KB9BVN

Well this coming Field Day is going to be difficult for me. I will be unable to participate with my friends over in Ohio, and I will not get to enjoy it with my friends here in Central Indiana. I have a work function on Friday night, a previously made charitable commitment on Saturday, and Sunday I have to work in the afternoon. I suppose I could setup a station on the back deck for use between prior engagements….but my heart is not into it.

This entire week I have been in Boston attending EMC World. On Tuesday night we were all invited to attend a Boston Red Sox game at the legendary Fenway Park. I can now scratch that off my bucket list, but you’re probably wondering what the heck that has to do with radio anyway, so let me tell you a story.

When I was a youngster, maybe 9 or 10 years old, I had a transistor radio that I would stick in my pillow at night and listen to radio from all over the country instead of going to sleep. I think that was when I got hooked on radio and electronics in general. When I was in the 7th grade, I built a crystal radio receiver for the AM broadcast band in shop class. I remember having a wire running around the window frame in my bedroom and using that for an antenna, I grounded the radio to the metal bedframe and surprisingly it worked.

I would spend the nights looking for baseball games in the spring and summer time, I could hear the Cardinals from St. Louis and I would listen intently and tune ever so precisely when Bob Gibson was on the mound, I loved listening to Lou Brock steal base after base. No steroids on Lou!

I could hear the Reds on WLW 700, and the Big Red Machine was in its infancy, Don Gullet on the mound, Johnny Bench behind the plate…and now up to bat, Cesar Cedano, Pete Rose, Davey Concepcion and one of my all time favorites, Joe Morgan. I would tune that dial so carefully, it was so easy to spin right by something good. Maybe I was already training for DX chasing!

I also listened to the Yankees, the Indians, the Cubs and White Sox, Tigers, and once in awhile I could pull in the Red Sox from Fenway Park. Radio was so incredible, some of the broadcast guys (Joe and Marty are all I can remember) made you smell the popcorn and peanuts, and you could almost hear the swing of the bat.

In 1975 my beloved Cincinnati Reds found themselves in the World Series against none other than the feared and loathed Boston Red Sox. I was 15. I loved the Reds….but I was so afraid of Luis Tiant coming to the mound and just sending those boys back to Ohio. Tiant was in his prime and one scary pitcher.

It’s funny to note, but in 1975, World Series pitcher Luis Tiant earned a paltry (by todays standards) $90K for playing baseball that year. This pitcher kept me up at night worrying about what he was going to do to my Reds. The series started, and seven games later the Reds celebrated the first of what was soon to be back to back World Series championships. Game six went 12 innings, I listened to the last two innings on the radio, I couldn’t sleep at all because the Sox pulled it out and set up game 7, also in Fenway. Man those were the days.

At Fenway they have a tradition, I asked several Bostonians about it but none of them knew the origin…in the 8th inning, the crowd sings the Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline”. It was SO cool sitting there in my 98 year old stadium seat, eating clam chowder, a Fenway Frank, and singing with the crowd. I haven’t been much of a baseball fan for the last two decades but this one night at the ballpark really got me in the baseball mood again…and it made me remember that very first radio I ever built.

Today is the Indiana QSO party and I was looking at the website and contemplating whether or not I will have any time today to participate. Previous to viewing the website I had talked to a couple of fellow hams this morning and they told me the QSO party started at 11AM local time…and another said Noon PM local time…so that is what drove me to the website. The website shows time in UTC, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time, or Zulu, that which is based on the Prime Meridian that runs right through the lovely town of Greenwich England. It also shows time based on the US Central Time Zone, which only covers a very few counties in Indiana. In Zulu we begin the Party at 16:00 hours, in CDT we begin at 11:00AM local CDT…but most of Indiana is in the Eastern Time Zone, and we have Daylight Savings Time (DST) in effect, so that would mean for the rest of Indiana the QSO Party starts at high noon. This brings a whole new complication to the question, “What time is it?”.

If I were the Supreme Ruler Being in Charge of Ham Radio, I would decree that any event in Hamdom that is guided by a time schedule, must be described in ZULU/GMT/UTC time notation only. It would then be up to the individual ham radio loyalist to KNOW what that means to him or her in their own local time convention.

Remember what good old Confucius says about time: “A man with two watches, never knows what time it is”

73

For almost the last month I have been operating a Packet station on 145.050 and having a little fun. I have it setup in the kitchen, sans computer, and every morning I drag my old IBM Thinkpad out of the shack and into the kitchen so I can connect to my aged and yellowed TNC. Much to my joy, I find a message waiting for me almost every morning. It seems there are about a half dozen of us “Packeteers” hanging out on this frequency and we take turns connecting and leaving messages almost every day. Packet is what got me started in amateur radio in 1988. It’s certainly not the internet, but it can be fun.

Anyway, this evening I will be dismantling KB9BVN-1 and redeploying the radio to my car, a 2006 Saturn with absolutely NO PLACE to install a radio. I figure with my driving in Indy now, and severe weather season on the horizon, I might make better use of a radio in the car than on Packet in the kitchen. I just happened to buy a new antenna and trunk mount at the Columbus hamfest a few weeks ago, so I ought to be all set. While I’m at it, I may just go crazy and install the trunk mount for my hamsticks. The Saturn will look so much more Hamsexy with two more antennas on it….now where do I get some of those pizza box sized SKYWARN stickers…

The PFR-3 ought to be some mobile fun when I am out and about, fear not dear reader, I do not attempt to CW QSO and drive at the same time…I always pull over or aks someone else to drive.

