handy equation to calculate it that gets you within less than half a dB of the more theoretically-backed equation. We haven't talked about a frequency, so let me use that 2.4 GHz (2,400 MHz) the Germans used. It's a ham band here in the USA as well. 

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(f) + 20log(d) where,f is the frequency in MHz and d is the distance in miles.

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(2400) + 20log(10⁸)

Path loss = 264.6 dB

If you're not used to this world, this may shock you, but the impact in path loss isn't terribly big for the return back to you doubling the distance. If you double the 100 million miles in the last term to 200 million (2*10⁸) the increase is 6 dB. Right, 270.6. There's more uncertainties to come than that 6 dB.

The problem with that number is not knowing how much signal you get back because of a big unknown. How much signal is lost in the reflection sending the signal back to you? It seems a safe bet that your signal isn't going to exactly light up the entire earth-facing side of Venus, it'll be wider than the planet out that far, so there will losses I can't guess at - say your signal's diameter at Venus is 10 times the diameter of the planet, yes, you're losing 9/10 of your signal strength in that reflection. The next problem is how much of what hits the planet reflects? Venus is famously clouded over, how much loss is there? Let me PFA some numbers, and I'll say I lose 20 dB in the combination. 

What does it mean to increase the path loss from 271 dB to 291 dB?

The real problem, then, is not knowing how much loss there is in those places. I'll use the 6000 watts that the German guys did.  That's +67.8 dBm (decibels above 1 milliwatt) If I had no antenna gain the signal I'd get back would be +67.8 dBm minus 291 dB or -223.2 dBm. I don't know of any way to detect and use a signal that weak, regardless of modulation and receiver enhancements. 

What if I had an antenna like the one on the right here, with LOTS of gain?

I don't know exactly how big this is or how much gain it would give at 2.4 GHz, but it's a site in New Jersey where a secret military radar project first bounced radar off the moon. Not with that antenna, it's just a nice looking model for a ham radio project. My guess is the AMSAT Germany guys probably had something like that, if not bigger. 

There's a lot of what I consider reasonable guesses here, and (as always) some "hand-wavium" but it doesn't sound easy - more like on border of impossible. Good antennas for 2.4 GHz aren't hard to get and will do nothing but help. I'm not sure about the amplifier to get 6 kW, but I think they're out there. 

Ham radio and Artemis 2

Before I get to that, a short update on the comet story. While I haven't seen an actual headline comet MAPS appeared to break apart in a video I saw that was made as the comet was getting close to going behind the blocked out visual center of the Lasco camera's center of view. The latest view, time tagged at the same 2306 UTC that previous posts displayed, shows nothing has come out from near the sun. 

This tells me that the comet was ripped apart by something in that environment. Not only is this not unexpected, it's rather common for these Kreutz sungrazers. 

Late in the afternoon, I ran across an interesting story for those of you interested in radio, ham radio, and experiments you can do yourself.  It focuses on how hams are tracking Artemis 2.  It opens with what I find to be an interesting thing I haven't heard yet. Three of the four Artemis 2 crew are hams. Commander Reid Wiseman, is KF5LKT;  Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen is KF5LKU, the next call issued, and Pilot Victor Glover is KI5BKC (so he's been licensed longer). You'll note that the only astronaut who isn't a ham is the YL Mission Specialist Christina Koch. 

The story itself is from a Vancouver, British Columbia newspaper called the Vancouver Sun. Vancouver is about as far as one can get from Florida's Kennedy Space Center and still be in North America. The story they present is almost entirely centered on Vancouver native named Scott Tilley who is apparently not a ham, they never say or give a callsign for him but a contractor on a program NASA started. 

This week, he is tracking NASA’s Artemis II rocket as one of 34 individuals and organizations from around the world selected by the American space agency to monitor its first crewed mission to orbit the moon in more than 50 years. 

Here's where the ham community kicks in. QRZ member K6CLS adds: 

The 13cm EME guys are tuning in. Orion xmits downlink on 2216MHz +/- 2.5MHz. easy to see the continuous signal with some gain from a dish and a good preamp.

To look at the spectrum, some folks are using a down converter to an SDR, or an SDR that can work on 2216MHz, or a spectrum analyzer directly!

