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We are working hard be able to demonstrate a working receiver station in time for the next meeting of the VHF Work Group next Thursday.

The Beacon project currently has accumulated R24, through their crowd funding drive. We need reach a target of R60, so that we can purchase the hardware for the next two beacons that are being planned for Cape Town and the Northern Karoo.

There are three easy to use predefined payment options that can be selected, R50, R or R We look forward to receiving your contribution. The Hepburn charts show some possibility of tropoducting conditions along the West coast and South coast in the latter half of next week. Meteor Scatter - A propagation mode that takes advantage of the ionization trails left by extra-terrestrial debris burning up after entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Every day, meteor scatter opportunities exist for contacts on 10 meters, 6 meters, and 2 meters at distances between to kilometres, especially during the morning hours. During meteor showers, there may be hundreds of "pings" per hour. Thanks Dennis. There has just been a Perseid meteor shower earlier in August, but it was primarily visible in the Northern Hemisphere at higher latitudes. In mid December we again expect the Geminids Meteor shower.

This however is not the only time we see meteors. As these particles move through the Mesosphere which is the third layer of the atmosphere at approximately 50 — 60 km above the surface of the earth they burn up because of the friction caused in this layer and leave behind an ionising trail. You often see these meteors, or shooting stars burning up in the night sky. The ionised trail has the ability to reflect radio signals.

All the showers that have a negative declination should be visible in the Southern Hemisphere. There are at least eight during the year that should be visible in the Southern Hemisphere. This is a list of meteor showers for with dates that are fairly accurate. Looking at the second link that Dennis sent me there was a comment on the forum that led me to do a quick search on the internet and I found a whole lot a information on how you can build a simple Raspberry Pi based Meteor camera that will continuously record the night sky and photograph the meteors that it sees.

There is also an article of using a Raspberry Pi and a SDR receiver to detect meteor pings or echoes. Some interesting projects that may spark your interest in this interesting propagation mode and lead to experimenting with meteor scatter and possibly some great contacts as well.

The CW and Tone are still running perfectly. I have had a busy week and amateur radio has taken a bit of a back seat which has resulted in me and Rickus not being able to spend time together to prepare for troubleshooting the beacon. Rickus will let me know when he can get up to the high site and then we will do the troubleshooting.

He ran through a quick presentation with me and I certainly believe that it is a solution that we can use for monitoring and controlling the beacon. The Hepburn charts show little chance of tropoducting around the coast the coming week. Remember there are other beacons as well running that can also be monitored. It was a very interesting and educational day. I made a number of notes on things to follow up on.

I have never come away from one of these sessions without learning something new. A lot of the amateur radio activities we are involved in now days involves software. A lot of the software is Open Source software meaning it is free to use and share and the source code is freely available to anyone. Makes you think! Good to be back after a well deserved break.

Rickus has checked everything that he could and on Friday, Rickus and myself discussed how we will go about troubleshooting the beacon remotely.

Once Rickus has set up the beacon management software on a laptop that I can access remotely, then I will guide Rickus through the process of accessing the DDS board so that we can figure out where the problem may be.

We will report back on our findings once the beacon is again transmitting the PI4 mode. Rickus has also in the meantime been putting together a system so that the power to the beacon can be remotely switched on and off without him having to physically go to the site.

As we all know most of the beacon and repeater sites in the eastern half of the country are vulnerable to criminal elements and while the sites are secure once you have opened up to do maintenance then you and the site are vulnerable. I am making a lot of notes regarding functionality that we need to incorporate into the design of the Karoo beacon to enable us to remotely access and troubleshoot the beacon.

We will also need to gather telemetry data about the voltage, current, internal and external temperature to name a few that will be able to assist us with managing and maintaining the Karoo beacon.

Lucky for us the site that we are looking at using already has internet access on it. The beacon has been working very well and the PI4 signal is certainly being monitored over a much wider area and further a field than the CW signal. Even though the PI4 sequence is not being transmitted, the CW sequence and the frequency accurate tone is still being transmitted. On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning there was a possibility of tropoducting between the East Coast and Reunion Island and amateurs were monitoring the band on both sides, but again the conditions did not allow any contacts to be made.

