ICQPodcast Episode 478 - QRP Labs Q&A

iCQ Podcast Episode 478, QRP Labs Q&A.

Well hello fellow Amitabha Radio enthusiasts and welcome to the 478 episode of the iCQ

Amitabha Radio Podcast, supporting this episode by a month in the description donors.

In this episode we join Martin M1MRB, Chris, Mike 0, Tango Charlie Hattell, Martin, Mike 0,

Sierra Goldflim, Frank, Kilo 4, Foxtrot, Mike Cotell, Bill, Whiskey Charlie 3, Bravo and

Leslie Goldfer 0, Charlie in the Bravo to discuss this Amitabha Radio News.

Myself Colin M6B, B.O.I, rounds up the news in brief and this episode's feature is our

first of our manufacture Q&A, so we are joined by handsamers of QRP Labs to answer your

questions.

Now as always it's your very valuable donations of value that you send that way that keep

us your advert free.

We'd like to thank all of them on the description donors for supporting the work of the iCQ

podcast.

If you get value and enjoyment from today's show we ask you to consider supporting us by

going to iCQpodcast.com forward slash donate word to say whatever value you send back

our way we would greatly appreciate and I say we ask you to consider doing that so

as iCQpodcast.com forward slash donate.

Right now we're going to join Martin Chris, Martin, Frank, Bill and Leslie to discuss

and generate thoughts about the latest Amitabha Radio News including, hands, collect data

on blizzards and the RST president to contest as always hope you enjoy.

Well, hi guys and welcome to this episode of the iCQ podcast episode 478 and tonight

sir news round table for that episode tonight I'm John by Mr Chris Howard M0 TCH Hi

Chris.

Hi Martin, hi guys looking forward to this one.

Yeah, good to see you and yeah I saw you Monday so good to work you as always.

Also, my side of the pond who likes to get me in as much trouble as you can because it's

great fun isn't it mine?

You need no help getting yourself into trouble.

Yeah, is that Mr. Myroff or LM0 SGL?

Hello, I don't know why but you're asking me to be the best man at your wedding, you

know.

And you've got yourself in trouble there as well, didn't you?

I did, yeah, you said I was still talking to me.

I have no idea.

All right, okay, moving to the other side of the pond we have Mr. Frank Hell, K4FMH,

hi Frank.

Hey Martin, hey everybody, great to be here again.

Yeah, great to have you as always Frank.

Your side of the pond we got Mr. Bill Barnes, WC3B, hi Bill.

Hey Martin, good evening everybody.

Yeah, good impression I saw him, he's here shortly but we've missed you a few times because

I know you've been extremely busy with work Bill but great to have you here tonight.

And last but not least, he is with us back by popular demand and Leslie, G.C.R.H.T.I.B,

Leslie Patternfields, hi Leslie.

Good evening Martin, good to be on.

We have fun doing these, yeah, I've spoke to a number of listeners and they've said,

yeah, guys, you know, you really sound so you have fun and we do.

Can you put the outtakes on one and sort of an hour of the outtakes and the listeners

will just be cracking up?

They would but we took a lot of our rating.

We might lose our rating.

We definitely lose our ratings and in fairness, fairness, I did say we don't keep the bloopers.

However, the only blooper we have Leslie is of you and you know about it.

And let me add Martin, let me add and it was a very ethical blooper.

Well, we're out with one of them, that was one of them.

The other one was when Leslie was doing the experiment.

Now, I've got a feeling that was actually a different podcast that we do still have it.

All right, okay.

I have got another one as well of you trying to pronounce someone's name.

Me getting very angry about it as well.

You're getting drunk, you're getting in trouble.

Let's move on for a while.

Yeah, I think we ought to move on but yeah, we don't keep the bloopers because in fairness,

we probably wouldn't get a lot of the infuse we get because if people thought we were

going to make them look silly, poke fun of them, even though we poke fun of them.

Look silly.

Oh, of course we can.

We don't have to.

We already are.

That's right.

There is no proof necessary.

So I'm having it.

Just like our cast.

Moving along, Martin.

Let's get moving.

Okay.

First, the story.

Hams helped forecast a real time data on the Northeast Blizzard.

Now, that happened about a week or so ago, I believe and it was phenomenal what went

on.

Looking at it here, 350,000 customers to lost power in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The snowfall there was 37.8 inches, now that's almost up to your waist.

That's frightening.

Frank, what do you think on this one?

Now, turning to our live reporter in Eastern Pennsylvania, Bill Barnes.

I waved from my mountaintop eastwards towards the poke nose, is that storm went through.

We lost the state in New Jersey for a couple of days completely and it was what we call

a Noreaster.

So this is a winter storm that comes from the south up along the Atlantic.

They sometimes diverge inland, hit my house pretty good.

So 30 inches of snow is not unusual with a Noreaster.

Just we haven't gotten them in quite a few years.

Well, this one went a little further east, got New Jersey, Hudson Valley, Rhode Island,

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Eastern part of Canada.

It was pretty brutal.

But, article you sent out highlighted the local areas teams were also involved in the

National Weather Service SkyWorn Program.

This is a program of train spotters, I am in the SkyWorn Program, and they teach you

how to take measurements and proper ways to collect it and basically report in the data.

Most folks nowadays either do the web submission or they text National Weather Service, they're

reading with their SkyWord spotter numbers.

But this was interesting to me because they actually activated nets on amateur radio and

took reports and then collected them all together and then sent them in as a unit bundle to

the local national weather services offices for them to help their forecast.

The real important part about the SkyWorn Program is it actually helps train the National

Weather Service folks when they're looking at their Doppler 88 radars and they see things

they can associate, okay, this on the screen I'm seeing right now ends up being two inches

of snow an hour or this ends up being a heavy thunderstorm with hail or this one ends up

being a tornado or this one ends up being a downburst.

Because of those reports it helps the folks that are actually doing the forecasting be

able to read their weather radars a little bit better.

The article went pretty descriptive on all the reporting they did, but really it is a

really great program to help out our National Weather Service here in the States so that they

make better forecasts and understand what they're seeing on the computer screens from the

radar system.

Martin, I'll jump back in.

I didn't want to be guilty of bringing coal to Newcastle so to speak and that was right

up where Bill was located, but let me dovetail, Bill did an outstanding job over viewing that.

It's like any set of sensors or models based upon sensor data, you kind of always need

to validate or ground truth as the case may be.

All the problems we have here in the U.S. we have a great program as a concept and you'll

hear people argue, in fact there was a YouTube video that made the rounds this past week

is that race aries and racies are dead and the guy went on and on and on and on and whether

he was right or whether he was wrong is another issue.

Problem is you have some sky-waring programs and aries nets in some areas that are outstanding

and this is one of them.

I happen to be involved with sky-warned like Bill, trained sky-warned spotter.

I've got a number.

They'll believe me that it's a quarter inch hail, you know, if I have that number with

it.

Other people, they may not.

And so the Jackson weather office, we work with them and they've worked with them for

a number of years and here's what happens.

Personnel in the National Weather Service, very.

Some go, Bahaomba, I don't need no stinking hams telling me what my radar says.

Others say, I'd love to have you work with me.

So while there's a national MOU with the weather service for aries, local offices vary.

And when there's a new director in a weather service office, you sort of have to read and

go shake that relationship.

We have one that comes and goes a little bit here.

We have some directors that come in and some retire, some move on, some get promoted.

We have a pretty good one here right now.

And ours is more severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

And we might every several, several years get some snow, but nothing, nothing like the

noraster that Bill was talking about.

So we have a lot of variability in how well this works.

They have gone to NWS chat, which is an online collection system that allows a couple of

things to happen.

Because keep in mind, you have TV weather people.

They're also monitoring this so they can get it into their own screen weather forecast.

And they're reading the mail, if you will, on the NWS chat.

They kind of don't have time to talk live to a ham operator.

So things have modernized more from the voice nets, although we still use those as Bill

describe.

Well, the country, this large in the topography, this different in the well,

prevailing weather patterns that different things are different across the country.

And you get a little more success than others.

This was clearly a dramatic success back to you, Martin.

Yeah, as you guys have pointed out, yeah, as for us in the UK, this would be phenomenal

weather.

I mean, I'm still old enough to remember the winter of 1963 that literally brought the

UK to a standstill where I don't think we had as much as you had there.

So that took us out for about six, eight weeks.

That was a worry one.

Leslie, what do you think on this one?

You know, the amp amps did pretty good.

I thought, well, look at this article, you just sort of say to yourself, they're doing

a great job, you know, nobody wants to use these systems.

You actually don't want them to be in use.

You want them to practice, practice, practice, practice, get your procedures right.

But if they're needed, and in this case, they certainly will, and they certainly did

a fine job, I think the other two contributors really sort of explained how the system works

and how it gives sort of on the spot data to people like the television studios and the

metrologist actual data to what's happening on the ground and to my mind, that's actually

invaluable.

So good on them.

I think it's absolutely great.

Over to you, Martin.

Yeah, I think you're right.

If, you know, we need to get, we all want data, we all want good data and we want to

know about it, and if people are giving the right data, they can prepare for heavy problems

like heavy snowfall and things like that, in advance, I would suggest, mine, what do you

think?

You know, listening to, I mean, we've talked about these nets and things before, and I

think I've asked the question of, you know, how effective are they, but listening to

what Bill and Frank have been saying, I had no idea that these things fed into other

things and the TV weather forecast has used the data and stuff that they were collating

to help understand their maps and things like that.

They mentioned the new story that obviously amateur radios become to the rescue to help

with comms and things like that.

43 inches of snowfall.

That's, you know, that's like three, three and a bit feet, something like that.

It's incredible.

They talk about, a lot of people say they rely on mobile phones and things with comms and

what, yeah, that only works if you've got your network working, doesn't it?

But it just sounds like that they've provided some very valuable communication at the times

when it was, when it was needed the most, when all else fails.

Yeah, certainly.

And with what, 30, 350,000 homes without power, you know, the amateur radios community would

have helped out, I think, quite a bit there.

Wouldn't you, Grace?

Yeah, so I agree with everyone said really much more to add on this one, but absolutely,

I think this is one of the situations where, you know, we can, you know, yeah, great people

can communicate by the internet, they can send in reports that way and if that works

fantastic.

But when the power fails, when the internet or the networks go down, you know, the cell

phone goes down, etc, amateur radios is the back of business, the ultimate back at

we know we can always get on the air with a simple car battery and a piece of wire and

there's an aerial and a radio and we can always get through and that's where it's a great

thing to have.

So, and yeah, in this situation, when you've got, you know, an awful weather with massive

amounts of snow, etc, then I think our hobby can really come in and be really, be a real

service to the community.

So, yeah, that's all got to send us some more to him.

Yeah, if I was this Chris, no problem on that one, then I think that just proves that

usefulness to society.

Next news story, it's kind of sad, but it's kind of police that people are stepping

up to the mark.

