VP9KF Blog

There’s a weird thread going on on the SKCC groups.io group.
Isn’t it really obvious that 72 when sent by someone near the end of the QSO means the same as 73, but a bit less???? Meaning from a QRP station.
The same thing has gone on for decades, including the less obvious 74, which is used in eyeball-to-eyeball comments to mean QRO. This implies someone is using power, well, errr, over the legal limit!
Along the same lines, the G-QRP club has it’s magazine called “Sprat” for all things QRP and it certainly used to be very good. I hope it still is. At the other end of things, those with QRO in the UK always joked about the mythical publication that would be called “Splat!”.

A surprisingly large proportion of groups on groups.io are to do with amateur radio. Just remember that groups.io is NOT a chat platform or messaging platform but it’s almost to-and-fro e-mail in it’s style. Sometimes you’ll see odd orders of messages because it takes longer for some posts to occur than others. Some take seconds, others can be many hours before they appear! If you are treating it like some sort of chat, don’t expect actions to occur when you expect. Most recently I saw someone say ‘yes, buy that for me’ about 8-10 hours after it had clearly been intended to a reply that had just appeared!

Use with care when a timeline applies, including last minute bookings.

A very expected e-mail hit my inbox this week from the “Over To You” panel coordinator.

…… this coming October, a number of programmes will end. They include:

Africa Daily [that will be no loss at all]
Business Matters [that’s awful, it’s one of the better programmes]
Science in Action – to be replaced by Inside Science. Best of the science programmes! Please, don’t let the new one be anything like ‘Unexpected Elements’.
The Forum Very mixed quality from edition to edition and too long on one subject.
The Cultural Frontline Not very inspiring compared to ‘Arts Hour’. No great loss.
The Explanation – don’t even know this programme, I don’t think!
Pick of The World – this is rubbish. An underwhelming summary of social media ‘hits’, which are alarmingly small in number, given the BBCWS’s supposed listenership .
Over to You [though a new monthly audience feedback programme is expected to be commissioned]. Scrapping your feedback programme is the ultimate way of shooting yourself in the foot.

This is supposed to be in the name of 130 job cuts and 6m quid saved. That’s only 50,000 each per year. How the BBC can retain staff is more of a mystery.

It’s as though nobody knew about what a macro was until the Elecraft K4 started to number more than about 500. How can sitting in front of a supposedly “ergonomic” rig suddenly become so hard? The answer is, it didn’t. Laziness and automation have become rife. How on earth did we ever manage to tune a rig? Key down, power level, tune, load, ATU knob tune, ATU knob load. Or even worse, tuning an amplifier! A minimal amount of your time is spent changing bands, the rest is your operating skill. Given that few contest stations rarely break 200 QSOs per hour, I’d say that that is where the hurry is needed, or a better receiver. It seems to me that most people seem incapable of pressing a sequence of buttons and knobs that they should know by second nature. Of course, the real downside in all of this is that if the operator sits in front of anything else they’re LOST!

Having gone from a statement of “it’s a radio not a computer”, not only is that NOT SO but boxes and computers running macro commands in makes it ten times worse!!! I don’t see why all this makes any operator feel better or even perform better ………

I tried to post this information here on this WordPress platform. It was horribly complicated and generated vast numbers of ‘media’ files at different sizes. Instead, you can find out the nightmare that is USB, drivers, Windows and Windows applications at this glorious link:

Drivers and why life gets hard

I had to make the page because it’s almost impossible to STORE the information in a file and just as unlikely that you’ll find just ONE of the ways of getting to where you want!

As time goes by more and more people seem to be only using a cellphone and no PC at home. I can’t see how they can possibly do this without going crazy, with touchscreen errors, inconsistent icons and methods! I just never want to touch the things.
However, it signifies that we’re very close to the ‘one device can do all’ mark.
Think about it:
PC platform now forthcoming (‘arrived’ in some opinions) with ARM cores.
All ‘phones running ARM [at least iPhone, Samsung and others].
Just stick it all together!
Apple have a patent which illustrates the concept:

There you go. Detect the phone docking, switch displays and GUI [from phone style to PC/Mac/Linux] style, connect extra processing. What’s the problem?

Recently, G4BUE and I posted a couple of reports of Logger32 being completely ‘blocked’ by telnet activity during major contests. Well, it just cannot keep up with more than about 45 spots per second. In reality the rate coming in is about 75 per second. Worse still, if ClubLog updates or anything else runs while spots are coming in, the spots are sent into a solid block which then has to be processed afterwards. It never catches up. This seems to have started a few versions ago and I think it’s to do with changing compiler versions.
You can use VE7CC client in the telnet link but this shouldn’t be necessary out-of-the-box. The code needs to be fixed, most likely by changing the code that writes the band map, which is where most of the processing goes.
P.S. There are now reports of oddities with bandmaps (from others) in both DXLog and N1MM Logger+. Gasp! Either the compiler or use of an open source shared handler is the culprit?

