So, yeah, it seems to be fixed

To rip off on last Sunday's dive into troubleshooting my audio oscillation problem in my ham shack. I haven't seen a single repeat of that issue since the one I described in a comment to that post on Monday  10/26.

After cleaning the two USB B connectors on the one side of the SignaLink I did last weekend, I did 10 tests of 10 transmissions on all five bands that my one antenna covers (a Tennadyne T6 log periodic) and the first transmission on the band that was giving me the most troubles started the comb problem. After Monday's test, I decided to move a clamp-on ferrite bead on the back of the SignaLink from one side to the other. Before I did that, though, I operated hours on that band (17m) without a repeat of the problem.

It looks like this now. That's the back of the SignaLink on the right edge of the photo: 

In this picture, the cable closest to the camera is the USB B (square) connector I cleaned with Deoxit5. It has one clamp-on ferrite bead now, but had two before. I moved the second bead just over to the next cable.

The connector closest to the camera is just labelled USB on the SignaLink box, and you can see that far cable looks more like a phone cable. That black plastic part between the molded part of that cable and the ferrite bead I moved onto that cable might well be holding a ferrite bead as well. 

From the pilot's seat, the station looks like this now. 

At the top of this frame, you can see a string of white LEDs that produce an even light in the area that I do things. You can see a piece of wood running left to right at the top, and that's the front of relatively large, table-like area, about 2'x6' (it has been years since I measured that, so it's a SWAG - but close). On top of that is the computer that controls all this, a huge monitor (well, 27" - biggest monitor we have) so I can watch several pieces of software running at once. There are my antenna and radio selector switches, the manual antenna rotator controller (I do that from the computer most of the time), a power distribution box and some odds. Or ends.   

So Is It Fixed?

Followers of yesterday's post on the problem I'm having with my station have probably read my description of today's work, but I copy it here for everyone else. 

The most effective thing I did yesterday was to unplug and replug the USB cable into the audio input box on top of the rig. It's one of those square plugs, about 1/4 on a side, so I think those are USB A family. Today, I tried the station the way it was last night and it was doing better. I did about 10 transmit tests before it went into the "audio comb mode". Once I reset everything, I grabbed my can of "Deoxit 5" spray that's always on hand and gave a small spray into the end that plugs into the audio box on top of the rig.

Since then, I worked a couple of stations on 17m, figure about 10 T/R changes (both to and from that box), for them and ran around three dozen "tune" button transmissions. No returns of the "comb". 

So given that connector issues like this are about as common as can be - although I can't say I've seen one with these square USB-B connectors - and since I've done lots of transmissions without seeing the problem again, it might well be "all better." Between working the two new countries on 17m and my roughly "three dozen" transmit tests, that's more than I tend to transmit in most full days of making contacts on any band. 

Let me add some info that I should have included last night but wasn't prepared. 

First is the "red comb" effect, at the top of this screen capture. From the start of continuous lock out of the system until this screen grab is five 15 second intervals, and this was early this afternoon before the Deoxit5.

I've seen the red comb continue after I've turned off the radio that had been transmitting, so it's got to be coming from the audio system. The transmit audio is generated by the WSJT software running on the PC that gave us this plot. The audio from the computer goes over the USB cable that appears to have fixed it. That goes to a SignaLink USB box that controls both the transmit and receive audio levels. 

It has been a tricky problem to work on because it seemed different at different times. On the first day I spent time testing other bands, I found it on 20m and while I'm not 100% sure at the moment, I'd swear I saw it on 15m. I haven't seen it on any other band as much as 17m, and none on 20 and 15 since Thursday. Intermittent or "flaky" problems can suck up a lot of time.

So while I think it might be fixed, I'll be keeping an eye out for milder issues or more cases of this. 

A day of troubleshooting ...

... a very unusual problem that I've never heard of before in my ham shack, and I'm not sure I have anything to share. If you've been down the road of troubleshooting intermittent problems you're familiar with the idea that you may spend a lot of time deciding if you've fixed the intermittent problem, or just made it more intermittent. 