Can see the chips in the signal, so it looks like QAM something, but I'm sure it's more complex.

Several folks have reported they can see the Doppler shift in the mark tones.

Fun stuff!

As you can see by him specifying the downlink at 2216 +/- 2.5 MHz, is part of S-band (2.0 to 4.0 GHz) communications (the way NASA is using it), the 13cm ham band is close to the 2.4 GHz WiFi band, so some folks online may have some means of tuning in the band - if you're comfortable working with microwave frequencies near that to tack in coax or power splitters, amplifiers and other kinds of modules.  EME is Earth-Moon-Earth communications or Moon Bounce. Wikipedia notes, 

"The first Earth-Venus-Earth contact by amateur radio operators was established on the 13 cm band in 2009."

That's in case that Earth-Moon-Earth stuff is too easy for you. I honestly didn't know anyone anywhere had done Venus Bounce or EVE before.

If you're interested in trying to put something together to listen for Artemis 2, I don't know of any really easy, off the shelf solutions because I haven't looked. A quick look at some broadband SDR companies whose products I've used don't show any that are rated for 2.0GHz to, well, anything. That basically just implies that you need to use a block downconverter from 2216 MHz down to something you have that would allow you to play with the signal. I'll have to play more with this idea. 

Changes to ham radio that have upended the old hobby

This post is going to be ham radio heavy, especially old ham radio. If you don't care about that, go check out the blogs on the right side of the page, and check back tomorrow to see if I could find any space-related news. 

Back in early January (the 4th), I did a post mentioning that this February was going to be my 50th anniversary of getting my first amateur radio license, my Novice class license. I figured the date based on having a QSL card in an old file box. 

The only thing I could find that I think is useful was in a QSL card box that was full of cards from my early days in radio. I think that card was from my first QSO. It says the date and time of the contact was February 9, 1976 at 4:15 PM, on 3.720 MHz - allocated to Novice licensees in those days. February 9th was a Monday, and the typical way that contests are timed is to start at midnight (UTC) on Saturday morning. Saturday was February 7th and 0000 UTC would have been 7:00 PM in the evening of Friday, February 6th, EST.  For me to be operating Monday, the license would have been received in the mail, before that Monday at 4:15 PM, although it might have come a day or more before that first contact.  

If you've been working toward getting a ham license, you've probably heard of QSL cards. There are a couple of handfuls of Q signals in common use, and QSL has got to be one of the most commonly used Q signals. The precise definition is a little wordy, but a common reference says.  

I am acknowledging receipt. - ("QSL" as a statement) 
Can you acknowledge receipt (of a message or transmission)? ("QSL?" as a question)

It was an old saying 50 years ago that a QSL card is "the final courtesy of making a contact" and you'll still see that saying today. It's not unusual to find that you don't get a card back in reply to every one you send because it's not unusual for one side of the contact to want a card more than the other side. Especially if you work a rare or hard to contact country.

In all the ways that Ham radio hobby has changed over my 50 years, one of the biggest changes has been exchanging QSL cards. As the name implies, for the vast majority of QSLs exchanged in my first couple of years, a QSL card was made out of a postcard-style card with space to write the other guy's address and the details of the contact. I'd write the other guy's address on it, stick a postage stamp on it and drop it in mail. The other end of the contact either did the same thing such that we both got each other's card within a day or two of mailing ours. We can still do that today, but it has been years since I've gotten plain, postcard-style QSL in the mail. 

The next level after the postcard dropped in a mailbox was to go to cards in an envelope and using first class mail. That's still a perfectly reasonable way to send cards to guys in our country, and the next level of caring is to enclose an SASE - a Self Addressed, Stamped Envelope - to pay the postage for the guy on the other end. This goes for virtually all of the "first and second" world countries. 

The first problem with sending a QSL to some countries is how to pay for their postage. There used to be something we could buy at a US Post Office called an International Reply Coupon or IRC that was redeemable for postage in other countries. I'm not sure if they still exist in some places but these days I regularly see other hams saying where they live the postal services won't accept the IRCs. There have been times when the safe way was to buy fresh postage for the country you're mailing to and either put that on your SASE or the other guy could put that postage on the reply envelope.  You could include a couple of bucks in the envelope with your card and the SAE, but that predictably led to mail being stolen from the guy it was intended for so someone could pocket the couple of bucks. The post office employees would learn who the guys were that had the radio towers and regularly got the large, thick envelopes that contained cash.

