First POTA

 I finally got all the pieces together and went out to do a Parks on the Air activation. The two closest parks are currently beneath the currents of the Missouri River, so I had to go to plan C. Boy am I glad I did! 

I had never been to the Glenwood Archeological Preserve until this morning, and it is a really pretty spot. Also, lots if great trees for tossing up a line and getting an antenna in the air.

Not counting setup and take-down, I operated for roughly an hour and 45 minutes and made 41 contacts. It was a lot of fun!

Here are some pictures:

I used my Xiegu G90 at 10 watts, TalentCell 12V 6Ah battery, CWMorse paddle, and a 66 foot end-fed sloper. Worked pretty good. Definitely going to do this again!

Field Day 2024

On the fourth full weekend in June each year there is a nationwide emergency communications exercise called "Field Day." Amateur radio operators and clubs practice deploying ad hoc communication networks "in the field" under emergency conditions like battery, solar, or generator power and use improvised antenna systems. The event lasts a full 24 hours and stations log their contacts to be submitted for points. 

 The Plattsmouth Amateur Radio Club set up in Murray at Young Park. Here are some pictures.

This Week at Amateur Radio Station N8VCL 6-12AUG22

 

5 QSO's

Not a huge week. But that doesn't mean I haven't been on the air. This week, for something new, I checked in or at least listened every day to the Nebraska Morning Phone Net in the mornings, and in the evenings, the Nebraska CW net, Kansas Net, or the Tenth Region net.

A "Net" is a network of ham radio ops who work together to "pass traffic" as part of the NTS or National Traffic System. "Traffic" could be any non-commercial communication from one person to another, anywhere in the country. It's like sending a telegram, but there's no charge and the message can't be for business purposes. Congratulations, Happy Birthday, Planning to arrive on the 3th etc etc.could all be "traffic" passed by the NTS.

A person can contact a Ham and say "hey, can you send my gran in San Diego a message?" The Ham takes the message, and puts it into the format used by NTS. That evening, he checks in to the local repeater net where folks from the surrounding area, say 25 mile radius, congregate on the air at a specified time. For example, a club here has a net every Monday on the club repeater. Folks from all around the Omaha area check in and there are announcements about club activities, maybe a trivia question, birthdays, anniversaries and other announcements, a time for everyone to make comments, etc. At this net, our Ham can check in and let the "Net Control Station" know that he has message traffic. The "Net Control Station," is the guy "in charge." He asks everyone "Can someone take this message for  California?" Some nets have designated liaison stations that always represent them at the next level. In our local example, another ham on the net hears and responds that he is going to check in to the state-wide traffic net later, so he can take the message. Net Control tells him to meet the other ham on a different frequency where they can pass the message.

Our man then checks in to the state-wide net and the scene is repeated, this time to the regional net, and once more to the area net. The Area Net folks then make trans-continental connections. Our message would go from an Omaha net to Nebraska, to "Tenth Region" which is NE, IA, KS, MN, MO, SD, ND, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, then to the Central Area, which covers the middle of the continent. From Central Area, a Trans-Continental Corps operator contacts his regular liaison in the Western Area, and the message follows a similar path from Area to Region 7, to California section, to a local San Diego net and a helpful Ham in San Diego will deliver the message to the destination by phone or in person.

Crazy! That's gotta take a long time!  Nah. Most messages are delivered within 24 hours.

To ensure efficiency, the nets run in cycles throughout the day, and from east to west, they follow each other on the hour across the country. For example, in the 4th daily cycle, there are region nets in the Eastern area at 9:30PM ET, then here in Central at 9:30 CT, etc. so a message from NE to CA could be delivered to the final destination in just a few hours.

So I have been checking in to the Region 10 late net daily. I've sent messages to Hawaii, Florida, and Ohio, and I've received and delivered a few in the Omaha area.

While I have checked in to nets before, this is the first time I've passed traffic. It has been fun, kind of exciting.