For one thing, I don't have single picture of the failure when it happens. I've been too distracted by trying to "make it stop!" 

Let me start from the beginning. Back in about 2018, I started running the various modes offered by physicist Joe Taylor, the vast majority of the time on what's called FT8. Yes I've used others, mostly FT4 which is like FT8 but less sensitive (less able to copy very weak signals) by using shorter transmit and receive intervals. The trade-off being you give up some sensitivity for shorter contacts - for those days (like today) when maybe you hear another state for a minute. I've used its meteor scatter mode, moonbounce mode, and more. 

Over the years, I've worked FT8 on all HF bands and 6m. My station has antennas for 80 to 6m except for 60m, a small chunk at around 5.5 MHz. 

A couple of nights ago, with 6 being as dead as it has been, I dropped down to HF, but instead of going to 80/40/30 as I typically go, on a spur of the moment decision, I went to 17m (18.068–18.168 MHz). It's a small band that hams were granted in the '79 World Administrative Radio Conference, or WARC, and the three bands that came out of that are known as the WARC bands. (If you've never heard of 17m, this seems to be a good overview). 

One the things I'm used to doing as last check on my station before I start to operate is hit the tune button, which just transmits a carrier at whatever your rig is set to. The (always there inline) power and VSWR meters looked perfectly normal, but nothing else did. Let me show you a screen capture of FT8 software (tuned to 30m - that's the only thing that's different) to make some points.

There are two windows here, the top one is the audio channel from 100 to 3100 Hz, each of the colored areas at the top are individual stations. In general the orange strands that are the most orange (like around 1700 Hz on the top scale) are the strongest, fading down to the more yellow ones (around 2000 Hz and that green rectangle). The spectrum at the bottom is more like a regular spectrum analyzer and is only showing the very topmost thin line of colors. The taller the spectrum the stronger the signal. 

When the "bad" happened, that topmost line was replaced by what looked like a continuous spectrum of lots of narrow "spikes," all red. Except spikes tend to have points and bases. This was just alternating big signal and nothing. Maybe like a comb, but all the red "teeth" were the same height and width. 

It gets weirder. The needle in the inline power meter that had previously measured the normal roughly 100 W transmit signal was now not showing any power at all. The receiver sounded muted, as it does during transmit. There's a transmit/receive indicator LED on the radio that stayed in transmit (red) instead of receive. 

It took a while to get it to stop; I had to reset everything. Turn the radio off and back on, reboot the computer, and several things. 

Yesterday, I started looking at it in more detail. I found that it did this on 20m but not higher: 15 to 10. This is helpful because 20 and 17 are on the same antenna, my Tennadyne T6 log periodic (LPDA). The other bands I've been tending to operate, 80, 40, 30 and 6m, haven't shown the issue. Then playing around on 17m, I found I could operate CW or SSB with no problems showing up. The frequency sensitivity made me think something in the LPDA's circuitry might be the problem. Looking up from the ground shows nothing, but it's at 25' above ground, so the view isn't that great. An easy next step seemed to be to check the grounds around the antenna. 

So that was today's start. All I could say was that the grounds looked just like the last time I did my routine inspection last spring. Nothing broken, nothing missing, nothing looking like the ground wire was replaced by weeds. They just looked like they've been outdoors and corroded a bit. The next thing to check was connections in the shack and while checking things on 17m again, I noticed the rig control software (Ham Radio Deluxe - HRD) would not always see the radio. So I did the old "unplug it then plug it back in" trick. That's a USB connection from the radio to a little box that sets up the modulation for these WSJT modes. That made a difference. It was easier to recover from the "red comb". 

Late in the day (it was nearly 5PM by this time) I decided to retest the setup on 17 and the problem was gone. I tested a couple of times and it worked. I tested 20m - no problems, and worked my way back up to 10 without seeing the problem again. Then I went back to 17 to "soak in the success" of just unplugging and re-plugging one cable. That's when it failed again. 

What was that thing about making the intermittent problem more intermittent? 