The gentleman who produced Ham Clock, who died about a month ago and this is a terrific

piece of software that I've certainly used and certainly, you know, if you have it running

in an event, people will stop and look at this Ham Clock map.

It feels a whole screen, a whole computer screen.

It's something phenomenal, but I know you've used it, Frank, so I'm going to pass it to

you this time because I know you've used it.

What's your thoughts on this one?

I have used Ham Clock.

In fact, I bought a couple of the Intervato, which is a third-party company that made

those small computers and they made a turnkey operation.

And there were about $50 at U.S.

And people were really drawn to it.

It was inexpensive.

It allowed you to make some customizations to put your call sign, your location.

If you want a DX report, you could identify and say, you're up from the state or Australia

or something like that.

You could put satellites on it and you could put the solar, and it's just a lot of things

that you could do.

And it came in under the premium product Geocron, which I had been a beta tester for Patrick

and the Geocron company out in Portland.

And it's a marvelous commercial product, small computer.

If you've got a 4K monitor, it knock your eyes out.

And I forget to name, but there's a fellow in the United Kingdom that has some neat software

that I purchased and used.

It's a little more technical to maintain and this kind of thing.

And so Ham Clock hit that sweet spot where it wasn't a total appliance.

You got to change things up in it, but it just worked.

And what was really neat is it would operate headless.

So you didn't have to have a small screen or a dedicated screen to it.

You could access it via a browser that would automatically scale to the monitor that it

was on.

And I used it that way.

And so I have a couple of computers in my shack and then one here at my desk where I'm

speaking at at the moment.

And if I wanted to monitor things, I would just take a browser tab and point it to that

internal IP address.

So when that went away and it was very unfortunate, but that's always not well planned as the

saying goes.

And some Ham's got in gear and a group created a free back in server where the data come

from.

And now a second group has reconstituted the original server at a different address with

just one command to change your existing ham clock to point to that new server.

And I'll leave the rest of it to the other presenters, but I found it to be one of those

items that once you have it, you really miss it if it's if it's not working.

Yeah, I agree with you Frank.

When we were doing trial of libraries on the air last year, Ham clock was one of the

things we had running.

It's a showstopper.

It stops the general public.

What's that?

They come across and Martin, about the time this happened, I was on the way to taking one

of my two innovative machines and posted into library and they were getting a glass case

so it wouldn't walk off for for display and I'm with you.

So yeah, oh yeah.

Mine, I only thought so on the hand clock.

Have you played with it?

You know what, I've not played with it.

It's one of those things.

It's been like, well, let me say a lot of things.

It's been on my to do list of like, I just at some point I need to get around to setting

this up.

It looks to be an absolutely fantastic toll and it's like, if you can, if I wanted it to

do a couple of things and I don't know, I'd never really looked into it further.

If you could do that, if you could do that, then absolutely I'm going to dedicate a

monitor to that.

I am my shack, run it on a pile, whatever and be done with it.

But like a lot of things, time has just got away from it and I've never got round to doing

anything with it.

Obviously, the news came out about the guy that developed it, but they do say here that

they've developed, the users have developed a free backend server and I don't want to

be negative about this because obviously people want to keep this project running.

They've developed the server as you rightly know running the digital talk group.

Service costs money, not just electricity, but internet costs, you know, if you're in

a data center, you've got to pay for the data that goes through it.

If you're running it from your house, you've got to obviously pay for your internet connection

and whatever.

Obviously, the bigger the more users you get, the more data is going to go across it,

the bigger servers you're going to need.

Part of me wonders how long will this be free for?

It almost needs to be, and maybe it is, maybe because I've not used it, I don't know.

It almost needs to be the majority of it runs on your own computer and then calls the data

from a variety of sources like your data.

That's what happens, Martin.

That's exactly what happens.

That's what the backend server is.

Okay.

So it's not a server that runs in a data center that you would connect to?

Not really at all.

Yeah.

Oh, there we go, that in which case, this is definitely worth a look.

Well, I thought you'd be excited about that one.

I'm very excited.

I'm going to try, I've got a spare monitor sitting right beside me here.

I'm going to give that a go.

Well, how about waiting until we finish recording, Mike?

I'm going to go and reach you.

Hang on, I've lost the clean for you, you know what I'm saying?

Very excited.

Yeah.

Chris, have you had a play with a hand clock?

I haven't.

It looks interesting.

I guess the amount of what I'm thinking is, is this not some web page?

Could someone who's not just created this on a web server, so we're just having to

rather have them to install it on your machine locally, don't know.

I'm guessing it's, I guess you can create connected to some sort of API back ends.

I don't think it would cost a massive amount of money to run the backend.

So Martin's concerns there.

Hopefully people would donate towards doing it.

That's what I would hope.

I would hope people would know.

What happens?

What happens, Chris, if I can interject to help, is there's two ways to go on about it.

You can have a local Raspberry Pi or some other whatever, and you can even run it on

WSL on Windows, you know, in the Linux portal.

And I've done that.

I actually forgot for a moment that I have an instance running that way.

You can either have each individual client go out to all these different places that PSK

reporter and whatever, and you're going to generate a whole lot of heat on those servers.

Or you can have an intermediary server that, say, once an hour or once every clock cycle

of whatever, as you said, it'll go get the data.

And then you point to it from your client and get that.

And that's two models.

And that's what this backend server was doing, was sucking in those particular data points.

And then you called what you wanted from the Hamtalk server.

So I'll back out of here, but that's kind of what was happening.

Thanks.

Thanks for the explanation in front of us.

That's interesting.

So it's great.

Someone put this back on the air and I think I spent Martin's point, you know, it may

be that they meant to make a small charge.

There may be some, some hosting cost there that they might need to cover.

And that's only fair enough isn't that if someone's providing a service.

So I wish them all the best to look.

It sounds like it's touchy interesting and useful things to have.

Yeah, certainly that's what I used to have it running on my link, sir, computer.

Until I replaced the computer and I never installed it again.

It was one of the things that I was going to do and never got around to.

Oh, final words on this one, but you used it.

Yeah, I've used a ham clock before I really wasn't too much into it.

And it's good that someone came out with this replacement back in.

That's really good.

What I jumped on because it's both live on the web or you can put it on the pies, open

ham clock.

It's a GitHub project and openhamclock.com and it's, you know,

pretty much the same kind of thing.

I have it running just because I have the spots filtered.

I think it's where the DX is coming in at.

So it's just another view for what's that Frank PSK reporter or something that we use.

Yeah, yeah, and it'll do whisper.

I mean, most of most of them will do that too.

Yep, yep.

So there's, there's options now.

And it's nice that folks have picked up on this and provided options.

Yeah, I think you're right, Bill.

I think you're right, but let's say it will be a shame to lose this application

because it's a great piece of work.

Moving on to our next new story.

And I thought the boys were going to tell me now we should run this.

It is interesting.

It doesn't, on the face of its own, so it's much to do with radio because

with some drones that have caught video capturing video in East Texas

of a hot air balloon rescue at 1100 feet.

The radio part is the air balloon is impaled on a radio tower.

And they're trying to get these people down from the radio tower.

I thought this was quite interesting.

Now, Leslie, I know you saw this one and you were getting quite excited about it.

Martin, I'm not keen on quite as at all.

I went in a lot the other day and that was a bit as much as I could do.

Anyway, I'm looking at this video and with the drones flying around

and this hot air balloon basically torn to bits,

but hanging on there, so to speak.

And they got these ropes, guidelines tied to the hot air balloon.

And I thought, no, I was absolutely astonished.

And I don't know how many fire people, there was a number of a team of them

that managed to get the man and the woman down.

I'm just trying to see 35 members of the fire department responded.

And you could not pay me enough money to do that job.

I went no way, but apparently they was rescued safe and sound with no injuries.

So yeah, there's a good outcome, but I would not like to do their job for anything.

Over to you, Martin.

Yeah, well, I was lucky enough many moons ago to have a flight in a hot air balloon

as a corporate customer of one of the big computer companies in the UK.

And they took me up in it.

From what I remember, and I was only a passenger, but from what I remember,

you only got one control, put more heat in with the burner into the balloon, it goes up.

And it gradually comes down to you, put more heat in it goes up.

And you're blown where you, it decides by the wind.

So I'm wondering whether they run out of fuel and they couldn't get the burner

to burn quick enough to get a higher, but that's quite frightening when you look at the pictures.

So yeah, Chris, what's your thoughts?

Well, again, not also not a fan of heights, Martin, you recall a couple of times

of being to freely solve them.

We've been at the tower in the harbor there, and I've got about a third of the way up

and decided, now I'm not going any further.

So I remember Edmund being at the top last time we went on his handhelds,

putting a few contacts out or putting a few calls out on two meters and having a chat

with some of the folks in the area.

But no, heights are definitely not my thing.

And every day in a hot air balloon, not sure I'd like it, not sure.

But no, I mean, the video, I'm sure it'll go on the website somewhere on our new section,

is amazing.

You know, there is the other side of the drone footage there of this rescue and scary stuff.

I don't know, it mentions about, there's a number of different transmitters on this tower,

so cellular services, public safety as well as, I think, broadcast as well.

I don't know if any of that stuff had to get turned off.

I don't know if there's any RF issues about having that on,

while you've got rescuers up there and people hanging from a rather broken looking balloon.

So, I don't know if it affected any of those services while the rescue was up,

you know, kind of in progress.

But so, I felt everything, in fact, anything got damaged.

But what's the most important thing was that those folks got rescued and sounds like

the local Friday's partner did a great job in getting those people down.

So, yeah.

Oh, it all ended well, but it could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

But, yeah.

Yeah, it was a bit worrying.

So, Martin, before I give it to our American boys, do you any thoughts on this one?

Yeah, I mean, I was, what I watched the video, and it's, there's,

not only is there drone filming it, there's, you can see at least two or three other drones

around as well, capturing it as well, which I presume are to do with the rescue,

you know, the rescue team so they can see what's going on rather than like a new service or anything.

It's amazing how calm, sort of, the balloon was hanging on this thing,

and the basket was several feet out.

They'd obviously tethered it off.

It's just how calm the guy that's just done the basket is.

He's just like, just sitting there like, yeah, okay, I'll be over whenever, you know,

it's quite happy.

People are hanging on the tower.

Obviously, they trained for this kind of thing.

But looking at the tower, it was a tower that had various services on it for 105.7KYKXFM.

It was running 100 kilowatts ERP as well as various translators or relays as we call them

in the rest of the world.

So there's multiple FM's up there.

So yeah, RF is probably something that they would need to have considered when they were

going up there.

I have seen people, obviously, shouldn't be, but people climbing radio towers and waving

like a flag next to the one of the transmitting antennas.

And the flag just caught light as it, obviously, ERP or ARP, or something across.

And certainly with a hundred kilowatts, which is crazy power for concept stations in London

and run about four kilowatts, you know, I wouldn't want to be climbing that.

So I would imagine before the fire crew and what have you were allowed on the tower,

they probably had to either turn those transmitters off, switch back up, or just turn the power

down or whatever.

