Recipe for Success: What is RTTY?

Radioteletype or "RTTY" is a digital data mode that allows text to be sent over radio and has been around since the 1930's.   

Before RTTY signals were sent over wireless, teletype was used going back to the mid 1800's which makes this one of the oldest modes of non-spoken communication, just like Morse Code.

Within amateur radio, RTTY is commonly sent on HF bands by using 45.45 baud at 170 Hz shift width along with a mark frequency of 2125.  It is also possible to use RTTY on all other bands such as the popular 2m band and at even greater speed. What does this all mean?  Lets find out.....

RTTY Basics

The term "baud rate" is used to explain how many words per minute can be sent and there are 60 (45.45 baud), 67 (50 baud), 75 (56.25 baud) and 100 (75 baud) options as standard within amateur radio.  

Here is where sending large amounts of data really started thanks to RTTY since even trying to speak more than 60 words a minute may be a challenge for many people.

If you think about how that translates to 1200 baud which is what APRS uses, or the last generation of "dial up internet modems" in the late 1990's which used 56,000 baud and now, all the way to modern broadband which would be too fast to even easily think about, RTTY sounds pretty interesting, right?

Some of the earliest RTTY activity took place just down the Hudson River on Long Island and a brief history is available on the RTTY Wikipedia page.  Lets keep building on our regional history by keeping RTTY alive! 

Here is what a RTTY signal would look like and how the "mark" and "space" are visualized.

Each of the signal peaks are one of opposing tones that help identity bits in the symbols being sent which translate to letters, numbers and special characters.

While there are more efficient modes of "keyboard to keyboard" communication available today, RTTY is not only reliable, but easy to be sent with basic equipment.

We learned with SSTV experimentation during the weekly UNDR Net in September 2021 over the 146.805 MHz repeater operated by the Overlook Mountain Amateur Radio Club, its possible to send images, so now its time to send some text.

RTTY takes up around 250 Hz of receiver bandwidth if your radio is set for 170 Hz shift between the high and low tones. This is more than ok if you plan on sending RTTY over FM since a typical signal is 25 kHz wide, so there is more than enough room to send RTTY over FM.

The year 2021:  Why RTTY?

While RTTY is mainly used during special contests or between just a few friends, its still a mode that is worth keeping in your communications tool box.

A benefit of audio frequency shift key (AFSK) based modes is that they are easy to decode simply by holding a smartphone near your radio speaker. You can even send RTTY by holding the microphone of your radio near the speaker on your smartphone.

Better results can be had with a wired interface like the Easy Digi device for use with most any handheld radio or the Masters Communications Model RA-40. 

Some radios even include a built in decoder for RTTY like the Icom IC-7000, IC-7100 and IC-705. 

As we learned by sending the PD50 SSTV mode which takes about one minute over FM,  this should mean we can send at least 60 words of text or more in the same time using RTTY.  This capability could be very useful in certain situations where accuracy counts and a digital signal is better than speaking.

What if we wanted to share Uncle Grants Field Day Chili recipe over the air?  

According to the below photo courtesy of the ARRL, this recipe page has 313 words and it may actually be quicker sending a recipe like this over RTTY compared to multiple smaller sectional photos sent over PD50 SSTV or one higher resolution photo using the PD290 SSTV which would take almost 5 minutes!

The above recipe can certainly be condensed and reformatted for more "human readable" reception if sent over RTTY.

This will be one of our first tests in sending some interesting information using RTTY in the month of November during the UNDR Net.

If you are interested in joining our experiments, feel free to come up with your own interpretation of the above recipe and lets see who can transmit it the fastest that is human readable on the receiving end. 

Please join us every Tuesday at 8:00 PM Eastern US time in the month of November to listen in or participate with what we are doing each evening with RTTY.

IMPORTANT:   Starting December 6th 2021, UNDR Net will be moving to Monday 8:00 PM 

Why United States amateur radio can not evolve?

 

The title of this post sounds a little like a "Jeopardy" answer in the category of "Famous son inventors".  Probably, the question was "Beyond silencers, this son of a different American pioneer was also known for the growth of which hobby, which involves shooting things other than bullets into the air?"

1ZT: Getting your attention!

Its always easy to poke fun at the love of all things high frequency and possibly even one of the important founders of the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) who we have to credit, much like the National Rifle Association (NRA), for embedding certain hobbies and perceptions into the DNA of Americans.  

This is none other than the old man himself, Hiram Percy Maxim, who is not only one of the co-founders of the ARRL, but also one of the early inventors of the firearm silencer and son of the mastermind behind the Maxim machine gun.

Did you know there was a more legitimate co-founder of the ARRL named Clarence Tuska?  He was also the person behind the much loved QST magazine and likely would be more apt to read an article like this compared to Mr. Maxim.  

Both of these "OM" helped evolve the world of wireless communications for hobbyists like us, but we are now at a time where we need to prevent us from facing extinction.

As an engineer,  Mr. Tuska is who promoted the use of the higher 200m and above spectrum rather then the lower 600m band and was much more focused as an experimenter with radio technology.  I like Mr. Tuska and what he did for the hobby in the United States, thanks to his awareness to share information in written form. Lets now jump into something fresh and new! 