Around the time I sat down to write this I realized, I could use far more pictures than I've got. So I went back to the shack, tuned to 17 and hit the tune button to transmit. No problem. Tried it again - surely it must fail by now? - Nope. I think I transmitted 10 times and it never had the failure. Then I tuned it to a band I've never seen it fail on, 30m, for the picture above. 

What's next? Can't say I really know. More experiments and measurements, but I sure don't know what to go after. It looks like it's in the computer control of the rig. I've tried two different versions of the WSJT software, the latest and a somewhat earlier release. I'm on the latest update of HRD. 

On 10/10 day

October 10th, which is 10/10 both for the way Americans and the rest of the world write the date, could well mean more to hams than to "regular" people. Some of you are nodding in agreement already. 

Quick explanation, among ham radio's relatively strange habits is to refer to the wavelengths of various frequencies we're allocated by their metric lengths. The High Frequency spectrum is spread across the 3.0  to 30MHz frequency range, but there are more allocations above and below the HF band. Now, I don't personally have any radios that read out in wavelengths in metric or US numbers but that could be done. It just isn't done routinely. 

The general allocation of HF bands for hams in the US, given in meters is 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 meters. It's not universally true that the bands we use contain any frequency for those wave lengths. Most of the time it's just "close enough" for someone naming it. When I was first licensed, in 1976, the bands labelled 60, 30, 17, and 12 meters weren't available to hams, it was just 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters. 

For working far away stations, the higher frequency bands tend to propagate over longer distances due to using the higher F2 layer of the ionosphere. That means that when conditions are good, you'll hear places on 10 meters that are farther than you'll hear on lower frequencies. The other side of that is that more people will tune their rigs to 10m than when conditions aren't as good - also called "when the band isn't open." 

So some time ago - I really haven't found a summary of that today - a group of guys who wanted to try to encourage more use of 10 meters got together and started a club called 10-10 International and one of their "tricks" to get more people on 10 was to issue "Ten Ten numbers" which fed into contests and other activities on the air in which transmitting a receiving each other's 10-10 numbers was the way scores were determined. I got my 10-10 number early in my "ham life", July of '77.

Since today was 10/10 (until 7:59:59 PM in EDT), I thought it would be a good time to get on 10m and see if there was any activity going on where stations were swapping numbers. Bottom line: nope. In close to an hour tuning around the SSB portion and FT8 channel I heard and saw (read? "copied?") nobody giving a 10-10 number. In fact, I heard one other person and he was calling CQ from California.

Today's Planetary K index (K_P). The three tallest bars on the right include my time listening in. (Source, but you won't get this one, you'll get the one closest to the UTC time that you click on the link.) Was the dead band due to the Geomagnetic storm (G2 in the orange)? Could be. 

The VHF Contest is about what I expected

I had to shut down the station for an hour or so to let the daily thunderstorms roll past (it is August 43rd, after all), but I had the station on for a couple of hours before that and since then. 

The short summary is it's pretty much as I expected last Sunday night. Most of what I heard were stations within a 25 mile radius of my place, but I'd get maybe one or two 15 second windows when I'd hear someone farther away. A couple of stations around Atlanta and about that radial distance.  I'll go back when I'm done here and try not to fall asleep from boredom as the night goes on.  

In other places around the country, people will load up a van or car with radios, computers and portable antennas they can set up - like this guy. Not here. At least no one I know of does it. It is August 43rd, after all. Maybe in January.  

Photo from the ARRL.org. This link says the guy in the photo is Ed Parsons, K1TR, but no more details than that. 

Alright hams, the next big VHF contest is next weekend

I've got to say I've never had much luck in it, but the ARRL September VHF Contest is next weekend. It runs from Saturday Sept. 12 at 1800Z, to 0300Z, on Monday Sept. 14. Here on the East Coast, that's Saturday at 2:00 PM until Sunday night at 11:00 PM. If you've read my ramblings about the other ARRL VHF contests, they all that time format. The first time I ever tried to do anything in that contest was back in early '80s, when I didn't have 6m station at all, and was operating with my HF transceiver driving a 2m transverter I designed and built. I heard absolutely nothing other than the couple of local guys on 2m sideband (voice).