With the advent of computers and phones everywhere for everything, that has also affected QSLing. There are services that keep a little memory file for every licensee, like QRZ, and licensees can edit their "Biography" page to include info on how to QSL. In the last decade, hams started turning to various online payment services like PayPal, with the end result being you can send an email to them, listing all the contact details (time, signal reports, frequency, mode and all), send them something like $5 and get a bunch of contacts confirmed. 

In a parallel move to using online services for looking up addresses and paying for QSLs, a group of electronic QSL services got started. You upload the details for one or a bunch of QSOs you've had and depending on the service, you can either make your own QSL or use standard cards they have. 

If you're chasing a particular award, check their rules for what an acceptable electronic QSL is. One of the best services is the American Radio Relay League's Logbook Of The World or LOTW. A competitor is just called eQSL.cc and I've used both of those for as long as they're been around. A startup that's sending me a lot of cards these days is QSL World. I haven't yet joined or supported them, but I've replied to the cards I've gotten. While I'm not 100% sure of this, my guess is that LOTW works a lot like the ARRL's DXCC works. You can submit log entries that get security checks when you upload them, or you can send them physical cards, but I don't know how they handle the electronic cards from eQSL, QSL World or others. 

"I've had worse"

Or how to tell you've had a bad weekend without going into more details. 

I'm sure most people are saying something along the lines of "what??" Let me back up a bit and start over. 

Something I talk regularly about is my ham radio hobby, and the annual VHF contests I play in a few times a year. There are several of these contests over the course of the year, where the goal is to exchange a piece of information, sometimes two small pieces, and call signs, of course. Well, the real goal depends on why you're playing in the contest. If you're trying to win the contest, it's different than if you're trying to contact places you've never confirmed contact with. 

While there are more than these three, the USA's national ham radio organization, the American Radio Relay League, puts on three contests per year, June, September and January - around the second weekend of the month. Without a doubt, I consider the June contest the best of the year; my results have always been worse than June's in the other two. The reason June is better is purely that the radio propagation is regularly among the best of the year. Another group/company - ISTRC it's CQ Magazine - puts on a July contest and that one is also good. 

Long introduction out of the way, the title is my summary of the contest so far. "I've had worse." At 2PM Eastern (1900 UTC), when the contest started, the band was better than usual, with stations in New England coming in strong and steady. As is often the case, the openings weren't to all of New England, but to a small stripe of the grid squares. I clipped this image of the grid squares in the area from a US Map that Icom America gives away at hamfests. 

The exact spots I was hearing varied a bit. Most often I heard the stripe of FN31 and FN41 north to FN35/FN46. At other times I heard FN00 and 01 in western Pennsylvania, and FN13 quite often. In my quest to contact every grid square in the continental US, the four I'm really hoping for in FN are 57 and 65 to 67.

In and out of the shack for a while (making a jar of Mayonnaise to turn into Caesar salad dressing) and a few other things didn't change the overall picture of being open to a few of these grid squares, the squares I could hear just moved down into the SE states, until this evening when the only grids I heard were peninsular Florida. EL96, 97, 98, 99, EL 87, 88, 89, and EM 00, which is as far into the NE of Florida as we can get, and includes some of SE Georgia. 

The contest continues until tomorrow night at 0359Z (which is actually early Monday morning UTC, not Sunday night). That's 10:59 PM Eastern time. I'll keep the station on and keep trying "asbestos" possible.

A Big Anniversay Coming

This post is going to be ham radio heavy, especially old ham radio. If you don't care about that, go check out the blogs on the right side of the page, and check back tomorrow to see if I could find any space-related news. 

Back in December, I noted that it was my 10th year of retirement, December 18th to pin it down.  Ten years of retirement is a good milestone, but coming up in early February is bigger to me.

February will mark my 50th anniversary of getting my first ham radio license. 

Do I mark the day I got the license and made my first radio contact? Do I mark when the license was issued, or whom I had the first contact with?  I know none of those details, and I've torn apart the shack trying to find either my old license, or a logbook. I would have sworn I had both of those, but I sure can't find either. 

