pa0r

On special request I present a screen shot of our faithful visitor on 10.148 MHz, we call it the pregnant sea cow because of the characteristic sound. This screen shot was taken this morning while getting the mail from SM0RWO. The whitest bits are S7, and this time pskmail won the battle...
The signal is a distortion product from an active packet forwarding station about 1200 Hz up. The FT897 RX has AGC off, and DSP on the most narrow position (1000 Hz for both Low pass and high pass).
This sick signal has been here for months now, and I think the operator (?) of this station is deaf, dumb and blind.

I will donate a free beer at the next hamradio exhitbition in Friedrichshafen for the person who is the first to tell me what station I am talking about!! Maybe we can persuade him to stop this pollution (if he knows what that is).

The packet center frequency is around 10.149 MHz, and you cannot miss him.... he has been 3 kHz wide since I started monitoring this frequency!!

I came across a splendid idea the other day. One contest group has now installed a receiving antenna in a remote location. The connection to the station (K2 of course) is not via a coax cable, but via a broadband internet connection. Antenna direction switching and RX frequency setting can be done via the internet link (Tlf has been doing it for years), and a web cam makes sure you know immediately if the cows damage the antenna. The argumentation was: "we have too much noise at our contest location".

This set my mind off, and when that is the case there is no stopping...

I have seen a lot of nice, noise free locations on our various trips, one of my favourites being in the middle of the "Waddensea". You can hear the grass growing on Mars in that location (electro-magnetically spoken).

What if I hired one of those fancy satellite internet installations during a major contest, and auctioned the spot on EBAY!! Think about it. You are somewhere in California and you have tried to win the CQWW-SSB for the last 10 years but these darned guys in Aruba, HC8 or CT3 always win the pot....

This is your chance!!! You rent my antenna installation for the duration of the contest and you are the only one who can hear those thousands of low power and qrpp basterds in Europe who do not even bother to put up a decent antenna for the contest!! You can not imagine the pile up...

Now of course there is this rule that your antenna must be no further away from your main location than 500 meters, unless you own the property?

The solution is very simple. On the 1st of April I will offer you the opportunity to become co-owner of a small piece of land in the middle of Europe. I will auction ownership certificates on Ebay, and the bidding will start at $1000 per station per contest.

I will undertake to put an antenna on the piece of land, and facilitate a 1 MB/sec TCP socket to connect your station to. Stations in California will get 10% rebate as they are in a disadvantage anyway.

Of course we could strike a deal beforehand... If you don't want your competitor to grab this fantastic offer you can email me via pskmail...

Now how could I make this work for a M/M station? Could I organize an antenna for the Europeans which is located in Japan? Let's see. I would need to build 6 K2's, the satellite connection would cost Euro 90 for a month, .... And what about auctioning the roof of the camper including the fishing rod and the wire, that would make... There is a lot of mileage in this idea.

The financial aspects of my next vacation are settled!!!

This morning I had only one email waiting on pskmail, a 7k masterpiece from the crew of PI4TUE who were preparing for the PACC contest this weekend. The server at SM0RWO was a stable S7, as always in the late morning hours (we don't get out of bed very early here). So this was to be a piece of cake again.

And indeed, the first bit came in without problems and I enjoyed watching the block size of pskmail going up to 64 characters per block. If you are used to PSK31 or RTTY, that is quite fast, and the protocol overhead is only 6% in this case. But this was sunday morning, and it could not be true. There was an RTTY contest going on HF, and all non-contesters would be on 30 meters?

You bet.... The first intermezzo was a PSK63 signal, S9+20, that came smack on frequency and started to send

"rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" on top of the server. Pskmail got a hicup, but went on as if the rx had been dead during the intervention. 60 seconds later, probably the same station (did not send a call, so must be an unlis...) came back, this time with a lot more creativity: äskdjhnjklssjhhssssrrrrrrrrrrrrsjk,,fffmmklajdshjiwioinbnamjdbnj".

Interesting. The burper was actually communicating!!!

Pskmail went on, now with a block size of 16 chars/block, which makes the text slightly worse to read for an outsider.

Again a few minutes later: '"QRZ QRZ QRZ? What means 2615?""

As the email got really stuck now, and was not ready, I could not answer this interesting question. Meanwhile the number of repeats had triggered PSKmail to reduce the block size further to 8 characters/block, but it was still pushing the text through. The jammer gave up.

5 minutes later, a PSK31 signal came on our channel, exactly zero beat with our frequency, and started calling CQ I guess,at least I cannot imagine that he was in qso, as the SM0RWO server was still pushing text with an S7 signal.

PSkmail could get 1 block through out of 8 during the times the caller was silent.He gave up after another 5 minutes.

After this we only got disturbed by the "pregnant sea cow" living 1.5 kHz higher, supposedly passing packet radio trraffic. This guy (or girl for that matter) is so overmodulated that his signal is 3 kHz wide, and knocks our PSK63 signal out when he vomits on our channel. This normally knocks out only 1  block out of a sequence of 8, but the speed is going down dramatically because of the automatic block length adjustment.

I have made some pictures during this session (yes, this was one 40-minute session!)

