Chitika: China

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家酿的你

As I mentioned in the last podcast, we've been in some pretty serious negotiations with a new sponsor that I think is going to bring some MAJOR changes to the podcast.

"Homebrew 4 U"  家釀的你   is an innovative new company based in Fakeszuhow, China. Up until now they specialized in custom circuit board manufacturing, but they recently contacted us with an expansion idea that we found very interesting. They have been listening to the podcast, reading the ham radio magazines, and monitoring the U.S. amateur frequencies (especially 75 and 40). They noticed some things:

Most hams DO NOT build their own gear.... but many seem to feel vaguely guilty about this. They seem to react with unease when they encounter a ham using a homebrew rig. They grow defensive and scornful. The jealousy is quite palpable. Obviously there is an exploitable niche in those sentiments!

Many hams express a DESIRE to build gear but then follow-up and say they "have no time" (what with all the contesting, video games, NASCAR, and golf!)

Other hams say that they really want to build their own gear, but don't know anything about electronics (even though they are Extra Class -- how did that happen?) and they don't really want to learn.

Some hams say they would really like to build their own gear but find parts of the process quite distasteful. Like winding toroidal coils. Or reading schematics. And then there's all that soldering! But they insist that in spite of all this distaste for actual building, they really DO want to join the ranks of the homebrewers.

So.... Homebrew 4 U is developing a FANTASTIC product line that meets the needs of these guilty, busy, knowledge-free, toroid hating,  solder-averse homebrew wannabes!

On April 1, 2016, Homebrew 4 U will roll out a line of GENUINE homebrew radios. To bolster their genuiness, they will henceforth be referred to not as radios but as "RIGS" (nice touch, don't you think?)

Unless the buyers select the optional "really build" option (see below), each "rig" will be complete and ready to operate. And here is the beautiful part: it will be a genuine homebrew rig, BECAUSE the company is doing all their work in an actual HOME in Fakezuhow! Pretty great huh? So you WILL be able to proudly announce on 40 meters that you are running a homebrew rig (Remember: rig, not radio!)

Each of the H4U rigs will share some common features, all designed to provide the proud buyer (I mean homebrewer) with opportunities to remind people that he is running a genuine homebrew rig:

-- They will drift a bit. Not too much, but enough to provide you with the chance to mention that your "rig" is "homebrew." Prepare to be envied my friends!

-- The frequency readout will be set up to put you automatically on "wrong" frequencies.
Like 7.162.025 instead of the "correct" 7.162.000000000000000000000000000000000000. Again, another opportunity to gloat. Pretty neat, huh?

-- The audio quality on SSB will be SUPERB. EXCELLENT. This will provide some wonderful opportunities to compare signals with the Enhanced SSB gang. Yours will sound as good or better than theirs, and you can follow-up by telling them that you are using a Radio Shack electret mic element, a one transistor mic amp, and NO EQUALIZER. They'll love it!

REALLY BUILD OPTION:   For those wanting to enhance the truthiness of their on-the-air homebrew experience, for just a few dollars extra, H4U will leave one part UNCONNECTED. You will then be able to make that critical final connection (don't worry, it won't be a toroid, and the connection will be via alligator clips -- if you've gone this far we know you don't own a soldering iron!). You will thus be able to tell your envious interlocutors about the happy day when you "finished" your radio. I mean rig. You know what I mean.

Pete is heading out to China this week to supervise the manufacturing (I mean the homebrewing). Thanks Pete! Skype in OM!

So remember, the roll-out is set for April 1, 2016. Watch out Yaesu!


Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

These little frequency counters from China have a lot of potential. And they add a dash of digital color to an otherwise bland analog hamshack. I got mine on e-bay.

My BITX17 has now been "accessorized" with
1) A rotatable Moxon antenna (big improvment!)
2) A 120 watt Communications Concepts Linear amplifier (another big improvement) and
3) This digital frequency readout.

What next?

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

For the past month or so I have been wondering about a strange echo that I've been hearing on the 31 meter transmissions of Radio China International. I first noticed it on my "Kings Speech" regen receiver. Then I heard it again on my "Off the Shelf" regen.