I never tried the June version of this contest until I got on 6m in the early 2000s - I'm not sure what year it was but my first contacts on 6 were in the spring of 2002, so there's a chance that was the first time I worked the June VHF contest. It would have been both CW and phone. After retirement, I started paying more attention to contests like this and made it a point to try the three contests the ARRL puts on: January, June, September. It has always been the case that June is the best and September is the worst.  

Nowadays, I have a radio that has 2m and 70cm (144 and 432 MHz bands) built in, but I don't have an antenna for either of those two bands. (I still have that 2m transverter on a closet shelf, so it may even still work) 

The bigger problem in my eyes is that the Sporadic E season is over. I think my last couple of E skip contacts around the US were almost a month ago; around the 10th of August. While there can be sporadic openings around the winter equinox, and more broadly from around November into January, the northern hemisphere summer E season tends to be better. Back in late January of '24, I worked both New Zealand, and Australia over the course of a couple of days. That propagation, at least the longest hop of "a few" it takes to get there, is more likely to be F layer. A common explanation is that the first and/or last hops of propagation tend to be E layer skip, and after one or two E layer skips, the signal becomes F layer skip. It can be E skip at one or both ends, and move around in the ionosphere.  

Unlike E layer skip, F skip is easier to predict from the Solar Flux Index, sometimes referred to as the 10.7cm solar flux (2.80 GHz). In general, the more the merrier for VHF, and while today's SFI has been around 100 and "quiet sun" levels are in the 70s, F and F2 layer skip are better when it's much higher than 100. A year ago, values around 200 and higher happened a few times.   

An illustration of the ionosphere layers, called the D, E and F layers – in order of height. If solar energy is high enough, the F layer can split into two layers called (imaginatively enough) F1 and F2.

It appears that someone has stolen the E layer of the ionosphere

Longtime readers, and in particular those who are also hams, may well remember this meme I created and posted in November of '25. At that time, I was concerned about a different layer.  

The F-layer is the highest layer of the ionosphere and when solar flux is highest, it splits into an F and F2 layer that's even higher. In short, when the F-layer is propagating signals around globe, the stations we can work (contact) are the farthest ones we'll ever hear. Pretty much around world. 

So while it's the best for long range contacts, I've worked Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and several small island countries in the pacific on 6m, F-layer propagation is actually too long for working around the US. For that we tend to rely on the E-layer, and what's referred to as Sporadic E or Es propagation. Sporadic E is possible for more of the year than just summer, but Es is most dependable as summer mode. It's just not available for as large a part of the day as in the summer. 

The days when the Es first appears tend to be a celebrated surprise, but when it just suddenly stops, it's the ending of some of the best times of the year, depending on what you're pursuing. The last "good" opening in my neck of the woods, west to Montana and Idaho - for example - was on August 10th, so just under two weeks ago. 

I've mentioned before that I'm trying to work what's called The Fred Fish Memorial Award, or FFMA, for working all 488 Maidenhead Grid Squares (which are rectangles because they're two degrees in longitude by one degree in latitude) in the continental US. This ES season I added around 30 grids (I'd have to dig out some notes to be more accurate than saying "around 30"). I'm not quite at 100 left, but I'm close: something like 385 worked instead so 103 left. 

I also mentioned DXCC as a target, which I expect to achieve as opposed to the FFMA which I'll be lucky to be around long enough to get all 488. I have worked over 100 countries on 6m, but I'm at 97 confirmed. I could use the F layer, too. 

So whom do I report the theft of the E layer to? FCC? EPA? It's part of the environment, after all. I bet that Greta kid stole it. Someone convinced her the E layer added to global warmening. 

Part of an adult conversation about hamfests

Anybody been to any hamfests lately? 

There's a thread going around on public media like YouTube that paints a dim picture of the market for used gear, saying that prices have fallen off dramatically for popular classic radios from the last century. We haven't been to a hamfest in a couple of years, and our local fest is coming up in a couple of months, so I'm thinking about trying to find new homes for some of my old books or gear. 

