I noticed only a few days before new year's that, with 7 more actiations, I would have 50 in the log for the past year. I activated my "seven summits" within 4 days. :-) Task completed. Here are a few random impressions from the activations of:
Thanks to all chasers!
Technical infos: 2m VHF 5 Watt + Diamond RH-770 antenna respectively FT8 with app. 10W with FT817 + PA + Tuner ATU-100 + Diamond RHM-8B antenna
Activation report: Gelände (OE/NO-251)
Gelände is a funny name for a mountain since it means "terrain" or "area". However it was a nice walk up there very close to Vienna and I had the luck to have 4 S2S QSOs. The weather forecast was promising with a chance to get above the clouds. Below you will find a few photos!
Thanks for all chasers!
73 de Alfred
Activation report: Hermannskogel (OE/WI-001)
The Hermannskogel is the only SOTA Mountain within Austrias Capital City and one of very few which actually are within a major city. It was the first SOTA activation I did back in 2018, immediately after I passed my ham radio excam. So I thought why not using the nice weather to return to the Mountain. :-)
I used my UHF/VHF Handheld and a Diamond RH-770 antenna mounted to a tripod. That way I was able to have a QSO with OM1ST/P located at JN99JD, 208km distance.
Below you will find a few photos!
Thanks for all chasers!
73 de Alfred
Recently I made a double activation again, which went more successful than one of the last attempts to do a double activation. I activated Schweineck, OE/ST-244 and then a close by summit, Osser, OE/ST-223. Both are situated on a mountain plateau called Teichalm, normally a very popular recreation area but currently not as populated as normally due to the restrictions.
Teichalm
I used my standard SOTA VHF equipment comprising of the Anytone 2m handheld and my self built 4-element Yagi.
One of the funny things was that very well within the activation zone there was a tree stand which made an excellent base for my activation.
Perfect location
Also a first during the activation was a DMR (digital voice) direct simplex contact. I had to schedule it with another OM. Do not expect to get an answer frequently on the DMR simplex calling frequency 145.375. If you are interested in the technical setup for DMR direct, please see my description here. The distance was not far though, it was 15 km direct line.
Osser, OE/ST-223
Recently I made a sota activation and managed to have my first DMR digital voice contact on a direct simplex frequency. See my activation report here.
Here is a short description of the setup which lead to the successful QSO on a simplex frequency.
Both of us used Anytone devices, but I am quite sure it can be done between any DMR device. I had to use the 2m DMR simplex calling frequency 145.375 MHZ since my self built yagi which I used for the activation is only resonant on 2m.
Here are the settings:
For us it worked but of course all devices have so much different settings and options that you might have to play around a bit.
73 de Alfred
The antenna mounted on a 8m fibreglass mast during a SOTA activation
Doing a lot of portable QRP activity for SOTA and GMA I repeatedly ended up on summits with no trees or structures to mount a 40 or 20m dipole QRP antenna like my self built lightweight 20m dipole for SOTA. I already own a 8m HD fibreglass mast and was doing some research for a vertical antenna with no need for a second mount point.
The antenna during testing
After some research I ended up with a solution suggested by N2CX (as far as I found out, there might be another initial inventor which should be credited) and now produced commercially also by http://qrpguys.com/. It is a very basic construction made up from around 6m of vertical wire and 4 ground rods with 2 toroid coils in line for 40m (coil no. 1 and coil no. 2 active), 30m (only coil no. 2 active) and 20m (no coil active). A basic description can be found here.
My radials have fixed length of 3 meters.
Please find a few photos of my construction below. 73 de Alfred
The case with the PL connector for the antenna, the coils and the switches. Here without the 1:1 balun which I added later
In order to attach the antenna and ground rods I mounted 4mm (I think) screws outside the case
This is a brief report and a few photos of my activation of Jochart, SOTA reference OE/NO-057. I actually planned a double- activation: I went also to the summit of OE/NO-224, "Hegerberg" but as soon as I have set up my QRP PSK31 setup (see here for a description of my 3-band vertical lightweight portable antenna) heavy rain started and I had to abort the mission without having made a single QSO and pack everything into the rucksack swiftly in order to protect my gear which is not completely water-proof. I tried quickly also with my 2m/70 cm handheld and the very short (15cm) antenna attached to it but as usual no success with this setup.
I then checked the weather report and decided to give Jochart (OE/NO-057) a try, which is very close-by, the starting point is only around 15 minutes by car from the place I started to the initial mountain. On this one I was more successful, I managed to make 11 QSOs on 2m with my self-built 4 ele-yagi antenna. After entering a SPOT on the android SOTA spotter app, also my very reliable friends from Bratislava showed up on air, thanks to all of them!