Why?

I write this after sharing notice of an important evolution within radio technology which has not yet really come into wide spread use across amateur radio yet.  

Today, we can not wait around for QST to learn about the latest innovations.  Its right here in the digital domain is where you will learn about something new. And, by the time most people get QST in the mail, its out of date and more time is spent trying to find who to give it to! 

The Future.....

What I am talking about is known as a software definable front end preselector.  Those I shared this latest Crowd Supply project with immediately needed to point out that something like this is useless, since it does not include capability for our much beloved "HF" spectrum allocations.  

At $419 USD, it is expected to cover spectrum much lower in order to appeal to the amateur radio hobbyist to make it a worth while purchase.

This preselector is a versatile, highly useful tool for providing programmable bandpass filtering for a software-defined radio, among other applications. 

In the receive path, that filtering can be used to mitigate the effect of strong blocking signals; in the transmit path, it can be used to help reduce out-of-band radiation. 

ATEK1001 aims to provide an affordable filter bank for radio enthusiasts and SDR users. More of the technical specifications concerning the 485MHz to 7.7 GHz can be read about here. 

Starting so high into UHF spectrum even limits its applications for most of the amateur radio community members interested in bands such as 70cm, 1.25m, 2m, 4m, 6m and of course the rest of the HF band.

What makes the ATEK101 interesting is how small it is. 

Who cares. More money for another HF CW/DIGI Kit!!

For those interested in Software Defined Radio (SDR), this is where the market software defined radio front end (SDRFE) is really targeted.  Not the HF only operator who only chases CW contacts in South Dakota.

The popular Lime SDR and Lime SDR Mini are joined by a branded product also available via Crowd Supply called the Lime RFE which does cover the important spectrum we care about and is only a mere $699 USD and covers up to 3.5 GHz plus all the important amateur radio bands in between. 

It is however a much larger product. There is even a $549 USD option for those who do not need the cellular filtering and this will appeal more to frugal amateur radio operators looking for something new. 

If you wanted to experiment with RF filtering, the Lime RFE or the ATAK1001 are what is available today.   

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SIDE NOTE:   Interested SDR for HF?   Get online for the QDX available October 11th at 2:00 PM EST until units sell out.   https://qrp-labs.com/qdx.html 

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Do I need a SDR Front End?

Reason here is to illustrate there are some interesting things taking place within the world of software "re-defined" radio worth keeping an eye on, but another area is the niche that the phase coherent software defined radio is filling.

We are jumping to a totally different topics here because I can not find anything about a dedicated HF only or even HF and VHF RFE to write about, but now I know I have your attention.  

A phase coherent SDR is a combination of multiple software defined radios which can act together or separate from each other to do interesting things.

Combining multiple receivers can act as a way to filter or combine signals and the RTL-SDR.com provided "Kerberos" product was the first low cost way to do this with its four receivers which are identical in performance to the popular RTL-SDR V3 most who are reading this probably own already.

Software for Software Defined Radio

A challenge when the Kerberos first came to market in early 2019 was little available software to use it with and it also needed a little more horse power from a computer to utilize its capabilities.

Things changed for Kerberos when the Raspberry Pi 4 became available and it was far easier to use the Kerberos for applications like radio direction finding or using its phase coherence capability. 

Software also improved since 2019, with applications like SDRangel being one of the first to offer easy to use multiple receivers at the same time in a visual application.   

Using something like a Kerberos and its 4 separate receivers capable to tune to any approximate 2.4 MHz chunk of spectrum at one time means you can monitor multiple bands at the same time or even the same frequency via different receivers and find ways to optimize reception by using different DSP filtering tools.  

By the time many people got excited about the capability of the Kerberos, it was already out of production or sold at lower cost, but there is a new model called the Kraken about to be unleashed which will include five independent receivers.  so,  its time to jump onboard now if you want to do amazing things with a phase coherent receiver. 

There is a more polished software program specific for the Kraken, which can also be used with the Kerberos if you have.  

Many more traditional SDR programs like those which Rick W1RHS let us know about recently also exist now which can be used with phase coherent hardware.

During the October 19th session of the popular Northstar Digital Net managed by Jim WA2UMP,  some discussion about both phase coherent receivers and possibly other SDR topics like RFE will be mentioned. 

Steve K2GOG of HVDN will be available to share more details and field questions on some other aspects about software defined radio that hopefully, will make the likes of Mr. Tuska and Mr. Maxim proud. 

Please be sure to join us Tuesday October 19th at 8:00 PM Eastern Time on Brandmeister Talk Group 31630 if you are interested in topics like this on the evolution of amateur radio by using the future to do so thanks to DMR.

NEWSFLASH: Virtual Hamfest!!!

So many amateur radio clubs that miss the ability to run a "hamfest" no thanks to COVID have become very creative in the past year.

Just outside of the official boundaries of the Hudson Valley is the Long Island Mobile Amateur Radio Club (LIMARC) and is one of the largest clubs in the United States. 

