Today I volunteered as part of a group of ham radio operators from the Appleton, Wisconsin Fox Cities Amateur Radio Club that provided ham radio communications support for the 2010 Appleton, Wisconsin area MS Walk.  I was surprised twice during the event…

On a normal morning my wife, Jane (kd8krs) and I go to church and then have lunch and do projects or watch a Packer game in the afternoons.  This Sunday Jane went to church while I went to participate in this communications support event.  It was a dark, dreary, cold, VERY windy day with heavy rain.  The rain drops were so big and were driven by the wind so hard that when they hit the windshield of the car it made me wonder if they had some slushy snow in them.  But it was a bit too warm for that.  I’m not sure what the wind-chill was, but I was glad that I was going to be sitting in a nice warm car for the event.

Before I went to the event I checked my e-mail and listened to my police scanner for any 2 meter repeater traffic.  I wondered if the race would be cancelled since the conditions were so bad.  It wasn’t as far as I could tell.  So I went to the school where we were scheduled to meet.  I soon found droves of people showing up for the event.  Brave souls I thought…

We each were given maps and assignments and I soon departed for my spot.  I had a good location – it was along the long leg back to the starting location.  One of my assigned tasks was to report when the main body of walkers passed my location so the cooks would know when to get the lunch food out and be ready for the walkers when they finished.

The winds this day were at least 30 mph at times.  And the heavy rains did not stop.  To my surprise, neither did the brave walkers.  Hundreds of them!  I honestly was surprised how many brave souls seemed to think absolutely nothing of the weather – all to raise money for those in need.

The other thing that surprised me was how chilled a person in a nicely wind and rain protected car could get after sitting for more than an hour or so…  The warm lunch at the end of the event was a really nice gesture by the race sponsors.  It sure tasted good and helped warm me up!

As for ham radio operations, I had participated in a number of nets over the years and so I felt comfortable operating in this networked environment.  It also helped to polish my skills should I need to use them in more serious times like during Skywarn severe weather nets or worse – after a severe weather event.

I wondered, in the morning, if the effort would be worth it on such a lousy weather day.  To my surprise, it very much was!  My personal reward, other than the good warm lunch, was a personal thank you from a family member of one of the walkers.  She took the time to thank me for the support as I walked in to the commons area of the high school where the lunch was being served.  That gave me a good feeling that I had helped a large group of people in some small way to accomplish their goal of helping those in need.

It was a good day!

Stay Radio Active!

Jon, AB9NN

http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN

http://www.HamRadioResources.com

This week was Severe Weather Awareness Week in Wisconsin.  April begins the ramp-up in temps and mixing of cold air from Canada with warm moist air from the south.  While there ARE tornadoes in winter months from time to time, according the Wisconsin climatology records – MOST of them occur in May, June, July and August.  Thus the timing of the awareness week.

As part of the Outagamie County (Appleton, Wisconsin area) A.R.E.S. group I participated in three events this week.  One had enough humor in it to write about.  The other two were just good ‘ole ham radio stuff…  First the other two.

On Thursday there was a state-wide simulated tornado event / drill.  As part of that exercise there was a simulated SkyWarn ham radio net activation for trained storm spotters such as myself.  I happened to be driving back from lunch with Justin (K0RPL) in Appleton, WI.  I heard the net activating and so I checked in and advised net control that my A.P.R.S. tracker was active.  Net control responded that my APRS track was a good one.  Once I got back to work I checked out of the net.  I think that net control appreciated having someone on APRS to track to practice with.  For those new to APRS, it is a little tracker about the size of a silver dollar (GPS sensor) and a cigarette package (data converter known technically as TNC or Terminal Node Controller).  This device sends my GPS coordinates and speed and direction, etc. data out over ham radio frequency to listening stations.  Those stations take the data and send it down the line to the internet servers.  My track is then instantly displayable by anyone on the internet via www.APRS.FI as long as they know my FCC callsign.  I am tracked as AB9NN-9.  The AB9NN is my FCC call sign (for ham radio) and the -9 signifies that the transmissions are from my car.  I might use -7 if I were on foot, etc…

That evening there was a siren test.  I wasn’t going to participate but was just finishing dinner when it started on the police scanner.  YUP – I can get 2 meter ham radio on my regular police scanner!  You can get one for around $100 or less at places like Radio Shack.  I wandered out to the car and checked in.  Turned out there was a siren near our home in Appleton, WI that had not been checked.  I wasn’t quite sure where it was but managed to get to within a couple of blocks of it when it went off.  That sure helped me locate it exactly!