This was not all. During the rest of the qso (1 email !) I was jammed by 2 SSB stations (this was 30 meters!!) who started a qso right on top of us, (PSKmail worked during the listening period of the loudest station), and 4 pactor stations, who just switched their burpers on without listening. Some of them started off-frequency, but completely blanketed the signal as soon as they switched to higher bandwidth. At one time I had an SSB qso with a pactor signal on top on our channel!!

But in 40 minutes time I managed to get the email through!!!

What I have learned during this interesting qso?

• Don't think any of the digital operators will listen on frequency before transmitting.
• Don't think an SSB station will give a damn if he ruins your digital qso
• Don't think any pactor 2/3 operator has a clue what he is doing
• Don't think he cares a damn about you losing your qso, he doesn't know who you are anyway
• When you use a different mode from the other guy you are an ALIEN, which must be shown he is not welcome here.
• Don't think ham spirit still exists in the digital sub bands

And this was 30 meters.... outside the WARC bands the RTTY contest was spreading anarchy.

Monday morning. We are in Benicasim, Spain, and it is raining. The temperature is still a nice 10 degrees plus, but it feels a lot colder than yesterday when we had sunshine.

We have been lucky with the weather until now on this trip. On saturday, the main roads in the south of France were closed because there was 20 cm of snow on the autoroute. To prevent such panic situations we had taken the western route through France to get here. Ultimate target for the journey is the Costa del Sol. But it is raining there as well, so we are not in a hurry to get there.

We started on the 18th, and took the route via Antwerp and Brussels. That way we circumvented the very bad roads through the walloon part of Belgium, and the route is flat so we save a lot of fuel. First stop was Soissons, just above Paris. The camp site was almost deserted and very quiet. We will come back there.It was bitter cold in Soissons, somewhere near the freezing point. But at least the sun was shining all day.

On thursday the 19th we made it through Paris to Pons, which is near Saintes, not far from the Atlantic coast. We know a camp site there which is run by a dutch couple. It had been raining quite a lot during the previous week so we got stuck in the mud and a helpful french guy with a pick-up truck proudly pulled us out and we parked the camper on the road.

Friday we took the 'route de 2 mers' to Sigean, just north of Perpignan. The camp site is well known amongst travellers to Spain. It is situated at the entrance of the 'Reserve Africaine', an animal park with thousands of african animals.

We visitited the park last year. This time we took a walk and had a glance at the zebras and oistriches from the ouside.

Sigean was sunny, and we stayed there for 3 days. This gave me the opportunity to put up the short wave antenna and get the email from the pskmail server in Stockholm. The server was workable all day from 9:00 untill 17:00 UTC.

On monday the 23rd we had a sunny drive to Sitges, just south of Barcelona. Sitges has a nice microclimate, with lots of sunny days. 3 of which we spent there. We could sit outside in the sun whilst the temperatures at home were going down, down.. Also in Sitges there was no problem at all reaching Per, SM0RWO's server to handle the email. The server was S7 with qsb to S4, sometimes the signal would disappear for a short time. But PSkmail handles all this without problems.

I tried the server of PA0N on 20, 40 and 80 meters, but it turned out there are constant hardware problems, and they are looking for new hardware for the server. It looks like the OMNI VI has been repaired. It had an intermittent contact in the PLL, probably a bad soldering joint. The TRX has been working for quite some time now and we keep the fingers crossed.

Thursday we drove down to Benicasim, our present location. Weather has been nice until today. Yesterday we had a walk down the phantastic beach, and enjoyed the sun. I also had some first test qso's with the client-to-client mode of the pskmail client with Paul, PA0N. We tried 40 and 30 meters, but ended up on 20. The test was succesfull. I have to tweak the timing a bit. Because of theintelligence built into the polling system the clients end up polling in sync, so everybody is transmitting at the same time. I tried to solve the problem but, I set poll time of one client to 10 + 5, and the other to 10 * 1.5 seconds which did not help obviously. I really should take more time for these things....

This morning I managed to get the list of email headers from SM0RWO, but that was it. I guess the power supply of the server needs a reset because the server had beaconed to the aprs-is ok. First time I used the wifi to get my email...

Yes, this modern camp site has Wifi, and I can use the internet from the camper. But you have to buy a card for 10 Euros per 120 minutes. At least I can now download the february issue of Scientific American from here.

Today it is raining. I think I will read a book.

We are now testing the new features of PSKmail; APRS compatibility and rig control.

PSKmail is now able to send and receive short messages via the APRS backbone, rendering a world-wide messaging service. It even has a built-in answering machine, which lets you read your message history in connected mode, even if you have not been 'on-line' for a considerable time. I can now exchange messages with stations active in the 2 meters band in California, and I do it via Per's PSKmail server in Stockholm on 30 meters.

I also implemented a frequency scheduler. The hamlib library does all the work, I only have to make up a frequency schedule and the server will follow. Provided of course that the rig is remote controllable.

UBUNTU-5.10 now supports my USB/RS232 converter (Sitecom) out of the box, and I have tested the stuff with the ORION, which worked fine.

We are planning to set up a server in a rural area here, which will switch between 30 and 80 meters depending on time of the day. I will try to use my old OMNI VI plus which has a 250 Hz filter. The only thing is the multband antenna. Hopefully we get it installed before we leave for the GREAT TRIP in a few weeks.