Since they have a HUGE network of expensive repeaters to maintain, they count on income generated from these social selling and buying events to keep things running.

HVDN loves to support anything that LIMARC does, since a few of us (K2GOG and W2NDG) were very active in that great club before we moved off of Long Island and up to the Hudson Valley.

Join us on February 28th at 9:00 AM Eastern for the 2nd time that LIMARC is doing a Virtual Hamfest.

Attendance is free and details are here at https://limarc.org/virtual-hamfest/ 

There are some excellent door prizes offered by many great organizations to help create more attendance, so feel free to check it out and see if we can get past the 1,000 person attendance limit the last Sunday of February.

Also, please do not forget about  what we hope will be a return to normalcy with a real hamfest by visiting https://hudsonvalleyhamfest.com/index.html and take our interest survey. 

The Dreaded Independent ARRL Field Day 2020 Analysis Article

We all knew that the ARRL Field Day was going to be different in 2020, so in early June I decided to gather 10 years of public data from the ARRL about past Field Days and build one mega database to compare annual results. 

The end product of that first analysis can be found in the "ARRL Field Day: Independent Data Analysis" article I authored six months ago.

With December under way, the latest issue of QST has been released with the full results of this great event meant to showcase amateur radio at its best. 

The ARRL has even been kind enough to provide a free PDF version of the article for those that do not have the member only magazine or access to the very limited outlets where you can find a print copy such as Ham Radio Outlet and other select specialty retailers who are trying to figure out ways to do business no thanks to COVID-19.

2020 ARRL Field Day Facts and Fallacies

It is really tough for the ARRL to compile the scoring for Field Day on a normal year, but this year was much tougher given rule changes that allowed participants to remain at home but still support a club by sharing logs and attribute them to a club entity.

Based on the official ARRL QST article and the official data found on the ARRL website CSV repository, there are some things that do not add up 100%. I am not sure why this is, but the overall numbers are not "that far" different, so I guess they are still ok to use. 

What am I talking about you ask? Here are some random spot checks comparing the article data to the website data for a few ARRL sections:

Overall, the ARRL QST article tallied up an impressive 10,213 entries for 2020, but the data only shows 9,601 entries. 

Even if subtracting the 58 DX entities which are not represented in the website date very well, the difference is still over 1,000 off and I would like to know why that is, especially when some of the data does line up from both sources.

Taking another spot check comparing counts by class summary, the ARRL QST article says there were 517 "A" class participants in 2020, but the data adds up to only 481, which is 7% less. Looking at the rare "F" class, 84 are claimed by the article but only 78 are found in the data which is a little more than 7% difference.  This makes me really concerned even if thinking about margins for error. The data should line up!

Transmitters & Classes!!

Diving even deeper, the QST article claims that 12,297 transmitters across 60 categories were used in the 2020 Field Day, but the data found on the website is 10,977.  

You would think that transmitters and classes would always match up for a 1:1 SWR, but many field day participants, especially at the club level, know this might vary over the contest duration on how many stations they have on the air which makes the ARRL's job in keeping things straight really tough.  

I think this is ok to have this slight mismatch though, since we all know a 1:1.89 SWR is ok, if we tried add some ham radio humor here, but still, we need to to depend on the ARRL for accuracy when guiding our hobby forward. As we learned this year, every point/vote counts!

This being said, lets compare the 10 years of average top 5 classes against just the 2020 data, but only using the website data because, that just seems a bit more accurate than the article that seems to use some sort of imaginary math.

Please do not worry, this story is going to get way more positive, so please stay with me here.  

The exciting thing is that almost 60% of participating transmitters were those playing "ham radio" from home as single operator home based stations (1D) being cautious due to COVID, where 16% over the last 10 years were those more rare operators. 

Home stations, but operating on emergency power (1E) increased 8% on average compared to past years, so this tells us that some people made an attempt to at least try to operate in the true spirits of Field Day while they were confined at the home QTH in 2020. 

Interestingly, the fragmentation of so many different operating classes in years past shrunk from 45% to 12% which shows that COVID-19 really impacted the ways that even portable, temporary operators approached Field Day 2020 which was too bad, as there were many open green spaces to still attempt to play amateur radio this past June away from home and still be safe from COVID.

The most popular club run double transmitter 2A stations over the past 10 years shrank from 13% to under 2% in 2020 and this is not surprising given health concerns.

If anyone would like to help me analyze the master database that I have created to see how many of those 2% were part of that averaged 13% of years past, they may need some special award for treating Field Day the same as any other year, while still likely being very COVID compliant.

Participation & Contacts

Its time to reach for the sky pilgrim, as John Wayne might have said when it comes to participation this year for Field Day. 

This gets confusing because tabulated web data shows a super steep drop off in the total number of participants from an average of 36,800 over the past 10 years to only 17,777 in 2020. 

Some people might say that the death of ham radio is finally here, but I disagree after looking at the total number of contacts made.

Now, how can so many contacts be made with so much fewer participants you ask? 

Easy, people had more time from home to operate and play radio rather then get stuck spending hours putting up antennae, running feed lines, avoiding mosquitos, having intellectual discussions while waiting for time at a club radio or being distracted by meal times and countless other "what happens at field day, stays at field day" sort of moments.