Schneeberg
Schneeberg and Rax
"Gipfelkreuz"
QSO Map
Rohr im Gebirge
Rohr im Gebirge
Just a little bit slower than me
73 de Alfred
(And how I solved them.)
In this article I am going to describe which frequency issues I experienced with my Ubitx V3 board and how I solved it.
My Ubitx V3 in the making...
Disclaimer: I am really no electronics-expert. Everything you do based on the info provided here you do at your own risk, with no warranty whatsoever. Only do it if you know what you are doing, there might be errors in my assumptions and descriptions which might harm you, others around you or your devices. Don't do it if you are not a licensed ham radio operator.
I am using a Ubitx board V3. The Ubitx is only slightly modified:
My Ubitx, fitted in many hours into this lim case
The first time I noticed something might be wrong was when I tried to receive WSPR signals on 40 meters. I could not decode any signals. Looking at the waterfall it looked like the tone signals received are shifted to the right in the waterfall diagram, respectively too high in frequency:
Tone signals are shifted by around +100 HZ
They should look like this actually:
WSPR signals received with correct tone frequency (on another transceiver)
I then checked in "real-time" with a friend and compared FT8 CQ signals he received with the exact same signals I received and we found the same pattern: the frequency of the FT8 tone signals where all shifted to the right in the waterfall, or too high with other words by a few 10 to 100 Hertz, depending on the band.
The assumption had to be that there are some issues with the frequency but I needed to do some real testing.
Description of my test setup:
Schema of the test setup
The assumption for the test has to be that the whole setup on receiver side (FT-817, Audio-Interface, sound card) works correctly. To proof this I tested it by comparing it to yet another station. It received the same FT8 tone frequencies as another high-end Yaesu transceiver from a friend, so it is safe enough to assume that the FT-817 setup works correctly.
The test results revealed exactly what the waterfall suggested: A shift in frequency. Note that the frequency deviation is different on each band. In the table below you will find the average deviation per band in the yellow column.
The correction values were calculated based on the excellent explanation provided by KD8CEC here.
875000000 (PLLA frequency) / Test Freq * (Measured Freq - Send Freq) = calibration value
Master calibration value = existing value + calibration value
Results from my testing, note the yellow column
I did not find any advice on the internet on how to proceed in case the deviation is different on each band, so I decided to try my own approach: I just average the correction value.
In order to transfer the new master calibration value to the Ubitx I used the Ubitx memory manager, also provided by KD8CEC.
I transferred the new master calibration value to my Ubitx using the uBITX memory manager
After this I re-tested with the same setup as mentioned above. To my own surprise my approach worked quite well:
Results after testing, the deviation has been greatly reduced!
As you can see the approach worked quite well. The deviation is greatly reduced and acceptable now. Also the WSPR signals can be decoded now correctly:
WSPR signals can now be decoded.
I hope I could describe my approach clearly enough, if you have any questions please feel free to write me or leave a comment.
73 de Alfred.
Here is how I built my Audio Interface for my Ubitx.
My audio interface for the UBitx
When I first tested WSJT-X with my Ubitx I connected the USB sound card directly to the MIC and AUDIO OUT connections of the UBitx. I noticed soon that the USB sound card got extremely hot. I did some research and found that its probably not a good idea to connect them directly due to currents flowing between the sound card and the Ubitx. I even read that some friends destroyed their Ubitx circuits that way.
My self-built interface does not have a PTT circuit since the Ubitx can be connected to a PC with USB providing the option to trigger the PTT through USB (at least with the firmware I am running, KD8CECs version of the firmware).
After some research I came up with a schematic like this:
The 600 Ohm transformers were ordered through Ebay. The remaining parts I had at home.
73 de Alfred.
Like every year also this year the Vienna Sota Day took place, of course with some restrictions. However there very many ham friends on the air, on summits and in the valleys.
It was a beautiful spring day and I have chosen a simple hike up on Reisalpe, OE/NO-038. I used a fibre glass mast and my self built 5 element yagi antenna and made 41 contacts within around 2 and a half hour including 18 summit to summit QSOs.
Check out the activation QSOs on a map here. Biggest distance was a summit to summit QSO with OK4KOP/P on OK/JM-058, around 172km, not extraordinary but still something probably not possible without the yagi.
Below please find a few photos from this day. 73 de Alfred
I do not want to open a discussion on the best practice, neither do I want to fall into the trap of claiming the software and tools I use are the best combination. I did ask the question on what is the best strategy some time ago in the forums on SOTA Reflector and I have found myself doing SOTA activation quite intensively lately, so I thought I might share what I came up to.
Overview on my workflow
On the summit I use paper and pen. Specifically for the 2m handheld radio I made a board from cardboard to which I can mount the Anytone d868uv, so I have one hand free for the mic and the other free for writing.