Along the West Coast and along the South Coast there has been storms and strong winds that has been wrecking havoc with antennas again.

Let us hope that not too much damage has been done. I have not seen any other reports of local VHF and above activity. Frequency accuracy. A topic that has come up a number of times now is the frequency accuracy of our radios.

This is especially noticeable when using digital modes and as one goes up in frequency the error increases. Those playing in the microwave bands or with QO will have first hand experience of being way off frequency and the nightmare of trying to tune to the correct desired frequency.

Some GPSDO devices are designed to put out a 10 MHz reference signal which is fine for test equipment, but does not really help us as our radios invariably will not have a 10 MHz reference oscillator, but one at another frequency and each model and manufacturer uses a different frequency. There are options that you may want to add such as filters and attenuators as well which will of course increase the price and you will need to also provide a box for it to live in.

Of course you would also need to figure out how you are going to connect the GPSDO to your radio, but that is normally not a big challenge. There have also been some discussions around designing a GPSDO locally which may be a little cheaper. Last week I spoke about the contact that Rickus ZS4A had made using a quarter wave antenna on a magnetic base attached horizontally to a railing at his new temporary QTH.

I misunderstood Rickus. Apologies for that mistake. RS Footprint. Watching the passes we were only able to get brief overlaps of a minute or less and elevations of around 1 degree. On a couple of occasions we heard each other but not enough to complete the contact. We both made changes to our systems to gain what improvements we could. Oleg changed his feed lines making the routing shorter whilst I changed my antennas using my terrestrial 6 over 6 skeleton slot for the VHF uplink and assembled a pair of 12 element Yagis for the UHF downlink together with a mast head pre-amplifier.

Today it came together in the last moments of the pass and under 1 degree of elevation. In just less than half a minute the contact was completed. From JF95fx to LL77sl the distance is km. Here is a short audio clip that Tom sent. Well done Tom. This is a remarkable contact as the satellite was barely above the horizon for both operators when the contact was made. As they say, you need to put in the effort to make these great contacts and Tom and Oleg certainly did. Apart from feedback regarding the installation of the new Next Generation Beacon in Bethlehem, we also discussed briefly the proposed Karoo Beacon.

We are also very fortunate that the existing equipment on the tower is owned and managed by a local radio amateur Leonard du Plessis ZS3LEN. The Bethlehem beacon ZS0BET is working very well and there are again interesting reports coming in about the performance of the beacon, with some strong signals being reported at unexpected hours of the day, like 3 am in the morning.

It is also being reported by amateurs who are just using a simple vertical mobile antenna. The monitoring and reporting of the beacon is called a reverse beacon network. Our experience with the previous CW beacon showed us that it is rather difficult to monitor a CW beacon.

The CW needed to be a clean signal and even then the Skimmer software needed a fairly strong signal before it would decode the beacon. If you can operate digital modes, then you have all the tools necessary to monitor the beacon even when you are not at your QTH or in your shack.

All that you need to do is keep your radio switched on and tuned to The software automatically records the decoded PI4 signal in a log file.

Please rename a copy of the log file with your callsign and grid locator and send it to vhfnews sarl. Net 4. Here you will find the install files as well as a link to the manual for the PI-RX software.

Are there any software developers out there who can perhaps assist in putting together a low cost monitoring station using a Raspberry Pi and SDR receiver?

As I see it, the challenge is the software to decode the PI4. I have found that it is still a bit sluggish even on a Raspberry Pi4 with 4GB of memory. I however do not have the skills or time right now to see if I can encourage more performance out of this configuration. Yesterday morning there was a lot of activity on 23cm. Is there anyone active higher up in the microwavebands? After a quick pitstop and some coffee along the way we arrived at the Bethlehem Beacon site at Rickus ZS4A met us there and we quickly made our final plans before dropping the power to the current beacon and getting it out of the way.

The bracket for the Storno cabinet that the new NGN beacon is built into was mounted on the wall and the cabinet attached along with the power and RF cable to the antennas. Lastly we temporarily hung the GPS antenna onto the palisade and powered up the beacon. The wind had broken off one of the director elements on the Yagi pointing towards Gauteng, so while we were there, I also had a chance to quickly sweep the antenna to check the SWR and we are please to report that all is well with a 1.