Most people who operate field day at the club level probably know that some participants like to operate while others do the physical labor.  This drop off could have been worse and it was not.

Normal levels of participation should bounce back next year, I hope and I suspect a huge increase.

Mr. Mic says: Amateur radio is finally here?

Could someone like Jason AF7JP from Ham Radio 2.0 been ahead of the curve just like HVDN and other forward minded people and organizations in the hobby today? Yes, they were! Digital was coming in every form possible and the entire hobby needed to get ready for it!

Dissecting the total contacts in 2020 into voice, digital data and Morse code, it looks like the complexities of more people doing digital during field day has finally come thanks to COVID.

Personally, as part of the 6A Overlook Mountain Amateur Radio Club (OMARC) team in 2020, we ran a really safe COVID compliant outdoor operation this year at Ferncliff Forest in Rhinebeck NY.  

Everyone noticed that voice contacts were pretty much the same as years past and we suspected that field day overall was disappointing for many people across the land.

In past years, certain OMARC club members operated digital modes which gave the clubs valuable points thanks to portable go kits, but they decided to stay home this year and we missed those QSO's and friendly faces a lot.  The logs do not even show them participating in field day this year which is too bad, especially when it came to digital contacts.

OMARC still had a pretty good score considering and we generally thank Joe N2LL for this since he is a pure CW operator. Since we put extra special attention into his favorite 80m vertical antenna this year, he made more personal contacts than the year prior to help close the digital gap for the club.

Where OMARC totally missed out was no digital station for the duration of the event, but everyone who worked the overnight and early morning shifts knew that all the activity was on non-voice modes after scanning the bands and hoping to avoid duplicate voice contacts.

Across the country, it seems the data backs up our experience that digital is here to stay and is coming into its own against CW even, which as a 200 year old technology is still used to make contacts.

Could voice QSO's be a thing of the past?  Are we losing some social aspects in the hobby?  Not likely, but it does seem the magic of rubbing two wires together or bashing bits and bytes together will help maintain the legacy and future of amateur radio for years to come.

2020: Field Day lessons learned

It is encouraging to see such growth in digital modes during field day, that it is in every club's best interests to focus some time on building out a dedicated digital station to not miss out on points in the 2021 version of field day. 

Many people say that Field Day is not a contest and I agree with that, but if we are going to think of this event for a reason to create emergency communications capabilities, digital needs to be front and center for anyone looking to participate in field day.

Hudson Valley Perspective

HVDN is based in the beautiful Hudson Valley section of New York and we need to now shift from the national picture to that of our local region, known as ENY.

Our ARRL section is actually one of the few in the United States to keep up mostly with national trends and actually come close to showing growth, where other parts of the country are stagnating against the national averages.

For ENY to continue showing this strong leadership, we need to encourage more of our communities to get active in other "non-contest" aspects of  amateur radio such as Summits On The Air (SOTA), Parks On The Air (SOTA) and even Islands On The Air (IOTA). 

These sort of converged activities will not only help future participation and modernization in Field Day, but also help those who only get outside once a year for Field Day to try some other ways of operating.

Comparing ENY to the less than the 2 hour away Long Island section know as NLI, which also has roughly four times the population and number of amateurs, the contact trends are not as active as the neighbors to the north. Considering that so many fewer ham's live in ENY compared to NLI, this is pretty interesting!

Even when looking at the entire FCC Call Letter Section Two which covers New York and New Jersey,  the Hudson Valley seems to be the place to be when it comes to amateur radio if we use Field Day as a small example.

I hope you can come for a visit either for Field Day, upcoming Fox Hunt adventures or even to explore our many, many SOTA, POTA and possibly IOTA destinations plus Winter Field Day operations which OMARC also seems to have taken a lead on here in the Hudson Valley.

So how can I get this database you have?

To gain access to the tool used to visualize the charts used in this article, we are currently offering this as one of the HVDN member benefits, so if you would like a copy, please consider becoming a supporting member for $12 USD even if you do not live in the Hudson Valley.

The database will let you:

• Track per callsign, all ARRL Field Day activity from 2010 to present
• Look at voice versus non-voice contact comparisons
• Explore participants, transmitters, power sources and station types
• Learn about how to use pivot tables for a practical application in amateur radio
• Understand more about data analytics and science
• Attend related presentations via Zoom about data analytics and amateur radio

The older and slightly less refined 2010 to 2019 version is available via an Easter egg hidden in our June article if you rather not have the latest data and learning experience.

Help HVDN grow as a supporting member 

and you even get to learn something for less than $1 a month, not just limited to data analysis and visualization

Author: Steve Bossert K2GOG (Co-Founder, HVDN)

Use it or lose it: Death of 3.4GHz

Wireless spectrum is what makes amateur radio valuable. Without the ability to experiment at different frequencies, "ham" radio will stagnate into being known only for what was up until today 0.0163% of its total available spectrum. This is totally NOT fair! 

What else beyond HF?