Paper holder for SOTA activation
At home, for the first step of digitalisation I use FLE - Fast Log Entry. It takes a little bit of time to get used to it but once you know how to use the tool it is fantastic. It is very fast, you do not need to jump between fields and you just can write plain text as you would do when writing an e-mail. You can define an ADIF compliant QSL message which is considered correctly in eQSL and you can add the SOTA reference of your AND the other station in case of S2S QSOs. Also the grid locator of the other station can be set which will import correctly into your logging software. If you want, you can add comments too which will be shown correctly in your ADIF compliant logging software, on sotadata and on cqGMA as well.
FLE- fast log entry tool
From the above mentioned FLE tool you can generate an ADIF file directly. This ADIF file can be smoothly imported into sotadata (go to "upload ADIF log file") and to cqGMA as well. Everything works out of the box, even S2S QSOs are considered correctly.
I then import the ADIF file into my logging software (I use the dxkeeper tools) and enrich them with additional info if necessary (e.g. personal comments and some user-defined fields). I am aware that dxkeeper is not as popular as logger32, Ham Radio Deluxe or UR5EQF_log but for me it does the trick. By the way, eQSL provides a nice statistic on the logging tools used in the files uploaded to them.
For me the reasons to chose this tool were:
Import options are quite extensive
You can set user-defined items. If named properly and configured correctly, they are imported correctly from ADIF files
Disadvantages
It is not straight forward to use, just to mention it.
I still do send paper based cards by the way if requested. :-)
That's it basically.
73 de Alfred
Today I activated OE/NO-219.
Sunny, but windy conditions. I successfully tested my newly built lightweight dipole for 20m and made 4 contacts within 30 minutes with PSK31. I used my FT-817, the fantastic wolphilink modem and an android phone.
I also made several contacts on 2m using my Anytone at-d868uv and the good old Diamond RH-770.
73 de Alfred.
One of the things that fascinate me in ham radio is the ability to build actually working stuff from very basic materials. I am still fascinated by the fact that you can communicate - e.g. using PSK31 mode - thousands of km all over Europe with more or less only double the power of a cellphone using a self built antenna made from basically 10 metres of standard wire. The very first version of the antenna described here didn't even have the balun and still worked.
This is a brief description of my newly built very basic and lightweight SOTA dipole for 20 m.
The design is based on calculations performed by the SOTA linked dipole calculator which can be accessed here. I added a few cm of the calculated length in order to have some reserve for adjustments.
When I did tune the antenna by changing it's length I did it for the most common setup I expect for SOTA activation, the inverted V form.
During adjustment (cutting the length) SWR was 1:1.0 for 14.070 MHZ (my main use case will be PSK since I operate QRP and I can't morse ;-). I am aware that SWR is highly dependent from environmental conditions, I do not use HF amplifiers, so I do not care too much about SWR below 1:1.5.
It was quite windy on that day, so I made only 4 calls on 2m FM and went down again.
QSOs made:
This is a short description of one of the antennas I use for less serious hikes and for SOTA activations where the access is easy and short. Its not as small as my 4-element yagi but has even better performance of course.
The antenna is based on a design by DK7ZB and former NUXCOM.
It is build from basic materials:
** Usually the rods sold on Ebay are too short for the longest element, so you have to attach another short piece with the luster terminal.
For FM use the polarisation is vertical. I mount the antenna on hiking poles. In order for the antenna to be (more or less) free from interfering with the hiking poles I built an extension with 25mm insulation pipe.
Construction details
For the radiation elements I did drill a hole of 3 mm into the PVC clamps, that way the 3.2 mm rods are quite hard to push into to holes but once there they do not need additional fixation.
To attach the radiator element (4mm) I used a piece of wood. The radiator rods are attached to the piece of wood by small holes I drilled into it. To fix the rods in the wood I used small metal screws, those are at the same time the connection terminals. The loading coil is attached to the piece of wood as well. The antenna design is 50 ohm, the loading coil is used to act as a sheath current filter. The whole plate is again attached to the pipe with a PVC clamps.
As you can also see above the coaxial feed line is directly attached to the loading coil. This has four advantages compared to using a connector: it's lighter, the setup is faster, you cannot forget the cable ;-) and the feedline can run inside the boom, keeping it away from the radiation elements and helping therefore a good SWR.
For the mast as mentioned I use the hiking poles which I attach to each other an to the extension pole with velcro tapes. The antenna itself including cable (I used 6 meters of RG58) weighs around 450 g.
