Carsten, OZ9AAR added many new features. The best in this release is:

When a station with "/" in the callsign (/P, /R etc) is called, UHM will retry a number of times to get "DX heard me" status (if the DX is using UHM). This helps when the DX/Rover has bad internet connection. Terminal will retry 4 times with 5 seconds delay to get an answer. This means that it can take more than 20 seconds before you get a UHM confirmation on a "/P" etc station ! If the DX has good internet, the confirmation will happen instantly (after the delay configured in "UHM settings"), if internet is not optimal, it will allow 20 seconds delays from the DX to the UHM server.

The latest versions can be downloaded on his Website.

With the help of Derek, V51DM in Namibia I reached 100 DXCC on Greencube IO-117 only. I have no homestation, so this was either done fully battery powered from portable or with my 10 ele Alaskan Arrow antenna handheld. I did my first QSO on Greencube in Feb 2023, so it took roughly 15 months to reach this milestone. GreenCube, also known as Italy OSCAR 117, or IO-117 for short, is an Italian technology testing and amateur radio satellite in 3U-CubeSat format. The project is coordinated by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and took advantage of a launch opportunity offered by ESA. At the end of the mission, the satellite was recently taken over by AMSAT Italia.

Der Besucherrekord des vergangenen Jahres ist geknackt: Rund 2700 Besucher des 6. FUNK.TAGs erlebten ein buntes Programm voller Highlights. Der Saxophonist Stefan Metz bewies zum Auftakt sein musikalisches Können und dann galt es für das aus der ganzen Republik und dem benachbarten Ausland angereiste Publikum, eine Entscheidung zu fällen…

Zuerst zum Flohmarkt, um die besten Schnäppchen zu ergattern? Oder zu den Händlern, um die neuste Technik zu entdecken? Dann gab es ja noch die zahlreichen ideellen Aussteller und Verbände, ein abwechslungsreiches Vortragsprogramm, den Dialog mit dem Vorstand und und und Viel zu erleben gab es auch für die jüngeren Besucher: Die Lötecke war ebenso gut besucht wie das Kinderschminken, und am Eisstand mussten sich die Jüngsten mit der Erkenntnis abfinden, dass auch Erwachsene sich für ein gutes Eis in einer Schlange anstellen… Allen Neuerungen zum Trotz unterschied sich der 6. FUNK.TAG in einem nicht von seinen Vorgängern: Die Stimmung war bestens – Amateurfunk verbindet eben. Dazu passte auch die Übergabe eines Geschenkes des ukrainischen Funkamateurs Konstantin Chernokrov, UR2AM, an den DARC-Vorstand. Der im Jahr 2022 aus der Ukraine nach Nordhessen geflüchtete Konstantin drückte damit seine Freude über die Unterstützung durch die deutschen Funkamateure aus. Die Mitarbeiter der DARC-Geschäftsstelle und die vielen ehrenamtlichen Helfer, die den FUNK.TAG so wunderbar vorbereitet haben, schauen nun nach vorne auf das nächste Großereignis: HAM RADIO vom 28.-30. Juni in Friedrichshafen.

Quelle: DARC

Nicht mehr lange, dann ist wieder Ham Radio in Friedrichshafen. Dieses Jahr zum 47. Mal. Wie die letzte 7 Jahre, bin ich auch dieses Jahr wieder dabei. Praktischerwiese verbinde ich die An - und Abreise immer mit einigen SOTA-Aktivierungen oder Großfeldaktivierungen für LEO und MEO Satelliten. So bin ich dieses Jahr auf dem Hinweg aus Liechtenstein HB0 aktiv auf den Satelliten.

Die Ham Radio ist Europas bedeutendste Amateurfunkmesse und zeichnet sich durch die Kombination aus qualitativ hochwertigem Produktangebot und einem breit gefächerten Rahmenprogramm aus, das wir mit dem DARC als kompetenten Partner zusammenstellen. Es geht immer darum, aktuelle Themen aufzugreifen und gleichzeitig spannende Akzente zu setzen.

Die Ham Radio findet dieses Jahr von Freitag, 28. bis Sonntag, 30. Juni 2024, in Friedrichshafen am Bodensee statt. Die Tageskarte kostet 13 Euro. Die Drei-Tageskarte ist für 30 Euro erhältlich. Ermäßigte Tickets sind erhältlich für Schüler, Auszubildende, Studenten, Rentner, Gruppen ab 20Pers. und für Menschen mit Behinderung.

Weitere Informationen gibt es unter www.hamradio-friedrichshafen.de.

People often ask me on Twitter how I mounted my 15 ele Diamond A-430S15 yagi antenna on my photo tripod. Well, it was quite simple. I have a normal photo tripod for photo cameras.

I already had one at home anyway. So I measured the boom of the 15 ele Diamond A-430S15 and sent the measurements (boom diameter 22mm) to Dragan, 4O4A. He then made me a drawing that I could easily print with my own 3D printer. Of course, this part does not fit universally. It depends on the mounting plate.

I'm very happy that I was finally able to finish my first Earth-Moon-Earth 🌍-🌕-🌍 (#EME) QSO last week. It only worked out because Bernd, DL7APV did all the work with his amazing 128 (!) x 11 ele 70cm Yagis. He has a gain of incredible 33.7dB over a dipole:

Nicht mehr lange, dann ist wieder Ham Radio in Friedrichshafen. Dieses Jahr zum 46. Mal. Wie die letzte 6 Jahre, bin ich auch dieses Jahr wieder dabei. Praktischerwiese verbinde ich die An - und Abreise immer mit einigen SOTA-Aktivierungen.

Die Ham Radio ist Europas bedeutendste Amateurfunkmesse und zeichnet sich durch die Kombination aus qualitativ hochwertigem Produktangebot und einem breit gefächerten Rahmenprogramm aus, das wir mit dem DARC als kompetenten Partner zusammenstellen. Es geht immer darum, aktuelle Themen aufzugreifen und gleichzeitig spannende Akzente zu setzen.

Die Ham Radio findet dieses Jahr von Freitag, 23. bis Sonntag, 25. Juni 2023, in Friedrichshafen am Bodensee statt. Die Tageskarte kostet 13 Euro. Die Drei-Tageskarte ist für 30 Euro erhältlich.

Weitere Informationen gibt es unter www.hamradio-friedrichshafen.de.

I recently bought an Icom IC-910H. It was in extremely good condition and came with a dealer warranty. I just had to buy it. For SSB/Digi on SAT I only had my FT-817 and FT-818 and I wanted something with better internal filters and more power. Also, FT-817 and FT-818 can't do doppler correction while transmitting. During TX the 817/818's CAT is not responsive so I wanted something else.

In this post I explain what you need to do with an IC-910 for FT4 via SAT.

Even though I have been using cloudlog to log my SAT QSOs for a long time, I would like to explain here how to log a QSO in Log4OM so that it also works as a SAT QSO in LOTW, eQSL and paper QSL (label).

If we entered a callsign we click to "My".

Then we chose Satellite in the drop-down menu unter "Propagation". We also need to check the SATELLITE MODE box.

Now we fill out these fields and we see "RS-44" on left and can chose VU.

Without the correct SAT Name and Propagation mode set to Satellite it is not possible to get a LOTW cfm. All those values need to be correct.

How to add other SATs?

In the current version 2.23.0.0 the most popular LEO SAT RS-44 is missing, but this is not a problem. Log4OM simply uses a CSV file as database. We can edit this file to fit the LOTW name list. This step is important. If you add an own name, LOTW will never get a match and the QSO will still be unfonfirmed. All missing and new SATs can be added.

The file "satellites.csv" can be found under C:\Users\[YOURNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Log4OM2:

I just added this line:

Just comment if you have any questions regarding Log4OM and Satellite QSOs.

{loadposition position-1}

NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren brought joy to many radio amateurs in recent weeks when he contacted them directly from the space station via the ISS repeater, giving some a QSO with NA1SS. In the past three to four years, there were mostly no connections with the crews outside of school contacts. On Friday 22 July, NA1SS was heard over Europe in the evening, allowing European radio amateurs to make a QSO. The following day, Joshua, DL3JOP, was able to make a QSO with NA1SS at 18:08 UTC. Motivated by this, John, DK9JC, also set off with his portable equipment to hear his call confirmed by Kjell on the next overflight 1.5 h later (21:45 h local). Anyone who also wants to try their luck should have a 2 m and 70 cm directional antenna and a full duplex transceiver system. The repeater's frequencies and CTCSS can be found on the ARISS website.

Nicht mehr lange, dann ist wieder Ham Radio in Friedrichshafen. Dieses Jahr zum 45. Mal. Wie die letzte 5 Jahre, bin ich auch dieses Jahr wieder dabei. Praktischerwiese verbinde ich die An - und Abreise immer mit einigen SOTA-Aktivierungen.

Die Ham Radio ist Europas bedeutendste Amateurfunkmesse und zeichnet sich durch die Kombination aus qualitativ hochwertigem Produktangebot und einem breit gefächerten Rahmenprogramm aus, das wir mit dem DARC als kompetenten Partner zusammenstellen. Es geht immer darum, aktuelle Themen aufzugreifen und gleichzeitig spannende Akzente zu setzen.

Die Ham Radio findet dieses Jahr von Freitag, 24. bis Sonntag, 26. Juni 2022, in Friedrichshafen am Bodensee statt. Die Tageskarte kostet 13 Euro. Die Drei-Tageskarte ist für 30 Euro erhältlich.

Weitere Informationen gibt es unter www.hamradio-friedrichshafen.de.

I recently bought an FT-818 to accompany my FT-817 to work portably on linear satellites. In this article I will show you how to set up Gpredict properly.

At home I use Gpredict for doppler correction under Windows. Gpredict is free software, but requires Hamlib/rigctl(d) for cat control. Hamlib is not self-explanatory because it is not a ready-made software. You have to create the individual parameters yourself. The necessary information can be found in Hamlib's Gitlab.

So you have to create a command for each transceiver. Since I use 2 transceivers for full-duplex, I have to create 2 commands.

The most important thing is to find out the ID of your transceiver. The list can be found here: https://github.com/Hamlib/Hamlib/wiki/Supported-Radios

For me it is ID 1020 for Yaesu FT-817 and 1041 for Yaesu FT-818.

FT-817 and FT-818 have slight differences in the CAT commands. Therefore there are 2 profiles. (This is also the reason why the current version of SatPC32 currently does not work with the FT-818. Only the FT-817 is supported there.)

Wow. Now I was also affected by it: My power amplifiers from the FT-817 blew up. After several hundred SOTA and /p activations it happened at home while I was listening to SSB satellites. Especially with the old non-ND versions (like mine) the power amplifier starts to oscillate by itself and destroys itself by self-oscillation then. The older MITSUBISHI RF POWER MOS FET 2SK2975 were not that good. I had already read a lot about this on the internet. The FT-817 suddenly became very hot and had a permanent current consumption of 2 amps. It was clear then that the FETs were short-circuited.

After I kept seeing new SSTV images sent from the ISS on Twitter, I thought I'd give it a try too. Since I've been doing a lot of radio via FM amateur radio satellites lately anyway, I have a small 4 element LogPer directional antenna at the window anyway.

The free open source Android software "Robot36" was often recommended as software. I was very surprised when it gave a very clear picture even without a cable between my handheld radio and my mobile phone. In Robot36, however, you should select the mode manually and not leave it to chance whether "auto" works. Currently PD120 was used, which is what ARISS announced (see original message below).

I was able to achieve very good results with my Yaesu FT2 and FT4. With every pass I could decode at least 1 complete picture. The antenna was always an Anjo 4 ele logper held out of the window on a 2m wooden broomstick and the ISS was tracked via the Android app "ISS Detector".

{jcomments on}Recently, I saw a newcomer's post on Twitter regarding his first WSJT-X session. I noticed right away that he only decoded a handful of stations, but those with supposedly extremely good reports. This is what happens when you set your receive bandwidth extremely low. This means that you only receive signals that lie within this range. If we remember again our education, we find out that a normal report refers to a bandwidth of 2.5kHz. In this articel I explain the fundamentals about that.

Some time ago I already built some "loose" interfaces for my FT-817. I used these later on my FT-891. The CAT, respectively the FTDI USB to serial converter I needed at the FT-8x7, I don't need at the FT-891 anymore, because it already has CAT via USB integrated. The FT-891 simply uses a Silicon Labs CP2105-F01 USB/Serial UART converter internally. As with many other TRXs, this is not galvanically isolated, but the engineers thought of something. Apparently it works well anyway. I have had no problems at least in the last 2 years. In this article I show you my solution for this problem.

Some quick shots from this week while we did some SOTA in the in the northern Black Forest region. We started on Hohloh DM/BW-054 984m. The next day we went to Hornisgrinde DM/BW-019 1163m. After those 2 I had 994 SOTA Points, only 6 points short of the so hard wanted iceblock trophy.  We then drove one hour further south to the Brandenkopf 945m DM/BW-067. I was not prepared for this (battery-wise) and we hoped that somehow 4 QSOs would come into the log. It became then nevertheless even 10 QSO, until the device switched off from the low voltage. Now I am SOTA “Mountain Goat”. After 177 SOTA activations in 7 countries in 5.5 years. I already ordered the award and I applied for the trophy.

Last year in December I wanted to activate 2 mountains in the Vosges. These two are not too far from my home town. Both could be done from the same parking lot. That day it was below 0 degrees °C and we had freezing rain on the Petit Donon. But in return we got 3 points winter bonus each in addition to the 2 times 10 points. 26 points with only one parking stop is not too bad. I was already on the big Donon at the end of 2017, actually you have to go there more often. Simply very nice there. 13 QSO vom VO-023 on 40m and 20m SSB. Exactly 2 hours after the last QSO we logged the first one from VO-090. 16 QSO here on 40m and 20m SSB with best DX AE7KI in TN. Always great to work DX with 5W.