Daily Archives: 14th December 2014

Ham Radio

WSPR – Propagation Report on 10 Watts

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Now revision is over, I’ve been playing with WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter)pronounced ‘whisper’, I’ve had the program for quite a while but never really dedicated any time to setting it up, other rather checking that I can connect to the Kenwood and it allows the program to receive and transmit.

I set WSPR to report on the 30m band with a spot receiving frequency of 10.138.70MHz USB with a 2 minute RX/TX cycle using 10 Watts, unbelievably my very first report back was from the USA, this is a screen grab after a couple of hours:

WSPR on 10w
Map showing stations who received my 10 Watt transmission

Maybe my inverted ‘L’ isn’t as bad as thought! I’ll keep it running for a while and see who else can hear me. I will add to this post with more screen grabs when it has been running for longer and I get some even further contacts hopefully.

The screen shot below was taken on the 20th May 2017, I was running a Kenwood TS-200- at 5watts :

 

wspr

Ham Radio

Advanced Exam – Update

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I sat the Advanced Amateur Radio exam on the 8 December, the venue was Cauis (pronounced Key’s) College in Cambridge city center with the exam starting at 19:00, Martin from Cambridge University Wireless Club (CUW) arranged the venue and invigilated, Colin from Cambridge and District Amateur Radio Club acted as the second invigilator.

The exam had an allocated time of two hours and three in total taking the exam, the results are due 6 working days after receipt of the completed papers at RSGB Headquarters in Bedford, so I’m hoping to hear one way or the other by Tuesday 16 December using the OFCOM licensing web portal as I’m told this is where you find out earlier than wait for the results letter, the downside is that if your registration code used on the OFCOM site does not allow you past the application stage, then it may not be good news :-(.

Watch this space and I’ll post up as soon as I know.

17 December 14 – Well it’s good news, checked the OFCOM web site and bingo, passed the advanced, my new call sign is M0HTA, when I got home the envelope containing the certificate was waiting for me, posted on the 16th.

In my blog I’ve mentioned Hamtests and QADV being used as part of my pre exam revision, here are a couple of screen shots of what I did:

Hamtests

hamtestSet of 10 test questions with a 10 minute time limit.

hamtest1Set of 62 test questions with a 2 hour time limit.

The results dropped on the 7th December as my exam was on the 8th and I was panicking!

QADV

QADV resultsCombined results of QADV.

Sorry for the compressed image – the last version used was downloaded on the 6th December, 2 days before the exam.

QADV I found to be very well supported in regard to upgrades and it was very easy to use,  the screen grabs were from my Laptop, the program was also installed on my desktop so the number of tests actually undertaken is a lot higher than shown (each version change wipes your previous results)!

Many thanks to the providers of Hamtests, QADV, advice from members of CDARC and CUW for facilitating the exam.

Weather Site

General Status Update

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14 December 14 was a record for the duration the weather PC has worked without a glitch, usually I have to restart, or close and then re-open an application every week or so, but this time it ran for 31 days and 16 hours before a restart which is really good.

Had a few days of the weather site not being available (5 Dec – 10 Dec), this was due to an upload which failed due to a corrupt file, unfortunately everything work ok when I accessed the site, it was only when I enabled Pingdom.com did the problem come to light, this has meant that the’ Who’s Online’ menu bar item is not available until this corrupt file is found and fixed.

The other issue has been with ‘Space Weather’, NOAA has revamped their web site and this has led to a number of broken links, I’m waiting for a week or so before I start tracking the links down and re-linking in case they continue tweaking for a bit longer.