The LF Notebook - Mailbag, News and Comments (From THE LOWDOWN, Sept. 1996) John H. Davis, Box 367, Warm Springs, GA 31830 -E-mail - johnhdavis@aol.com -Longwave BBS - 706-672-0360 -Fax - (706) 672-0964 -World Wide Web http://users.aol.com/lwcanews/ Me and my big mouth. No sooner did I grumble about the Dog Days than we had our first major break from the heat. We then had a downright chilly spell, a definite hint of autumn, several days before the Equinox. It'll soon be time to pour some cider, roast a bunch of chestnuts, and curl up with a warm receiver. The Web page and BBS did not see many changes this past month, although BBS usage is picking up a bit. I do have some newer files for the BBS again, and we should see those online soon. (My apologies for not having quite all the Olympic and Paralympic stuff in place on the Web during September as intended. I'll try to have it there throughout October if anyone's still interested.) And a reminder that, while the Longwave BBS and the Longwave Home Page cannot take the place of The LOWDOWN, they can be useful for updating you on beacon changes and news during that long wait for the next month's issue. E-mail List. Members have asked for, and earlier this year I was working on, an experimenters' contact list. I hope we'll be able to do that soon. Several people have responded to my request for e-mail addresses, but so many have changed in the past few months that I've been unable to keep up. On To The Mailbag -Rick Warnett (Papua New Guinea) renewed this summer and expressed his enthusiasm for The LOWDOWN. He has been following developments with digital modes, calling them a "very big step forward for real long distance work." He often listens for some of the utility beacons reported in these pages... which constitute truly exotic reception in his part of the world, and are seldom audible there. Rick wonders if there are other members in the Pacific region, say, Hawaii and westward. It would be interesting to know what sort of signals they hear. He notes: "I have improved my listening equipment here, changing the principal receiver from an ICOM IC-R72 (which is now with a friend) to a Watkins Johnson HF1000. Although this is a great receiver for coverage, I found it a bit deaf at the low end, say below 150 kHz. To overcome this, I added an LF200 pre-amplifier, which has made the system very sensitive right down to OMEGA frequencies, where my antenna is the limiting factor. I have yet to try some active loops at this sort of frequency, but expect they may improve things. The loaded long wire I have is about 50 feet high and has some top loading radials as well as a ferrite cored series loading coil. I have so many earth radials that I keep getting complaints about tripping the pedestrians, so I guess I have reached the natural limit!" "I hope to get a 60 foot aluminum lattice mast up some time, as long as it will fit among the ham antennas and the 15 foot dish we hope to use for weather satellite pix. I guess when you get down to it, there is not enough room in a suburban back yard for everything. I need to move out into the rural areas and start again." "To help with noise and such, I added an MFJ-784 digital processor on the output of the HF1000, and this further improves things. It seems a pity that WJ did not include further audio DSP after the success of the RF processing. The MFJ sure offers some improvements at times." "Overall, I have to agree with some reviewers' comments that the HF1000 has super setability and stability, allowing extremely narrow bandwidths (and) extraction of otherwise undetectable signals. I cannot agree with the generally read comment that the unit is very noisy--on the speaker audio, at least. There does seem to be a lot of hashy type noise in the raw headphone audio, though. This is easily cleaned up by the MFJ-784, and appears to be no major problem if the processor is used." -Don Tomkinson (Huntington Beach, CA) reported at the end of July that LowFER PLI has returned to audibility at his QTH, after an absence of over a year. (This message was supposed to have been in last month's column. My apologies to Don and our readers for the mishap.) -David Jones (NR; Columbus, GA) advises that the June Shortwave magazine says a Dutch company is constructing a 10 Megawatt LF broadcast station on 171kHz, to be completed in 1997. "Since France-Inter is about 2 MW, the Netherlander should be strong. Will play middle of road music," David says. He's been experimenting with playing with the FFTDSP42 weak signal integrator software package. "Not perfect for my computer which is too slow, but it may help me recover weak