What I remember first about that beginning is that my first week on the air was during an annual, week-long contest that the American Radio Relay League used to put on specifically for Novice License holders, called the Novice Roundup. This guy says that was the week of February 7th to the 15th. While I'm not sure when my first contact was, I do remember that my first contact was a station not far from where I'm living now.  I also vividly remember working California for the first time during that Novice Roundup. When you have zero experience with radio, working the other side of the country is exciting! All new contacts with a new place are exciting. 

The only thing I could find that I think is useful was in a QSL card box that was full of cards from my early days in radio. I think that card was from my first QSO. It says the date and time was February 9th at 4:15 PM, on 3.720 MHz - allocated to Novice licensees in those days. February 9th was a Monday, and the typical way that contests are timed is to start at midnight (UTC), so 0000 UTC on February 7th would have been in the evening of Friday February 6th in EST (I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, FL at the time), and that means the license would have arrived in the mail, no later than that Monday, although it's best to think it might have come a day or more before that first contact. 

I don't remember enough about how well the station was checked out and "ready to go" for the contest to decide if waiting until Monday was necessary. I don't remember much about what I was doing all day in February 50 years ago, but I think I was in one of the junior colleges nearby. I would have gotten home, made sure the station was OK and tried to make some contacts. 

The station itself was kind of "high end entry level" station: a Heathkit HW-16 transceiver and HG-10B VFO - those weren't available to novices until about a year before then. Those two are considered such a classic pair that there are hams using them today. I went to this guy's site, K3MSB.com, to copy his station picture because it looked better than the others that came up.

Image credit to K3MSB, Mark Bell.

Yes, I built both of those kits, put up the antennas with some help to tune them for use, and did everything to get a signal on the air. 

I can imagine someone saying, "why today?" Why talk about an anniversary of something that happened in early February of 1976 short of 50 years ago? Mostly, to be honest, because I've been trying to narrow things down better, about a path and project that took up much more time than just a day in February. I took the exam in December of '75, and started working toward that in the summer of '75. The FCC probably took 6 weeks to process the papers and send me the license.  Somewhere in there, I became a ham in everyone's eyes. 

About that Geminid Metor shower

You may have seen a bit of a headline buzz about the annual Geminid meteor shower peaking. The peak is going to be tonight (Dec. 13-14), and the Geminid shower is typically considered one of the best of the year - if not the best. The general rule of thumb is that the best viewing is with the moon in its darkest phases, and moonrise is after 1:00 AM Sunday the 14th, local time - my local moonrise is 0134 ET. The phase is in the last quarter so the moon doesn't get much less light than this. All things considered, if your skies aren't cloudy, this could be a very good meteor shower to watch.  

If you're going to be watching visually, the standard advice is to get to the darkest skies you can.  Outside of town, if possible, which means in most the country you'll need to have planned this before the last minute. Of course, considering the time of year and local weather is important, too. Maybe even life threatening if you don't have adequate warm clothing, and maybe even a thermos bottle of hot coffee or tea. You know your conditions and weather better than I can say. 

A composite view of the Geminid meteor shower taken from Arizona. (Image credit: Alan Dyer/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Images)

If you trace the bright streaks, you'll notice the streaks get shorter as you get closer to two brighter stars just right of center: those are Castor and Pollux, the two stars at the "top" of Gemini. The constellation stretches up and to the right in this picture. 

Of course, this is written from the perspective of watching the shower. If sitting up all night or until the early morning doesn't sound like fun, and you're also a ham or the radio aspects are more interesting to you, there's always Meteor Scatter.  I covered a lot about meteor scatter in that article, but not the details of how to set up a computer driven VHF radio to make contacts via meteor scatter. Unfortunately, that's too involved for you to set up everything if you aren't already. If you've already setup a station, and you're using WSJT-X or the Improved version, just click the MSK button, and it will change you to the default frequency and other settings.

I've posted screen captures from DXMaps before, and this one is from about 0220 UTC - less than 15 minutes ago as I type. Every dark blue line on this map was reported as a Meteor Scatter QSO, on or near the agreed frequency to hang out on and try for MS contacts: 50.260 MHz.

