I just wanted to get it out there, since I’ve had a number of hits from “Google Maps Aprs” searches, that the http://gAPRS.net site is up and running. Within the next few days, I hope to add Zip-Code searches as well as display of stations near a searched location. Right now, the SSID I use for my car, K5EM-9, pops up in the box by default. My co-workers have affectionately named my APRS station the ‘Husband Tracker.’ Unfortunately, the APRS coverage here in Los Angeles is much worse than that in Dallas, so for now (assuming you cared where I was, which you don’t) you’d have to settle for the sketchy updates.

David Norris, KG9AE, of http://webaugur.com/, has his own Google Maps APRS here. David and I have collaborated on some of the code on our two sites, but the truth is that he’s done most of the difficult legwork. He describes some of the technical details of his work on his blog.

Since Google released the Google Maps API today, I took the liberty of hacking together a quick Amateur Radio Automatic Packet Reporting System ( APRS ) viewer for Google Maps. The first go at this took about 20 lines of code, but I plan to continue working on it and hopefully turn it into something useful. Reading the full api documentation, there is a lot of functionality that can be had in Google Maps.

The link to the Google Maps APRS page is http://gAPRS.net.

For those of you outside the Ham Radio loop, APRS is a system by which Amateur Radio Operators can transmit their position, as well as any number of other bits of information, over the airwaves for others to receive and decode. Popular sites which achieves much more functionality than my little hack are findu.com and APRSWorld.Net, both of which use free US Census Bureau Tiger maps.

Special thanks to Jim, KB0THN, for access to the APRSWorld.Net APRS database.

Well, a brief primer on amateur radio in general may be in order…

In about 1905….blah blah blah 1960 blah blah 1985 blah blah blah blah 2004. OK, now that we have that out of the way.

These days, ham radio is used for a lot of different things. There are many different facets in amateur radio, and many different modes of communications. One such mode is phone (voice communications) and another is CW (for continuous wave) or Morse Code. Others still include digital modes which encompass many various modulation techniques. A mode is a general term for a way to transmit information.

These modes are used on different frequency ’bands’ from 1.8 MHz (called medium frequency or meduim wave because of it’s wavelength of over 100 meters) through 30MHz (2-30MHz is called high frequency, HF, or shortwave, with wavelengths from 10 to 80 meters long) and upwards through Very High Frequency (VHF, 50MHz-400MHz, 6 meters through one meter) and Ultra High Frequency (UHF, 400MHz – 4GHz or so) and even higher.

The HF bands allow for worldwide communications by reflection of signals off of the ionosphere, which acts as a large radio mirror. The Ionosphere has many different layers, and is ionized (charged) by interaction with the stream of energy and particles from the sun. Thus, as the sun has an 11 year cycle of waxing and waning sunspots, we have an 11 year propogation cycle. In the years where there are may sunspots, the higher frequencies are the best for long-distance communications, while during the years of fewer sunspots, the lower bands are better. Accordingly, the lower bands are good at night while the higher frequency bands are better during the day. Anything above 100MHz or so is exempt from this rule. Once you get up this high in frequency, except in special cases, the communications are mainly line of sight, or local. See spaceweather.com for more details about how the earth interacts with the sun.

Morse code is called cw because of the modulation technique, that is, turning on and off a continuous carrier on a certain frequency. Since the inception of radio, CW has been a vital tool in communications. It was really the first type of digital wireless, in and of itself a binary format that uses a series of tones in time to create information (whereas today most digital modes are modulations of various tones in frequency [audio shift keying] or phase [phase shift keying]). If there were such a thing, CW might be called time shift keying. It is the only digital mode that I know of that can be interpreted in real time without a computer.

Anyway, Morse code is still used for communications today. Morse code is very useful in times when voice communications are not possible. It is very resistant to noise and fading because of the same reason a digital cellular phone is – that is, the only information that needs to make the trip is a one or a zero. In morse code these are the dots and dashes, or ’dits’ and ’dahs.’ In recent years, especially with the widespread availability of PCs and sound cards, the digial modes have become much more widespread and fill the gap that only cw used to fill. Now, with a sound card and DSP, a computer can interpret tiny phase variations in signals that the human ear couldn’t hear (phase shift keying). CW is still useful, but more nostalgic than anything.

Last night I was trying to hear and work a station in Qatar. On phone, I couldn’t even make him out, only the hundreds of other stations calling him. When he changed over to CW, however, I could copy every letter. Had he been on one of the digital modes, we could have had an easy chat.