signals in the noise here at the apartment." In reviewing some past tapes, David encountered a quarter second burst of 500 Hz tone on his 1992 recording of the INSPIRE project. "I need help figuring out if it came from the Shuttle. I would like to know the frequencies transmitted, when the sequence began and when the circuit breaker popped. Also the length of the cycle of twenty tones. I have asked Bill Pine but others may know this info." During mid-September, David visited with Harry Lanier, KF4VK. "I returned his whistler book and some copies of The Lowdown. He has built a device to simulate he bifurcation of lightning or how lightning chooses a path. It is a fir tree array of neon lights. He also showed me a paper by an Auburn University professor about the formation of ball lightning. I saw a ball come out of an electric oven once while my grandmother kept me and my brother nearby during a threatening thunderstorm. The ball coincided with a strike on the house and instantly disappeared." -Richard Lamont sent word that his 73 kHz Home Page, the Web site dealing with longwave Amateur Radio in the United Kingdom, has a new address. It may be easier to access at the new URL: http://www.stonix.demon.co.uk/73kHz/ This will be an interesting site to watch during the winter, especially if you have access to a secluded, electrically quiet listening spot along the East Coast of the U.S. or Canada. -David E. Crawford (KD4WHZ, 7821 SW 56th Ave., Gainesville, FL 32608. Tel. 352-374-8324) has a new e-mail address: decrawf@nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu. And speaking of coastal listening spots, David announces CANAVDX 1996, a radio listeners' DXpedition at Canaveral National Seashore, Florida, overnight on 7-8 December 1996. "CANAVDX is a not-quite annual autumn event that began in 1979, and is hosted by DX FLORIDA. CANAVDX is held at the CNS House of Refuge site, which is accessible only through the north entrance of the park. It is located on a narrow barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Mosquito Lagoon, and is an ideal spot for DXing due to lack of electrical noise, good ground conductivity, and lots of room to run antennas. Everyone is welcome, so pass the word, and please RSVP." It will be necessary for David to have an estimate of attendance ahead of time. He will be able to furnish you with directions, word of what sort of gear, clothing, and other precautions are advisable. Collected logs will be published in a CANAVDX 1996 Proceedings for distribution to participants and various nonprofit radio forums. -Lyle Koehler (LEK; Aitkin, MN; e-mail: lek@juno.com) confirms some of the hints that propagation continued to be strong during the summer, somewhere under all the QRN. "It's a little early to declare the start of the LowFER DX season, but on the morning of August 23rd, Bill Bowers' OK beacon was identifiable through the static crashes. Yesterday (Sept 9th) at about 0830 CDT it sounded like OK was in there again, although barely detectable. Not bad for a CW LowFER signal at 750 miles on a summer day. Bill has gone to great lengths to squeeze every tenth of a dB out of his system, and it certainly seems to be paying off." "STLMO still comes in through the static crashes on MF at times. Roger, K0MVJ joined Bruce, AA0YB and me while we were talking on 75 meters last Sunday. Roger's LowFER beacon RM is still functional although it's been off almost all summer." "I spent the last week of August as an instructor at the Courage Center's Handi-Ham Radio Camp near Lake George, MN, about 80 miles northwest of here. Of course the LF receiver went along, too. LEK was solid copy, and SAM was readable (at almost 170 miles) despite a fairly high noise level." "Not much progress to report on construction projects, except for the purchase of some chicken wire at a garage sale. Possibly a ground screen for a winter-only BPSK beacon antenna. I've found that a 28C64 EEPROM can be used in either the RAM or EPROM versions of Bill de Carle's beacon keyer circuit. All that's required is a way to slow down the programming process to accommodate the relatively long write cycle time of the EEPROM." "On a sadder note, my long-time friend Carl Heinen, W0MCN (LowFER CRL) became a silent key last Sunday. Carl was the quintessential experimenter. One of the many construction articles he wrote was the first solid-state all- band receiver design to appear in QST. Those of us who were privileged to know Carl will miss the inspiration and encouragement he brought to the hobby." -Dave Riley (AA1A; Marshfield, MA) hopes to return former LowFER 1A to the air in the vicinity of 188 