The high frequency HF or "shortwave" bands which are used for long range communications is what much of the public know amateur radio for. In times of emergencies or most any regular day or night, very low speed data or narrow band voice communications can be heard across a variety of sub-bands that are only to be used for amateur radio mostly between 1.8 MHz and 30 MHz.  Moving higher up the spectrum chart, much higher speed data and digital voice communication has been gaining in popularity globally.

As noted in a past presentation on satellite communications given at the Trenton Computer Festival when humans were able to gather in social settings with no fear of global pandemic,  Steve K2GOG shared an overview of how much discontinuous spectrum is available to all three classes of amateur radio operators in the United States.

Amateur radio satellite communications

While ham radio is known for its long history surrounding the so called "short waves", once you get beyond 30 MHz, the actual wavelengths get much, much, much shorter and commercial users have long used spectrum just above or below where amateur radio operations live in the VHF, UHF and SHF spectrum. Within these higher bands, there are specific portions set aside for satellite communications.

While there are some tiny portions of amateur radio spectrum that are dedicated for only satellite communications, they add up to over 300 MHz in what could be considered the more easily accessed spectrum between 7 MHz and 47 GHz.

While there is no commercial users likely looking to take back spectrum under 30 MHz, there are a few HF satellite frequencies in use, with examples being the very old AO-7 satellite and a few new Chinese satellites that will start using the 21 MHz band. 

Most amateur radio operators have been exposed to educational school contacts or narrow band picture sharing known as "slow scan television" by way of the International Space Station which mostly uses the 145 MHz spectrum.   

More specific satellites that act as "bent pipes" or repeaters often use 435 MHz as an uplink frequency and 145 MHz for a downlink.  To date, there is limited use of other frequencies above the 435-438 MHz satellite band, with satellites such as AO-91, AO-92, SO-50, FO-29 and RS-44 as a few of the more popular satellite destinations for amateur radio experimenters today that use these frequencies.

The AO-92 satellite also uses a 1.2 GHz uplink during specific times to help show use by the amateur radio community in an otherwise less frequented portion of spectrum, which much like the 3.4 GHz band, has been under attack from commercial users who could benefit from valuable amateur radio spectrum.  

The QO-100 satellite relies upon a 10 GHz downlink and 2.4 GHz uplink and this makes it the most advanced satellite that is accessible to amateur radio operators today, but just not in the United States due to its stationary position covering all of Europe, Asia, Africa and parts of South America.

The neighbors have better stuff

Over the past two years, European regulators such as CEPT and OFCOM tried to to make a case to take away parts of the 145 MHz, 1.2 GHz, 2.3 GHz and 3.4 GHz allocations to help expand different commercial services such as long range aircraft positioning and different "Internet of Things" applications along with different applications that can be considered as part of the 5th generation of mobile communication, often shortened to 5G. 

While fending off the recent attacks on the important bottom part of the L-Band from 1240-1300 MHz was successful as well the somewhat distracting 145 MHz allocation battle,  the spectrum just below the common 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band was lost to commercial users in Europe. 

Within the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has decided to "delete" the ability for amateur radio operators to use its allocation in the 3.4 GHz band due to the needs of 5G, especially that of CBRS which will drastically change the way spectrum is licensed moving forward.

We need to change

There is nothing wrong if HF focused operation is what is of most interest to you or anyone looking to get involved in amateur radio today. Those that decide to just spend a casual weekend enjoying the already well understood and no longer innovative 3.7 MHz, 7 MHz and 14 MHz bands are akin to being a bunch of "home bodies" and those that are easily pleased and that is ok.

While it is possible to take HF equipment out in the field and operate from battery power and make contacts with others using voice, Morse code or digital data modes such as  PSK31, FT4 or JS8CALL, this does not advance the hobby if we are trying to defend our spectrum. This use case demonstrates a level of converged activity.

In the next few decades, the novelty of HF based communication will be much harder to entice a next generation of amateur radio operators to unless they first are shown all the amazing things that can be done across other frequencies and applications such as satellite based communications.

We owe it to the next generation of prospective amateur radio enthusiasts to find differentiated applications for the 144 MHz, 435 MHz, 1200 MHz and all the way up to 60 GHz if we wish to remain relevant  rather than as a forgotten hobby deep rooted in the evolution of electronic innovations we have seen over the last 100 years.

ARRL Field Day: Independent Data Analysis

87 years ago marked the first official ARRL Field Day. It is absolutely amazing what technological progress has happened in just about the last nine decades in relation to amateur radio, but this is the first global pandemic that amateur radio has faced. 

With the 2020 ARRL Field Day less than a month away, preparations are very different in part due to the Corona Virus across the United States and elsewhere.

Certainly the global health crisis will change how amateur radio operators and clubs rally resources to mount efforts for portable and temporary field operations to demonstrate how reactive amateur radio can be when its required to quickly set up a national communications network away from home and in unfamiliar surroundings.

The above photo for those interested is of Joe N2LL and Bruce N2ZAC preparing the famous 80m vertical made from a former US Navy communications antenna. This great antenna gets deployed once a year at the Overlook Mountain Amateur Radio organized Field Day and has proven to be one of our secret weapons for making more contacts, especially on CW in the warmer month of June.