That video, by Australian ham VK3USA, starts out with lots of video clips of old Collins Radios and talks about the situation from the creator's viewpoint. He points out that he's of a much younger age than us old guys who were enchanted by those radios - he says he just turned 40. His conclusion is that ham radio is going through a phase where the older guys who idolized that gear are aging out of the hobby and the younger guys aren't as dedicated to these older radios. 

That certainly seems like it could be a driving force. There is a tendency for older folks to move to smaller or assisted-living places that might be especially bad for hams. Places where they aren't able to put a station on the air, or they can use small receiver but couldn't put up an outdoor antenna.  

Another video by The History Archive, doesn't look at things the same way as that previous one. He talks about the economic pressures brought on by things like the Chinese Baofeng UV-5R radios that slashed prices incredibly, the advent of software defined radios and software defined modes like the WSJT modes I've talked about often. Those impact prices, too, by shifting the demands from buyers. Then there were new aspects to the ham hobby itself, with the introduction of Parks On The Air and Summits On The Air (SOTA & POTA) and more. The summary was that the world shifted in many ways all in the same few years.

Has anybody seen this happening or not in their local American hamfests?

A big concern of mine is books, and Virtual Mirage's post on the End of Books brought this topic higher in priority. In front of me are two 7’ tall by 3’ wide bookcases - the one on my left is mostly full of technical books on radio circuit and systems design as well as programming in various languages like Delphi, MathCAD, HTML, and MATLAB. The bookcase on my right has a whole shelf or two on woodworking, another one or two shelves on boating and fishing. Another two shelves contain Bibles and study books about those Bibles. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve looked at any one of those hundreds of books. And this is just one room. In the next room over it's the same story of two practically ceiling to floor bookcases – just different subjects. And there are more bookshelves in other rooms. I think books actually outnumber insects in the house, and maybe even bacteria.

It's possible hams or other engineers would want some of the books on my left-hand bookshelf but if I had to ship them cross country, postage would be a concern. 

So what say you all? Any experience with this? Opinions? Stale jokes? I'm not particularly ready to empty out the station and put it all for sale at the hamfest, but part of the effort of keeping the house cleaned and easier to deal with is to get rid of things that we just don't use much anymore. Besides, we all check out sooner or later and less crap makes it easier and better on whoever cleans up after we're gone.

The Collins KWM-2, an early version of their very succssful HF SSB transceiver. Image credit: Rigpix

No, it's not mine, but I can't find a nice pic of mine. If I do, I'll replace this.

Alternatives to the ionosphere

A natural follow up to watching the solar cycle progress, like we did with yesterday's post, is to ask what can we do if the ionosphere just won't cooperate? 

This assumes you want to contact other people or places via ham radio, for some piece of wallpaper or other. I mean, obviously, if you're stuck in a broken down car in the middle of nowhere, you want some sort of phone or high bandwidth connection. 

An answer that's easy to overlook and can work very well on VHF is meteor scatter. Back in April of '24, I put up a post about it, called "When Hobbies Converge or What The Heck is Meteor Scatter?"

Back in the 1950s, hams discovered that the trail created in the upper atmosphere by meteors burning up acted like a radio reflector, as if the ionosphere was enhanced. The effect is most beneficial to VHF stations which typically don't have regular, predictable ionospheric propagation. In the early days, this was done with Morse code, or CW as the hams typically call it (CW for Continuous Wave). Now that we're firmly in the age of computer assisted modulation modes, most people trying to bounce signals off the meteor trails are using a computer assisted mode. The most popular appears to be MSK144 (.pdf alert).

MSK stands for minimum shift keying, a form of continuous-phase frequency-shift keying (FSK) with shift equal to half the baud rate. MSK144 uses message frames of 144 bits and modulation at tone frequencies 1000 and 2000 Hz to transmit channel symbols at keying rate of 2000 baud. The resulting audio waveform can be viewed as a form of offset quadrature phase-shift keying (OQPSK) with individual pulses shaped like the first half-period of a sine wave.