I know when people climb past and they could generally call down to the ground and they

turn the power into those radio bays onto low power as they go past.

But yeah, it was interesting.

Fortunately, where they got stuck wasn't next to the antennas.

You can actually see when the drone looks down, you can see the syrup bays below, though

it wasn't right next to an FM broadcast antenna, but yeah, it's scary stuff.

And yeah, my mum's been in the hot air balloon.

I remember her telling me it was a similar thing.

I think you said, you know, it's up or down and you go where the wind wants you to go

and if the wind wants you to go towards the radio tower, then that's what happens.

I guess that's why they check the weather and stuff beforehand to get understanding

where they're going to go.

I can only presume with a say, like you say, they run out of gas.

And we have the expert on the call, don't we, Lesley?

I'm sure could work out the expert, Lesley needs spreadsheet in terms of RS safety.

100 kilowatts.

100 kilowatts.

100 kilowatts.

100 kilowatts at 105.7.

Pretty, pretty close range.

Probably wouldn't say FM.

You don't want to be a lot of different.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Bill, what's your thoughts on this one?

I mean, it is from your country.

Although, it's a lot further south than yours, isn't it?

Yeah.

Everyone covered it really well.

I mean, the only comment I had is when I was reading this last night and I watched a video,

that's scary.

Four hours.

Pull these spokes off the tower.

Very, very frightening.

I'm glad everybody's okay.

Oh, yeah.

So Frank, have you had a guy in a hot air balloon and what's your thoughts on this one?

I've had a very small go and it was in North Carolina.

My son was a small child and there was a hot air balloon and a fair or something that

we were we were at and we went up maybe 25 feet and one of the master anchors was never

only so we were never going to go all the way up.

And if you're not familiar with that, that'll get you adrenaline going as well.

Of course, my little four year old son was, let's go higher.

Looking at this story, there was one thing that I think may have been involved.

Says preliminary FAA briefing said the hot air balloon became entangled in a guy wire.

Now I vividly remember my wife and I sitting on top of what's called the space needle in

San Antonio and there's several of these around the country.

There's one in Seattle.

We've had dinner on top of that one as well and it slowly turns around.

So every hour you've made a 360 degree revolution around the top of that tower with a restaurant

on the top and I remember watching this little thin stream of smoke go straight up and there

was a fire and I found out that it was almost a hundred miles away from the news coverage

in the newspaper the next day.

So we were there and you could see a hundred miles.

That's San Antonio, which is South Central Texas.

East Texas is the little hillier.

Here's my point.

I wonder if what happened is the navigator in the hot air balloon simply didn't see the

guy wire, saw the tower, but maybe didn't see that particular guy wire and may have underestimated

how much loft they needed.

I'm on out of pilot.

I don't know.

They were safe.

I will say this to our audience in the States.

This reminded me of a story of the lawn chair Larry flight out in California back in the

early 80s this guy for these home I beer and watch this things.

He bought a bunch of weather balloons from a military surface store 45 of them eight

foot balloons harness them to a lawn chair got a six pack of beer CB radio pellet guns

some sandwiches and so on in the camera and he let her rip and he got up to 16,000 feet

and an airline pilot called in to the nearest control center and says I'm not been drinking

I promise, but I just passed the guy in a lawn chair.

So I don't think this story may have been quite as dramatic as the lawn chair Larry story.

But it really got a lot of people's attention and it just goes to show you that nothing's

completely safe and just great work by the emergency people to take their time and get

these folks down and as as Martin Roth will say, how did the two people in the balloon

basket remain so calm?

Oh yeah.

Well, I just do my my experiences two things I'll tell you about balloon my balloon flight.

Number one, we're going up and down and the pilot said, that's what you don't see

very much when you're high up and we were I suppose getting lower and lower and we came

across into a field or just above a field that had just been harvested all the corner

been cut off and it was early evening and there were hundreds of rabbits in this field

and he said, just be quiet a minute, I only got down to about six foot off the ground

and he fired the burners and he's just in the whole field just moved all these rabbits

went everywhere.

I was it was hilarious.

The other one is when the balloon comes into land, he doesn't always just sit in the basket

straight down often, it'll tip the basket over so you know, if you're thinking of having

going a hot air balloon, they don't just land with a basket, not like to take off often

they'll tip over and you have to hang on until it stops moving.

Anyway, that's another story.

Move on to our next news story.

Listen out for the RSGB president, he's going to operate as GB5CC, that's Bob BB and Chris

and I met Bob over in three, carbon and we also met him at next to him for his last

year.

Do you want to go first, Chris?

Yeah, I can do so, absolutely so Bob is going to be operating on this year's Commonwealth

Contest, a GB5CC and he's doing it as a calendar memorial to the previous president Bob

William G3PGT, who's had the last year in the last year so he's sort of doing it as a nod

to Bob.

But yeah, he's up to make lots of contacts in the contest and you know, these guys, you

know, even though he's a president, he's still an amateur, he's still in the air and

he can still work him.

So yeah, give it a go.

Yeah, I thought Bob was a nice guy, we met him in the first time we met him was in

Freak Salvin and I don't think he was quite prepared to see about eight orange shirts

suddenly appearing in front of him, but that was good, that was good.

Leslie, have you got any thoughts on this one?

Well, I'm asking, I think it's good to show respect to people that contribute to normalisation.

Honestly, Contest aren't my game but I'm sure other people will be delighted to work

with G-G-B5CC myself, I'm not like I'm not Contest guy so I think I'll give that one

of this, Martin.

Yeah, no problem, so if you're not into the contest and I'm not contestant, what I will

say though guys, and certainly for the UK, and now if you're a podcast listener in the UK,

I'm saving you bacon.

The 15th of March, a week Sunday, his mother's day, not get your mother if you need me to

get me.

Martin, thanks for the reminder, I was panicking and I thought it was just weekend, it's

not, it's weekend after, thank you.

It's the week, it's all got time, it's all got time to sort it out, where you have.

You have.

Okay, move over to the States, Frank, you know, I know this is a UK story, but at least

time, I'm present, I think it goes, I thought.

Absolutely, and it's in memory of a former RSGB President Bob Wayland G3PJT came

a silent key last year, and I just think that's a very nice gesture by the President

BB to operate in memory of one of his predecessors who passed on, so good, that's a good thing

and I hope a lot of him's tried to work him during this contest.

Yeah, yeah.

Really science week starts, the party before the clock class goes out, and goes through

to Sunday the 15th, mother's day again.

This is an event in the UK that the RSGB with amateur radio are trying to promote because

it does promote STEM and a lot of other things, but British science week happens every year

and it tries to bring science to youngsters and families alike.

Leslie, do you know about this?

Well, Martin, I think British science week is a good idea, anything that gets radio

and the hobby of amateur radio out there.

Yes, it's got the STEM aspect, which is really, really good about science technology,

engineering and maths, and it's to do with new audiences and the RSGB involved, and

I do know that the RSGB supports things like this.

When we had our local club and they sent us, should we say, the paraphernaly of the material

that we could do the show with, and we were very grateful for that, it's getting the

whole thing, it's about getting the hobby of amateur radio out there, and that's a good

thing.

And I think there's quite a number of clubs involved, the Chums for the amateur radio

science society, the Lincoln Portable Radio Group, Crow Thorn on Woking without men's

shed and Bracknow amateur radio club and a self-dirt, Derbyshire and Ashby Woods amateur

radio group.

Sorry, if I'm mispronounce that, but there's certainly quite a few number of clubs being

involved, which is a good thing for the hobby, over to you, Martin.

Yeah, I'm glad when we promote ourselves and we show the public what we can do.

Are you going to look out for a British science week?

Well, it's something that I wondered, it starts somewhat Friday the 6th of March finishes

on the 15th of March.

How have I not, how have we not heard of British science week anywhere else?

I mean, maybe I've got my head under or I don't know, but it's not just amateur radio,

it's all sorts of stuff.

How is nobody else shouting about this?

As it says, there's a number of clubs hosting stuff, including Chelms for the amateur

radio society.

I did my foundation and intermediate with those guys, so there's definitely going to be

some good stuff coming out of them.

I'm sure of it, but hopefully people get on air, if people are out promoting the hobby

in any way.

It's a good thing.

Please ask for help.

Yes, it's a good thing.

Please ask for help.

I'm sure there will be people there.

If you hear people calling, please don't say 5, 9, next, give my conversation.

Don't say 5, 9, next and stop talking about your ailments.

Just say hello, especially if it's a younger person calling.

You never know who's out there.

They are the future of the hobby, but anything that gets people there, the hobby in a good

way, it's definitely a good thing.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Well, I'm sure it does get promoted.

It only gets promoted through schools, and I'm surprised your good lady being a teacher

hasn't had it to her school.

She might have done, but she hasn't mentioned it to me.

Yeah, I appreciate that, but I think they talked a lot to schools and that on this.

Chris, what's your thoughts?

Well, anything that helps us to promote the hobby, I think is fantastic.

I think amateur radio is science.

I think there's a lot of science involved in our hobby.

So if these clubs are going out there and demonstrating amateur radio to the public,

then absolutely if we can go along and help them, or if we can at least be on the radio

to talk to them, that's going to be, you know, people perhaps are doing, I mean, the first

experience of radio, perhaps sending ingredients, machines, that sort of thing, then having

friendly, I'm a friendly person, either end of the radio, we're always very helpful,

and it really helps to promote the hobby.

So I think, I think this is a win-win.

I think people to get, let's go, get to know about science, promote our hobby, and

it will also, you know, give the public something interesting to get involved with.

So I think this is a good one.

Yeah.

That's why lots can happen from this.

Now Bill, I know this is a UK thing, but, you know, do your schools have science weeks

and things like that going on, or your university where you work?

Do they have a, like, a science week event like this?

Yeah, but first, M0SGL, 59QRZ contest.

Anyway, I'm aware of some of the school districts have science weeks.

I don't think it's right now.

I think it's later in the school year, and we have a program, Frank's hurt us before

science and motion, where folks at the university go out to elementary schools to basically show,

I'm trying to remember exactly the whole list, but it's basically an experimental.

They take out science lessons that are based around doing experiments to various areas.

I know that's a thing.

The vet school at Mississippi State used to take a cow that had a port hole in his side

to feed him an ice cream cone, and they could see it coming by.

You know, good or bad on that.

That's a good example for animal science doing that.

Okay.

All right.

I was thinking of a sublimation of dry ice in the, you know, from solid to gas, but

okay.

I had to.

That too.

But yes, in general, these things are going on, so it's nice that they're having a British

science week, and I hope all of them work out really well with the clubs there, because

yes, so do I.

I hope, you know, the people who put these on do a lot of work to get them on.

Frank, last words on this one?

Well, let me give some applause to RSGB.

I think here in the States, we tend to maybe wax egotistically about Professor Einstein

and all who came after him, Stephen Hawking and all the wonderful sites we have here.