A less often talked about aspect of meteor showers is that they're typically usable for radio contacts for several days around the peak. This one, for example, will probably continue to provide contacts for at least another week, it's just the number of the rocks or grains of sand that cause the show and allows the radio contacts drops off. A benefit of radio is that you can make contacts well after sunrise or before sunset. Visually, you can only see the meteors while it's dark. 

Hams Are Never Really Unified on New Technologies

While I tend to try new things and communications modes there are many hams who don't really pay attention to that. Whatever aspect of the hobby they started out with is what they continue with.  There's nothing wrong with that, "to each his own" as the ancient saying goes. When I was starting out, our radios tended to have vacuum tubes. More so transmitters than receivers, but the first radio I ever had in my shack was a vacuum tube-based transceiver that I built from a kit, a Heathkit HW-16. 

Today, I still have vacuum tube radios in the shack, but I rarely even turn the Collins KWM-2 on.  

For most of my career, I worked in receiver design and I probably spend more time paying attention to receiver design and how they perform than most hams. While I never worked on the software side, I had to take the classes on communications theory that those software guys took. The concepts behind optimizing a communications receiver in analog parts (transistors and ICs) are the same as doing it mathematically in processor. 

I posted a longer description of my station with some explanations back in June of '23 but that's not really what I'm here about. What this is about is what's behind a meme that I've run into online. 

CW is an abbreviation for Continuous Wave, which is ham talk for communicating by Morse code - as you can see the guy's hand on a Morse code key (in front of that are two other keys). FT8 is a digital communications mode that has become exceptionally popular in the few years since it was introduced into the ham world. It was developed by a small group of hams with advanced degrees and experiences in communications (comm) theory, led by Joe Taylor K1JT, a professor at Princeton University. The software used is called WSJT-X, and while there are other programs that tweak little things in the user experience the most important things are the details in how the software sends and receives. 

The translation of the meme is brutally simple: if you don't operate CW instead of things on your (ewww!) computer, you're a pussy. You're a girlie-man not a real man.

For the last several years, I've operated FT8 far more than any other mode: CW, voice (called phone) or any of the other dozens of digital modes. Over seven years ago, I posted the first mention of FT8 I ever posted, and at the bottom of that post is a graph that shows the growth of FT8 in the first year it became available, going from zero usage to over 50% of the traffic through a service called Club Log (that helps coordinate getting confirmation cards for hams). 

Let's talk about the communications theory here. Morse code or CW is a single tone, with information added by on/off keying - the familiar "beep-beep" sound of code. The bandwidth (BW) is determined by the on/off keying and the faster the keying (Words Per Minute), the more bandwidth the message takes. This is an iron law of Comm Theory - the more information you send in a given time, the more BW it requires. Morse code at 20 words/minute takes far less BW than talking, but transmits far less information per second. Video takes more BW than voice because it sends more information.  

The digital modes in WSJT are designed to be sent by modulating different tones that create a Single Sideband signal. Everyone operating FT8 on the same band uses a common frequency designated for users to meet. Let's say we're meeting somewhere in HF with an SSB rig. We send the audio tones from the computer's audio output to the transmitter and choose where in the transmit BW the output will be. My transmitter is set to allow a 3.0 kHz wide transmission, but the signal from WSJT is a tiny fraction of that width - on the order of 50 Hz. The signal is converted from the text on the computer to audio tones that are encoded with error correction information. In FT8, both stations in the contact take turns transmitting and receiving, 15 seconds each way, and a complete contact is about 75 seconds. 

CW wins in speed. A contact at 25 WPM or so (common in contests) can be under 15 seconds. The difference is that CW has problems with interference and interruptions that the signal coding and decoding from WSJT handles easily. 

There's a saying that goes engineering is the art of compromise because no solution is perfect everywhere. That's the case here. I've barely gotten into enough details about how the software works, what actual contacts are like and more. I have nothing against CW - until I started playing with WSJT, it was my favorite mode: I have Worked All States and DX Century Club with CW.

In which I yell at clouds

Chances are, you’ve seen one of the hundred versions of the “old man yells at cloud” meme that features grandpa Abe Simpson. Changing the target slightly sets up what follows.

Hey, it’s like yelling at a cloud, only the F layer is a hundred times higher than a cloud – or more. The F layer pays just as much attention as the cloud does. Or less.