I know what you're thinking. One or both of the following:

1. What in the world? I can pick up my cell phone and text a person on the other side of the planet nearly instantaneously. Why would I ever use such a slow and antiquated method??
2. I'm remembering the proverbial game of "Telephone" where the message is terribly mauled by the time it gets to the destination. This sounds like the same thing.

To #1 I respond "You wouldn't. Unless..."  Yes, it's slower than texting or emailing, or even phone calls. The NTS was designed at a time when not every house had a phone, long distance calls and telegrams were expensive, and there was no other way besides mail that could take a week or more. We've advanced beyond that, but could those conditions ever return? Have you heard of the Texas ice storm blackout? Great Northeast Blackout? Hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, natural and man-made disasters could all pose a threat to the infrastructure we rely on today. When those situations arise, it's nice to have a group of people trained and equipped to get messages into and out of stricken areas where services are down. The guys who use home-made radios with battery packs charged by the sun will be worth a million smart phones.

To #2, NTS messages are typed/written in a specific format pictured above. There are built in error checking aspects to the messages. Also, when the messages are transmitted by morse code, there's no hearing an "S" and thinking it was an "F" etc. It's robust and reliable.

So that's how I spent most of my radio time this week. I don't log net participation because I don't think it counts that way. There is a log of my participation, and on my computer I have a log of the messages that have come through my station.

It's a lot of fun. There's camaraderie and skill-building in the process, and there is a certain romance to the whole thing. It is technologically anachronistic, but...so am I.

Thanks for reading! If we had a QSO this week, thank you!
If we didn't, I hope we do soon.
73!

 

 "This week [...]" is a summary of Radio-related activity from Saturday through Friday.

This Week at Amateur Radio Station N8VCL 30Jul - 5Aug22

 12 QSO's, 9 CW, 3 FT8.
Longest: EA1DR in Spain, 4454 Miles.

This picture sums up the last couple weeks.

I got an alert on my phone just as I turned on the radio. "Transequitorial coronal hole." What's that? It's like a giant belch, spewing forth a blast of solar winds that, as they crash into the magnetosphere, bend the earth's magnetic field, causing mild to moderate geomagnetic storms which tend to rain on the radio wave propagation parade. Great for auroras tho...

It takes some time for solar winds to smash into the earth. More than the 8 minutes it takes light to get here. Solar wind generally travels at around 200 miles per second, so about three days to make the trip from the sun. 

But the sunspots have been way down, and other conditions make it seem as if I have no antenna connected.

And ...it's just creepy that it looks like there's a face looking out! He's saying "I'ma eat yo radio waves!"

Some other things: I disassembled the Loop. Yeah. Bummer.  I was surprised to see that it performed more poorly than my end-fed wire, both according to my S-Meter on receive and on other folk's meter when I was transmitting. All is not lost. It's still tossed up over that super-high branch. I'm thinking of trying to make it just a really long random end-fed, or some kind of folded dipole. We'll see.

I also got a voltage regulator to power my Cricket 40 from the 13.7 volt power supply. It lets me turn it down to 9V flat, so I can sit there and pound out CQ CQ CQ for 2 hours and not have to buy 100 9-volt batteries to keep the power on.

Well hopefully the sun will start cooperating more...otherwise I'm going to look at home-brewing an amplifier! ha!

Thanks for reading! If we had a QSO this week, thank you!
If we didn't, I hope we do soon.
73!

 

 "This week [...]" is a summary of Radio-related activity from Saturday through Friday.

This Week at Amateur Radio Station N8VCL 23-29JUL22

 It's been another quiet week on the bands and in the shack here. 8 contacts, USA and Canada, VA7CKD is the long-distance QSO this week at 1415.5 miles.

One of these, KB0BEE, was the first QSO with my Cricket 40 QRP transceiver that I built a few weeks back. That was a blast.

The week started off with some fun on Saturday afternoon, when I intercepted and decoded a secret message. I learned a lot of neat stuff in doing so. Subsequently my friend Mark, K5CYA, pointed me to this video about how the Enigma machine works:

That led me down a rabbit hole to this video about how they cracked it:

Pretty neat stuff. I was impressed. But then...someone had to make one out of a pringles can and ...well... I couldn't decide if that lessened the esteem of the Enigma, or was just really cool and imaginative use of a Pringles can.  I'm impressed with that too!!  lol

Anyway, I got a reply to my decryption saying it was 100% correct and they'd send me a certificate. I'll post a picture when it comes in.