But let's just remember a little history.

British science is what gave rise to science in the US, and there are so many preeminent

scientists from the universities in the United Kingdom, just incredible history there.

And it continues.

I read a lot of work out of UK universities.

So the British science week does something build described things over here in the US.

It's a little more hitter mess, just maybe because it's so much larger and less organized.

And so I say good on the British Science Association for putting on British science week

and the RSGB for participating.

And I just think that's a tremendous thing.

And as the other presenters have said, getting what we do out there within that stream of science

and that we're part of that, because frankly, it's one of the parts of science that particularly

younger people can get access to directly, parents may not want to put a Bunsen burner

in the home, you know, but you can get into amateur radio and these kits that are being

sent out to do some of this stuff, I think is a great mechanism.

So I'll certainly give a round of applause for RSGB and what they're doing in the UK on

this.

Well, thanks to that one Frank and in fairness, I think British science week is worth noting.

I tend to, I know of it because I've promoted it a couple of times at the library, but it's

one of those things it's not as promoted as much as it could be.

It would be nice if the powers that be gutted out to the general public.

It probably goes into schools, people get it in the schools, and if they're not involved

in it, then it doesn't move out from the schools.

So that's my opinion.

Okay, that concludes our news stories.

Let's find out what the guys have been up to.

Bill, I'm going to let you go first just in case you ever hard-stop when need to get

away.

So I know sometimes people are chasing you all the time.

So we've been up to you, Bill, since the last time we spoke.

Yep, I need to get children, the sports here shortly.

So thank you.

Then a lot going on.

So the biggest part is my goal last year was to work 100 DXCC countries on Morris code.

I did that.

I got all the, you know, confirmations and long book of the world.

I ended up with 115 stations.

So I sent away for my DXCC club, a century club in CW, and I finally filled up the form

for phone.

So now I have DXCC on three different modes.

Brought my whole country total up to 232 out of, well, I think it's 340.

So I am slowly working the world.

So that's, you know, exciting.

Real wise, lots of soda chasing.

I finally hit a thousand points in chasing soda stations.

So I am a Shaq Sloth.

It doesn't really sound that appealing.

Worked a bunch of DX stations last time, including the KP5 DX position and I'm listening

to the DX position on Bavae right now.

So that's one of the ones I need.

So I will continue to try to chase them when I can't, until they're done with their DX

position here in a couple of weeks.

So a lot going on, a lot of activity, a lot of fun.

Yeah, sounds like you're having busy, Bill.

And congratulations on your certificates there.

Frank, what have you been up to since the last time you spoke on the podcast?

Well, I'll begin by congratulating Bill.

I was going to do the Wayne's World movie We're Not Worthy, We're Not Worthy.

But it means that in all sincerity, quite an accomplishment Bill.

So congratulations.

I've been doing several things.

I've got the galley proofs for my next article in practical wireless.

It's on the wavecaster vertical.

A couple of hams inspired me and it's based on the carbon mask.

Vertical, easy to build up, take down, goes into a little small zippered case.

It'll be in the April issue and it's designed for 40, 20 and 15 works, works pretty easy

there.

Still doing the research on the viability of a program for activating the local parts

in the US.

I published some of that research on k4fmh.com and there's more to come.

It's been discussed a bit on Reddit and created a little bit of a wave there in terms

of social media.

And it's not pro or con on POTA.

I think POTA is one of the most impactful programs we've had, certainly in the US but in

long, long, long time.

But there are a lot of people in urban areas that would really like local parts there.

So I'm doing the research piece as part of a group that's just looking at whether or

not it makes sense to try to bring local parks into a different program since POTA said

they don't want to do that.

If part of this, I've launched a new research effort on where their hands live.

Well, it may seem like a dumb question, well, you know, I know where they live.

Well, but from a national point of view, I began to look at, I've geocoded the December

31st, 2025 slice of the FCC database for hands and taking out those with expired licenses.

I've got all them geocoded and I've linked those individual amateur license locations

including the Erasmarton to census geographies like are you in a metropolitan,

micro-polloton or non-metropolitan area?

Are you in an urban zone?

Are you inside of a town or municipality or not?

And what is your block group location?

Now block groups in the US, if listeners are not familiar with it, are the closest census

geography to a neighborhood that we have.

And so I've taken a lot of socioeconomic data that we have available for block groups

and while we may not have that measured for hands like median income, how many work

in the technology occupation and so on, we do have characteristics there for their neighbors.

Now the other thing is I've used remote sensing data from the land use and land cover data

system from a US geological survey used to use some of that in class when I teach remote

sensing.

And so I've attached that to each ham record.

What kind of landscape do they live on, do they live near open water, do they live

on barren land, do they live in a forest, do they live in developed land or how intense

is that development and so on.

And that's taken about a month of PC processing time and the PC that I've done that on

this, got 256 gigs a RAM, two CPUs, eight terabytes of NVME disk for I.O.

So for a non-commercial setting or non-university setting, it's not too bad.

Taking me a month to pull all that together but it's beginning to give me the opportunity

to really look at where hands are and I think there'll be some surprises in that.

Nobody articles posted on my blog at K4FMH on where the hands are and one will be coming

out fairly soon.

Still working on finalizing that ground playing vertical for 20 meters, the weather and timing

has just not been good for me to finalize that but that's certainly in the works.

Preparing for an invited talk to RATPAC in May, RATPAC is an online group of people centered

on the West Coast.

They contacted me about my blog articles on powder activation and activators and some

of that that I published and they were very complimentary and wanted me to present some

of that to their audience.

So I think May is the first opening to head.

I also finally built out that GMRS radio with a BTEC 50 watt GMRS radio on a go box and

I gave a little demonstration at the recent Jackson amateur radio club meeting here.

And a friend gave me a surplus UHF mag mount a whip that I used and I put a square of magnetic

stainless steel on the top side of the go box when it's laid down and opened.

Not all stainless steel is magnetic, it depends on how it's poured and what ingredients

they use but that antenna will just pop on there and stay there pretty sturdily.

And it will actually fit inside the ammo can that I used for the radio.

So I've got that out and done and also gave a talk to the Jackson club about where GMRS

licenses are located in the US and Mississippi.

Everybody was completely shocked at how many of those there are and how close and how many

of their neighbors have GMRS licenses.

We only have a few GMRS repeaters in the state but two are here in South Jackson and

one to the west office in Bixburg.

So we've invited GMRS operators in the area to visit our club in the coming months.

Let's see if we can broker some sort of common community where we can work together particularly

on service projects.

So Martin, that's mostly what I've been up to since I've been on the podcast last time.

Yeah, well I've seen some of your diagrams, some of the previous look you did show me

some of them.

It's very, very interesting, put it that way.

I can imagine the amount of work you did to get that done.

Leslie, what have you been up to since last time you were on the podcast?

Oh, what have I been up to?

Well, a couple of things I've finished off renovating that most key I was talking about

a couple of sessions ago.

So that's finally done.

The 80-meter trend, little trend CW trend C, we're still on the bench and I'm trying

to get it done to actually get on and do it but that's not been there.

That's not making the progress I would like but the other two things are the, I've been

taking a couple of courses at the local college, one on WordPress and the other one on introduction

to IO, so there was gaps in my knowledge on that, so I've very, very interesting courses

indeed, so I was quite pleased about them and that's about it from me Martin.

Well, as I think I said before, all knowledge is good knowledge, they can't take it off

here Leslie and you can use it going forward.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Martin, what have you been up to since last time we spoke?

Well, I've been up to, I have been, a few bits and pieces actually, I've been, I've rediscovered

DX Heat as I quite a useful website to have running in the background while I'm working

at home and when some of the bands have been opening, I've been switched on Whisper and

seeing what I can do on there.

Actually, 10 meters has been quite open recently all around the world and I've noticed

actually just playing with the different antennas I've got.

It's actually 2HF antennas, one is an off center fed dipole freight up to 80 meters.

The other one is, it's a solar car, I like 2000, so a CB antenna that I had up on my

parent's house, but it's up here and I use that for 10 and 12 meters and what have you.

And it works really, really, it's a lot quieter than the long dipole, but it does pull in

a lot more signals, it's particularly on tail, I guess, because it's a tuned antenna pretty

much for 10 meters.

But yeah, that's worked really well with her, although I have noticed that it wasn't

working as well and I realised that the clock on my laptop is a Windows 10 laptop which

Microsoft have obviously withdrawn support for, so the clock syncing just isn't working,

so I've re-synced that and it suddenly starts working against, I've been playing with

that.

I have been, we've got some wireless lights at work, these are like up lighters that you

put on the floor and normally are lights, you think them via DMX which is just like

essentially it's a serial cable that goes between the lights and you can choose the colour

and things like that.

I wanted to make them wireless, so I bought a wireless transmitter for them, they do support

it and teaching myself how to understand that.

If you can get your head around how the system works, it's actually really simple.

But playing with the system and making it work in the first place and understanding how

to program the lights to talk to this transmitter has been a little bit of a learning curve

for me because I can do it with the cable system, they problem, but getting them to sync

with the transmitter when you've only got four little digits on the screen to tell it

what it's doing, that has been fun.

But we've now got eight up lighters in the office that you put around the edge, you switch

the colour on and it just lights up the wall and makes it, makes you meeting room, that's

like a meeting room and while I can event space, which has been fun.

The other thing I've been playing with is some SDR radios from around the world, this

is from a website, rx-tx.info, you can go on there in it, it seems to be mostly, I

think Kiwi SDR radios, and you basically get a world map with dots all over it, you click

on one of those dots that tells you how many SDRs are in that area, you can zoom in, find

a SDR, click on it and connect to it, and some of them, you know, obviously listening

to amateur radio stations and things like that, there's a couple that are listening to

air band in particular areas.

But the ones that have really caught my attention, there's one that can receive medium wave

broadcasts, obviously in the UK, meaning wave is going away for whatever reason.

But in, I've been listening to the SDRs in Australia, it is amazing how many AM radio stations

are still broadcasting in Australia and how packed the AM band is and how good quality

their AM transmissions are by comparison to anything that I've ever heard over here.

It is incredible, but I've had some real fun just jumping around these different stations,

not just in Australia but around the world and seeing what I can hear there, it's been

pretty fun, especially as I don't always get a chance to come down to the shack here

when I'm looking after the kids and stuff, I can just sit at the laptop on the lap in

the living room and have a bit of a tune around, so it's been a bit of fun.

Other than that, I don't think there's much going on, I've been on the talk group a little

bit, not as much as I would normally would, but other than that, yeah, it's been pretty

quiet.

Yeah, I think we've all tried to be on the talk group, but I think we've been on as often

as we ought, not just you, mate, me as well, but I know Chris has been on as well.

Chris, what have you been up to since the last time we spoke on the podcast?

I think I mentioned in the previous episode that I was going to do a talk at work about

cemetery radio, so that I've now done that, I think I actually went very well, I didn't

get my main challenge, I only had 20 minutes to talk about the subject, and that's not

a lot of time.