Starlink has promised so much, yet why would it be any better than those that came before, such as Iridium and GlobalStar? The problems are the same. Physics doesn’t change. Both these companies went through 2 rounds of bankruptcy before being valued at well below 5% of what had been put into them by Boeing, Qualcomm, etc. They then ended up as niche, low data rate, specialised systems for those on expeditions or blue water sailing, using mostly Garmin handhelds. Most certainly not high speed, high user number networks.
Starlink, trying to swamp the sky with satellites, is a brute force, highly expensive way of doing it. It equates to each satellite only supporting about 50 users at a time. As the number of users grows, the number of satellites needs to as well, unless you are prepared to trade off data speed, latency and a whole load of other factors.
Something has to give and one factor is the rate at which hand-offs occur from one satellite to the next as they pass overhead. The best case is about 4 minutes. However, think about the difference between being on flat land (Florida) vs. mountainous valleys (North Carolina mountains). You can’t see anything like as much sky in the latter case, which leads to hand-offs in less than 2 minutes. These hand-offs are like flipping a coin and at times when there is heavy load on the system (evenings with streaming or a big sporting event) it will all start to break pretty frequently. This is what users are seeing
Add to that, that any real-time control systems are virtually impossible to keep up 24/7 it’s practicality is only for web browsing and e-mail. Even Skype or Zoom aren’t going to be great. Far from it. They’ll keep dropping connections.
One of the biggest issues is that the router is built into the back of the phased array antenna and attempts to force you to use ‘their’ set-up with regards ports, services, IP addresses and timing issues. Worse yet is that it’s power hungry at about 50 W most of the time and even more when transmitting (especially over a lossy path) when it can be around 90 W. Consider being in an RV or on a boat, this is 4-5 A, which is pretty unacceptable without a lot of battery back-up and also, probably, with solar.
Ironically, what’s used at the ground end is very advanced and complex to manufacture. What’s up in the sky is pretty simple.

Misnomer (or ‘oxymoron’ in USA). There’s no challenge to setting up and using any of the FT modes. A really silly ‘contest’ and waste of spectrum.

Well, I don’t think this will turn out well. WIA in Australia has published this (I’ve seen nothing from the RSGB!) or, as usual, is WIA spilling beans before real action?

The Commonwealth Contest has been run each year, excluding wartime, from 1931 to date.

The Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) have been the custodians and administrators for the contest for the whole period, although the original suggestion came from New Zealand.
The Commonwealth Contest participants in 2024 have been asked their preferences for the future of the event and they overwhelmingly said that ‘we should engage with Commonwealth Country National Radio Societies to negotiate “shared ownership” of the contest – with the Commonwealth Contest being included on the contest calendar for each society. Responsibility for the contest would be shared by Commonwealth countries.’
On that basis, as representatives of the contest participants, the RSGB are asking Commonwealth National Radio Societies to consider joining a group to share equal ownership of the contest.
The Commonwealth Contest is held for 24 hours in March each year using CW. It is held over the weekend nearest to Commonwealth Day. It was still very popular in 2024, with over 240 entrants and 15 Commonwealth Headquarters stations active.
One of the unique characteristics of the contest is that it celebrates the Commonwealth and facilitates contacts between Commonwealth residents over significant distances, without many of the very loud international contest stations outside the Commonwealth monopolising the contest bands.

The RSGB have approached the National Societies in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the UK to establish a committee.
Proposal for the future
The proposal is that the contest will no longer be called the “RSGB” Commonwealth Contest, but that responsibility would be shared. Governance would be between a group of National Societies by agreement.
Each Commonwealth National Amateur Radio Society who wishes to take part would nominate representative(s) to form a committee to govern the contest and to determine future strategy.
In the case of voting on any issue, a simple majority based of one vote per member society will be applied. Rule changes will be subject to consultation among contest participants. The committee will elect a chair and secretary who will be responsible for calling meetings and recording discussion points. We would anticipate that this will be a committee that meets infrequently, and that dialogue will be electronic due to the variety of time-zones that the Commonwealth enjoys.
On behalf of and under the scrutiny of the Committee, RSGB will publish the contest rules, gather logs from entrants, adjudicate the contest and publish the results as it has done to date. This is to reuse resources that have already been developed and not to impose an administrative burden on the other National Societies.
The Committee would manage the awards which could include the introduction of awards for the members of each National Society.
Each society would include the Commonwealth Contest in their contest calendar and will promote the contest in an equivalent manner to those which they have organised previously, for example through their journals, websites, and social media.
Joint efforts will also be made to encourage participation from Commonwealth countries which have small amateur populations and less representation.
The RSGB would aim for the new Commonwealth Contest Committee to take responsibility as soon as is practical.
The Wireless Institute of Australia has agreed to continue to participate and support the Commonwealth Contest in 2025 and beyond and have indicated support for this proposal to “share ownership” of the Commonwealth Contest.
The WIA are seeking expressions of interest of Interest from members who would like to be considered for appointment to the Commonwealth Contest committee. Please send your expressions of interest to the WIA Secretary for consideration.
We trust that together we can enjoy this historic contest for many years to come.
Peter Clee VK8ZZ
WIA Director and secretary

That comes from the country that has probably just destroyed the Commonwealth Games.