kHz around the time of cold weather. "Between LORAN C from Nantucket, and local JK Knight Oven/Osc, I am ready for very stable CCW to anyone wanting to give it a try," he says. Have you ever been listening to mediumwave or longwave on a portable radio while close to some large structure, like a broadcast antenna tower, or a long metal fence, or an extraordinarily tall tree, and observed signal enhancement as you got into inductive coupling proximity of the object? What do you reckon would happen in the neighborhood of a really B-I-G metal structure--say, a major bridge? Well, Dave knows, and it's fascinating: "Beacon 1A/mm in 1985 was sailing on the Motor Vessel 'Sea Venture WJMV' on the Gulf and East Coasts. Besides many real time CW QSO's and beacon QSL's a most welcome phenomenon was experienced while approaching New York via the Varazano Narrows Bridge. It seemed that all LowFER beacons broadside to the bridge went up 15-20 db while stations in line with the bridge suffered signal strength degrading by the same amount. This was verified many times with CW QSO's up to 200 miles away while transiting under the bridge.. Lesson learnt: That bridge is over a half wave long at 185 kHz. and the ship was off centerline transmitting with a 25' whip loaded with a variometer. Both transmission and reception were enhanced for approximately 3-5 minutes. Moral: If you can modulate a bridge (folded dipole) with any coupling from a LowFER Tx. then that is the place to camp out during LowFER Weekend. (When is LowFER Weekend?)" "When my portable receiver is next to a large pine tree, signals get much better so have mounted my active E-Probe out in the quiet back 40 for real good reception." Dave also offers the observation that "Bill deCarles BPSK/CCW Board (the Delta-Sigma A/D converter) is a bargain and plenty worthwhile to anyone wanting to enter the world of weak signals." -Bruce Koehler (YB, BK, AAO0YB; aa0yb@juno.com) says, "YB and BK have been off the air all summer, but I hope to get them running again soon. The Shell Lake, MN, cabin is being moved about 50 feet back away from the lake to get away from the water. The water level has dropped about a foot since I last reported to you, but it could come up again.... All the heavy machinery has really torn up my ground radial system, so that will have to be redone after everything gets moved into place. We're planning on building a new garage too, and I think the BK antenna will be put on the garage roof. It should be a little higher than it was last winter. I might put chicken wire under the garage roof for a ground plane if I get the time." "This project has been taking up a lot of my time. I still get out on the 16 foot Hobie Cat sailboat quite a bit, but I haven't been fishing as much as I usually do. I expect that we can start building the garage in a couple of weeks, and once that's done I can think about getting BK back on the air. I need to get a new tophat built for YB too, and get that antenna hauled back up into the cottonwood tree. There is a lower limb on that tree that inter- feres somewhat with raising and lowering the antenna, so I'd like to get that removed first.... With all that's going on, there probably isn't much chance that I'll complete as much as I hope to do." "I still hear LEK regularly, and SAM is sometimes on the air. Those are about the only LOWFER beacons running in this area this summer." -If you've been looking for Jill Dybka's home page lately, it's now at a new URL: http://funnelweb.utcc.utk.edu/~jtdybka/radio.htm She also has a new e-mail address: jtdybka@utkux.utcc.utk.edu. -John Lyman (TAL; Tacoma, WA; Jlyman@wport.com) says TAL should be back on now. "After quite a bit of re-modeling this year, I have moved and re-installed my LW antenna. It used to be on the roof, now it's about 50 feet back in the back yard. I should be getting a lot less interference from the electrical lines coming to the house. I will be going to continuous operation from every Friday/sundown to Monday/sunup starting October 1st. I'll probably also run on holidays which fall during the week." BPSK Update Bill de Carle (VE2IQ; bill@ietc.ca) reports a new version of the MATIC utility is available, for those wanting to program EEPROMS for the multimode digital keyer project that appeared in The LOWDOWN earlier this year. It's downloadable at http://w3.ietc.ca/home/bill/keyer.zip. Lyle Koehler has been working on an article for this publication about use of EEPROMs in that circuit, and it should appear soon. There's also a routine in BASIC for programming the chips, too. Footnote - Hope you enjoy your autumn. Until next month, 73. - - -