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Friendship Amateur Radio SocietyCanada

    

F.A.R.S.
Canada

2850 Queenston
Street

Victoria,
B. C. V8R 4P3

Canada

                       
NEWSLETTER



Victoria                                        
Feb/05
FARSC business

We held our AGM November
2, 2004. The officers for 04/05 were elected as

follows:

   Robin Applewhaite,
VE7DFI - President,

                  
director

   G. D. (Joe) Young, VE7BFK -

                 
Secretary/Treasurer, director

   Perry Creighton, VA7PC - director

   John MacConnachie, VE7GED - director

   Douglas Pattison, VE7XAT - director

   Rick Williams, VE7TK director

President's Report
Fellow FARStions:
Another year has gone, and the torch, though flickering, has been
passed on to me.
Since the original idea for the Friendship Amateur Radio games was
proposed, the world and our members have changed considerably. Our world
has become more open; advances have made communication faster and places
closer; and many of our members have become older, wiser, and unlike
communications, slower.
This New Year finds FARSC at a point of reflection. Due to these changes,
questions arise as to the future of the organization. What is its purpose
now and in the future? Are there new directions and goals we should
be aiming for?
Thanks to the superb efforts of the past Presidents, and Executive,
the group has survived this long. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate.
May I ask all members to think about the whys, wheres, and hows of
FARSC?
Again my thanks to all whom have worked hard, for their accomplishments,
and for their efforts in keeping the group going.
Please give me your comments.

Robin Applewhaite ve7dfi@rac.ca

EVENTS

FRG04 was held in Khabarovsk
in August, 2004. The games were attended by three teams from Russia,
and by a somewhat small international group3 from Portland, U. S. A.
and one Japanese. Dale Hunt from Portland has produced a fairly detailed
report accompanied by some pictures of the trip. Contact ve7bfk@rac.ca
if you would like to read this report.

Discussion with IARU
Region 2 ARDF coordinator Dale Hunt WB6BYU indicates that the next U.
S. ARDF contest in Albuqueque NM will be billed as a Region 2 event.

The next Region 3 ARDF
championship will be hosted by Japan (JARL), September 19 to 24, 2005
in Niigata prefecture. For full info see the event's web site:

   http://www.jarl.or.jp/2005r3ardf/

Other News

ARDF practise sessions,
with alternating 80m and 2m hunts continue. The twice a month sessions
are held on the first and third Saturdays, muster in the lower parking
lot at Beaver Lake park about 9:30 to be ready for a 10:00 start. All
welcome. No ham licence required. FARSC usually has three or four receivers
available that can be shared with the equipment challenged.

ARDF equipment reports
- VE7BFK:

Dale Hunt low-cost 80m receiver - update

I mentioned in the previous newsletter that this receiver would be
featured in a QST article 'real soon now'. Dale advises that after much
unexplained delay, the article has now been accepted for publication.
This means that the article should actually show up in QST when they
get around to it; or, in other words, 'real soon now'.

Montreal fox controller - update

We used this controller retrofitted into one of the Chinese 80m TX
for a few sessions. It turned out to have a temperature sensitivity
in its keying of the transmitters which is likely nothing to do with
the controller, but with the rather odd level-shifting keying circuit
that was needed to translate the 5V logic to the 12V transmitter circuits.
In the course of tracking down this temperature sensitivity (which also
had an aspect associated with the TX alone--see last newsletter), I
removed the controller to simplify the troubleshooting. It didn't get  
put back. One operational inconvenience also became evident: the controller
is set up to be started in synchrony with all five controllers in a
set. So the set must be either harnessed up all together, or if each
controller is started separately, each one must be started on an even
5-minute time on the clock. So, the controllers will take 25 minutes
to get them all going if they're started one at a time.  

VK3YNG 80m ARDF receiver kit

I obtained this kit early last year, built it up, and have been using
it for most of our monthly 80m hunts since. Full information is   
available on Bryan's web site:

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/vk3yng/foxhunt/foxhunt.html

The kit is a fairly complete, baggie of parts plus assembly and setup
instructions type of kit. The majority of components are mounted  
on a very neat, 55mm X 95mm, one-sided copper with component-side silkscreen,
printed circuit board. I had a couple of problems during assembly. First,
because the VFO coil is wound with fairly heavy wire,  and I was
trying to pull the turns (too) tight, I managed to break the small iron-powder
toroid core. The junk box provided a larger core of the same material
and the replacement required some fiddling to get the operating frequency
correct. The second problem arose with fitting the ferrite-rod antenna's
coupling coil. The rod and coil assembly is mounted inside a length
of pvc pipe with an access T-box in the middle. The problem arises because
the pipe and T-box entry holes are too small to allow the link coupling
coil to be wound on before the assembly is put into the pipe. So it
has to be wound on after the main coil is wound and this part is inserted,
and then it is hard to wind the link turns inside the T-box, to keep
them tight and held in place until the glue to hold them dries. Finally,
the leads have to be long enough to allow them to be soldered onto the
bottom of the pc board. That length of fairly heavy wire makes it hard
to tuck them out of the way when the board is mounted down in the bottom
of the enclosure; also, the tucking in tends to break the link turns
out of the glue. These minor difficulties aside, the kit goes together
reasonably easily.

The full kit comes with a, 3V, logic-gate oscillator board that has
a number of attenuated outputs to produce +6, -40, -80 and -120 dBm
signals that can be used to align the receiver so that you need not
have an RF signal generator.
The kit can also have a stepped-attenuation RF gain control in place
of a potentiometer to give 8 fixed attenuation levels plus one position
that's wide open and switches off the audible S-meter. The complete
step-attenuator is an extra-cost option, but my kit came with the printed
circuit board for the step-attenuator. My junk box came through again
with 8 trim pots (to set the gain steps), resistors, a transistor, and
a 10-position switch that fit the  holes in the included pcb.
Once I'd overcome the problem of the wrong oscillator frequency because
I used a different coil core, and fixed the receiver 'break up' at high
gains, alignment went smoothly. The fix for the 'break up' (which is   
now described in the FAQs on the web site) required a smt, control-gate
bypass cap (very short leads).
In use, the 'audible S-meter' feature works extremely well, giving
quite sharp bearings with only the cardiod pattern. This feature makes
the receiver quite easy to explain to novice users--it just points in
the direction of the transmitter. No need to explain about using nulls
for sharp bearings and the sense switched in only to disambiguate the
nulls. Nevertheless, I did install the optional switch on the sense
antenna so that in the case of quite weak signals (which do not activate
the audible S-meter) one can still use the nulls for sharp bearings,
then switch in the sense to disambiguate. I've used this weak-signal
technique often enough that I'd advise installing the external switch
(even though it makes the already-awkward final assembly more awkward).
The step-attenuator option simplifies operation in a number of situations.
When the attenuation required for one fox is quite different from another,
you can return to the last-used value for a given fox with certainty
and thus improve your confidence that you're closer (or farth