|
Here are some of my favourite amateur radio websites, now sorted to make some sense of the mush.
Clubs/societies
- ZL6QH is the club station for the infamous Quartz Hill contest group. The club runs a fabulous contest QTH on a windswept hilltop just West of Wellington, so windy in fact that it is currently becoming a wind farm. The station is temporarily dismantled and in safe store, while slowly in a quiet corner of the South Pacific, cunning plans are being hatched to rebuild the mark II ZL superstation.
- M6T (Martlesham DX and Contest Group) is the UK’s premier HF contest group and a great bunch of contest nutters like me.
- The Voodudes activate different rare West African countries in CQ WW CW every year. Read about most of them in Contesting in Africa by my mate and supreme CW DX op G3SXW - Rogah.
- RSGB - The Radio Society of Great Britain is the UK's national radio society. The site carries weekly-updated news (including DXpeditions), propagation info, contest info etc.
(including the text of the
Sunday news
bulletins). And the RSGB
publishes some of the best
Amateur Radio books and maps
available, including the
definitive callsign/prefix
guide edited by my pal Fred
G4BWP. The monthly Radio
Communication magazine
carries RSGB contest rules
and results, Pat
Hawker’s excellent
Technical Topics scrapbook
and a bunch of other
trivia. Oh and the RSGB
HF Contest Guide I wrote a
long time ago on behalf of
the HF Contests Committee.
- NZART - New Zealand Amateur Radio Transmitters is the NZ national society. Their bi-monthly magazine Break-In publishes a few technical and operating articles.
- ARRL - Amateur Radio Relay League - the American national amateur radio society. I’m no longer a member but I still enjoy their publications, particularly the antenna books and handbook.
- G-QRP-C, the G
QRP Club, has no official
website,
unfortunately :-( Despite
having enjoyed QRP operating
with my K2 and other
home-brew rigs over the years
(including a whole year
chasing DXCC on 9 bands CW
and giving various G QRO
stations a good run for their
money), I’m not really
an out-and-out
QRPer. Still, the
construction articles and
operating tips in the club
mag Sprat are well worth the
miniscule
subscription. And
I’ll always do my best
to pull QRP stations from the
pileups (including those who
sign /QRP, where legal to do
so).
Radio friends
- G3TXF - Nigel is a well known DXer, QSL manager, oh and DXpeditioner, often in cahoots with my pal Rogah, G3SXW. Nigel’s website has searchable logs plus lots of radio photos from his DXpeditions and other jaunts. Both upload their logs to LoTW giving lots of us numerous “firsts”. Cheers lads.
- G0AFH - Ian is a pal from M6T and Windmill CG. Check out Ian’s cracking pix
of Windmill’s entry in
VHF FD 2004 including my all-time favourite field day picture, a night shot of the 6m set-up done with a long exposure and torch illumination. Clever stuff Ian.
- G0MTN - Lee also belongs to M6T and the Voodudes. His site has some great pictures of the West African hotel roof style typical Voodude set-ups.
Ham software, DXcluster & digimodes
- VE7CC’s cluster user software is neat: set up a local cluster on your PC with flexible filtering, LoTW indication and useful other options. Read more here. List of DXcluster nodes accessible via the Internet over Telnet. Much more reliable than 2m packet cluster access!
- Having completed a rigorous selection process, I chose to use K4CY’s Logger32 for my main station log and N1MM for contest logging. Both programs are
free and
support the ADIF XML log
standard, meaning that after
a contest I can integrate my
contest logs from N1MM easily
into Logger32. Read more
about the fun I had getting
QSL labels out of Logger32
and various bugs in the
software here and read K5LAD’s page showing how the QSL label “fields” are defined in Logprint.
-
VE3NEA writes wonderful ham software, some of which is free of charge. The DXatlas program lets the user draw beautiful high-resolution colour maps complete with overlays for CQ zones, country outlines, latitude & longitude or Maidenhead locator grid lines, capital cities, DXCC prefixes, grey lines, propagation prediction (with the associated IonoProbe program) and so on - pretty much anything a serious DXer could ever want from a map program. Mercator projection or great circle projections are no longer confined to the shack wall: the software allows the user to interact with the maps. The globe projection is great for those of us who don’t have the desk estate for an actual globe. Morse Runner is an excellent free program for practicing CW pileups and contests. The sound output is significantly better than those old fashioned CW practise programs - it includes realistic QRN QRM and all the usual crud you experience on a hot and busy shortwave band - including lids who CQ on “your” frequency. Real-time feedback on the accuracy of your log as each QSO is committed to the record is great for improving your contest logging techniques. Its nearly as much fun as a real contest. Get it now, while it’s still freeware!
- The Bozo’s guide to JT65 is responsible for persuading me to experiment with some digimodes. Boy have things moved on since the noisy, smelly, oily days of Creed 444s! I made my first JT65 QSO on 20m, holding the mike to the PC speaker on TX. Thanks to some pals on CDXC reflector, I’ve discovered a German site with sound bytes of various types of data modulation. Now
I’m looking for
software to decode the more
exotic ones - MultiPSK by F6CTE perhaps or something else from Utility
Monitoring Central’s
software links page.