The boom itself is also cut into 2 pieces and the whole antenna fits into a plastic document roll from Ebay. It is attached to the extension boom by another piece of wood to which I attached appropriate plastic clamps:
As mentioned above for transportation I can put the whole arrangement into a document pipe. The whole package weighs around 1.1 kg then. The performance is very good, see antenna analysis below.
When building our own antenna my advice is to make sure the measures given related to distances and element length are followed precisely. You can cut the radiation element 1cm longer as given to give some room for SWR adjustment but take into account that you cannot change the optimum SWR far from the center frequency for which the antenna is designed by just changing the length of the radiation element. The whole arrangement of distances and length of all 5 element is relevant and is what makes the design a complex calculation.
There are already many reviews out there for the Anytone mentioned above, so this is not meant to be a detailed review but more a list of pros and cons from my perspective since I mainly use it for SOTA activation. I am using it for two years now and am very satisfied with it in general. I do also use the DMR functions occasionally but it's not my main use case.
Its receiver, subjectively at least, is quite sensitive on FM. And the device produces around 7 Watt with the "Turbo" setting applied on 2m -which does make a difference when signals are already weak: on several occasions the other station was not able to read me with the power set to "High" (which gives around 4 Watt), but was able to understand me when I changed it to "Turbo", which gives around 7 Watt. I now per default on 2m simplex leave it on "Turbo" during SOTA activation.
Sota references: OE/ST-112 and OE/ST-127
Hiking distance: 15,4 km, elevation gain total: 1253m
Equipment used:
My standard SOTA equipment with the AnyTone AT-d868uv and my self-built 4-ele yagi.
QSO | UTC | Station | QRG | Mode | RST | wkd Stn Ref. | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
tx | rx | ||||||||
1 | 11:19 | OE6TTF | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
2 | 11:23 | OE6BID/P | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | OE/ST-448 | ||
3 | 11:24 | OE6PID/P | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | OE/ST-448 | ||
4 | 11:29 | OM1ALT | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
5 | 11:33 | OE1GKS | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
6 | 11:37 | OE1HTA/3 | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
7 | 11:39 | 3 | OE5JKL | 144 | fm | 59 | 54 | ||
8 | 11:45 | OM5AST | 144 | fm | 59 | 56 | |||
9 | 11:46 | 3 | OE6WOF | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | ||
10 | 11:50 | OE6END | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 |
QSO | UTC | Station | QRG | Mode | RST | wkd Stn Ref. | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
tx | rx | ||||||||
1 | 13:33 | OE5GHN | 144 | fm | 59 | 56 | |||
2 | 13:38 | 3 | OE5JKL | 144 | fm | 59 | 55 | ||
3 | 13:44 | OE6SQD | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
4 | 13:46 | OE6BFE/P | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
5 | 13:49 | OK2PDT | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
6 | 13:51 | OE5HDN | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
7 | 13:53 | OM1ALT | 144 | fm | 59 | 56 | |||
8 | 13:55 | OE6END | 144 | fm | 59 | 55 | |||
9 | 13:55 | OM1ZZ | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
10 | 13:56 | OM1AVV | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
11 | 14:00 | OM5AST | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
12 | 14:03 | OE4GUB | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 | |||
13 | 14:04 | OE5SLE | 144 | fm | 59 | 59 |
Here is the description of one of the antennas I frequently use during SOTA activations.
The antenna is based on a design by DK7ZB and former NUXCOM.
It is build from basic materials:
* For FM use the polarisation is vertical. I mount the antenna on hiking poles. In order for the antenna to be (more or less) free from interfering with the hiking poles I built an extension with 25mm insulation pipe, see pictures below.
**My initial version was around 1,1m long when disassembled but this was too long for more serious hikes since it could be mounted only outside on the rucksack. Now I have cut all radiation elements so they can be mounted together with luster terminals. Also the extension pipes (25mm) and the boom itself is cut in appropriate places and held together with sleeves. When disassembled the whole packages now measures around 65cm in length and fits into my rucksack.
Construction details
Above: For the smaller package size the rods are simply cut and then mounted together with the luster terminals. For the rods themselves I did drill a hole of 3 mm into the PVC clamps, that way the 3,2 mm rods are quite hard to push into to holes but once there they do not need additional fixation.
Above: For the radiator (4mm) I used a piece of wood. The radiator rods are attached to luster terminals which in turns are attached to the piece of wood with small screws. The loading coil is attached to the piece of wood as well. The antenna design is 50 ohm, the loading coil is used to act as a sheath current filter. The whole plate is again attached to the pipe with a PVC clamp.
For the mast as mentioned I use the hiking poles, see above. The whole SOTA package, including the handheld transceiver, 5m cable, notebook and pen, the velcro-tapes and a screwdriver weighs around 1,4kg.
The maximum distance I achieved with this setup (4 Watt) was 361km.