Well... it's actually been 10 years since the first post on SEKARC and the club was started. I think we should all be proud of what we have built over the years. Field Days, meetings, coffee's, park events and the big Mining History Special Events!
Let's keep it rolling and growing! The link below takes you to our first post on Feb 23, 2013.
Nice short video regarding fan dipoles. Easy to build, multi band and not that costly! Give one a try! Have you built one? What are your thoughts? I built one and it worked well. Made mine for 70, 20 and 40 meters. I used a Balun Design feed point balun and it was up about 25 feet. Worked good but not the best for getting lots of DX due to it's radiant angle.
I am sure some of you veteran hams have... but I think today I had my second Feld Hell (Hellschreiber) QSO. See videos below of actual signal and the decoding. I was using Ham Radio Deluxe for the QSO.
Here is some history regarding Feld Hell that I learned after the QSO. My interest was peaked and I thought it would make a good post for our website. The source of the information below was from these two websites.
Introduction To Hellschreiber Modes
"The traditional method of sending Hellschreiber by radio is to key a Morse-type (CW) transmitter ON for every black spot in a text character,and OFF for every white place. Different parts of each character are sent at different times. The technique is still in use by interested Amateurs, communicating world-wide. This mode is now called Feld-Hell (Field-Hell), since the pre-war format still used was originally used for field communications by the German Army. Feld-Hell offered good immunity to interference and provided a clandestine transmission capability, because nothing was transmitted until a key was pressed. Commercial variations of Feld-Hell could still be heard occasionally on HF up until the 1980s, transmitting Chinese and Korean characters."
"Feld-Hell characters are sent as a series of dots at 122.5 pixels/sec, using a CW transmitter, or these days, by sending tones to an SSB transmitter. Black dots are represented by a CW dot (key down), and white spaces by a space as long as one dot (key up). The timing requirements are quite precise, like FAX, but Rudolf Hell developed a simple but clever technique, which involves printing the text twice, which can negate the effects of phase and small timing errors, thus avoiding the need for true synchronism."
This video shows the demo we showed at Hamvention 2022, in Dayton, Ohio.
This demonstrates the core underlying technology behind what we’re calling “SDRconnect”
“SDRconnect” is the new name for the multiplatform version of SDRuno (up till now we called it SDRuno V2)
We demonstrated the completely rewritten Core DSP engine for Spectrum and Waterfall displays – with the prototype software running on a Mac M1 computer. We also show the networking capability by remotely accessing an RSP based in the UK.
This is still an early stage demo, and the software team have a lot to do to complete the graphical user interface.
Work is underway on the new graphical user interface which:
• Retains the style and popular features of SDRuno
• Offers a more consistent and intuitive layout
• Addresses fixes and improvements suggested by users ever since SDRuno was first adopted.
Jim Szabo of SanCap Ariel had recently posted some of his work on Facebook and I thought the club would appreciate these photos. I met Jim through the Sanibel Island Facebook groups and was fortunate to spend some time with him and his lovely wife when he lived on Sanibel. Fortunately he moved well before Hurricane Ian devastated the island and the surrounding area.
He currently lives near Tampa Florida and has been doing drone work and is FAA Certified For All Aerial Photographic Needs in Commercial Real Estate, Construction Updates, Tower Inspections, SAR, Developer Portfolios, Public Safety and has recently retired.
Nice to know you Jim and we hope to meet again... and yes I will bring you more molasses crinkles and NO, this HAM guy doesn't wear overalls!! Love these shots!
From "The Voice of ChatGPT is on the air" by Hackaday Please read the whole post, it's very interesting. And a little unsettling. Did I write this... or did ChatGPT?
"AIs can now apparently carry on a passable conversation, depending on what you classify as passable conversation. The quality of your local pub’s banter aside, an AI stuck in a text box doesn’t have much of a living quality. human. An AI that holds a conversation aloud, though, is another thing entirely. [William Franzin] has whipped up just that on amateur radio. (Video, embedded below.)
The concept is straightforward, if convoluted. A DSTAR digital voice transmission is received, which is then transcoded to regular digital audio. The audio then goes through a voice recognition engine, and that is used as a question for a ChatGPT AI. The AI’s output is then fed to a text-to-speech engine, and it speaks back with its own voice over the airwaves.
[William] demonstrates the system, keying up a transmitter to ask the AI how to get an amateur radio licence. He gets a pretty comprehensive reply in return."
Here is an example I came up with after logging into ChatGPT.