We believe that all that is affected by the broken director element is the radiation pattern of the antenna. After we tidied up and said our goodbyes we hit the road again, arriving back home just around A very successful and enjoyable outing.

Great reports. I am also please that there have been some good reception reports coming in since Wednesday. We are going to start seeing patterns emerging that can be closely correlated with the weather conditions. From previous experience with the CW beacon we received reports from some unexpected areas and we would like to encourage all VHF enthusiasts to listen out for the beacon on Digital signals will be heard and decoded a lot better than analog signals. I have had a question of how much a digital beacon will cost for 6m.

This question is difficult to answer as there are a number of variables that one needs to consider when planning to build a digital beacon. Remember that the beacon is essentially a homebrew project as you cannot buy an off the shelf product and if you could, you will pay the additional costs for someone who has assembled the beacon for you.

If one decides on a Next Generation Beacon platform like the one that is now operational in Bethlehem, then you are looking at the following:. These three boards are the heart of the system at a cost of DKK which at the current exchange rate translates to R14, Then there is the cost of shipping approximately R Money transfer fees R Customs and clearance fees R So landed costs is going to set you back around R18 and this is only for the three boards that make up the heart of the system.

One also needs to remember that all these figures are very much dependant on exchange rates which fluctuates daily. Now we need to think about a power amplifier for the particular band that you want to a beacon for.

Here again there are options that you need to consider. Do you build your own or do you use a commercial power amplifier. This module would have cost R, but because I ordered 4 modules as I was already planning for the other beacons that we had in mind I managed to get the price down to R per module.

Why the difference? Now we need to look at an active GPS antenna, 12 V and 5 V power supplies, some filtering on the output of the power amplifier, surge protection both on the coaxial cable and the AC supply and a box for the beacon. At least another R The numbers quickly add up and unfortunately the exchange rate and shipping are the biggest variables.

So on average you are looking anywhere between R20 to R25 for a very good digital beacon radio. While we were installing the beacon, Rickus ZS4A told me about his great achievement the previous weekend during the VHF competition where he participated using only a quarter wave antenna on a magnetic base attached horizontally to a railing at his new temporary QTH.

Rickus has also provided me with a path profile between himself and Charl ZS4CGR that shows that both of them had direct obstructions between them as well. This just shows that VHF communications is possible over a considerable distance with modest equipment. Well done guys. There is a second 8m beacon that has gone on air in Ireland.

What about higher up in the microwave bands? It is all systems go for the scheduled installation of the new Next Generation Beacon in Bethlehem on 19 May This was all done to ensure minimum fiddling while doing the swap out of the radios in Bethlehem. There was some strong tropoducting along the East Coast on Friday afternoon and a number of amateurs were monitoring for the beacons of Phil FR5DN from Reunion Island, but unfortunately the ducting did not extend far enough to the East.

In this discussion thread there was a comment by Dave, NZ3M, that said "It should be used if band is not open. Especially if looking for multipliers. I can work out 1, miles, at will, on 6 meters using Q65 30A mode. Any time of day. The introduction in the Quick Start Guide for Q65 states the following:.

Q65 is particularly effective for tropospheric scatter, rain scatter, ionospheric scatter, TEP, and EME on VHF and higher bands, as well as other types of fast-fading signals. Locally there seems to be little uptake for Q65 despite some early testing showing that it does work very well.

Looking through the various messages on the WhatsApp groups that I receive information on, I can find the following:. Signal reports were dB and dB. At the time Dick mentioned to me that a dB decode is significantly better than that obtainable from JT Dick went on to mention that with JT65 mode you need a relatively steady signal as well which is not necessary with Q65 and that Cape Town should be relatively easy to work via tropo scatter. The recommended submodes in the Q65 Quick Start Guide is as follows:.

Ionospheric scatter on 50 MHz: 30A. Ionospheric scatter on MHz: 60C. Troposcatter and rainscatter at 10 GHz: 60D. Other EME:. There is a virtual seminar that should be interesting listen to. The Abstract reads as follows:. His presentation outlines the standard causes and cures for interference. The question-and-answer session that follows the formal slide presentation turns this into a real RFI workshop.