Speaking of "certificates," there is an ooooold tradition among radio operators and listeners of exchanging "QSL Cards." "QSL" is a morse-code shorthand for "I confirm receipt of your transmission," comparable to "roger" or "copy-that" on voice comms. So a QSL card is a report to a transmitting station saying "I'm officially confirming that I heard you or we had a conversation" and it lists the details like date, time, frequency, mode, etc and maybe a personal note. Shortwave listeners sent them to radio stations and the stations would often respond with a nice color card or photograph or something. Hams picked up this tradition and keep it alive today. I received a few on Friday:

 This is one of my favorite things about the hobby. I know that seems funny, that one of the best things about a hobby involving radio communication would be a regular old post card in the mail, but come on, who doesn't love to get mail? And it's always neat to see the designs and photos people choose to use for their cards. I have a photo album where I put the ones I receive. It just adds another dimension to the hobby and increases the amount of exposure to decent folks. ;-)

I'd show you my card, but...I'm not sure if I have you in my log book... Wouldn't want to spoil it. :-D

Been concentrating on my CW. All the contacts this week were CW except one RTTY. I enrolled in an online class that starts in September. My goal is to get up to 25 words per minute or more. Right now I'm at 12-15, but I really want to get better and faster. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes.

Tomorrow, Sunday, is the "Flight of the Bumble Bees," a QRP (low power) operating event where Bees go out to filed-operating stations and operate at 5 watts or less. The objective being to "capture" as many bees as you can. From noon-4:00 I'll be looking for the buzz-buzz-buzzing. 

Thanks for reading! If we had a QSO this week, thank you!
If we didn't, I hope we do soon.
73!

 

 "This week [...]" is a summary of Radio-related activity from Saturday through Friday.

Intercepted and Decoded a Secret Message!

 The Maritime Radio Historical Society sent a message encrypted via Germany's infamous Enigma cryptography machine from coast station KPH in Point Reyes, CA (which happens to be only 36 miles from where I used to live in Vallejo when I was in Navy A and C school).

The message was sent in 5-letter groups via Morse code and afterward using Radioteletype. Stations that received the message were then faced with the challenge of decoding it.

This is what it sounded like to receive the Morse code:

 

SPOILERS AHEAD: If you continue to read, you will see the encoded message and my steps to decode it and the final clear-text message.

Here's a screenshot of my Radioteletype reception:

This is, by the way, exactly as it was sent via Morse code.

"CQ" means "Calling all stations." "DE" means "From." "KPH" is the station callsign on Pt. Reyes. The actual message starts with "HQTRS FR FOCH" and that first line is understood as "To Headquarters from Foch sent at 1914 Zulu time today; 100 characters in the coded message; message keys are BRV and LTV;". The rest are the encoded message in 5-letter groups.

In order to decode the message you had to have the Codebook and the message keys. Here is a page from a German codebook:

Each day has its own line of info needed to decode the messages sent on that day, and the codebook is only good for one month. The columns to the right of the date column are Roller Position, Ring Position, Plug Connections, and ID Groups. Think of the Enigma machine as a typewriter with interchangeable letter cartridges. Roller Position is the roller number to be used. You would take the three rollers for the day and put them in the machine. Ring position is where the rollers would be placed. Ring Position 1 is "A", 2 is "B" etc. The Enigma also had a panel of jumper connections kind of like an "old-timey" switchboard, so for the day's messages, you would plug in the jumpers between the specified letters. ID Groups are codes that confirm you're using the right row of decoding settings. If you look at the message in the screenshot, the first code group starts with VCX. If you look at the line for the date of the 23rd, you see at the end of the ID groups is VCX.