Saturday we had another siren test.  I had figured on checking another siren near our house but when I got into the truck and checked in to the net I learned that it was already assigned.  Drats!  Well – I looked at the list of sirens and found one location that I recognized so I volunteered for that one.  It was near a school and I found it quickly.  Probably too quickly.  The sirens were set to go off at noon and here I was all ready to go and it was only 11:33.  What to do?  Drive around a bit?  Nah – waste of gas.  I figured I’d listen to the ham radio net operations.  Well, everyone checked in and then the net was silent waiting for the sirens to go off – so that got old quickly.  OK – time to check-out the HF bands.  I was figuring I would go to 20 meters and see if there was any DX.  I changed modes from memory mode to VFO mode on my 857d radio but we had decided to lower the ATAS-120 screwdriver (motorized) antenna when we put it into the garage the other night.  We left it on 6 meters (50 Mhz or so).  Since I had time and was not driving I decided to spend some time manually tuning through the band.  To my surprise I quickly found a number of ham radio operators working some good 6 meter ham radio contacts.  There was a 6 meter band opening!  The 6 meter band comes alive spring, summer and fall and then goes to sleep for the winter.  It has to do I believe with the tilt of the earth and charging of different levels of the atmosphere to the point that our ham radio 6 meter signals reflect off of it and back down to earth far away…  So I was able to make my first 6 meter contact – that was fun and worth a blog post of itself… but here comes the funny part…

While I was on 6 meters I notice a young lad dressed in tree / grass like camo diving onto the grass across the street from me.  Every time I looked away he covered his head!  It was a cold day and the grass was wet – but he laid there for a good 20 minutes or so.  I never did find out exactly what he was up to.  My theory is that maybe he wondered why this strange truck was parked in his neighborhood and some older guy was watching the school playground (tornado siren, actually) so intently?  After the siren sounded I left to drive around the block to verify that all four horns on the stationary siren were working.

On Sunday I will help our Appleton, WI ham radio club provide ham radio communications support to the MS Walk in Appleton.  It’s nice to be able to use a skill of mine to help others accomplish the goal of helping people in need!

Stay Radio Active!

Jon, AB9NN-9

http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN

http://www.HamRadioResources.com

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Ham radio as a hobby can be amazing at times when conditions are right and all of your equipment is tuned right and you are in a low electrical noise location.  And at other times it can be very frustrating when things go wrong.  No sun spots for good propagation.  High SWR for some unknown reason, etc…  I recently experienced both sides of the hobby – here’s my story.

I had a dentist appointment in Green Bay, Wisconsin recently and the 30 mile or so drive from Appleton, Wisconsin gave me time to do some HF work with my mobile HF radio.  Running just 100 watts into a less than sturdily mounted “ham stick” antenna on 20 meters I made an outstanding contact with a ham radio base station in France!  For some time after that I nearly gloated to myself about how lucky I was to be able to enjoy this hobby and how everything was working so well.  Bad move!

A couple of weeks later I was driving home from work and flipped from 2 meters over to 20 meters.  The band was surprisingly quiet!  Was it due to low solar activity?  AND – there was surprisingly little traffic on the band.  A few people, but not many.  Hmmm…  I started to get a bad feeling…  I went to an open part of the band and made a quick transmission with my call sign with one eye on the SWR indicator on the radio’s display mounted on my dash.  There it was – a flashing “SWR” – I probably had an antenna problem.

Well, I had mounted the antenna on the trunk in a snow storm and tuned it when it was around zero degrees Fahrenheit…  Not a time that LockTite epoxy would work on the mounting set screws.  Surely the mount had lost it’s ground connection.  So I popped the trunk and checked it out – good tight connections…  hmmm…

When I closed the trunk I noticed – the tunable radiating element (the adjustable length whip at the top of the antenna) had become a LOT shorter.  A closer inspection showed that the two set screws that held the antenna to the tuned length at the top of the antenna had been shaken or vibrated out.  Made sense.  That antenna is quite long and whips around in the wind at highway speeds quite a bit.  So I presumed I would be in HF withdrawal until I could find someone with an expensive antenna analyzer that could help me re-tune the antenna.

Ahh but I was wrong!  On another drive back from Green Bay, Wisconsin I decided to just listen on 20 meters.  Surely I would hear nothing, but I was bored…  To my surprise I listened to some quite strong and clear traffic between Georgia, USA and Vancouver, Canada during the 2010 Winter Olympics!  To my mind – it shouldn’t have worked, but it did…  It was quite a surprise.  And it gave me cause to check other bands, including shortwave bands, to see what else I was missing!

As of this post, I still have not found the correct size replacement set screws for the antenna…  grumble grumble…  The good news is that the air temps are warming and it will soon be warm enough to cement the set screws in place once I do acquire them.

Stay radio active!

Jon Kreski, AB9NN

http://www.HamRadioResources.com

http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN