It’s play for us old children [018]
Greetings from the shack...
HERE
If I don’t drop a newsletter tonight I fear it will never happen. The next few days are full on and before you know it it’ll be the weekend again. Hope you are well.
THERE
Very little HF this week. I did have my first AM contact. I answered a call from G4JBD (Graham) working his home-brew radio on 3.625. He calls CQ on AM because hearing someone on AM is what pulled him into the hobby and he is hoping he will have the same effect on some other listeners out there. Love that.
But most of the time, with the weather being as good as it has been, I’ve been out and about away from the shack. Sometimes I join the local net and although I always learn something, I remember the long list of things I should have done while sitting on the net. I never feel like I’m wasting time on my bicycle though. I’m exercising, experiencing, and going places. Throw in a radio and I’m communicating, learning and sharing as well.
With the FT5D in a pouch on the handlebars, the speaker is more than loud enough to be heard if I’m not on a busy road. I could use a bluetooth headset but I quite like to be able to hear what’s around me. If I’m on the net and in the middle of nowhere with no traffic I’ll chat one handed while I ride. But I also enjoy stopping somewhere to have my over, take on water and then continue down the track.
I did a 50 mile loop on one ride and was always in reach of GB3OV. Great coverage, even with the repeater outside the loop I rode.
The other radio playtime was at George Orwells Grave in Sutton Courtenay. For the last 16 years I’ve held a little gathering on George Orwell’s birthday called the 1984 Symposium. For the last few years we have set up a little field station. On this occasion I had rode my motorbike there and took my IC-705 and a Windcamp Gipsy. I forgot to take photos but managed to grab this still from a video that Gordon 2E0HVQ had the foresight to capture.
GEAR
I picked up a secondhand ladder today. I’ve also started trimming some trees in order to create a clear path for my sky loop. Progress is slow but steadily moving in the right direction.
Mod your QYT CB Radio to do 10M.
A 2M Moxon for less than a fiver.
After seeing a couple of motorbike riding friends with super lightweight chairs I also picked up a lightweight chair plus a stool. I plan to use the stool as a table for my radio.
These things are really lightweight and pack up small. I should have no issue carrying these and my radio gear in the top box of a motorbike, or in the panniers of my bicycle.
ONAIR
Have you ever considered tracking weather balloons? Here’s a little information on how you might get started.
It’s all well and good tracking them as they ascend, explode and then descend via parachute. But that’s only part of the fun. 3000 radiosondes fall out of the sky every day. How about actually tracking them down and finding them after they’ve fallen to Earth?
Meet F5ZV
I found this article about him in an old copy of Smith Journal.
The Etch-a-Sketch. Braille. Brie. Coq au vin. Thierry Henry's feet. These are all très bien French things - the majority of which you're probably familiar with. A French thing you probably aren't familiar with, however, is F5ZV.
F5ZV is a radiosonde hunter. That is, F5ZV hunts radiosondes: white plastic boxes that are attached to balloons and sent (by meteorologists) into not-quite-space to measure weather - temperatures, wind, humidity, that kind of thing - and radio the data back to ground control.
At around 100,000 feet, the balloons burst, and the little white boxes come floating back to earth care of their very own parachutes. That's where F5ZV - or Roland, as he's known to his loved ones - steps in. "My wife hasn't always been enthusiastic," he admits. "Especially when I would declare, in the middle of the night, that I was going out to hunt a radiosonde that was about to fall on a Swiss mountain. In the winter."
Not content with the idea of spending his golden years playing boules, Roland, now 68, took up radiosonde hunting in 2007 on advice from his friend, F1SRX, also known as Stéphane. (The alphanumeric monikers are used across ham radio.) To date, he reckons he's been on around 300 hunts and found roughly 170 of the things hiding everwhere from cow paddocks to suburban car parks. To get an idea for where a falling radiosonde might be headed, Roland, who lives about 30 kilometres from the Swiss border, consults a database that tracks the location of balloons as they approach bursting height. Once he's on the trail, he uses a relatively unwieldy antenna and radio receiver to listen out for signals given off by fallen instruments. He then decodes the signals using another piece of software called SondeMonitor. Simple though it may seem, this gear allows skilled hunters like Roland and Stéphane to determine the location of radiosondes across vast distances with near-pinpoint precision.
It's accessible, too. Roland says that the hobby is cheap to partake in and doesn't require any special technical knowledge. "It gets you in the open air, and you don't need to be very fit or exert a lot of effort to enjoy it." By Roland's estimation, there are hundreds of radiosonde enthusiasts all over Europe, and the pursuit likely began in Germany or England. Despite the niche pursuit's relative popularity, he's playing an active role in encouraging more participation. He's started documenting the history of radiosonde hunting online, and has even kicked off a competitive hunting circuit in a bid to get newcomers hooked. A typical hunt can last up to six hours, and Roland - who dons sturdy hiking boots and packs a lunch before every excursion - finds it all terribly therapeutic. "It's play for us old children," he explains in broken English. "I'm interested in the machines, and there's so much to be learned from the radiosondes. It's a whole world." OP
ELSEWHERE
Radiosondes: Getting data from upstairs.
A longwinded but interesting story about a nifty antenna set up for a pirate radio station.
Inside Ukraine’s Army FM radio station. “In some areas, our radio station is the only source of accurate information,”
An amateur radio related BBC news feature from 2013
New amateur radio courses are about to start with Essex Ham.
FINALS
Thanks for reading and I hope subscribing. Please share this wherever you think it might resonate.
There is a chance I will be traveling North up the A1 in a few days. Hitting all the repeaters on the way up. Let me know if you’ll be near one.
Over
73 de Christian G5DOC
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