And as you know, we can talk on a bit of cemetery, so I had to be really strict and disciplined

about what I talked about, so I kind of did a little bit about the background of what

the hobby is, a bit of a bit of a history, and then kind of just did a bit of a brief

tour of the hobby, talking about different aspects like SSTV, that's the lights, you know,

mixing contests, you're just trying to sort of give a flair of what it's all about.

And then I went on to a little bit about how the, you know, what the hobby's done for

me, sort of things, a little bit about the podcast, talks about the brilliant club, talks

about some of the skills that are kind of working both ways, you know, helping both aspects

sort of things.

So that was a good, got lots of questions, so I think that's kind of my judgment of

it, how well it went.

I think at about 20, 25 people come along to the talk, it was done online, you know,

nowadays the world of work is very much by the computer.

But yeah, I've lots of questions, part of what I did was I did a little recording, I thought,

well, that's just actually, you know, I do recording of some radio, people can actually

get a flair of it, so the night before, the little recording of my phone of a, a QS so

between someone in Q8 and someone in Virginia, so I think people thought that was pretty

cool.

I said, look, you know, I did that using a wire, you know, just down my garden, so nothing,

nothing particularly clever, that was the aerial.

And I thought people thought that was pretty cool, but yeah, lots of questions.

One was about, I think was something like, what was the most interesting conversation

you've ever heard?

And I forgot to say it, so I put it into the chat window afterwards, I said, well, look,

we know one time I was driving to work and I heard these American accents on the, on

a frequency that I wouldn't normally receive from the state, so then I realised I was listening

to the astronauts on the ISS and people thought that was pretty cool.

So, um, so I think that went, uh, it went very well and you can always sort of tell

the things you've got.

If you've got people interest because they ask questions, if you don't get any questions

or people are very quiet, you may have lost the audience.

So, uh, I thought that was pretty good.

Other stuff I have, talking to SDRs, I bought from, should we say, a Chinese online retailer,

a, a device called an SI 4732, I think that's right, which is a little receiver, a tiny

little receiver actually, it's kind of fits in the palm of your hands, picks up all the

HF bands, it picks up their various broadcast bands, including the FM broadcast bands,

it decodes SSB, decodes FM AM, and they're thinking of CW for some reason, but almost

you can still hear CW if you could tune to SSB.

And it actually works very well, it's battery, it's got a battery inside it, you can charge

it off USB, and it actually works using an ESP32 microcontroller, so it's kind of programming

using that.

And I think there's various different versions of the firmware out there.

I'm not, I'm not sure if it's time to play with it, I might do that a little bit more.

It comes with an aerial, come back, in fact, the one I got came with two aerials, one

uh, telescopic aerial, and then there was another one which is kind of a circular thing, not

pretty small, but I was just playing with it as you were talking there, and mute, I was

on mute, so I couldn't hear what was going on, but I was picking up most current on 40

meters on an aerial that's, you know, fits in the palm of my hands, so that's, so it's

almost you're not brilliant, but I was actually able to pick up some signals, he's just

inside doing that.

So, it looks like it's quite sensitive, so I might have a little play with it, might

have been interesting sort of thing to take out and about, you know, you can just look

in your bag and it doesn't take up too much space, so that's, yeah, that's kind of it

for me, Martin, that's what I've been up to.

Well, you've been a busy bunny, you have been a busy bunny and that's good, and then,

well, I've been busy pretty much for over a month on these first two things I'm talking

about, but they've come to fruition fairly soon after.

I did write to the ARBC and asked them if I could have joined their 44-net program, and

I now have a IP tunnel from my network out to the real world that bypasses my carrier grade

Natting on the network on HabitHub, so without what that allows me to do, I'll tell you

in a minute.

It took a fair while to get it going, but once the people were talking to me and I got

the right information to them, then they, it moved reasonably well, but it took probably

about three weeks to get the information from start to scratch.

I know Ed Durant said it took him a little while as well, but it's not something that

I wanted the tunnel for is I thought I'd have a look at AllstarLink and the analog radio

onto a hotspot and out onto the internet.

Now mine is now working, it's taking me best part a month to get my working, and I'm

sure half of you are going to sit there and think he must be a total idiot, he doesn't

understand anything.

Well nicely, I've found so many conflicting pieces of information out on the internet

on how to get it to work, and I got the tunnel working to bypass the carrier grade Nat,

but I still couldn't connect to, the only two things I could connect to was the parrot

in Texas and UK hubnet.

Nothing else would come out, and it took me a while to realise that I wasn't registered

on the network, so I wrote to the help desk group and said I'm not registered on the network,

any appointment in the right direction, blah, blah, blah.

Well the AllstarLink help group is really helpful, because they just wrote back RTFM, read

the manual, and I've been reading the manual for weeks.

I did find what the problem was, and I have got it working now, but no thanks to them

for their help.

It kind of works quite well, and I still think that Andy's Pi-Star program is far easier

to set up and get working, it's far more logical than Allstar, but it works down.

I also managed to get VPNs working, so I can connect back into my house, from externally,

so as when I was in Ireland with Colin, I can now get back to my house through the carrier

grade Nat to get files of my file server and things like that.

Moving on, I've been also repairing some computers and various bits and pieces here that

have had all sorts of problems, and I've built another Pi ready to become a hotspot more

on that in another time, because that one will probably go to Colin.

The work on the talk group had a few contacts on the talk group, and this Saturday, unfortunately,

it's the Saturday that before the podcast is released, but I put it out all over the

internet on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the ISK podcast, digital talk group, we're having

their net, this one's between 131700, please check our website, because the address the

times are on there for the rest of the year, and it's always going to be the first Saturday

of the month, so first Saturday month, this Saturday, we're on.

And last but not least, I have booked for next Wednesday the 11th, a talk to do to pen

on hands on my how to build a QMX Plus, so yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed that.

When I did it for Sutton and Scheme, Chris managed to get hands on us to come along to

the presentation, but hands is nice going, I've known hands a long time, and I've already

felt I was fairly, totally fair about it, because I'd tell it like it is, but I couldn't

find anything wrong with it, quite honestly. So that's what I've been up to, going forward

as I say, this weekend, there's the talk group, and next Wednesday I'm doing a talk to pen

on hands, and guys just to save you if you didn't listen to part of the round table, Sunday

the 15th is Mother's Day, do not get yourself in a trouble by forgetting your mother.

Well, let's point out that's in the UK, I think it's a different day in the state, isn't

it?

Possibly, Bob.

It will become peaceful.

Okay.

Well, certainly for the UK, I asked the UK, guys, it is a big deal.

Could be a nice surprise for mothers in the States if they suddenly got loads of presents.

It will be, isn't it?

Oh, okay, I've just checked, it's May 10th in the States, so there you've got your warning

there.

Yeah, so I haven't possibly had the parts of the world, but certainly in the UK, 15th,

the March, which would have been my mum's birthday if she was still with us.

Right, all that's left to let me to do now is thank you guys for turning up.

I'd like to thank Mr Chris Salad, M0, TCH.

Thank you Martin, thank you guys.

Yeah, thanks for coming.

I'd like to thank Mr Rafale, M0, SGL.

Thank you.

He's been fun.

Oh, I hope so.

I'd also like to thank Mr Frank Hill, K4FH.

Thank you, Martin, great time as always.

I'm sure we'll move all in joining ourselves, I know.

And last but not least, I'd like to thank Mr Lesley Butterfield, G-Zero C-I-B.

Thanks for having me on Martin, no problems at all.

And Mr Bill Barnes, as I say, had to pop out, so thanks Bill for joining us, and hopefully

you join us the next time as well.

So all of that for me to do is say 73, see you guys, and we'll move to the next part of

the podcast.

So many for you all.

73.

Yeah.

Giorgio.

Keep your amateur and hand radio podcast Abert-Free by donating less than a length of

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Visit www.icqpodcast.com for slash donate now.

For all the news, links and information visit www.icqpodcast.com.

That's time to have a look at the news in brief for me, Colin, M6 Bear, why.

We start with news here about the European Space Agency, and they're creating an opportunity

for students and amateurs to get involved with an Astro Pi Mission Zero Challenge, which

will be taking place on the 23rd and March, 2026.

Now, this is in conjunction with Sophie Aida-Nott, Kilo Juliet 5, Lima, Tanga, November,

who's currently on board International Space Station, final launch on the SpaceX Crew

12 mission, that Dr. Alas Mump.

So I'm basically saying this is in partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and it gives

everyone a chance to run some code in space.

Participants write a short Python program that reads data from the Astro Pi color and a

luminosity sensor aboard the ISS and use it to set the background color of a personalized

image display for the astronauts as they go about their daily task inside the Columbus

laboratory module.

So more information about this video on icecubepodcast.com, but certainly an interesting project to get

involved in.

The radio amateurs of Canada have announced the recipients of the Amateur of the Year Award

for the last year, SAD, Deerey, Honour, Fred, VE1, Foxtrot Alpha, and Helen, VA1, Yankee,

Lima.

They are a couple that they archibald and they recognize for their dedication to the Amateur

radio hobby.

They've been pillars of Amateur radio in kind of a decade, and whilst the award traditionally

reflects contribution and give near their sustained excellence in 2025, along with their lifetime

of service, made them compelling adjoint recipients, so they are avid organisers of the expeditions,

and along with that, Fred is an instructor and technical innovator, and Helen is the

president of the Canadian Ladies Amateur Radio Association, so what can deserve, as I say,

recipients, and congratulations to Fred and Helen.

The Dog Day Radio Amateur Club, best known for its party, especially in the International

Dog Day, each August, will be calling CQ, and tribute to dogs who have supported members

of the military over recent years.

This event will be taking place on the 12th and 13th of March, so next weekend as we

record, and we'll be active on the HF Band using CW and single-side band chromins in

the K9 Veterans Day, so if you want to get involved in that, keep an ear out for that,

and you can certainly work, as saying, those stations there.

Right, now we head over to our features episode, where it's the first of our requested

manufacturer question answers, days where we talk to hands, summers of QRP Lads, and

put your questions to him.

I hope you enjoy.

And now, for this episode's feature from the ICQ podcast.

Well, and when guys, for this feature, we talked about doing manufacturers Q and I's,

and the first manufacturer we contacted was QRP Labs and Mr. Hand Summers of QRP Labs,

of course I'm a G0 UPL, kindly agreed to do this conversation with us, so, you know,

I welcome you for a chat, hands.

Thank you, Martin.

Nice to talk to you again.

Yeah.

Well, it is fair.

I mean, we do spend a fair amount of time chatting, and when I see you, usually, if it's

at a rally, you're usually absolutely rected by the end of a rally, because I know everybody

talks to you, but I was lucky to catch up with you at the RSGB convention last year,

and you did give me a fair and extra amount of time.