Contesting- Contesting is a sport that was birthed out of a need. In the old days of radio (through the 1980s actually, and still today during communications emergencies), messages, generally called traffic, were passed between ham operators across the country. In the early days, when we hadn’t figured out everything I stated above, messages had to be relayed every 40 or 50 miles by different hams. Quickly, a network of radio operators came into being in order to relay these messages from one part of the country to another. It was just as easy as the telegraph, only free to the user. These relay networks were also vital during times of emergencies, especially when the telegraph or telephone lines went dead. Out of this network, an organization called the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) was born to help coordinate for the cause as well as to be an interface for the thousands of amateur radio operators across the country to the government.

Somewhere along the way, the ARRL began organizing contests to help its members practice moving information quickly and efficiently. The contests were based on the message handling system, and involved making a contact with another ham and exchanging certain information. Usually this was very close to the same info that was required for a radiogram, meaning the callsign of both stations, a brief message of some sort such as each operators name, location, and gear. This became the ’exchange.’ Points were awarded according to the distance of the contact. Longer distances were of course harder to come by and netted more points, because they required more skill to make the exchange.

Today, contests haven’t changed much. The need is still there during emergencies to pass messages quickly and efficiently, but few contest for this reason. It has turned much more into a sport and a way to keep those hams out there that thrive on competition happy in the hobby.

During the contesting season, which lasts throughout the winter months and into spring, there is some sort of contest almost every weekend. Some last a few hours, and some last two days and nights. The basic premise is the same – make as many contacts with as many stations as possible, with stations farther away netting more points, and generally contacts made using morse code netting more points as well. But few contests allow more than one mode, there are contests today for each of the modes separately. Some are domestic, meaning that only contacts in North America count, while others are international and only contacts outside of North America matter.

Callsigns are important because one may be making as many as 200+ contacts per hour at times, and over 2000 contacts in a weekend contest. The time it takes to say that extra letter 5,000 times adds up quickly. If a call is a tounge twister, or is easily reversed, or has other problems (like a trailing dit on the end), then a contact may be busted, meaning that it is not scored. If either of the stations that is in the contests copies the other’s wrong, the contact is thrown out. So it is important not only to get the other guy’s info correct, but to make sure that he gets yours right as well.

That was long, and probably as long as the post that generated it, but I hope that clears up any ambiguities one may have about amateur radio. As I said above, there are many different facets, and I have just covered a couple here. The real drive in amateur radio is engineering new technologies, and it always has been. Unfortunately, hams have been more and more dumbed down to keep people interested in the hobby and make it easy to get a license. Before WWII, getting a ham ticket was almost as hard as getting an engineering degree!

As most of you know, I’m a ham radio nerd. I’ve been in Amateur Radio since I was 16, when I got interested because I found out that the National Weather Service uses hams to do weather spotting. We had given my father a scanner for Father’s Day to use to listen to the local law enforcement radios, weather, and the like. In the process I found that the hams in the area would have ’nets’ on during bad weather and talk to the National Weather Service over the radio. I studied and got my license pretty soon thereafter.

I found a radio and a radio club on a Thursday night ’net’ that was used for area announcements and selling radio gear. I got my dad to take me to the club meeting the next night, and found out that there was a testing session the following day in Ft. Worth. Dad was nice enough to cart me around again, and I passed the first test with flying colors. The following weekend, before I had my license, I already purchased a used radio from a nice gentleman in Ft. Worth. A few days later, my ’ticket’ arrived in the mail, and I was on the air.

Three weeks thereafter, I found out that there was this thing called Field Day that would be happening near the end of June, followed closely by (or was it preceded by?) something called Ham-Com. Anyway, in some order I visited both of these orgies of ham radio delight, and found out that there was a whole other world to amateur radio other than the short-range local communications I was used to.

At Field Day, I got to help set up radios and antennas in an emergency-like environment, running all of the equipment off of generators, batteries, or solar power. I found out that you could talk to people all over the country and even outside of the U.S. with relative ease. At this time, I also figured out that I was pretty good at making contacts, and making them fast. Field day was the most fun I had had in a long time—I was outdoors, camping, and playing with geek toys, and I got to stay up for almost 3 days straight. What more could one want?

At Ham Com, I found out that there are a lot of wierdos in ham radio. Guys that walk around a convention center all day with antennas clipped to their hat brims. Others that walk around with antennas sticking ten feet above their heads from backpacks, and carrying radios that would barely fit on my desk at home. These guys were nuts. But it also turned out that most of them were techies, many were storm spotters, and almost all were interesting – in their own little peculiar way. That day I attended my first Skywarn School. I walked out a [semi] trained storm spotter.

