Engineering snippets

The Voyager program launched successfully the probes Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977, and they have been traveling through space until present days. The probes are technically impressive and well know in the techie circles because of the golden records. The Russian news agency RIA Novosti captured some interesting aspects of these missions in the infrographic presented below. Click over the image for full details.

Original source RIA Novosti.

After struggling with my schedule almost fully occupied by my PhD, projects and Danish lectures I managed to get some free hours to get my radio station up and running. Here it goes a brief description of my first steps in amateur radio.

After not very successful attempts with an Outback mobile antenna for HF I decided to use a long wire antenna (around 17 meters) connected to my FT-857 transceiver  through a Yaesu FC-700 antenna tuner.  My QTH is Aarhus, central Denmark and so far I have been transmitting full power (100W). The long wire was not specially high above ground, barely 1.5 – 2 meters. The results after some hours operating the station are quite nice!

16th of September, late afternoon. A few minutes after powering up and tuning the antenna for 14MHz I replied a CQ call from PA3GEG operating from the Netherlands, 490 Km away so not too impressive but still my first DX :) Following that I called CQ and reached further, this time the contact was with YT1AA operating in central Serbia (1500 Km away). Final CQ call was replied by RX3DF, operating 100 Km away from Moscow making a total distance of 1700Km. I tried to get into a couple of pile-ups, but stations from the eastern part of Europe were transmitting at 1Kw, so it was hard to get there with a tenth of that power. At that point I decided that I was done in 20 meters, and move up to the 18MHz band, where I replied a CQ call from EA2GJ operating from Bilbao, Spain. It was surprising to have my first QSO with a Spanish operator me being in Denmark (I am Spanish myself). That was the end of the radio session for that Sunday with a nice feeling of success!

22nd of September, starting at 19:00 UTC+1 summer time. Chilly outside, reading good propagation predictions, and getting ready to go back to 40 and 20 meters. I hanged out the same antenna as the previous day but this time my neighbor saw me and asked me if I was gonna fly a Kite :) I spent some time in 40 meters trying to make some contacts there, it was hard: many stations and the band almost crowded! I decided to go back to 20 meters and see how it was going there. Again nice results! This time I registered the contacts in QRZ.com and you can see below the logbook for that day: Ukraine, France, Bulgaria, UK and Russia again. The contact with Russia was quite nice: RA6ABO, Misha, replied my CQ call and he was 59, loud and clear. I got a 58 signal report from him and I was quite satisfied since this time I reached a station 2192 Km away with my limited setup.

My logbook in qrz.com at this point

Thanks to all the operators that were at the other end for the QSOs!

EA2ECV
73

EA2ECV

soon operating as

OZ / EA2ECV / Portable

Several weeks ago I discovered quite an interesting post among my thousands of unread google reader entries. The original post was published at dangerousprototypes.com and is based on a talk given at the Chaos Communication Camp 11 (CCCamp11) by some of the members of the Stuttgard Hackerspace (page in German).

The name of the project is Hackerspace Global Grid and the people behind it describe it very well in their website with this Mid/Short-term goals statement:

Mid-term goal: Design and build a modular terrestrial base-station for satellite communication. Based on open-source hard- and software as well as open standards.

Short-term goal: Gain insight into the nature, protocols and security features of satellite <> earth communication. Build a working prototype of a modular receiver station with networking capabilities. Provide interfaces to existing high performance computing platforms (GPU-based and similar systems).

I know, it sounds quite an ambitious endeavor but the guys seem to be working hard already towards their objectives and present some of their results and experiences in the talk. It is almost one hour long but if you are reading this blog probably you will find it, at least, interesting.

I do not know how far they will go but the idea itself and the presentation they made is inspiring for anybody into radio and electronics. I will definitely follow the project during the next months and hopefully read some interesting progress. It is a pity that these guys are based on Stuttgard, it would have been a perfect chance to collaborate in a project that combines electronics, communications and computing.