The presentation will be on Zoom on Wednesday 19 May at UTC which makes it a late night for us, but I believe it will be worthwhile. Looking at the Hepburn charts for the week ahead Tropoducting seems to be subdued along the coasts.

Remember that you do not need to only wait for Tropoducting to try some long distance communications. What about trying one of the new modes like Q65? Focus on VHF and above. Audio Version. The Hepburn Charts also show little prospects for tropoducting in the South Atlantic or along the coasts of South Africa for the following week.

I started doing some comparison tests and will need support from all of you to give feed back to John who again is reporting back to Hartmud DG7YBN the designer of this Yagi.

GTVW Yagi. This looks like an interesting antenna. Looking forward to hearing how it works. It is well known that amateurs make use of aircraft scatter at times however this is the first time that I have heard of ship scatter.

They found that the cruise ship Aidaperla is sailing towards the island of La Palma, and its position iwas visible for both stations. They initially used FT8 to help them align their antennas and then managed to complete a contact on FT8.

Thereafter they also managed to complete a SSB contact via ship scatter. What a fantastic contact. The South Atlantic may be the BEST location worldwide for long-haul ducting, both for range and how often the openings occur. I am very pleased to see more progress now.

One December he emailed that he was unsuccessful identifying an Angolan FM radio station as he had interference from a Brazilian station on the same frequency. This was using just a car radio with its whip antenna.

That is an omni antenna to an omni antenna on FM at a range of km. Dave is no stranger to long distance VHF propagation. The distance across the Atlantic was 4, km. Let us get on the air and make things happen! You do not have to rely on Tropoducting to try some long distance communications.

What abou t higher up in the microwave bands? This week has been a quiet week with no exceptional VHF and above activity being reported locally. The first report was on 14 March of this year when the signal was heard in Portugal. Well done Willem. In the last two weeks there has also been local reports of 10m band openings. Looking at the Hepburn charts. Hopefully there will be more to report on next week.

Those extraordinary long distance contacts that you have made or even that project that you are working on. Please send me a consolidated report of your activity with any additional photos, audio or video clips to vhfnews sarl. Last time I reported that the beacon was acting up. It has been powered down between and on Sunday 18 April so that it does not interfere with the Amateur Radio Today broadcast that also needs to be transmitted from my QTH. The troubleshooting process also helped me to learn more about the inner workings of the Next Generation Beacon platform and to get to know the Beacon Manager software as well as an opportunity to learn more about the programming of the beacon.

If the beacon had not acted up, I would have missed out on a learning opportunity. Even though the beacon is running on a vertically polarised antenna, it can be received and decoded and it would be great if some of the amateurs in the Gauteng area can listen out for it and provide some feedback.

Next Generation Beacon. In the last programme I reported about the exceptional tropoducting that was experienced along the West Coast. He could tell by listening to his APRS radio. I quickly went to my radio and I also received the beacon.

In the meantime, Chris tried to contact Gary via WhatsApp but without success. I also sent Gary a WhatsApp and he came back to me at last, but at that stage I could not hear the beacon any more.

Gary heard me calling but I could not hear him at all. After a long while, Koos in Kleinzee decided to listen and was quite surprised to receive Gary with a S7. I kept on listening for one and a half hours but could not hear Gary at all. This time around, it was only Koos who could work Gary!!

Congratulations guys!! This is the very first time the beacon on St. Helena Island was heard by 4 stations across the country and it also proved its value in knowing there is an opening for simplex communication. Thanks for listening. Charles, again many thanks fo.

I also asked the following questions:. In order to answer these questions we need well placed beacons and a beacon monitoring network to collect information about when and where the beacons are heard. But this information is not all that needs to be gathered. We also need information about the weather conditions at the time and upper air data that is collected by the radiosondes that are sent up twice a day by the South African Weather Service. Added to this we need to enlist the help of scientists who can analyse the data and make correlations.

The Next Generation Beacon platform has been designed in a way that it can be easily expanded to enable the running of multiple beacons on multiple bands from a single beacon site. HamSCI has the following objectives:.

You may have heard both Hans and myself mention HamSCI in the past, but to date it has only been the two of us who have participated in any activities. I have assisted with data collection on two occasions with Solar Eclipses. SANSA Space Science currently have a HF project running where they are looking for reception reports and data from the amateur community and we will pass on more information about this shortly.