-
Find out who else is using LoTW at HB9BZA’s site. HB9BZA also provides RXCLUS software to integrate DXcluster spots from various sources - SpotCollector is another package in the same vein.
Construction & electronics inc. K2 & QRP
 Lots of constructor articles from AD5X.
-
Sandpiper in the UK supplies cheap, lightweight /P beams and verticals. Some such as the VK2ABQ are
true multiband designs, others have to be brought down and re-configured for different bands. OK in a
portable situation, not so handy at home. The SteppIR idea is looking attractive for full coverage of all
the pre-WARC and WARC bands.
- Kicad is an open source/freeware electronics CAD system for drawing schematics and PCB designs. It
doesn’t do circuit analysis but others do ... I’m still looking.
-
Finger Dimples are, um, little round things you, err, stick to your knob. To make tuning easier, that is. US website UK website
- Elecraft - designers, suppliers and supporters of the K2 and other great radio kits. The guys behind
Elecraft provide a wonderful after-care service as well as producing one of the finest radio designs ever
made. [FWIW The K3 looks interesting but too expensive for my budget, and it’s a shame its mostly pre
-assembled.]
TS850 info and mods
GS35b/QRO HF amplifiers, circuits and bits
Here’s a heap of amp construction links courtesy of a ZL QRO linear constructor, supplemented by hints from
the great bunch of guys on Amps@contesting.com
Not all sites listed are still QRV - those I have checked and QSLd so far have comments as well as links:
More amp links as yet unchecked ...
Contesting & operating
- Fly through cool 4D images of the ionosphere courtesy of NASA plus Google Earth.
-
How good is your knowledge of world geography? Think you really know your DXCC entities? Take the traveller IQ challenge.
- Logbook of The World (LoTW) is the ARRL’s solution for electronic QSLing. To use LoTW, you first need
to apply for a digital certificate which authenticates you as a legitimate licensee. Then you digitally sign
your log using the certificate and upload it to the LoTW server (I upload my own log, or rather QSOs
added since the previous upload, every few weeks). The LoTW database then cross-matches QSOs
between you and any of the ~18,000 other LoTW users and generates electronic confirmations that are
accepted for DXCC credit.
- SM3CER website has the best and most up-to-date contest diary plus lots of links. An excellent resource
for contesters!
- Contesting.com has contest tips and links e.g. to the 3830 reflector for bragging about your claimed
scores.
- CQ World Wide is CQ Magazine’s official website for the biggest event in the contest calendar. CQ Magazine’s website is separate. I‘m proud to have been part of the GW8GT, M6T XT2DX and ZL6QH
teams that hold various multi-multi and multi-single all-time CQ WW records on phone and CW, and I’ve
held a 21 MHz CW record (albeit single-op at super-station GW8GT) for years. I think I might have set a
new Oceania record on CQ WW CW 80m QRO assisted in 2007 to add to the one I set on 40m in 2006.
- NG3K’s DX and contesting site - an excellent set of useful resources for contesters.
- HF beacon list - constantly maintained by G3USF.
- 10-band CW table - John, G3WGV, maintains an annual table of DXCC countries worked on CW on 160
thru 6m during the year. You are welcome to track your own scores but the competition is only open to
UK hams at present. CQ Magazine’s DX Marathon is a similar concept except that it is mixed mode and
only gives credit for the first QSO with each DXCC/zone regardless of band. Finally, ARRL’s DXCC
Challenge rewards QSOs with DXCC countries on each band but is forever, not annual.
- Logsearch.de is a fast log search engine with a growing collection of DX station logs. In the best
amateur radio tradition, it is free to use. I’m pleased to see big DXpeditions allowing near-real-time log
searches - it cuts down on the need for additional ‘insurance’ QSOs and hence allows more of us to work
the DX.
Antennas, towers & earthing
- Ultra Beam is a new Italian supplier of stepper-moter-and-flexible-tape beams. Ummmm. If only
there were a distributor in the South pacific region ...
- Porn for hams - ’nuff said
-
I’m interested in directional LF antennas. I’ve considered beverages and K9AY loops but I just came
across this 4x EWE antenna receiving array for LF - looks easy enough to replicate in any 100ft square
space.
- The entire 4th edition of ON4UN’s Low Band DXing book is online. The hardcopy is easier to browse while
sitting in the little “antenna planning” room though.
-
Read far more than you ever wanted to know about earthing for lightning protection and RF purposes in
small 40 page pamphlet and a large US DOD manual (contains parts 1 and 2 in the same file).
- A bunch of links of interest to those building hilltop VHF/UHF repeaters or antenna farms at home.
Those little bits at the bottom of my junk box ...
-
At last! A website clearly demonstrating simple knots suitable for guys and other radio purposes.
-
For a different perspective on being a ham, see what Dilbert has to say.
-
And to understand various engineering terms, read this.
Add URL: please let me know of other good amateur radio sites and tell me if you link to this site - I will
happily reciprocate!!
|