For a while I thought that what I was hearing was a propagation effect: Perhaps the very strong RCI relay station in Quivican,Cuba was sending north a signal so strong that it was travelling around the earth along the grey line and coming back to me about .133 seconds after the original reception.

This sounded plausible (and it does happen sometimes). But there were reasons for skepticism: Why wasn't anyone else hearing this? Why wasn't the effect showing up on signals from Radio Havana Cuba?

Pete Juliano had suggested that perhaps I was getting signals from TWO different RCI transmitters. I had quickly checked the RCI schedule and didn't see them transmitting on the same frequency at the same time from multiple transmitters, so I kind of put that idea aside. Hey, the round-the-world idea was just more appealing!

But then I remembered something strange about the echo: It seemed to disappear when I tuned close to the center frequency of the RCI signal, but then appeared when I tuned off to one side. Hmm.... That was an important clue.

I've long been wary of regen receivers and for a while suspected that I was dealing with some weird regen effect. Regen and Echo seem to go together, right? Well, as it turns out, no. But I was right about this being an effect of the nature of my receiver...

Last night I was listening to RCI English service at around 0030 UTC on 9570 kHz. Nice clear signal. No echo.

At 0100 UTC the program changed, and the echo started. A very strong echo.

I went to the RCI schedule. Here I found the answer:

At 0030 they were transmitting from their relay station in Cerrik, Albania on 9570 kHz.
At 0010 they switched programs, frequencies and transmitters. At 0100 Cerrik shut down, but the Quivican, Cuba relay came on on 9580 kHz. At the same time the RCI transmitter in Kasi Sabagh in far-off exotic Western China, in Xinjiang, fired up on 9535 kHz. Both transmitters were carrying the RCI English service.

You see, my little regens are not very selective, and the RCI transmissions are quite strong. So if I have my receiver tuned to around 9560 kHz, I'll be hearing BOTH the signal from Cuba AND the signal from Xinjiang. That would explain the echo.

To try to confirm this, last night I fired up my old Hammarlund HQ-100 receiver to see if I could discern the two different signals. I could. And the echo appeared when I tuned BETWEEN the two. You can hear this in the video above.

There is one remaining question here: Is the echo caused by the RADIO path difference between the two transmitters? Or are we just seeing the effect of the programming being transmitted at slightly different times, perhaps with this delay caused by INTERNET latency? Anyone know how RCI gets its signals from its Beijing studio to its distant transmitters? I calculate that the path difference is about 10,000 km. With c at 300,000 km/second, that would yield an echo of only about .03 seconds. The echo we are hearing sounds longer than that, so I suspect we are hearing a difference in studio-transmitter transmission time. What say the SWL RF gurus?

BTW: I think the same phenomenon may explain the echo on Brother Stair's "Overcomer" signal. I see that starting at 2200 UTC he is on BOTH 7570 kHz and 7730 kHz from RMI transmitters in Florida. Perhaps they are not synched up.

I think this is all very cool. Think about it: Here I am, sitting in Virginia in 2014, listening to the Albanian, Cuban, and Xinjiang relay stations of Radio China International on a receiver first built by some guy in England during the 1930s. And I'm trying to figure out if the echo I hear is caused by the limits imposed by the speed of light and the size of the earth, or by the time it takes packets to move through sub-oceanic fiber optic cables.

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Several people have e-mailed me suggesting that the weird echo I have been hearing on shortwave broadcast stations is in fact one of the fabled "Long Delayed Echoes" that radio amateurs have been hearing intermittently since about 1927. I was skeptical at first, but -- at least in the case of the Radio China signal -- I think LDE caused by the signal going around the globe several times does explain what I've heard. Each trip would add a delay of about .133 seconds, and that seems to match what we hear in my recording:

http://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2014/08/strange-echo-on-china-radio.html

Compare that with what K9FIK recorded on 10 meter SSB (thanks Stephen!):

http://swling.com/blog/2013/10/hearing-the-speed-of-light-dx-double-echo/
(you can listen to the audio on this one).

It sounds very similar.