What really prompted this article?

After  finishing up some group volunteer work at Ferncliff Forest this past weekend, the remaining 8 OMARC members left behind held a  "socially distanced in person" planning meeting to discuss final plans for Field Day 2020, which will be closely organized to maintain good health for all interested in attending or participating.

Further fueled by a "late night virtual Slack" meeting with a fellow Hudson Valley Digital Network member Joe NE2Z, two questions were common between the two communities regarding the annual June preparedness event.

• How important will the different "non-voice" modes be this year?

• How many people will possibly participate in person or through the revised ARRL Field Day 2020 rules?

Separating fact from fiction

The Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national advocacy group which supports the growth of amateur radio in the United States and is also the main sponsor behind "Field Day".

The ARRL has many resources for free on its website including past results and data on recent contests like Field Day.

After taking a quick look, the ARRL has the past ten years of data available, but with some not very user friendly differences.

Data available after 2015 includes more granularity around what type of conversations or "QSO's" were made as well as the type of power source used for operating radios. The total data set offers 15 unique data points per entry.

Prior to 2015, there were only 9 data points as illustrated at left.   I commend the ARRL on trying to use data to learn more about its most public event.

What I have done is taken the 10 separate annual datasets and combined them into one. I have also added the ability to look at the FCC assigned section (0-9 Call Areas) based on ARRL section assignments.

Additionally, I decided it would be good to combine CW and Data QSO as "Non-Voice QSO" and relabeled "Phone QSO" as "Voice QSO". This offers better resolution on who likes a microphone, keyboard of code keyer when making contacts.

Having one master data set also allows for better ways to visualize or compare data and spot trends across the 160,836 data points since 2016 plus another 110,747 from 2015 to 2010.

I have excluded the "Total Score" and "Bonus Scores" columns from my analysis tool because the way which bonus scores were tabulated have changed a few times and thus made total scoring not uniform from year to year.

10 Year Analysis: High Level ARRL Field Day Trends

First lets look at how the last 10 years have trended in terms of total contacts made during field day across all ARRL sections and which also combines US, Canada and DX ARRL data.

Even though the total number of contacts clearly shows a decrease over the last ten years, that is not cause for concern.

This trend could be part to blame for where we are in the sun spot cycle, which does influence the band conditions between 2 and 30 MHz which is where most of the contacts during Field Day come from.

Bad weather can also influence the number of contacts, but pulling weather for all 368,004 participants over the last 10 years would have been a daunting task.

In 2017, there was a pronounced increase in total ARRL Field Day contacts which almost perfectly lines up against the sun spot data to add fact to the analysis and partly dispel rumors about a decline in activity.

What was interesting is that while both voice and CW (Morse Code) contacts do seem to have declined, voice did not as much.  Since voice signals do not tend to travel as far as Morse code, this is potentially a bad trend to see especially when he band conditions are favorable.

Digital contacts using modes like RTTY, PSK31, etc show a major increase in recent years which is nice to see, but that is only because the ARRL has only recently started to track this.

At the national level, I can say with certainty that one of the two questions posed has been clearly answered.

Going forward, every club or individual participant looks to be spending more time learning about the benefits and challenges behind digital communication.

Who participates in field day?

Since 2010, there has been a 368,004 cumulative total of field day participants, with the average year seeing 36,800 radio enthusiasts take part in Field Day in the United States, plus Canada and a few "DX" stations.

What is troubling is a clear annual decline over the past 10 years even when the total number of licensed operators appears to keep increasing.

While there is a decrease in participation, there are positive growth changes in different ARRL sections and FCC call areas around the United States.

The only FCC call area showing positive growth participation over the last 10 years is the west coast in call area six, but call area one, seven and nine are the next most stable. The region with the largest decline are those in call area zero.

Here are the total participation in compound annual growth rates for the data presented in the below chart from 2010-2019:

FCC Call Area One = -0.36% CAGR

FCC Call Area Two = -1.84% CAGR

FCC Call Area Three = -0.50% CAGR

FCC Call Area Four = -0.95% CAGR

FCC Call Area Five =  -1.33% CAGR

FCC Call Area Six = 0.71% CAGR

FCC Call Area Seven = -0.29% CAGR

FCC Call Area Eight = -1.25% CAGR

FCC Call Area Nine = -0.40% CAGR

FCC Call Area Zero =  -2.08% CAGR

FCC Call Area Total = -0.73% CAGR

The ARRL Field Day data does not include demographic details, so the reasons behind regional growth is not conclusive.

One funny note though,  Canada participation is at 1.12% CAGR over the last ten years.  It is not yet clear if the ARRL has asked our northern neighbors for help to see how to make this event more popular.

Hudson Valley Regional Participation

Since HVDN is located in FCC call area two, we should look at New York to see how we trend and unfortunately, the four ARRL sections combine for a -3.05 CAGR which is totally horrible! Here is the breakdown:

ENY = -1.05%

WNY = -2.82%

NNY = -0.18%

NLI = =6.37%

Myself (Steve K2GOG) and  others may be to blame since there has been a noted relocation taking place from NLI northward into ENY for example.  The below charts help visualize year over year changes for the past decade in the Hudson Valley from New York City and Long Island.