After the Geomagnetic storms we went through this week, there were many posts around the places I visit most online where people referred to storms along with either good or bad conditions and their accomplishments (like Every Blade of Grass, or Come and Make it as well as here). Some of us had both good and bad. Along the same line, the only accomplishments I’m actively “chasing” on the VHF six meter band are both in the category of “difficult to practically impossible.” The easier one is probably 6m DXCC (100 recognized countries worked and confirmed). I currently have 87 confirmed with another four “waiting for confirmation.” I’m closer to DXCC on 6m than any of the major awards. Easy or obvious one first, DXCC is more likely than Worked All States - WAS. 

WAS is practically impossible from my location. I’m pretty sure last November (‘24) was the closest I ever came to even hearing Alaska, and that was hearing other stations in the southeast calling the guy in Alaska. I saw him “spotted” on some of the sites online that report that, but never actually heard him. I was hoping for this year, but it hasn’t been good so far.

The hardest one, the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award – the first person to achieve this award) is for working and confirming all 488 Maidenhead grids in the continental US. "Continental" means I don't need Alaska. I have 345 grids confirmed with another five that I’ve worked but can’t get confirmed. To be brutally honest, the FFMA is practically impossible from here, too. Unsurprisingly, when your goal is to reach every place  in the country, you're most likely to get everyone from the center of the country, and it turns out there has been one issued in Florida, in the northwestern most corner of the state. That's about 500 miles away - near Pensacola.

You’ll note that linked page refers to them as grid squares. They’re not. It’s a fun fact that these are two degrees in longitude by one degree in latitude, making them grid rectangles. I’ve never seen anyone anywhere refer to them as “grid rectangles.” 

Where these intersect with a meme about the F-layer of the ionosphere is that the F-layer is the key to long distance propagation in radio, especially 6m (50 to 54 MHz in the US). When conditions are good, the F-layer splits into two layers (F and F2), with F2 higher in altitude and allowing ever farther contacts.

As a good, general, Rule of Thumb (RoT), there are two things to watch in a propagation forecast, the Solar Flux Index (SFI), a measure of the strength of the constant radio signal (2.8 GHz) coming from the sun, and the K index, a measure of the geomagnetic field strength and stability. Both of these are given as a single number summary of many measurements in many places. A default page I always have open is the one I can look up “where you at?” when I hear someone I’m interested in. The current solar terrestrial indices are displayed in a dedicated box toward the top of the page, data from N0NBH.

The RoT for SFI is “the more the merrier.” There isn’t a handy RoT for K or the Planetary K index (Kp). Both too low and too high are bad, it’s just that what’s a good Kp depends on frequency and that’s different depending on what band you’re using. My experiences on 6m lead me to think a Kp of 5 is better than 3 while 3 is better than anything below 3, but I tend to think that both 3 and 5 are bad at low HF bands – say 80 and 40 sure – but lower Kp is fine at 80 and 40m. I have more questions as you progress higher in HF.

I have vague memories of hearing that the aftermath of a geomagnetic storm, as the K index is coming down is a better time to operate on the high end of HF, say 20 to 10m, than once the storm is over. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that effect on 6m.

An important point to mention is all of these indices vary both on longer and shorter intervals. If you’ve ever watched the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center’s Planetary K-Index charts, you might have noticed that each bar showing one number for three hours is displayed ending in #.00, #.30 or #60 (where “#” is the whole number below the top of the bar).

That tells me they take a number every hour and the bar they display is an average of three measurements. My mental analogy is measuring the depth of lava in a hole on the side of a volcano. The level goes up and down but is boiling at the same time so there are long and short periods that the level changes over. The number they get is statistically related to the actual levels, but I sure can’t describe how they relate numerically.

Solar Flux (SFI) is the indicator the most people follow, and the more the merrier. The idea that solar flux determines propagation is over simplified because of the effects of the geomagnetic activity and the minute by minute variations in that. The simplest advice is what I heard nearly 50  years ago, when I first got licensed: listen, listen, listen and when you get tired of that, listen some more. There are ways to automate your station, so you don't have to sit there, Butt In Chair, but you can't go wrong with BIC time and listening. 