The SARL beacon project is only just gaining traction and we now have tools that we can use to get this exciting research project under way and we need you to assist. Now is the time to take the development of amateur radio to the next level and truly experience the greatest scientific hobby on earth while collaborating with scientists to discover more about propagation than we have ever known before. There are exciting times ahead on the VHF and up bands and it is up to us to make it happen.

You can read more about this at. Scroll down on the website to the updates dated 10 and 13 March It is a very interesting read indeed. The frequency of the 8m beacon is More information at. Very few amateurs know that South Africa has an allocation between The beacon currently is putting out 25 W into 2x14 element stacked Yagi antenna. The gain is approximately 15 dB. Later in the week the antenna was again pointed towards KF59JR and Derek again decoded the beacon, however there were fewer decodes than previously.

Derek noted the following in his message to me:. Best times in late afternoon. But contacts are possible for sure. That may be part of the reason why the reception of the beacon was weaker. Tropospheric propagation is very dependant on the weather conditions with in the troposphere. Tells us so much more already than we knew. This is so true, and I believe that we now have a tool that we can really gather very good information about the propagation conditions inland.

Correlating the data collected from the reception reports of this new beacon with weather data, especially upper air data will help us to better understand tropospheric propagation across the interior of the country.

During the week, Danie ZR6AGB has been monitoring the internal and external temperatures of the beacon and experimented with the placement of a fan to improve cooling on the beacon. On Friday morning Danie and I mounted two mm fans on the outside of the heat sink that will make a significant difference to the temperature at which the beacon runs. We are looking for reception reports and preferably PI4 decode information from amateurs in those areas.

Registration information is on the front page of the SARL web. Registration closes midnight on 25 March. Remember if you have registered and not received an email within a day or two then you need you make enquiries. Do not leave it until the morning of the 27 th.

You do not need to be a skilled writer. Just provide me with the information and I will do the rest. The St Helena Beacon is running on The Tropoducting forecast was also good along the South Coast and in the late afternoon the East London Repeater was reported being very strong in Port Elizabeth or Gqeberha as it is now known. Went onto Excellent contacts. The West Rand Club also had a club station running. This video is a good introduction for the new amateurs who want to start exploring the world above 30 MHz.

They are well worth watching. The Next Generation beacon was a bit up and down this week with the load shedding the last couple of days. Listen out for it during the next couple of days on This is what you will here with your radio tuned to The CW portion of the beacon can clearly be heard. This is what it sounds like on I will request Rickus ZS4A to turn off the current beacon in Bethlehem while we test the replacement beacon.

Keep you eyes on the SARL homepage for when the registration process opens. Those extraordinary long distance contacts that you made or even that project that you are working on. The St Helena beacon that went on the air in February is certainly being heard. From the recordings that he made and the direction it seems as if it could be the St Helena Beacon.

You can also listen to the recordings made. My CW is not good enough to decode the snip-it recorded, but maybe you can. Well done to all the amateurs who contributed to making a beacon on St Helena Island a reality. Let us hope that it will soon be heard in Brazil as well. Pine was using W into a 2 element homebrew Hexbeam 8 m above ground level and Derek was feeding 1 kW into a 5 element M2 Yagi 18 m above ground level. Derek is hearing the beacon regularly.

Are there any other KZN stations hearing the beacon? Testing of the Next Generation beacon is progressing and shows that it is working well, however some issues with ground loops between the various boards needs to be taken care of. Once this has been done, testing will resume again. Whether you believe it or not, our VHF and above bands are under scrutiny and we need to be able to demonstrate that we are actively using the bands allocated for amateur use.

We need to document and talk about what we are doing on these bands. Symposiums and Workshops are where we need to share this information. Do your bit and help us show that we are actively using the bands allocated to us.

The SARL Technical Symposium, "Unlocking Amateur Radio Technology " that will be held on the BlueJeans platform on Saturday 27 March is the ideal opportunity to share the project that you have been working on with your fellow radio amateurs and an opportunity to show the world that technology is alive and well in Amateur Radio. The Symposium will run from - CAT and the speaking slots are typically 20 minutes with 10 minutes for discussion and questions. This was the first ZS6 to ZS1 contact on this mode.

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