The Experience !! Ham Radio

March 24, 2014

The Experience !! Ham Radio

The Experience - Ham Radio

This all started 2008,2009 on an weekend offroad get together of my local 4x4 club where I was introduced to HAM by AP2AUM. AP2AUM, a seasoned offroader/ham'er, gentleman and a good friend. I was amazed with the HAM and the more we talked the more I wanted to know. Had a little hobby electronics spark as a teenager years and the concepts of and/or/nor gates were still clear ;). Quickly got on the bandwagon and I was alive on 2m with the membership to P.A.R.S as an SWL. Soon got my license (after passing exams) and was allotted the call sign AP2CJ :). The question would be why AP2CJ, the answer to this riddle is that as an offroader and an owner of a JEEP (CJ-1980), hence the call sign :).Few years passed and the experimentation with 2m/70cm cross-band repeaters and 2m echolink interface, win32/linux node kept me busy. Used the 2m in Pakistan's flood relief efforts and other activities.

Then one fine weekend, P.A.R.S training batch 2 was being conducted and I took my kids with me to attend. Its always a good idea to attend these training even though you may be a seasoned HAM, you always learn something and can be a source of tons of experience for new comers. this is what happened to me, I was actually introduced to HF in this workshop though I had read-up/learnt many thing theoretically. The HF bug had bitten me bad !!. A friend AP2MF was selling his old iCOMM710 rig and I was the one to jump the gun and buy it there and then. The deal was final and few days later I picked up the rig from his qty all excited and charged knowing I was a HAM and how hard could it be actually.. was I in for a treat !!!

Now I had an HF rig, no coax and no antenna...???, took few weeks to arrange a decent coax meanwhile had started working on the antenna design, an inverted vee :). bought the stranded wire, pulley, rope and read many article on how others had built it. got my desired frequency set and started the antenna building with formulas and careful planing. I did not have an swr meter :P, how the hell am I going to get on the air? My friend AP2MF to the rescue !! got an SX600 and to my surprise, my 10m and 20m was 1:1, the dam 40m didnt come down from 1:7 :P :(, tried everything till I stood still and just looked at it and it suddenly hit me, both the elements were not properly inverted towards the ground :P. After weeks of planning, antenna design, experimenting and re-experimenting, I finally made it to the HF bands. Got a manual antenna tunner MFJ-945E (thanx to AP2MF), made things more intresting.

At my QTH in the twin cities of Pakistan, The antenna is hoisted in the air with a 20feet galvanized (grounded) pipe on roof, on top is a diamond 2m underneath which is the pulley system for the HF multiband dipole (40,20,10m). As a computer geek and a licensed HAM, had been tinkering with 2m Echolink with successful deployment of it and now was the time for the HF and its digital modes. The equipment I use for now is an iCOM2200H 2m, iCOMM710 HF rig, both feed via lmr-400 coax respectively. Had setup a separate ground/earth using 2xearth rods 10feet long driven in wet ground/soil which I use for the shack grounding. The rigs are powered by an deep cycle 160amp 12V bat with RF power supply and external rapid charger.

Back to the HF experience, I spent the first hour or two just listening 40m. I scanned up and down, and heard quite a bit of good DX, from Morocco, Ireland, England, Germany, Spain, Costa Rica, Cuba, and more, plus some Canadian stations and lots of our friends in the neighboring countries. By the time I was ready to transmit, 40m had gone silent, so I went to trusty 20m. I spent quite a bit of time just listening and tuning around. When I called CQ, I didn’t get any replies. Each time I heard a good DX station, there was a pileup before I could get in. Fortunately my call was answered with good signal reports. So my first HF contact was in Pakistan.

My first HF contact was AP2ZAF one sweet afternoon after which things just started rolling day by day. The more I listened the more I realized that I need to have a way to clear up some audio thus the search for DSP started. The approach I used was to get a mixer with 3eq's in source line and then preferably 5band eq's at each channel output thus the peavey mixer. The HF rig's audio out in fed to the mixer by concerting an unbalanced to balanced feed in xlr. took a little time to tinker and master the mixer to get what i desired and to my surprise I could clean up audio of most of the far away weak DX stations which I never heard on the rig's normal speaker.

Now that the phone qso's have started in, my computer geek kicked in and I started the search for the iCOMM710 digital mode solution, which I found @ http://deepplaya.com/w7pea/2011/12/conclusion-diy-icom-m710-remote-control-cable/ .