Oh, the RSGB convention is a very nice event for me, because it's unlike data and all

physics often where I'm running a booth, and it's incredibly hectic, whereas at the RSGB,

you've just got time to listen and chat, and it's great.

Yeah, I mean, I think you've got some great feedback there.

So, we asked our listeners to supply us with some questions they wanted to ask you, and

we've come up with half a dozen questions.

I'm looking at them.

I could probably answer some of them myself for you, but I'm not going to hands.

Having built a QMX Plus, I thoroughly enjoyed building that, and you did attend one of my presentations

on how to build it, which was enjoyable.

Anyway, to start with, Hi, Greg, Kilo, Mike, Fire, Golf, Tango.

Are my apologies?

I could mislade your audio file, totally my fault, my apologies, and we would have put this

question to hands.

Hi, Hans, this is Greg, Kilo, Mike, Fire, Golf, Tango.

Thank you for taking my question.

Do you have any plans to include a waterfall display in any of your radios?

But, I hopefully I can answer the question for you, having spoke to Hans a number of times,

not only on this recording, but other times.

Hans is kind of at a different part of the market.

I would never say never with Hans.

He's a very clever guy, but he doesn't like talking about future developments, because they put him under immense pressure.

When he mentioned he was going to do the SSB version of the software for the Kilo Max Plus,

he got hammered for the best part of a year of people saying where's it happening, where's it happening?

So, nicely, I wouldn't write Hans off on this one, but if he does go for that,

you're going to have to have a much different display than we've got now.

You won't be allowed to have the 16 character to line display.

And that will put the price of the kit up, not significantly, but it's a thought.

So, I wouldn't write it off, a very good question, and sorry, it didn't get to Hans, that was my fault.

Mr Stuart Bryan, G3 YSX asks, where do you think polar modulation will go next?

Is the technology only suitable for prime movers, brackets, transceivers, without a linear,

or does the future have any add-ons for linear?

So, I don't know, I'll let you ask that one, because you know more about polar modulation than I do, Hans.

Well, Stuart did ask me this at the RSGB convention, so he's probably just checking out what we need to see if I've had any more thoughts on it.

It can be used in add-on in your amplifiers, and the original 1952 paper by Khan in i.e. paper about polar modulation,

which was called envelope elimination and restoration at that point.

The clue is kind of in the title of the paper, because that paper was based on taking an existing SSB signal

and decomposing it into phase and amplitude components, which you would then be able to modulate those separately to a much higher power level.

So, there's no reason why technically it couldn't be done.

It is slightly different from what I did in the QMX, where you're actually taking an audio from the microphone,

and you've already got that in its sort of basic components, you don't have to start with an existing, say, 10 watt SSB signal,

and somehow extract that from that the phase and the amplitude.

So, it is a different thing.

The QMX just takes that microphone audio level and does all the processing digitally to come out with a phase and amplitude modulation,

and then feeds those to the modulators.

So, yes, I think it can be done, whether or not it does get done is an interesting question.

We have to see where a parallel modulation goes.

There's been a lot of talk about this.

Flex is very strongly emphasizing the efficiency benefits of the Aura 500,

which reaches something around 85-90% efficiency of RF power up compared to DC power input or normal grid power input.

But I think there are other benefits as well.

The simplicity of achieving a given level of performance is arguably higher,

because you're not having to deal with these transistors and their curved characteristics.

Everything can be non-linear amplifiers.

So, I think there are a lot of benefits, and I think the industry should be looking a lot more at polar modulation,

the other big manufacturers should be looking at it, and that may well include add-on linear amplifiers,

as well as fan-sealers.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens.

Yeah, I think what you're doing is good hands, and in some ways you're ahead of the curve,

because you've got polar modulation running in a couple of your kits, which are great,

and going forward, I think that it's a bit like going from AM to SSB.

It probably took a lot of people and a lot of manufacturers a long time to switch from AM to SSB in the early days,

because it was something new, and there probably a lot of manufacturers were sitting there going,

well, how long can I put it off before people rough me out for it?

I mean, there is a tendency for everybody to just deal what they've done before,

and make minor iterations to it.

I did a little analysis a few months back, where I looked at all the schematics I could find

if the big main flagship transceivers of Yasu and Icom and Kenward and Ella Craft,

and they're all using a pair of pushpill Mitsubishi RF MOSFET transistors in linear mode,

and so everyone's kind of doing the same thing, because that's what they know, and that's what works,

and there is a tendency to keep on doing that.

But the benefits of pole modulation, in terms of higher efficiency, lower cost, higher performance,

are so significant that I think that people probably will be moving towards it.

As you said, it's just a question of how long they can keep doing the old thing before they get kicked to badly about it.

Yeah, I'm going to assume that, you know, with the big manufacturers,

they probably got rigs in production, they're building them designing them,

building them probably two or three years before we actually get them in the shops.

So it would take them a lot longer to move to a new technology

than say somebody like yourself who's very much at the cut in edge.

Yeah, definitely. We'll see. It'll be fun.

Well, I think that was a good answer, Hans.

Mr Tim Price, who is one of the Southern team members, G4YBU,

asks, what type of soldering iron would you suggest?

And he says, do I need to buy a soldering iron with a small tip to build the QMX Plus?

This is a question that comes up a lot from our builders,

and I did two parts with the soldering iron, so let's deal with the soldering iron first.

The QMX Plus and the QMX are both made on six layer PCBs.

So you've got the top and the bottom layer of copper, which you can actually see,

but there's also four layers inside.

And the way I design these things, because I'm always very concerned about making things

as compact, cost-effective, and so on.

And I design these things to have as maximum area of ground plane as possible.

But what this also means, so you get very nice RF performance.

And in the QMX and the QMX Plus, two of those layers are just pure ground plane.

There's no tracks on them at all.

And then there's frequent stitching of the ground planes with ground wires between the six layers.

But what this means, the unpleasant side effect of this,

is that they take a lot of heat away from the soldering iron.

So it's like trying to solder something to a big copper plate that will suck away the heat very quickly.

So I do strongly recommend a sufficiently powerful soldering iron.

We use 60 watt or 80 watt soldering iron, and that seems to work very well.

In terms of soldering iron tip, a lot of people think,

oh, I'm soldering these small devices, small components, I should get a fine soldering iron tip.

I do not suggest a fine soldering iron tip.

And the reason for this is that if you have a very thin tip, like a point or something,

the heat can't get through that small area of metal quick enough to keep the temperature of your joint hot enough.

And it becomes very difficult to do anything.

So I recommend using a larger soldering iron tip.

I use at least a two, two and a half millimeter chisel tip.

And at points where you feel that you need to have a finer position,

you can always twist it so that you're just soldering with one corner of that tip.

But then you've got the much larger surface area,

the larger area of tip volume to get the heat through from the soldering iron heating element to the joint.

And I think that's really important.

It's a big mistake to use a soldering iron tip that's very, very thin.

And on all of these kits, the surface mount devices have already been soldered for you by factory assembly machines.

So you never have to solder anything anyway that has less than a 0.1 inch pitch.

So all of the components have that sort of minimum size, 0.1 inches.

There's no need really to have a very, very fine tip. You're not soldering SMG components anywhere.

So that's what I was suggesting.

680 watt iron and at least a two millimeter chisel tip thing.

Temperature control dimes are so inexpensive these days that we typically hear

all of my team here who do the assembly of the assembled radios.

They use a temperature control iron.

They're a lot cheaper than they used to be.

We don't spend very much money on soldering iron.

Iron is always an antics fan going back many, many decades.

But at some point I found that their reliability decreased.

And I had one of the first one I had for about 25 years.

And the second one only lasted about two years.

So I thought something had changed in that time.

And so we just buy the cheapest nastiest soldering iron that we can find.

And if they break quickly, at least they didn't cost too much in first place.

So we never spend more than about $10 on soldering iron.

But 680 watts and a good size tip is my recommendation.

For the solder, a lot of people have bad experiences of using lead-free solder.

So I've never tried lead-free solder.

I have to say I always just use a normal lead-it solder.

And so the team here when they assemble them.

So it's a 60, 67, 33 mix or whatever it is.

And so the circuit boards themselves were assembled in the factory using lead-free solder.

Which is the standard these days.

But it doesn't seem to cause any problem.

Soldering normal solder on the regular boards.

But I definitely think lead-it solder is the better option.

Because people have a lot of trouble with lead-free solder.

And just a couple of tips about the soldering.

I think keep your iron.

Don't be scared to keep the iron on the joint for quite a few seconds.

Until you can see the solder flow nicely around all the required lead of the component.

And get a good joint.

The kit, the QMX Plus did get easier to build.

Because now the capacitors are actually SMD instead of through hole.

The original reason for using through hole capacitors on the QMX,

which is the smaller, rather as the QMX Plus.

The question is about QMX Plus.

Is that we have three different band versions, 80 to 20 meters,

6 to 15 meters and 20 to 10 meters.

And all of those three versions have different sets of capacitors.

So we wanted to make only one board that you just build it for the version by choosing the right capacitors.

Also applying the right capacitors.

But because QMX Plus covers all of 160 meters to 6 meters.

And the capacitors are always the same for every QMX Plus.

Those are now SMD.

And those were one of the hardest parts to solve.

Because in the low, it's a solder.

Because in the low pass filters, one side of each of those capacitors goes to ground.

And in the area of the low pass filters, there are no SMD components or ICs.

And so you've got even bigger area of ground bank.

So that all of that was solved.

And the QMX Plus is actually, I think, much easier to solder now than it used to be in the first revision.

So just in some way, 60 to 80 what iron.

Good sized tip, not small.

So something like two millimeters, something chisel tip and leaded solder.

Yeah, well, I still got leaded solder.

And yeah, I agree with everything you said, hands.

You know, you've got to have an iron with enough heat in the tip.

Since so many people mess things up and make a right mess of the board if you don't have your iron hot enough.

The other thing is just because your iron melt solder, you switch it on your melt solder.

It ain't ready to use for at least another five minutes.

You've got to build a residue of heat, the residue of heat up in the tip.

That's where I go with that one.

But I agree with everything you said, hands.

Yes, I use the temperature control arm when I did mine.

Well, the only question that people have is what temperature should they set?

And for the cheap nasty ions that we use here, it's almost irrelevant to ask that question

because I'm really sure that the accuracy of the tiny little LCD on the hand of the iron is so poor.

It doesn't make any difference anyway.

But I have a sold you iron station.

I set mine to 350 centigrade.

And there is a temptation to set it for higher temperature.

And it does help sometimes if you're at a higher temperature and you're trying to solder joint

where the on the ground connection and it's going to suck the heat out a lot.

But then it does help to have a bit higher temperature so that you can...

You've got some room before the temperature drops to where the solder went melting.

Yeah, I agree with your hands.

Everything on that hand.

In fairness, I built a mine with my temperature control weller iron.

And in fairness, I had it set to 400.

But it melted the solder quickly and it was hot.

And you know, you get in and out quick with a hot iron.

You can get in and out quickly, cause less problems and you make a better joint.