So for today's messages, at the start of each message, the machine is configured thus:
Roller Position (Roller #) V II III
Ring Position 11(K) 21(U) 08(H)
Plug Connections EY DT KF MO XP HN WG ZL IV JA
ID Groups lsd nuo vcr vcx

All this info is kind of like the "Private Key" for the message (but not completely analogous). Only the Sender and Receiver know this info. There is also an analogue to "Public Key" of modern encryption, and that is the Message Key mentioned previously. The Message key is randomly picked by the operator sending the message. He randomly picks six letters. It's a convoluted process, but the first three are clear text to decrypt the second three, and this is the final setting to inter into the Enigma machine.

 Here's a graphical representation of an Enigma machine online. The Rollers/Rings are internal, so they are not shown, but clicking near the top lets you set the initial values. The three dials at the top are where you set the message key. The dots at the bottom are the plug connections.

Once the machine is set up with the configuration for the day and the message key, the message is typed and the machine outputs the clear text (or the encrypted) message.

 You'll notice that the encrypted message I typed into the machine does not start with the first code-group, but rather the second. This is because of the ID Group I mentioned above. The three letters of the ID group, VCX, have two more random letters added on to them in order to make it a group of 5, like all the rest, but if you start there, your message will be gibberish because that first group is for confirmation purposes and doesn't contain actual message data.

So why would including it mess up your message? Because every time a key is pressed on the keyboard of the Enigma machine, the encoding scheme advances by 1. For example if the machine was configured so that A=E and you press any letter on the keyboard, A now equals a different letter, and it changes with every stroke. So if you type in the first code group, the real message would be off by 5 steps, resulting in total gobble-de-gook. The letters above the keyboard light to show what the ciphered letter is for that key press. A quick test of repeatedly pressing "A" on the keyboard shows that the progression of the cipher is NOT linear, IE, "A" does not equal E,F,G,H, etc. with each key press. Rather, it varies widely.

So the decrypted message sent today is as follows:
MY RIGHT IS HARD PRESSED X MY CENTER IS YIELDING X IMPOSSIBLE TO MANEUVER X SITUATION EXCELLENT X I AM ATTACKING X

This is a quote from French General Ferdinand Foch (pr "Fosh"), Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War.

You notice I left off the last "WI" after the final "X". These two letters are there to make the final group of letters total 5, like all the rest of the code groups. (X is like a period or "STOP" in a telegram message.)

So that was a lot of fun, and a challenge, to boot! Radio signals fading and atmospheric noise make it a challenge to copy the message. This is why "numbers stations" repeat the same message over and over and over. We only got two shots today to copy it. Then there's the whole "Enigma for Dummies" crash course. I learned something and had a good time doing it. I hope you enjoyed reading about it!

73 de N8VCL

 

This Week at Amateur Radio Station N8VCL 16-22JUL22

6 contacts this week, all in CONUS. But the big news is my Daughter's wedding last Sunday!! As you can imagine, it's been busy around here, especially both days of the weekend. Monday was a recuperation day, and with the solar and geomagnetic activity this week, it just hasn't been a big radio week.

So I worked a couple Straight Key Century Club members. SKCC is a club dedicated to communication via Morse code using mechanical keys, ie typical straight keys or "bugs." Just a lot of folks (26,000+!!) who like CW and sending with mechanical means instead of electronic keyers or computers. It's a  great group that has a lot of members who go out of their way to help newcomers.

I also worked a couple "Parks on the Air." This is a program where hams go to parks and operate portable equipment. They're called "Activators" and the rest of us who try to locate them and make contact are called "Hunters." 

Like a lot of other operating activities, SKCC and POTA offer "awards" for certain accomplishments; Certificates for working certain numbers of stations, etc. It's a hobby. It's for fun. Some folks may lose sight of that, which is too bad. Lots of opinions about what's "real radio" and so on, but if I want to argue and be grumpy about something, I can do that at work. HA! 

I also checked in to a couple of nets and hung out on some round-table chats. Very casual week. 

Thanks for reading! If we QSO'd, thanks! If we didn't, I hope we do soon.
73!

 

 "This week [...]" is a summary of Radio-related activity from Saturday through Friday.