73

I have been toying with the idea of buying another “field ready” portable rig since about 5 minutes after selling my KX-1 last year. Is there a single radio I have sold, that didn’t cause immediate sellers remorse? So this winter I started looking at the options, and I basically narrowed it down to the Elecraft KX-1, the Hendricks PFR-3, and the BD4RG Chinese HB-A1. I have used all three radios and there is no contest. The KX-1 is by far the best “field ready” radio out there, and it’s priced to reflect that.

I tried an HB-1A only briefly, and I have to admit I had pretty much already made up my mind about not buying one before I used it. I think it felt clunky, was a little bulky, and frankly I just didn’t like it. If you read the reviews on eHam, everyone loves it. It is certainly priced to move. This radio is not a kit.

I have spent about three months looking at the PFR-3. I have been on the PFR-3 Yahoo group for a couple of months, and this radio is loved and hated by many hams. There have been lots of hams reporting missing parts from the kit, bad parts from the kit, orders taking too long to ship, replacement parts taking too long to get, and in many cases they just called Mouser and bought the missing parts. Like one guy said, for a $245 kit, you’d not expect any missing parts ($225 Plus $20 shipping). Several have said they won’t buy another kit from Hendricks Kits, while others just chalk it up to the amateur radio experience and move on.

Frankly I am extremely patient with club kits, as I expect a few problems coming from the non-professional all volunteer staffs kitting and bagging parts…I am not very forgiving when it comes to a commercial kit supplier having these kinds of problems on a regular basis though. Elecraft could teach classes on “How to Make and Keep Happy Customers”. They are THE model of customer care in our hobby, and you will pay extra for Elecraft stuff because it is THAT good.

So with that said, I didn’t have the dough scrounged for a new KX-1 and with my new job I don’t have much free time to build a KX-1 right now. So I opted for the PFR-3. I logged in, filled out my order, and when I saw Hendricks was charging $20 for shipping, and there was a potential two weeks lead time, I just bailed out. A quick look at the PFR-3 list on Yahoo showed me that Lou W0GT out in Missouri had a PFR-3 rig for sale, already built, and working just fine, for $210 shipped. SOLD. He even shipped it to me the next day via FedEx….I love me some instant gratification.

The PFR-3 I got from Lou is one of the originals with the silk screened labels for the knobs and switches. The new kits come with a sheet of stick on decals…Hendricks Kits ought to try and go back to the original silk screened cases.

The first night I hooked it up to 40m with 8 NiMH batteries installed, I was making one watt into my attic dipole. The first CQ I sent out netted a QSO with John WA5PFJ, down in Midland Texas…1100 miles away. He gave me a solid 599 and I was about to jump out of my chair. We conversed for about 15 minutes and then signed. I was pretty happy to say the least. Then about 30 minutes later, I heard YN4SU (100w and a dipole) down in Nicaragua calling. I answered him about a half dozen times and he finally came back to my one watt signal radiating off my attic embedded dipole and gave me a 559. I had him as a good solid 579-589. This was a short QSO but imagine my glee.

I did a big Happy Dance into the living room and my family just ignored me…as usual. I thank all those hams out there with huge antennas and great receivers, and the patience to work a poor QRP operator from time to time.

The PFR-3 design is from Steve Weber KD1JV, whom I hope to meet at FDIM this year, and the receiver is just fantastic. For the money spent I think I have a good radio that will be easy to haul to the park, the trail, or just deployed from the front seat of my car. Keep the power supply dialed in at no more than 12v and you’ll be in great shape.

73 de KB9BVN
Brian Murrey

Looks like the ARRL is reporting that once again, Amateur Radio operators save the day!

In my email box this morning I found a note from my friend Ivin W9ILF. We had attended the Columbus hamfest together, along with Don W9DEW, yesterday morning. Ivin is a QRPer that loves to operate from the outdoors, afterall, what QRPer doesn’t? So, after we got home from the hamfest, Ivin decided he would try his hand at building a ground mounted hamstick antenna system, just to see what he could hear.

As you can see, he took a hunk of aluminum bar stock, drilled a couple of holes, put the antenna stub in one side and a threaded metal spike in the other side, then added a mere four radials. I’m guessing this whole project took him less than 30 minutes.

He called CQ a few times and was answered by a 95 year old ham in Miami Florida. His RST from Miami was 569 to 579 during the 20m QSO. The Florida op was running 100w into a dipole that was hung about ten feet off the ground.

One of the things I really like about Ivin is he is like me when it comes to trying something new…I am too lazy to read about it, it’s just easier to try it. I think too many people try to document ways their ideas will fail, before they even do the work and bring the idea to physical reality. Ivin says this thing works as good as his Pac-12 did on 20m. He will be conducting more trials later this week with additional radials and different bands of hamstick type antennas. Looks to me like a great way to have a quickie lunchtime antenna session.

73

We got ours in the mail on Monday, I filled them out in about 15 minutes, and mailed them back. I have to admit that I did not feel very comfortable answering the 10 questions about each person living in my home. I don’t understand why it’s important that we all declare a race, and if we are Hispanic, what kind of Hispanic we are. The wise guy in me says it’s just because the federal government wants to keep us all segregated, there is more strength in unity, and apparently congress doesn’t want that. Some of my family members are mixed race, so how do we decide which group we lump them into? Maybe they just need two choices for the race question…Human, and Other.