So yeah, I agree with everything you said to your hands.

Okay, these were from a couple from YouTube but they were a little bit anonymous.

So I'm not sure who they came from.

What would be cool is to have a radio able to modulate class D amplifiers

so that you can run 100 watt amplifier.

Well, I said to you before we started, the name of QRP laps is kind of telling you

you're a QRP manufacturer.

Although, you know, you used to tell me you have a 50 watt amp.

What's the ideas of potential having a linear for class D?

Yeah, I mean, we do have a 10 watt linear amplifier and kit.

And we also have a 50 watt amplifier for CW, so it's a non-linear kit.

I'm not against a little bit more power than QRP

and I wouldn't rule out anything in the 100 watt category in the future.

I agree it would be very cool to have an external class D amplifier.

There are no external class D amplifiers on the market for amateur radio at the moment

which also kind of comes back to a Stuart's question from before.

You, I think, have two ways to consider this if you wanted to feed an external class D amplifier.

You might be in this situation where you already had separate phase

amplitude components, such as in a QMX class,

that you could use that signal directly to drive a class D amplifier

rather than need to decompose into phase and amplitude again and modulate them separately again.

So there could be some advantage if you really had a polar modulation transceiver like a QMX.

There could be some advantage to being able to drive an external amplifier in class D.

So it's another way to do it certainly.

Another exciting thing to explore will be interesting to see what happens.

Oh, yeah.

Any other one mentioned and looks like a lot of people are wanting you to go to 100 watts

because another one from the YouTube anonymous was,

yeah, I know you may not focus these QRP equipment,

but had you any plans of selling transceiver with a high pair of output? How about 100 watts?

Yeah, I mean, as I said just now, I wouldn't rule them out.

And I don't know where the next few years will take us.

I'm still at the moment exploring a lot of firmware development for QMX and QMX+.

There's still a lot that I want to do to finish those off.

The firmware is nowhere near, but I would consider to be finished.

Whereas you look at something like QCX, the CW single band transceiver,

there haven't been any firmware updates for quite some time on that.

There are no major bugs or nothing else, particularly, I want to put into that.

But QMX is still something that has a lot of work in my opinion needs to be done on it.

And so I don't know where things will go in the future.

And I certainly, I wouldn't rule out going to 100 watts.

And as you said, a lot of people have been asking questions.

How many of that? We've had three already.

And so I think, you know, for a very, very long time, for half a century,

the standard sort of amateur radio transceiver has been a black box that you sit on your table

and that produces 100 watts power up.

And it's kind of the standard thing for amateur radio.

So it's not really surprising that people think of that.

And some people are suffering, I think, for more man-produced noise.

And so it gets harder and harder to communicate.

And more power does help with that.

And so it's not really surprising, I suppose, that people think of that.

And especially when you've got flex, you've got their flight under what?

Pilot modulation or a transceiver.

So, yeah, I mean, it's something I would consider, I think.

Not in the immediate future.

I have too many things to do on QMX, but who knows?

It may come further down a few years down the road.

One of the things I like very much about my QMX Plus is that you do quite frequently

release updates to the firmware, either adding new features or you, you know,

in fairness, and let's go over this guys, there's always going to be a bug in software somewhere.

Or it doesn't quite do what you think.

But you don't just leave it, you know,

the big manufacturers that you're lucky to get one update in the lifetime of the radio,

you're adding features all the time, which is exciting.

And that's one of the things that I like about the QMX Plus.

It's not a stagnant device once built.

That's it.

It is moving on. So, yeah, I think you do a great job there.

I think a lot of the big manufacturers, it's a very different situation to what it is

with QRP labs where everything is driven by me.

And my reason for doing anything tends to be, wouldn't that be awesome?

Wouldn't that be cool to have a radio that did that?

And so, I'm kind of driven by things that are cool and I want to keep developing

to put more functionality in the radio.

And there's still a lot of things I want to put in QMX, QMX Plus transceivers.

Eventually, they will, I guess, reach a level where they have somewhat matured

and most people have got what they're asking for.

Most of the big bugs have been resolved.

And like the other products have, like the QCX has.

And lastly, the QDX. I haven't been so many updates on the QDX digital transceiver recently either.

So, things do reach a level of maturity where you've done everything you can think of

that would be cool to put in them.

But QMX has a long way to go before it reaches that point, I think.

It's a really nice platform being able to do everything with software to find radio

where you can incorporate all these new features just with software updates.

And of course, it's a very easy thing to do the software update

because it just appears on the PC as a USB flash drive

and you copy in the new firmware file.

So, that also makes it very convenient for people to be able to do the firmware upgrade.

It's not some scary thing requiring any particular software or hardware to be able to do.

Certainly, certainly is, and let's say I enjoy it.

Now, the next question.

I've got a feeling I know who sent this one in,

but the gentleman down here in Australia is one of our listeners.

It might have been him.

He said, a number of us don't like winding Toroids.

Could there be an extra option for kit-built purchasing kits with pre-wound Toroids?

Toroids are not that difficult, but I'll go with this question.

He didn't say they were difficult. He said he didn't like them.

Yeah.

I mean, it's kind of, it's an interesting question I had been asked this before

because we offer the QRP Labs transceivers, QCX QDX and QMX transceivers both as a kit

and as an assembled tested transceiver, complete assembled tested transceiver.

And in some ways, yes, you could have sort of a halfway option where you've wound the Toroids for people.

The Toroid winding is a very, very manual process

and it probably takes up about half the time of making the transceiver.

It's not really unpleasant or difficult. You only have to be able to count.

And if you do it while you're doing something else, it kind of can reduce the tedium with winding the Toroids.

The difficulty, I think, with us providing an option for purchasing kits with pre-wound Toroids is,

as soon as later, you get into a...

It's a general problem with providing options on a product.

The more options you have for a product, the harder it gets to manage it.

And the more the price goes up as well.

And one of the nicest things about QMX Plus, there aren't different band versions,

so it makes it very easy for me to manufacture it.

But the more options you have for something, the more complicated your logistics get

because you run out of things at different times and you have to order things from different places.

And it does drive up the complexity of the operation quite a lot.

And so I'm kind of hesitant always to providing the thinking of too many options.

And you might get into a situation where people wanted the Toroids and this and that.

And my team in the office will be messaging me every day,

what should we create people as the assembly fee,

because he wants to do some of it himself and not the rest of it.

I don't know, you know, we're only talking about one halfway point of just having all the Toroids done.

I mean, it's not impossible. I'm not terribly enthusiastic about it.

I don't know how popular it would be.

There is a guy as well, by the way, in America who winds Toroids to people.

And his cost of winding Toroids is quite similar to the cost of the entire additional assembly fee cost of the QRP Labs kit.

But he does produce a set for QMX and QMX Plus.

He produced Toroids for Elica after as well, I think.

And anybody who needs Toroids, he makes Toroids for them.

He's just any whinesome all by hand, he sits there and that's his living, winding Toroids for people.

I'll have to think about it some more.

But I so far haven't liked the idea of adding one more option just for Toroids,

because once you've got that far, you've got halfway through the kit anyway.

I don't know what was your experience, Martin. Did you feel that that's accurate?

It takes about half the time to wind Toroids.

In fairness, Hans, I...

I didn't twine myself.

I thought you were going to tell me, you told your wife to wind Toroids.

She said, oh no, hey, I'm not that brave.

No, in fairness, I found when building your QMX Plus.

I sat back, you have to be in the right frame of mind.

You know, sit down quietly, have a cup of your favourite brew, teal, coffee,

and just wind one or two Toroids.

Don't try my little twenty plus of them, because that's when you get frustrated and one thing and other.

But just sit back, maybe put your favourite music on quietly in the background,

and just sit there, and you do a few.

And then you have a break, and you do another few.

Nicely, and I mean this nicely, Hans, because I know you build QMX Plus,

it's ready built for customers.

But your time limit or your time scale of producing them,

you could actually get the kit and build it quicker than Hans' team could build it,

because they're building so many of them for people who won't build it.

So you will get your QMX quicker, but if you don't like building at winding Toroids,

write the bullet, and ask Hans' team to build the thing for you.

And that's where I go with that one, nicely.

Yeah, you're right, winding Toroids, it's not difficult.

I think initially people look at the number of Toroids and pack a little bit,

but I know I spoke to members of our club, Saturn and Dream,

and those that were going to build, going to order a fully built one from you,

after the presentation, sorry, Hans, I'll cost you a bit of money,

they decided to build the kit.

No, that was a good one.

That's as people also ask me, why do you use Toroids rather than these Axial molded inductors that you can buy?

And the answer to that is that those molded inductors, they don't have,

they're basically a very, very tiny tube of ferrite material with a high permeability,

with the wire around it cylindrically,

and they don't have the same level of performance in a transceiver as Toroids.

And this is why when you open up even any major manufacturers transceiver,

you will see Toroids inside because they achieve a much higher performance,

lower lofts, and they have also the self shielding properties

so they can be mounted quite close together without interfering with each other.

Not last year, I think the year before it, I went to the GKRP Club Convention in Telford,

and I couldn't help myself though as a guy, Phoenix kits selling this 20 meter transceiver there,

one or two Watts transceiver, and I built that kit,

and it uses radial inductors, and this is known I'm not trying to criticize at all

because he was specifically trying to avoid Toroids winding for people who are scared of winding Toroids.

But just for fun, when I got home, I built it and measured it and characterized and everything,

and then I changed those low-pass filter inductors to Toroids and re-measured everything.

And the performance improvement in terms of efficiency, power output, and harmonic attenuation

was extremely start, and so you're kind of stuck with these Toroids as a manufacturer

because you want the performance even though they're the most time-consuming thing to produce.

And there's no really good, automated way of doing it either.

You can buy these extremely expensive Toroid winding machines,

but they, I think, take longer to prepare per Toroids and it would break even on about the 20 or 25 ton Toroid.

And so it's the kind of unpleasant fact of radios that you need Toroids.

I think the best thing, as you said, is just bite the bullet and do a few at a time.

Yeah, and don't be scared of them.

My kids have ran Toroids during some holidays.

They were bored and they came and built QDXs and they ran the Toroids and did the soldering.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, is it so?

Just do a few at a time, do a few at a time, sit back and enjoy the build process.

It's not a race.

If it takes you two weeks and it takes me three weeks, we both end up.

As long as we end up with a working rig at the end of it, what's the problem?

Yeah.

Why are you building it anyway?

You're not building it to save very much money because the extra cost of the assembled one is not very much anyway.

You're building it for your enjoyment and the challenge and the enjoyment.

And you get this pleasure from operating something that works and you've built yourself.

Oh, man.

It's a very special, unique thrill that you get when you're the one who soldered that thing together.

Yeah.

And yeah, people even get this when they build their furniture.

They call it the IKEA effect just because you bought this flat-pack furniture and you came in and put it together yourself.

You may have sworn a little bit during the process, but you end up loving that piece of furniture because you put something of yourself into it.