Contacts made via meteor trails in other modes sometimes happen without either end of the contact knowing the connection was caused by a meteor and without using MSK144. Generally, though, your chances of success are better during the named meteor showers that get talked about regularly on sites like Space.com, as well as sites aimed more at amateur astronomers. While the number of meteors per hour varies widely between showers, there's generally one named shower per month, and there's some "sporadic meteor", also called a pebble or something, burning up in the atmosphere even on days when no "shower" is predicted. You'll have more luck looking for contacts in MSK144 mode on the frequencies hams have been using. 

That's why I'm bringing this subject up now. One of the biggest regular annular showers has been ramping up, the Perseid shower, which will (purely coincidentally) peak overnight on Aug. 12-13 under the dark skies of the new moon. It so happens the 12th is the day of the solar eclipse that will be seen to reach totality from a few small areas in east Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain, so the people who experience totality of the solar eclipse may be treated to a meteor trail or two.  

While sporadic meteors can provide short duration openings, long messages can take excruciatingly long times to send. Meteor scatter also tends to be shorter distances. While multiple hop sporadic E can enable contacts across the US, meteor scatter tends to be more like 1000 miles or less. Occasionally, 1500 miles can happen. That cross-USA kind of multiple hop sporadic E seems to happen less often than meteor scatter, too. 

Still, there have been a handful of grid squares in the SE US that I've worked by meteor scatter easier than waiting for other openings. There's such a thing as the other station being too close, too. 

Perseid meteors streak over Lucerne, Switzerland, during the 2018 shower's peak. The photo was taken with an Olympus E-M1 Mark II camera in Live Composite mode. Scene exposure of 2 seconds; the Perseids exposure was about 30 minutes long. Orest Shvadchak

Ran across a fun special events ham station last night

My usual hangout in ham radio has tended to be six meters, (50-54 MHz, and the first VHF band in the USA) and the last handful of days 6 has pretty much done one of its "oh, fuggedaboutit" intervals and nothing has been copyable around here. So last night I did one of those things I tend to do when 6 bores me out ofmy mind and dropped down to HF to see if there was anything going on. It was around 10PM here, so 0200 to around 0230 UTC.  

Dropped to 30m. Heard nothing new. 

Dropped to 80m. Likewise. 

Figuring 40m was likely to be the busiest/most crowded but with the same "nothing new" picture, I went up to 7.074 MHz. Very surprisingly, 40 not only wasn't as busy as I frequently find it, but there were a few stations that my copy of the JTAlert software told me I had never worked on 40. I worked three countries for the first time on 40 but that's not the story. The story is that one of them was a special event operation using the call sign GB64MOD. If you're familiar with the ham web site QRZ.com, this is what you see when you look up that call.  Here's a reduced copy of just one of the graphics on that page:

Their QRZ listing says they have a special web page for this event here. It adds this narrative:

GB64MOD ham radio special event station - Celebrates the spirit of the Mod movement through Amateur Radio.. classic British Culture modern communications with fellow Mods, Ham Operators and Shortwave listeners around the globe!

Calling Radio Amateurs worldwide! - Join us in celebrating Mod culture, music, fashion and more... Lets make this an annual event!

A truly modern Mod revival! Let us know your plans? 

Curtis MW0USK and Kevin MW9KJC.

Now, let me tell you why I'm emphasizing this. While I remember much of the "MOD" music, certainly The Who, and Small Faces that they make buttons for in that graphic, as well as many more, that's not what I'm seeing here. What I'm seeing is more evidence for the movement that says "this is why we were called GREAT Britain" with the implied celebration of being Great and not a place that should be wiped out by the suicidal embracing of immigrants who are wiping out the British culture and society.  Which leads to thinking, "we can be GREAT again and we should work at that." Notice there's nothing explicitly leaning in that direction on the website; just a reminder of those days for those who loved them. Make of it what you will.

If you're unfamiliar with special event stations like this they happen quite frequently. The biggest regular events these days are Parks On The Air (POTA) and Summits On The Air (SOTA). People collect certificates and QSLs from activities like all of these. 

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.