Soon, as my priveledges allowed me to get on the worldwide shortwave bands more and more, I opted to get a new callsign through the FCC’s vanity call program. I searched far and wide, and since at that time I only held a General Class license (leve 3 of 5 at the time), I could only get a call that was one letter, followed by a number, followed by 3 letters. This is called a 1×3. The more desireable calls are 1×2, meaning they only have 2 letters trailing the number. These call are a sign of stature because only the highest license class is allowed to request them, and they help to push up contest scores slightly because you can say them faster. At that time, I switched from my origional call, KD5AKO, to K5AEA. I chose AEA because it was a great callsign in morse code (called CW because of the method for creating it) [ -.- ..... .- . .- ] as opposed to [ -.- -.. ..... .- -.-—- ] for my older callsign. I thought I was hot stuff because my callsign was shorter in CW than many of the 1×2 calls. Later, as I began to compete in amateur radio contests, I found out that as good as it was in morse, it was a tounge twister to say in voice contacts.

Over the next few years, I discovered that there were many outlets in ham radio that fit my geekdom well. I could leave messages on a computer on the Mir Space Station that contained the moves to a chess game that a guy in South Africa and I played over a few weeks. I could pick up the mic at just about any time of day or night and talk to people all over the world (once I upgraded my license and got worldwide shortwave priveledges). I could chat with friends 40 miles away on my drive to school everyday for free.

Soon my electronic tinkering melded with my ham radio fun and I began building antennas. At first I just copied other people’s designs—I was 17 and didn’t really have a clue what reactance was or why radio waves were reflected if you put the right size antenna elements in the right place. But I had fun trying new things and coming up with crazy alternatives. Then I continued a tradition I had throughout high school of building electronic kits and ordered my first radio kit. It took me two days to assemble the kit, and about two weeks of poking around with a voltmeter to figure out that I had the transmit/recieve transistor in backwards. But it was the first radio I could say I built with my own two hands, and it worked wonders.

One thing led to another and I figured out that I liked this electronics stuff a lot. I liked the communications side of things even more. So I dropped the long-sought plan to do aerospace engineering and went for electrical. How happy was I when I found that UTD had an amateur radio club.

I quickly found that the radio club did not have any members, and set about it as my mission in life to find more people that were interested in ham radio. It turns out that they were few and far between. However, I had a lot of fun in those first years of college working stations all over the world on the shortwave bands from K5UTD.

After a year spree at TCU, I was back at UTD and found that the little bit of a club that I had helped build up before I left had all but disbanded. I quickly set about to fix this problem, and rounded up some of the old members for meetings. Later that year, my life in amateur radio took a crazy turn for the better. I wasn’t on the air much, and was active in other facets of radio even less. In the fall of 2002, Oliver Prinz, DK1CM came to UTD for a semester research position. Oli really taught me how to contest, and showed me what fun sitting on the radio with a station like that at K5UTD could be.

He could sit there early Saturday mornings on the radio and ’run’ Europeans like he was a contest super-station, and that was when there was no contest going on. I saw Oli make 200 contacts in a couple of hours of operating, and realized that was really where the fun was. Oli and I ran some major contests, with help of course, and actually did very well in a couple of them. We took K5UTD to collegiate radio fame by winning that category of a national radio contest. Oli also taught me that I didn’t know jack about radio or engineering. That was a motivator for times to come.

In early 2003, I started looking for a new callsign. I loved contesting, and K5AEA was just too to hard to say quickly and pronounced in phonetics (kilowatt – five – alpha – echo – alpha). So I found a great resource that I had used years before to pick my first vanity call, vanity headquarters. There, I found a list of 1×2 calls in zone 5 that were availiable. There were only about 3, and all of them were either really bad on voice or really bad in CW, or both. But one call that expired in March of 2004 caught my eye – K5EM. Kilo – Five – Echo – Mike. That sounds really nice. How about the morse code? [ -.- ..... .—] Dang that’s short. And it follows the rule of thumb for contest callsigns—that is, it must have a dash at the end. This is because a trailling dot under really bad conditions is almost always hard to hear. K5ME would have been worthless to my needs.

So the waiting began. I didn’t tell but a few people about the call, I knew that some of my friends would love to have the call too. After over a year, I took the chance and applied on the first available date. Then I applied again. And again. At the end of the day I had given the FCC almost $100 and had 5 separate applications in for the same callsign. I did this because it is allowed and because I figured many people would try to apply for the call as well. It turns out that I had 5 of the 11 applications made on that day. Because the process is a random lottery, I had a little less than a coin’s toss odds. And I won.

And that is the incredibly overstated story of my new ham radio callsign.

The end.

Well, right after I posted that, I got busy. The business continued throughout the night with the radio contest, Saturday with the wedding and all that is related, and has finally winded down now on Sunday morning.

