Radio Habana Cuba
Dxers Unlimited
Dxers Unlimited's mid week for 19-20 April 2005
By Arnie Coro
radio amateur CO2KK
Hi amigos radioaficionados around the world, and also orbiting the Earth !
Nice to have you listening to this twice weekly radio program, devoted
entirely to our wonderful and fascinating hobby :RADIO !!!
Here is item one: ATTENTION TV DXERS AND FM BROADCAST BAND DXERS... AND OF
COURSE, THE FOLLOWING ITEM IS ALSO VALUABLE INFORMATION FOR AMATEUR RADIO
OPERATORS... listen carefully to this news item :
LYRID METEORS: The annual Lyrid meteor shower peaks this Friday morning,
April 22nd, when Earth glides through a stream of debris trailing Comet
Thatcher. Go outside two hours before dawn and watch the sky near the bright
star Vega. You might see a dozen or more shooting stars before sunrise, and
keeping your TV set tuned to the lowest frequency empty channel at your
location, while keeping a VCR in recording mode, that will very probably
bring in some good examples of meteor scatter propagation. For the FM band ,
the technique is similar, tune your digital receiver to an empty channel,
and leave the tape recorder rolling... You will then review the tape later
to try to locate the station or station's heard and the callsigns... Two
meter band amateur operators have a meteor scatter calling frequency... ist
144.200 and if activity gets really heavy, tune up plus or minus ten
kilohertz for meteor scatter contacts... Meteor scatter propagation one of
the more than 78 ways you and I enjoy this wonderful hobby amigos !
Item two: A solar wind stream flowing from solar coronal hole could hit
Earth's magnetic field on April 22nd or 23rd. The: SOHO Extreme Ultraviolet
Telescope provided scientists with a very nice view of the large are of
lower coronal temperatures from where matter is expelled into space ... SO,
again, be prepared for more geomagnetic disturbances starting very probably
by Friday UTC day.
Item three: Lots of amateur radio related software can be obtained without
paying a single cent, and don't think that what you will be getting is
junkware... no amigos, there are lots of nice, very well written programs
that are the result of the work of devoted radio amateurs, who, in a good
will gesture have made that software qualify as freeware !!! Among the best
are Canadian radio amateur George Murphy's HAMCALC package, offered by
VE3ERP as a freeware download, that contains several tens of very nice
programs that can be run on almost any computer, including obsolete machines
..
My other favorite among the freeware programs is W6EL Sheldon Shallon's
masterpiece for calculating HF propagation, also very well written and
offering reliable and consistent results if you feed the program with the
proper solar and geomagnetic data...
Item four: A nice way of learning more about radio is by surfing the world
wide web, as there are hundreds of excellent websites packed with very
useful information about our hobby... Writing "amateur radio" into the
search box of any of the popular search engines will bring back more URL's
that you can imagine... Cybersurfing when HF propagation conditions are not
good, is a way that you can spend your spare time very usefully, learning
more about such topics as radio wave propagation, home brewing of radio
equipment, operation during contests etc... Si amigos, the world wide web is
full of sites from where you can download lots of radio hobby related
information !!!
Now let's take a little break for station ID. I am Arnie Coro , radio
amateur CO2KK,your friend in Havana, back in a few seconds...
........
This is Radio Havana Cuba, the name of the show is Dxers Unlimited and we
are on the air twice every week, providing you with the most up to date
short wave and low band vhf propagation updates and forecasts.. Now here is
item five of today's program...Minimum parts count radios are a challenge to
home builders, and they are a lot of fun to design, assemble and operate..
For example, my good friend Pedro Rodriguez, CO7PR, a radio amateur from
Ciego de Avila Province in central Cuba is now designing a simple single
band transceiver for the 40 meters band, based on his experience with the
famous double side band and CW rig "THE ISLANDER transceiver that has made
possible for many Cuban radio amateurs to be on the air...
Pedro is still looking for a name for the new solid state transceiver, and
in a recent conversation we had precisely on the 40 meters band, he told me
that this new project is definetely a minimum parts count rig.
Pedro CO7PR also promised to send me the complete circuit diagrams and step
by step building instructions in Spanish, for me to translate to English and
made it available to Dxers Unlimited's worldwide listeners...