Getting closer to home

By now it should appear that I can provide clarity around field day trends for many different things, so now lets have a quick look at the fastest growing and forward thinking club in the Hudson Valley, excluding HVDN of course since we do not yet officially participate in the ARRL Field Day with our N2HVD club callsign.

The Overlook Mountain Amateur Radio Club, in part thanks to its wide reaching 146.805 MHz repeater above 1800 feet elevation overlooking Woodstock NY in Ulster County helps the club draw a membership from four of the seven counties that make up the Hudson Valley.

Joe N2LL who is the longest tenured club member and CW op extraordinaire permits the use of his callsign for field day. 

In recent years, club leadership has helped transform the club into being more active and organized.

This is clearly evident by either not participating or not having scores submitted in some years, but since 2014 generally showing a net increase in contacts across different modes.

How do you do Field Day?

If we stick with the OMARC club as an example, they generally try to run field day as 4A or better.  The number represents the total number of on air stations at the same time during the contest and the letter defines the type of station being setup.

Over the past 10 years, only 5 different field day classes across the United States make up 55% of total deployments, but a massive 107 make up the remaining 45%. 

In 2020, the rules are slightly different because of how COVID-19 has created a socially distanced and health awareness scenario. 

1D is for participants operating from home, 2A through 4A are for clubs operating 2 to 4 stations, and 1E is for individuals operating one station under emergency power.

This year, stations can operate from home, but provide points to the club they are members of.

A big trend over the last 6 years and more evident in the last 3 is that the total different types of participation has drastically changed, but overall the total participation is trending downward as we has seen in other charts.

Due to COVID-19, it is going to be interesting to see if we will see an even greater number of 1D or 1E stations or higher number of participants that aggregate up to the club level.

This comparison is concerning as it indicates how participants think of field day is changing to be tailored to unique interests. 2020 will certainly throw all the data available into a spin cycle and who knows what the results will look like. 

If the classes of participation were more restrictive, its not clear if this would increase or further decrease participation, but likely create a large change. 

HVDN: Adding value to you

At around 9:00 PM Eastern time on May 30th is when I got nudged to look for ARRL  data to help provide fact to the two questions posed earlier in the past weekend.

A few hours later I emerged with the data set compiled from the source data found on the ARRL website.   I had some time last night and this morning to pull together this article based on my findings.

Since I spent a few hours consolidating the data, finding a way to re-organize it and be able to spit out insightful charts, maybe this exercise would be valuable to someone who wishes to articulate why field day is important locally, regionally or nationally.

Having this data now also lets us think about how the  2020 version  of Field Day will be really interesting when the results become available in December 2020.

I would propose that if you are an executive within an amateur radio club anywhere in the United States and would like for me to present insights based on this work to your club via a virtual meeting that is more specific to your own club, please contact me directly. 

I am not interested in sharing my compiled data set with the public as I can not guarantee it would be used correctly or in a responsible way. I do encourage you however, to recreate what I have done or contact the ARRL for opinion.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

Steve Bossert K2GOG

K2GOG@yahoo.com

/...- .. ... .. -     .... ...- -.. -. ·-·-·- --- .-. --. -··-· ..-. -.. -../

HASviolet: What color is your spectrum?

The entire United States amateur radio community are relative late comers to using or even understanding what LoRa is.

However, the "maker" community in the United States and elsewhere has embraced this weak signal spread spectrum technology much quicker and has been doing some interesting things with it.

This article will highlight where both communities of hobbyists can learn from each other and inspire some really nice projects enabled by LoRa technology thanks to HVDN's HASviolet project.

Black & White: What is LoRa?

Amateur radio or "ham" radio people usually love to talk about history and sometimes forget to look forward.

LoRa actually has some roots going back to the German radio company Telefunken and the underlying thinking of LoRa as a general concept was even described in part of a 1903 US patent by Nikola Tesla.

During World War II,  both the Axis and Allied powers experimented with "frequency hopping spread spectrum".

The smart minds of the day such as Leonard Danilewicz, Willem Broertjes and actress Hedy Lamarr being just a few to read about to learn the history of spread spectrum communication to help level up when it comes to learning about LoRa and technology like it.

While frequency hopping spread spectrum or FCSS can be useful for both data or voice transmissions,  only "chirp spread spectrum" or CSS is useful for sending short bursts of data over multiple frequencies.

This is one reason why the "maker" community has adopted LoRa because they generally care more about actionable use cases versus "talking for the sake of talking", which is what a lot of "ham radio" people enjoy most.

LoRa is not meant for voice transmission and it even requires some fancy manipulation to get it functioning for basic "chat" sort of communication.

The good news is that the HVDN team and our HASviolet project went a few more steps where others gave up when it comes to use case exploration.

The lack of voice communication via LoRa does not matter much for non-amateur radio users as other electronics hobbyists are more interested in using LoRa to relay sensor data or control the status of different devices, like a gate, mailbox or even as a fault indicator for a 3-D printer. But, not all amateur radio people use voice to communicate so this is ok.