And so it's definitely worth doing, I think.

Certainly isn't.

And when you show people, I mean, I've got pictures of the inside of my QMX.

And I went to, I'm a member of a repair cafe and I went to the repair cafe and the guy said,

can you sold or not?

I said, I'll show you some of my work.

And I showed you myths.

I did a QMX and he went, QMX was even okay, but I'll discuss it any more with you.

So, yeah, enjoy the processes where I go.

Now, I'll ask question hands.

This is a bit of a generic question, but what are the minimum tools required to build your kits?

What is the skill level required for each kit?

And this would help new hands to ensure that they build kits correctly.

I think what the guy was possibly trying to discuss is having like a badge or a logo

next to the kit saying easy build, easy this.

I think, but maybe I'm preempting your answer.

One of the things that really turned out to be very popular about the kits was the built-in test equipment that I included.

And going back to the QCX transceiver, the QCX transceiver came about in early 2017.

When I got an email from the RSGB and they were looking for Buildathon suggestions

for the Yota Summer Camp, which was going to be held in August in 2017.

So, you end up with two or three participants from each region one ITU country going to the UK in the summer.

And one of the activities they did with this summer camp.

And I had this vision that they would all be lined up in some gigantic hall somewhere.

And there would be some helpers going around trying to help people to build something.

And many of these youngsters probably didn't ever do any assembly before and needed some assistance and everything.

And I had this terrible idea that the poor helpers would be running around

by headless chicken trying to help so many youngsters at a time to get these things working.

And there was no way that they were all going to have separate oscilloscopes and signal generators and things.

And I had built kits before and you typically came to a point in the kit construction where the instructions would say,

OK, now you inject a signal from your signal generator or you look at the output on your oscilloscope.

And it was always kind of thinking, well, what if you don't have a signal generator or an oscilloscope

and you want to minimize the amount of equipment that is necessary.

And those were the reasons why I included all this self-internal test equipment in the QCX.

So, you could do all the alignments and adjustments without any additional equipment.

And it was just a simple practical choice.

But it became something that the kit was known for, that it had all this stuff built in and that people loved.

And so I continued that with the QDX and the QMX.

And they have all these built-in tools where you can run the sweep of the bandpass filter

and you can do all the adjustments just with the built-in tools.

So, for this reason, you don't need things like an oscilloscope or a signal generator.

If you end up debugging something that doesn't work, then that's a different question.

And the oscilloscope can be used for that.

But for the basic assembly of the kit, you don't need very much test equipment to go with it.

And pretty much the only things you need are a good sharp wire cutter, a good soldering iron, and some screwdrivers.

I think a DMM just for checking continuity through the torodes to make sure that you've burned or scraped off the enamel thread.

The enamel from the soldering wire, from the enameled wire, during soldering sufficiently to get a good solder joint.

I think that is a very useful thing, and we recommend that in the manual.

But just these very basic tools, I think, are enough screwdrivers to bolt everything together at the end in its enclosure, the soldering iron, DMM.

As far as skillage required, that does depend on the kit you're building.

And different people also have a different opinion about what is a difficult kit and what is an easy kit.

But it might be an idea, I mean, I haven't done it so far, but it might be an idea, as you said, to have something next to each kit on the website saying whether it is an easy kit or intermediate kit or a difficult kit.

I think the most important thing is to follow the instructions very carefully.

I do put a lot of effort into the instructions, partly for selfish reasons, because I don't want too many people coming back to me with questions.

Why doesn't it work? What did I do wrong? And if I make the instructions as detailed as possible, that's avoided.

So I think it's very important to follow the instructions step by step, and don't try and get ahead of yourself or skip things or think that you know already how to do something.

It is better to read every single detail.

And if people follow those instructions carefully, step by step, and with care, then I don't think particularly a very high level of skill and expertise is required to build any of the kits.

I would say that the QMX is very much more compact than a QMX Plus, and so it would help to have had some soldering experience before attempting to build a QMX,

because everything is very close together and you're nearby where your soldering is near to SMD components that you could damage and things like that.

But a QMX Plus is, I think, a really ideal project, even for a beginner.

And the, once you've counted the Torodes, turns, that's the hard part, don't you know, or tedious part, if you like.

But the rest of it is just connecting the connectors, soldering on the connectors, the transistors, the pin switching, switching diodes, and inductors for the low-pass filter switching.

And then the mechanical assembly of the front panel and the buttons and rotary encoders and LCD.

But there's nothing in there that's really, really hard, but there's nothing in there that's really hard to do and requires a new special skill.

So I would suggest if you're a beginner and you think you can follow the instructions and be a detailed orientated constructor who doesn't step up the head, then the QMX Plus is a very good kit for that.

If you wanted to build a QMX, I think it would be helpful to not have that done that as your first kit because things, just because things are closer together.

It's not that there are more components, but everything is very, very close together on the compact in the QMX.

So really, you know, it's kind of the size of a deck of cards.

And so things are necessarily very compact inside.

But on the QMX Plus, I think you have got space.

But again, as you were saying earlier, Martin, taking your time over it and not rushing it is so important and following the instructions well and, you know, give yourself a piece or quite a place where you can be too distracted.

All of these things contribute to a successful build just as much as skill and experience does.

So I would really don't underestimate the importance of just, you know, be careful, follow the instructions, giving yourself peace and quiet, not rushing.

These things are all very important.

But yeah, you don't need very, very many tools to assemble the QMX Plus kit.

And I can't, I don't know what you think, Martin, you've just built yours recently.

There is the screwdriver, soldering iron wire cutters, sharp wire cutters, I think, good.

Because one of the mistakes sometimes people make is they have blunt wire cutters.

You end up trying to yank the pin wire, the wire you've just cut, just soldered.

You're trying to yank it to get to trim it.

And that can then cause tracks to lift and joints to be broken and things.

So a good sharp wire cutters, I think, is a good one.

And it took me two hours, twenty minutes recently, I built the QMX Plus.

And you've got to remember, I'm not really that experienced at building QMX Pluses.

I built maybe two or three in my life.

And I wanted to get a feel for how long it should take our team in the office and who's built hundreds.

So I should be establishing a lower bound.

But two hours, twenty minutes, but you know, if you were going to read the instructions every page and take it carefully

and it could take a lot longer and that would be perfectly fine.

It's about enjoying it, I think.

Is there anything you think I've missed Martin or anything else?

I agree with everything you said there, Hans.

And sit back and enjoy yourself.

Now, what Hans did say is, RTFM, read the funny manual.

I have to own up. I did make a mistake building mine.

And I in mine didn't work initially.

And I was just about to email Hans saying, hey, I've got a rough board.

And I reread the instructions.

I'd missed one vital sentence that said do something.

And if I did, once I did that, I'd actually thought found it back to that problem.

And knew what the problem was and knew how to fix it.

And I thought, I'll just phone hands and do let him know.

And I read the manual.

Damn, I missed an instruction.

So the instruction mouse are really, really good.

Are you going to tell us what you see instruction in this button?

Yeah, well, I was just saying, I got, I got...

You've come this far with all this, this closure.

Yeah, yeah, but I'll be honest about it.

I made a mistake.

Number two, if you haven't, or you haven't done soldering before,

then what I would suggest, if you've never soldered,

from in some of you knows how to solder properly and get them to teach you,

it won't take more than half an hour,

by yourself a few random components of the rally.

And a bit of circuit board, maybe, or even,

if you find something on a scrap sheet with a surface board,

take your heart, take it down, take the components out,

and then refit the components.

You can practice soldering.

Yeah, I was going to say nothing.

It's very hard for me to remember back to when I couldn't solder

because I think I could probably solder before I could walk.

But I remember in those days, I used to dismantle an awful lot of things,

and that was very educational.

Because I had no money at all when I was growing up,

I used to salvage all the components from old TVs

and set recorders and things like that.

And even deep soldering is also teaching you soldering techniques.

Oh yes.

That will help when soldering as well.

Yeah.

So I think we've covered a lot of ground here the day,

and I'm very pleased this went this well, hands.

One last thing.

Is there anything else you want to tell us before you leave?

I have taken over the last few years,

and approached to live on working on something new,

whether it be a new product or a new software feature.

I tried to keep it to myself,

because otherwise the pressure is immense and it never happens.

We've spoken about this before last year, no, no,

but it's worth staying again.

To be able to produce any of these designs,

and even in the case of firmware,

it does require an awful lot of time and effort,

and it requires a clean mind to do that.

And so I intend to these days not give any advance notification

of what I've been working on.

Yeah.

But yes, there's still a lot of stuff to come

for the QMX QMX classes I said earlier.

Well, all that's left for me though,

hands is to thank you very much for the interview,

and I'm sure our listeners will be very, very impressed.

You can find hands is company just by looking

for QRP labs on any internet browser,

and hands has got a whole raft of kits and bits and pieces there,

as well as the QMX Plus that I've talked about today,

and hands, all I can do is wish you every success going forward,

and thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Martin.

We do have a big range of kits there.

It's definitely fair to say that the QMX and QMX

Plus are the current flagship products,

and recently will across the 15,000 mark for sales

of QMX and QMX Plus kits.

So that's more than 5,000 a year.

That's since the launch in May 2023 at Dayton.

And so it's certainly keeping me busy.

You could imagine.

So very honored to be your first manufacturer's Q&A.

It's well, Martin.

Thank you very much for the opportunity,

and good luck with your future interviews on the series as well.

Yeah.

Well, thank you very much, Hans, and I'll say 73.

Look after yourself, and we'll see you at some point in time this year.

I'm sure in the rally.

Dayton, three of self, and somewhere I'm sure.

Take care, Martin, 73.

73.

Well, everybody, I really hope you enjoyed our first manufacturer,

Q&A of 2025, and we thank Hans Summers of QRP Labs

for taking part in this episode.

And I say it won't be your only opportunity.

I'm sure to ask Hans questions.

He's quite active at all the major hand phase,

and I'm sure we're right back on the show very soon.

So if you've got a question that's burning,

as I say, let us know or keep it for the next time.

And we're certainly opposed at the hands for you.

Now, of course, if you found value from today's show

and learned, signed, or presented, et cetera,

we'd ask you to support us.

Please visit itcupodcast.com.

For us, let's donate.

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So please do consider us and support your itcupodcast.

There are always, we'd like to direct you to the itcupodcast.

Digital Group yesterday was our second net of the year

and I really hope that everybody enjoyed it.

And again, we've got more lined up for the rest of the year.

So check out the itcupodcast where page 4,

when the net is coming your way next.

Of course, we'd like to thank everyone who took part

in the news round table.

We've, say, Martin and my name are B.

And as I say, hopefully we've really given you

some wonderful insights into, say,

a hobby and what's going on from there.

Right, but we'll be back in a fortnight's time

with the next episode of the itcupodcast.

As always, I hope you continue to enjoy the hobby

and have some fantastic fun.

And we'll talk to you again in a fortnight's time.

73's up.