The contest went pretty well – the low bands weren’t bad but they weren’t great. I got to see the value of morse code first hand—last week in 9 hours I contacted almost as many countries as we did the entire contest on one of the bands. We probably spent almost twice as much time on 40 meters on phone, but we only had about 10 more countries than I had in nine hours of work in the morse code (CW) contest. There are some pictures in the photo gallery.

The wedding was great. Congratulations to Matt and Jen and to their families. They are having a little bbq today that I might make it to if I wake up in time.

Also, trying to figure out what will happen with the house in the coming months. I’d love to know if I have a job here or there or anywhere, but without that knowledge, I want to stay in the house. I want to stay anyway – mainly because moving sucks and because I think we have a pretty cool house.

More on that nonsense later, for now I’m going to get some much needed sleep, as I’m at about 24 hours without, after only about 5 hours of sleep yesterday morning.

I’m probably going to post about 5 times in the next few hours. First, because I’m bored. I’m helping out with a radio contest in Prosper, TX, and I’m waiting my turn to operate again. I’ll get plenty of action here in a few hours, but for now I’ve yielded the mike for some other folks to have their hands in the fun. So I’m just chillin here and trying to get the stylesheets for MT setup how I want them. I thought they were good, but looking that the MT site now in IE6 has shown that I am very wrong. IE6 sucks.

On the homefront, I’ve snached a freelance web design job that will keep me employed for a week or so. The guy that I’m working for is very nice and hopefully we can get his company set up the way he likes it. I’m sure I’ll post a link on here once I get it to some sort of a conclusion. I will now play a little Super Mario Bros. on my cell phone. More to come as the night wears on.

It was a busy weekend, and has been a busy week so far.  Over the weekend, we finished up CQ World Wide with 1112 contacts, up 103 over last year, even amidst some fairly strong solar flares that caused radio blackouts for a few hours.  Tuesday morning we saw the third-strongest flare on record, an X17, which caused aurora as far south as Houston Tuesday night.  So last night, I took off north to see what I could see.  It was well worth it, and I got a fairly good show.  Being about 10 miles from nowhere, OK without any city lights to be seen helps.  It was also a nice drive, 250 miles and all after sunset.  Made it back here about 2, after being followed for awhile by some hick kids trying to mess with me.  It was an interesting evening.

Upcoming highlights:  Maybe more aurora tonight as a result of an X11 flare yesterday afternoon.  If the Kp index gets up to 8 or 9 there will be a pretty good chance.  Right now its back down to 5.  See spaceweather.com for more about aurora forecasting.

Here we are, 8 hours into the contest, and already improving over last year’s score.  We’re hoping the European run in the morning will push us well over the top.  Having an extra radio thanks to Thorsten Prutz, K5TCP, has helped out immensly. 

We spent all afternoon working on antennas, and of the 2 new ones that we put up one isn’t working.  The small tribander is working, however, and should come in really useful in the morning, granted that storms tonight don’t take it down. 

If you’re trying to reach me, send me an email; I’ll have my phone off until about 7:00 Sunday.  If it’s an emergency, call my girlfriend, she knows how to get in touch with me quickly.

This weekend was full of festivities, from the ΣAE Columbus Day Party Friday night to the Karaoke Saturday evening at The Plantation that ran into the wee hours of Sunday morning.  Sunday was spent sleeping and playing video games - a much needed day of rest from the craziness that has been the past few weeks.  Now its back to the real world: work, homework, and gearing up for the biggest amateur radio contest of the year this coming weekend. 

CQ World Wide is 48 straight hours of contacting as many amateur stations in as many countries as possible, day and night, while competing against thousands of other operators doing the same.  We’re really doing it for the sport; CQWW can’t even be won by a stateside station.  Points-wise it is impossible.  About half of the competitors in the entire contest (usually over 5,000 logs are submitted) are in the US; and contacts with stations in the same country are not allowed.  So, most of the people trying to win head down to the Carribean, or to some island off the western coast of Africa, somewhere they can work both the quantity of stations the U.S. provides while still being able to work the quantity of countries required to get a big score.  If you have time next weekend, drop by the radio room at UTD and see what its all about, there should be someone operating from 6:00pm Friday through 6:00pm Sunday.  You could always bring us food too.

The North Texas APRS Workshop is over and gone, and with it hopefully will go my sleepless nights. Everything went amazingly well – we didn’t have ANY problems with UTD, parking (except for the change a day before the event, but it wasn’t a big deal), or even Audio/Video. I think the only thing that might have worked a bit smoother was the Wireless Internet connections, but that’s UTD’s network for you – flaky as can be.

Well, today is Katie and my one year anniversary, we we’re chillin here at the house and trying to get some rest after an exhausting day. More to come.