Item six: Cuban radio amateurs had a very active participation during this
past Sunday municipal elections, providing backup communications to remotely
located polling stations all along the Cuban archipelago... Many of the ham
radio operators will be back with their rigs and antennas because at one
thousand one hundred and sixtythree electoral districts second round
elections will be taking place next Sunday, there none of the candidates
achieved the more than fifty percent of the votes required by Cuban
electoral law to be elected ... The use of 2 meter band FM transceivers and
the more of the 35 repeaters operated by the Cuban Federation of radio
amateurs demonstrated that VHF communications are playing a significant role
to many of the social activities to which the Cuban radio amateur operators
provide their useful support... Among the most recent events that benefitted
from the communications links by Cuban ham operators were the Terry Fox
marathon, the MarHabana marathon and during last year's very active
hurricane season, when more than 800 Cuban radioaficionados provided
excellent emergency communications from even the most remote sites.
......
Radio Reloj, the 24 hours per day news and information broadcast station was
founded in 1947 here in Havana, and today broadcasts on the AM and FM bands,
and also provides streaming audio by means of the Internet... Radio Reloj is
extremely popular among AM medium wave band Dxers around the world, because
the station uses a CW Morse Code tone modulated identifier with the letter R
R, that is very easy copy even when the signals are very weak. So AM band
Dxers have a positive identification that they are picking up Radio Reloj
from Havana, Cuba, even when they can't copy the voice of the two announcers
that provide the news , as this is a voice only station with pulse ticks
every second that are also very easy to identify... Here is a short example
of how the Radio Reloj signal sounds like, pay attention to the time pulses
every second...
Si amigos, you can pick up Radio Reloj on 950 kiloHertz from Havana, and
also on many other frequencies, like 850 kiloHertz from the Isle of Youth
and 860 from Colon, Matanzas...QSLing Radio Reloj is very easy by sending a
postcard to their website address found at http://www.radioreloj.cu...
again http:// www.radioreloj.cu
Now here is item seven of the mid week edition of Dxers Unlimited amigos,
this is our popular antenna topics section, that today will answer a
question sent by several listeners from Canada, the USA, France, Mexico and
South Africa, they all want to know what they can gain by using a larger
diameter coaxial cable for the antenna downlead... Well amigos, this is a
very tough question to answer, because the answer will depend on several
factors, among them the frequencies involved and the length of the coaxial
cable run... For example, the small diameter RG58U or RG59U cables of 50 and
75 ohm impedance will work very well when used for antennas operating
between 1 megaHertz and 60 megahertz with cable runs that are no longer than
about 30 or even 50 meters... But, the same cable runs used with VHF
antennas will require the use of the larger diameter cables like RG8, RG213
for 50 ohms or RG11 for 75 ohms... You must check the losses of each type of
coaxial cables at the operating frequencies and install the type of cable
that has the lowest possible losses,and this is especially important when
you are going to use the cables for transmitting...
Item eight of the mid week edition of Dxers Unlimited coming up in a few
seconds...
.....
Si amigos, yes my friends, we do QSL here 100 percent, and we are planning
now a special anniversary QSL card to be sent to listeners picking up Dxers
Unlimited's programs and reporting them during the period between April 15
and May 15... On May Day, the first day of May we will be celebrating Radio
Havana Cuba's 44th anniversary... something very dear to me, as I was among
the small group of radio enthusiasts that helped to put this station on the
air 44 years ago !!!
And now, just before going QRT , here is our exclusive and not copyrighted
HF propagation update and forecast...
Solar activity will remain from very low to low, the solar flux is barely ten units above baseline activity, that is its very near 80 units, and the A index will be moving down during the next two to three days, before it takes another turn for the worst by Friday due to the possible arrival of a high speed solar wind gust from a coronal hole that was located using the SOHO extreme ultraviolet telescope. As we approach the month of May, chances for sporadic E openings will increase, so be on the lookout for the tell tale signs of suddenly raising maximum useable frequencies indicating the presence of high free electron densities at the altitude of around 100 to 120 kilometers above the Earth... See you all at the weekend edition of Dxers Unlimited amigos, and don't forget to take a little time to send me a signal report and your valuable comments about this program that help me a lot to make it a better each day contribution to the radio listening hobby enthusiasts around the world... My electronic address, the e-mail is arnie@rhc.cu, again arnie@rhc.cu, and VIA AIR MAIL send your postcards and letters to Arnie Coro , Radio Havana Cuba, Havana, Cuba.