2006-04-29

Ham Station Tips and Tricks

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to show you how you in a quick way can improve your ham radio station operation. Secondly, the purpose of this guide is not to force you to read the whole manual of the various software packages. Instead you must invest 15 minutes reading these pages if you read all of it. You may also come back from time to time if you forget how to do...

If you find any bad links please check it a couple of days later and if it still fails please let me know. Otherwise please do not mail me to ask questions about this page or the relevant software packages.

Commands or stuff to enter into the computer are written like:

sh/dx

That is Blue Text in Fixed Width Format. The commands have been tested so they should not contain any error as long as you enter exactly what is shown at the beginning of the line. All command lines are followed by pressing the ENTER key on your keyboard.

Command parameters in square brackets [] are optional, and sub commands in capital letters must be replaced with the requested information.

Keep in mind there will be no permanent damage to the computer etc. So if you are in doubt then give it a try.

DX cluster	VHF DX chats	PC time	Browser startpage
Distance calculation	Meteor scatter	What's the QTH?	Google Earth

VHF DX chats

Alain, ON4KST, provides a number of VHF DX Chats. Many VHF DXers are present in these chats where DX, skeds and other VHF DX related topics are discussed on the fly.

Inappropriate behaviour

Quite often you experience a behaviour on the chats that in my view is very inappropriate. The common characteristic is the repeatedly displayed message that pollutes the chats. Some examples are:

Sending a link to the persons own home page at times when it is completely out of context. This is unsolicited advertising and as such nothing but spam.
It seems as if the spamming person is very proud of his home page. He may have every reason to be but why bother the rest of us continuously?
Sending a standard messages, beyond a polite "hello" to those already talking, when entering or leaving the chat. This message is often with a long standardised greeting vs. time of the day and including a link to more information about this person's "latest" whereabouts.
- Sometimes the wrong message is pasted which is obvious since it has the wrong time of day greeting. Pathetic.
- Pasting a standard message saying I am extremely busy so I do not participate in the chatting. But the person was not even engaged in chatting. If it is very important to tell that you are not accessible then change your status to "not here" or exit the chat.
Sending an advertising message about latest changes to this or that more than ones and at times when it completely out of context. Again this is unsolicited advertising thus spam.
Plain advertising for goods to be sold again when no one has asked for it. This is pure spam.
Asking for skeds at a repeat rate that is very high, e.g. 5 min intervals, and everybody has neglected each and every one of them.
Sending a message just to say that the person's home page has been updated. This is also unsolicited advertising thus spam.

Imagine if everybody applied the above behaviour. The chats would become useless. Imagine being in a conference room in the real world a similar behaviour where someone from time to time stood up and said: "See me, see me." Eventually the person would be asked to leave the room.

For some reason this inappropriate behaviour seems to be very popular among Danes, Dutch and Germans.

Top three commands

Prompt a specific user

/cq CALL MESSAGE

e.g /cq oz2m Hello Bo how are you. This command will highlight the Message for Call. Try it out using your own call to see how it works. The message sent using "/cq CALL MESSAGE" is not secret it is only highlighted at the screen of Call.

Show a station's locator

/shloc CALL

e.g. /shloc oz2m. When doing so the ON4KST server will respond with a message that only you can see. If you are using telnet to access the chat the command is /sh loc CALL instead.

Update a station's locator

/updtloc CALL LOCATOR

e.g. /updtloc oz2m jo65fr. You can use this command when you want to tell the chat a locator of a station that is unlisted or the locator was changed.

If you are really lost you can always evoke the help! Go the Menu or type /help

PC time

You can have your PC's time updated automatically from servers on the Internet. You can use Dimension 4 that you can download from here.

Browser startpage

Why not design your own web page on which your Internet browser starts? See mine here. Please do not use it to send DX spots as my callsign is embedded in the page. Download the necessary files here and follow the instructions in the ReadMe.txt file.

Distance calculation

The IARU Region 1 VHF Committee recommends two different methods for calculating distances based upon the need for:

Contest QSOs.
DX record QSOs.

The two methods are quite different in their mathematical representation. But first the location of the station must be found. The IARU Region 1 VHF Committee recommends that WGS 84 coordinates are used for determining the location of a station. GPS uses the WGS 84 system.

Contest QSOs

The method to calculate a distance for a contest QSO has been chosen due to it simplicity. It uses the formula proposed by PZK for calculating distances in VHF and Above Contests and the "commenced km" rounding method (Lillehammer, 1999), i.e. Distance = 111,2 * arccos(sin Latitude1 * sin Latitude2 + cos Latitude1 * cos Latitude2 * cos(Longitude1-Longitude2)), where distance is in km, and coordinates are in degrees.

	Rounding methods
Distance	"Commenced km"	"Math"	"Truncation"
0 km	1	0	0
43,2 km	44	43	43
56,7 km	57	57	56

DX records

Since the IARU Region 1 VHF Committee recommends that WGS 84 coordinates are used for determining the location of a station it must be assumed (this is my personal interpretation) that the WGS 84 Earth Model is used, and not the simplified one used for contesting purposes.

However, today the IARU Region 1 VHF Committee, recommends the Datum Hayes 1924 Earth Model as implemented in the "The GM4ANB Formula," that does not comply with WGS 84.

I have made a WGS 84 locator program, using Vincenty's inverse ellipsoid algorithm, that you can download. Another WGS 84 program by John, OZ1JM, has many more features and can be downloaded from his homepage. The principles behind GPS and WGS 84 can be downloaded from WGS 84.

What's the QTH?

Quite often you see requeste like:

"What is the locator of QQ0Q?"

What is the problem you may ask? Well, the problem is that the station requesting the locator, or other information for that matter, probably has not bothered to look for the information himself, and if others are willing to spend their time on him why should he waste his own time finding it.

But what should the requesting station have done first? He could at least have tried the following:

/shloc QQ0Q on the ON4KST chat.
sh/st QQ0Q on the DX Cluster.
sh/dx 20 on 2m QQ0Q on the DX Cluster. Or more than 20 spots and on another band also.
sh/vhf QQ0Q or searched on the web here.
Searched QRZ.COM.
Searched HamCall.net.
Tried QSL.NET directly, qsl.net/qq0q.
Searched the web using one of the search engines, e.g. Google.

In most cases Step 1 or Step 2 will be sufficient, and then everybody else does not have to be disturbed.

Sometimes these kind of requests become really grotesque: The station requesting the locator of QQ0Q has not even entered his own locator in the DX Cluster profile (set/qra), on his home page or on the other above possibilities!