The "Continuous Wave" or CW mode for short involves Morse Code and is still highly practiced within the amateur ranks today.

Even much newer modes  like WSPR, JT-65, JS-8CALL and PSK31 are some other choices with different use cases, but all really only focus on chat functions and not anything more use case driven beyond that. This now starts to make some amateur radio and maker people not very different from each other, aside possibly from age.

How to send LoRa:  Straight key optional

CSS also not only helps obscure messages as Hedy Lamarr exploited in her work more than 70 years ago with torpedoes and the US Navy, but also helps increase transmission range and control of torpedoes.

While encryption on amateur radio spectrum is not permitted, LoRa is easily demystified once you know how to look for the signals and decode them.  This makes LoRa and CW not really that far different from one another.

An amateur radio person may known Morse Code and a maker will not. Conversely, a maker may know how to probe packets and reassemble messages where someone who lives only in the ham radio world will not.

Perhaps the shared merit of LoRa and CW as  "DX" or "Long Distance" communication capabilities is worth exploring within amateur radio, but with value added use cases for a change beyond making contact for the sake of it.

This is where both communities can share and learn different skill sets and what HASviolet is all about.

LoRa implements CSS mostly in a default configuration which takes up about 250 kHz of spectrum,
but can be easily modified by changing the spread and bandwidth settings, which may be advantageous for certain applications.

This may sound crazy compared to sub 2 kHz wide CW signals, but LoRa can offer so much more.

What makes LoRa unique compared to other "spread spectrum" methods of transmission is that it is focused on relative narrow band use cases and thus better suited for sub-GHz spectrum use.

Comparatively, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are also spread spectrum based, but use much wider bandwidth and would be troublesome to be used at frequencies such as 433 and 868 MHz as well as 900 to 928 MHz.   Since Bluetooth and Wi-Fi live at 2.4 GHz and above, this is a non issue since the higher you go in frequency, the shorter they travel when not including "Line Of Sight" communications.

The HASviolet project's goal is to utilize LoRa in the 900 to 928 MHz band also known as 33cm and to take advantage of the different characteristics this unique mode offers.

And because how well LoRa works very far into the "noise floor"  the communication distance when thought about as a function of transmit power, range and antenna size becomes pretty interesting.

There are ways to shrink the bandwidth which LoRa uses for single channel communication and will also be explored via the HASviolet project too at a sub 6 kHz levels and possibly even further with correct precision timing.

LoRa: Made better with fruit?

One major challenge with LoRa is that it uses proprietary modulation offered by Semtech and is not considered an "open source" mode like what NB IoT uses, which is a competing wireless standard along with SIGFOX as popular "Internet of Things" type of applications that commercial and maker enthusiasts are using.

A company started in 2005 by Lady Ada (Limor Fried) called Adafruit Industries helps the educational "STEM" and maker communities through open source development of fully functional and semi-complete products which incorporate components made by company like Semtech.

The modern electronic hobbyist or "maker" can easily purchase what Limor and her team creates and use them in any number of projects, just like our HVDN HASviolet project.

And there is one thing that the "ham radio" community really loves, and it is anything that involves "low cost".   LoRa easily becomes a low cost way to experiment with something very fun.

A side benefit beyond cost is that it makes a perfect platform to start the "ham radio" crowd to essentially start to "level up" on some areas of interest that the maker crowd has already zoomed far ahead on. Some of these include things to do with "Raspberry Pi",  "ESP32", "MicroPython", "IoT"

Full integrated Semtech LoRa chips such as the SX1276, SX1272 and SX1261 can all be generally had on preconfigured breakout boards for under $10 USD, so lets dive into what each community can learn from each other in upcoming articles.

So what is HASviolet?

When the HVDN HASviolet team came up with an idea to make something which the maker and amateur radio community could use together,  they started thinking about how to highlight underused spectrum where licensed and unlicensed users may overlap.

Originally, the amateur 50-54 MHz "6m" band and its nearby unlicensed 49 MHz spectrum was thought to be a good starting point due to the ability to easily design something that could use the popular Raspberry Pi with an add on RF filter board.

This proved pretty quickly even after discussion with other amateur radio enthusiasts as far away as Arizona and Germany to not be a path to start down first as others have done it, but failed to get a lot of interest.

Instead, it became clear  that going much higher in frequency would still offer what the HVDN team was looking for.

We would like to introduce you to the HVDN backed HASviolet project, our journey and lots of great documentation to inspire others to come along for the ride using violet shared spectrum.

If you want to learn something cool involving hardware, antenna or software, we think you will like what you are about to find.

HASviolet Team

• Joe Apuzzo N1JTA - General Do'er & HASviolet HW Certification Guy

• Steve Bossert K2GOG - Antenna & RF Design Lead & UI/UX Hamster

• Joe Cupano NE2Z - Core Software Developer & Git Hub Jedi Master

HASviolet General Details

• General Information -  https://hvdn.org/violet 

• Git Hub Repository - https://github.com/hudsonvalleydigitalnetwork/