W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

CHIRP, for programming your radio

CHIRP is a versatile tool for programming your amateur radio. It supports dozens of radio models and has a straightforward and largely vendor-independent way to get a new radio up and running.

https://chirpmyradio.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Home

A few years back there was a workshop at the All Hands Active maker space in Ann Arbor which was all about taking your new radio, programming in some local frequencies with CHIRP, and then going out into the field (namely downtown Ann Arbor parking structure rooftops) to try it out. I'd love to run a workshop like that again.

https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2014/07/operating-notes-using-a-parking-structure-to-great-advantage.html

Operating notes: Quansheng HT + egzumer v0.22 firmware + Nagoya NA-771 antenna on the Seneca County Total Eclipse Net

I went with members of the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club and the ARROW club to Findlay, Ohio for the total eclipse. The eclipse itself was fantastic - the sudden darkness, the eerie lack of shadows, the bright horizon, and the fabulous corona around the disk of the moon. Well worth it.

While I was there I got a chance to check in to the "Seneca County Total Eclipse Net" which ran on the Seneca County, Ohio (Bascom, Ohio) 145.15- repeater. I know this repeater because when band conditions on two meters are just right, there will be interference between it and the N8DUY 145.15- repeater that shares a frequency but has a different PL tone.

The radio I brought with me was a Quansheng UV-K5, an HT which I got in February 2024 for less than $30. I loaded it with the ezgumer firmware from https://github.com/egzumer/uv-k5-firmware-custom and had very good results operating on frequencies that I didn't have preprogrammed into the radio.

The Quansheng will take Baofeng accessories, so I swapped out the stock antenna with the Nagoya NA-771 that I got a few years back. That helped quite a bit as the stock antenna is not very good.

The ezgumer firmware includes a spectrum montior which pulls in about 2 MHz of bandwidth at a time. As a built-in scanner of sorts it allowed me to find out where the traffic was and to tune into it pretty much right away. For regular channels it has an S meter which is sensitive enough to let you fine tune position.

Front panel programming for the Quansheng is much easier than on any Baofeng I have used. With this firmware loaded the front panel buttons can be long-pressed to do the function that's labeled on the button. There is a big button for a menu to get you to per-channel options that worked as well as I needed it to be.

My best transmit results were to use the rooftop of the car as an extra ground plane, that brought the receive signal up from S2 to S4 and let me check in to Bascom from Findlay (about 20 miles of flat terrain).

All in all a trip well worth it.

Software-defined baseball season, 2024 edition

Previously: 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018

Ball games are shorter now, with the combination of the pitch clock and the free runner in extra innings combining to make games closed to 2 hours than 3 hours. This means that late night baseball from the west coast might be done by midnight instead of 1:00 a.m. as it was.

My current setup for quickly tuning to far-away games relies heavily on work I did in previous years. Key to the effort is the international network of KiwiSDR receivers, which can be typically used to tune the AM broadcast band for up to 4 different simultaneous listeners. Some Kiwis will return 8 signals decoded at once.

The decision process looks like this:

• Who is playing now?
• What is that team's flagship station on AM?
• Which KiwiSDR receiver has good receiption of the flagship?
• If that reception is bad, are there any affiliates in good KiwiSDR locations?

My technology stack so to speak is Tailscale's "golink", https://tailscale.com/blog/golink which gives you named bookmarks. On my personal tailnet I visit the site http://go/tigers which redirects to http://go/wtka which then resolves to a specific KiwiSDR ("Pembleton Farms" north of here) at a speicified frequency (1050 AM). From trial and error and an annual opening day sweep I've pretty much dialed in my favorites.

For a map of KiwiSDR sites see http://rx.linkfanel.net

Alas this year I'm not going to be listening to as many Los Angeles Dodgers games, as my favorite listening posts to Dodgers affiliate KIKI 990 in Hawaii are offline.

"I'm rooting for the team that has the best announcers with good reception." This year I find myself tuning in Cubs games.

Operating notes: ADS-B and a clear view of the sky

My usual ADS-B antenna these days is a mag mount whip, stuck to either a cookie sheet or a curtain rod. It will typically get good coverage with an indoor placement near a window of 60-80 nm range. To my mind that is adequate but not exceptional.

I asked myself if it would make a bigger difference to get a faster CPU to decode signals (I'm on a Pi 3 now), or whether I should focus on antenna design or antenna placement. So I did some experiments with the existing equipment just moving the antenna around.

My best results by far were to open up my attic window and stick the antenna outside with the window open. The particular window opening mechanism has a metal support that the antenna could stick to. The result was far and away better, with 160-200 nm of range. Unfortunately it was temporary because it doesn't do very well to have a window open in the rain.

There are other people who have discovered that a clear view of the key matters more than decoding power or antenna design. See this discussion on Flightaware for a sense of this as well.

https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/clear-view-of-the-sky/69202

(Perhaps one more radio experiment to take to the top of a parking structure?)

Daisy, Daisy on AM radio - synthesized music

The first computer-generated music I ever heard up close was from an AM radio next to an 8080 machine. Tune to the correct frequency, run a program, hear "Daisy Daisy" on the radio. This was in the mid-1970s at the Michigan Tech University's "Summer Youth Program", a week-long class on "Hobby Computers".

I think it was this code (but not this specific computer)

https://digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/altair-sheetmusic/index.html

No transmit antenna needed, there was so much RF output on the unshielded motherboard.