If this is in fact LDE, I'm lucky -- this is pretty rare. And it is a eerie that I first heard it on on Regen receiver from the 1920s! Above is a picture of the regen used to study the FIRST LDEs. See: http://folk.uio.no/sverre/LDE/

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

A few weeks ago I noticed a strange echo on Radio China International's signal. If you scroll down a bit you can see my YouTube recording of the problem. On one of the SWL lists, there was speculation that this problem was the result of a flaw in the RCI digital studio gear. But then a few days ago I heard it again on RCI -- surely the tech-savvy Chinese would not have let this kind of problem persist for weeks.

Today I heard the same effect on a very different SW station -- this one an the 24/7 fire and brimstone broadcast that appears at many points on the dial. The effect is very similar to what I heard on RCI.

So OK all your shortwave gurus: What is going on here?

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Last night I was doing some shortwave listening on my new (OLD!) regen. As always, China Radio International was booming in on multiple frequencies. But as I tuned them in, I noted something strange: a very distinct echo on the signal (you can hear it in the video above). Very strange. Kind of like the Long Delayed Echos we've all heard about. I started thinking of explanations. Might this be some weird regen reverb effect? (You see -- I'm still wary of these regens!) But no, I checked -- the echo was there when I listened with my superhet HQ-100. Could it be that this was some strange multipath effect, perhaps involving multiple powerful transmitters in different locations? I was listening to the 0100-0200 UTC (20 Aug 2014) CRI English language service. (The echo continued when they switched to Chinese at 0200) I think the frequency was 9580 kHz. An SWL website says the transmitter was a relay station in Quivican, Cuba.

What do you guys think? These fellows might have an explanation:
http://swling.com/blog/2014/07/china-radio-international-warbling-on-daves-home-brew-receiver/

I really like shortwave listening with this old homebrew 1930s radio. There are still a lot of interesting signals out there. Recently heard: Voice of Vietnam, Radio Turkey, Radio Romania, WWV, WWVH, CHU, W1AW, transatlantic aircraft, Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand... and the mysterious numbers.

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

http://hackaday.com/2014/03/24/the-gathering-shanghais-hackaday-community/

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21587201-robert-ford-british-radio-operator-free-tibet-died-september-20th-aged-90-robert-ford

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Today I bought a copy of "Feynman's Tips on Physics." I wasn't sure about buying it, but this story in Ralph Leighton's foreword convinced me:

"At a lonely border post high on the Himalayan frontier, Ramaswamy Balasubramanian peered through his binoculars at the People's Liberation Army soldiers stationed in Tibet ― who were peering through their scopes back at him. Tensions between India and China had been high for several years since 1962, when the two countries traded shots across their disputed border. The PLA soldiers, knowing they were being watched, taunted Balasubramanian and his fellow Indian soldiers by shaking, defiantly, high in the air their pocket-sized, bright-red copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao ― better known in the West as "Mao's Little Red Book."

Balasubramanian, then a conscript studying physics in his spare time, soon grew tired of these taunts. So one day, he came to his observation post prepared with a suitable rejoinder. As soon as the PLA soldiers started waving Mao's Little Red Book in the air again, he and two fellow Indian soldiers picked up and held aloft the three, big, bright-red volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

One day I received a letter from Mr. Balasubramanian. His was among the hundreds I have received through the years describing the lasting impact Richard Feynman has had on people's lives. After describing the "red-books" incident on the Sino-Indian Frontier, he wrote, 'Now, twenty years later, whose red books are still being read?' "

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Pretty impressive for a guy whose previous project was a crystal controlled DSB transceiver, don't you think? They say that variety is the spice of life, and the Arduino board has been adding quite a bit of spice to my tech life lately. That tiny board up above the proto board is the six dollar DDS-9850 board -- it arrived in an envelope from Shenzhen, China last week. I hope to connect it to the Arduino and the LCD to make a sig generator or VFO.

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Chitika

Our New Sponsor: HOMEBREW 4 U! 家釀的你

Glowing Blue Numerals! A Frequency Counter for the BITX17 (VIDEO)

Radio China International Echo Mystery SOLVED!

Long Delayed Echo on Radio China International

Shortwave Echo Mystery on Yet Another SW Station. What is this?

Strange Echo on China Radio International

Hackaday Goes to Shanghai

"Robert Ford -- A British Radio Operator in Free Tibet..."

Feynman's Red Book (on the Sino-Indian Frontier)

Arduino Adventures: LCD screen added

AHMED HASSAN MOHAMMED

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