Hamfest weekend

This Friday and Saturday were the 60th annual Melbourne Hamfest and the Florida State ARRL Convention and as you can see by that link, the 60th such get together (not every year is the state convention).  I've mentioned this activity many times, and it's one of two shows we go to pretty much every year, partly because the 1976 Melbourne Hamfest was the first hamfest I ever went to.  The other is the Orlando Hamcation, which has become one of the biggest in the country. 

This subject should really be broken in two parts.  First off, there's a lot of new hams that frequent the same blogs I do and I don't know if other bloggers have talked about local hamfests.  Should you go?  More than likely. Why should you go? That's marginally harder to answer because it kind of depends on your local show and you won't know what they're like until you go - or talk with someone who goes regularly.  The local hamfest is likely to have lots of used equipment for sale, quite possibly a lot of new equipment and lots of opportunities to learn.  The exact mix of used vs. new depends, again, on your particular show.  Melbourne used to have more new gear than it has had for the last couple of years as the commercial sellers have gone elsewhere one by one.  It's a good place to make meatspace connections with local hams. 

There are generally talks by locals who can be regarded as Subject Matter Experts, be it a specific maker of ham gear (this year's was a Yaesu expert) or some other expert the crowd may like to see.  I gave a talk on modern HF receiver design back in 2011's 'fest, based on a paper in a trade journal that I had published the previous year. 

Like hamfests in general, the Melbourne show seems to have trouble getting a nice big crowd.  The 1976 show I mentioned was a full weekend show, Saturday and Sunday.  Until relatively recently, like 2010 or so, the 'fest was the first full weekend in September.  They moved to October after a couple of years with hurricanes caused it to be cancelled.  That has been changed to Friday afternoon and 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Saturday.

People have been predicting the demise of hamfests for almost as long as I can remember; certainly since eBay became a hamfest that's going 24/7/365.  If nothing else, they will evolve and change. 

The big hamfests seem to have a different niche and are doing better.  The Orlando Hamcation is doing well and bills themselves as the "second largest hamfest" in the US, behind the "granddaddy", Dayton Hamvention.  Usually just referred to as "Dayton" by hams; as in "you goin' to Dayton this year?", Hamvention has outlived the city's HARA arena it had been held in forever and after our last visit to Dayton in 2016, they moved to nearby Xenia, Ohio.  Behind those two, though, and the handful of large 'fests, how well they'll do is an open question.

Photo of the International Space Station from the Platinum Coast Amateur Radio Society website, the club organizing and putting on the hamfest.

Well, that was a pretty enormous waste of time

The radio contest I mentioned yesterday.  As the day went by yesterday I pretty much only heard a handful of guys in the peninsula of Florida, from a guy in Miami area to one on the farthest northeast corner north of Jacksonville.  I didn't even hear the panhandle like out by Tallahassee or farther, like Pensacola or Panama City.  A review toward the end of the day showed there were a couple of short openings to around San Antonio, Texas and then around Arlington, Virginia.  Both openings were short and I didn't try to call those stations.  

This morning started out looking quite a bit busier.  I had the station on around 8AM and listened to the meteor scatter activity also on 6m.  It was busier than most of Saturday, with signals copied from around the SE US.  After not hearing any new places to work, I went back to FT8.  While the overall picture of the activity was similar to yesterday, there were no new places to work there, either.  

A rough rule of thumb for choosing meteor scatter over other modes is that meteor showers are best, and those tend to be densest in the midnight to sunrise hours.  This is primarily due to the geometry of how Earth moves through the space dust trails the comets leave, which create the meteors.  The speed at which the meteors impinge on the atmosphere and leave their ionized trails drops off after sunrise, and the few times I've dedicated a morning to making contacts thanks to some meteor shower it was unusual to get a contact after 9AM.   

Today brought more signals heard from relatively populous areas in New England, and along the eastern seaboard.  As the day went by that thinned out but didn't get replaced by areas to the west, as often happens.  As a trade-off (I guess) we did have a few countries in South America show up as it was approaching evening: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were all heard, and all three are common and easy to contact from here.  

By the time the Cargo Resupply launch to the ISS from Cape Canaveral rolled around, we were ready for some "sit back and enjoy" time. 

From Space.com's Video From Space.