Friday, October 28, 2011
Radio Havana Cuba

Dxers Unlimited's weekend edition for Sunday 30 and Monday 31 October 2011

By Arnie Coro

radio amateur CO2KK

Hi amigos radioaficionados ... welcome to the weekend edition of Dxers Unlimited, that is going to be on the air during Sunday and Monday UTC days.... The weekend edition is heard just after the top of the hour news, everytime that our English language broadcast is on the air... For those of you living in the Pacific Coast of North America, from Northern Mexico to Canada, our English program is on the air starting at 0500 UTC , it runs from 05 to 06 and then is repeated from 06 to 07 UTC on 6010 kiloHertz, and that is on the 49 meters band....

After this announcement , here is now item two of today's show.... Amateur radio operators all around the world had a very busy weekend, that has increased the activity on the 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meter bands to levels not seen in a long time... The one and only reason for this extraordinary number of stations operating on the SIX CLASSIC HF bands , is that the CQ Magazine World Wide Single Side Band Contest began at 00 hours UTC Saturday and came to an end 48hours later. As a matter of fact, ham radio contest operators consider this contest as one of the most important ones, and that is why you will hear many stations operating from portable locations in order to activate new of seldom heard DX entities.

The CQ WorldWide SSB Contest this year has included the participation of a Cuban multi-operator station , that has used the special callsign T46A... in phonetics Tango Four Six Alpha, an effort by a group of very enthusiastic and also well experienced operators from Villaclara province located in Central Cuba.

Now , a bit more about the weekend contest , that in my opinion will very probably produce several records due to the fact that it takes place under the best propagation conditions on the HF bands seen during the past five years or maybe more....

One final note about the contest ... and this is answering a question sent by a newcomer to amateur radio some time ago.... listener Gary from Georgia , USA, wanted to know why the ham contests do not include the use of the 30, 17 and 12 meter bands, and the answer is that the so called WARC bands that were born during an ITU Conference in 1979 are very narrow frequency assignments , and one of them 30 meters, the 10 megaHertz amateur band allows operation on a secondary user assignment ... So amigo Gary, the ham contests organizers have agreed not to use those bands for such events.
Again, the amateur radio contests on the HF or short wave bands take place on the 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meter bands.

By the way, I will be operating my ham radio station, callsign CO2KK during the contest, under the low power category... CO2KK will be limited to 100 Watts and my contest strategy, taking into account the current HF bands propagation conditions will be to operate on 10 meters as many hours as possible, and then switch to 40 meters
when 10 meters closes down ....

Stay tuned for more radio hobby information, coming to you from Havana... You can send your comments and radio hobby related questions to inforhc at enet dot cu...
I am your host Arnie Coro in Havana, back in a few seconds....
Now a short break for a station ID...

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This is Radio Havana Cuba, the name of the show is Dxers Unlimited and it is on the air twice weekly during our station's English language program segments...

Here is now our next radio hobby related topic....A visit to my workshop, join me so that you may learn what is going on in my big garage workshop... that among other things really needs a big clean up and reorganizing, something that I seem never to find time to do them... Anyway at your amigo Arnie's workshop three things are happening at the same time... the UNIDEN CR2021 receiver repair job is in progress.... thanks to the kind help of several listeners that have sent me , via e-mail tips about typical faults seen on those radios, and also the complete technical manual in dot pdf format of a very similar receiver known as the Radio Shack DX440... So far, I have already found that the FM section of the receiver is working up to the 10.7 megaHertz Intermediate Frequency channel... something that was done by placing an RF probe near the CR2021, and connecting it to a receiver capable of picking up 10.7 megaHertz... Radio Progreso's Havana's FM powerhouse transmitter on 90.3 megaHertz came in loud and clear....

But so far efforts to pick up the 450 kiloHertz second intermediate frequency that is used for the picking up the AM broadcast band and the short wave frequencies up to 29,999 kiloHertz have proven to fail.... So more work will be required on this nice receiver, that also has NO audio output at all....

The other work in progress at my workshop are a pair of identical power supplies that are been built for two Super Islander 40 meters amateur band transceiver... One for my own CO2KK ham station , and the other one for a disabled member of our Plaza Municipal Radio Club. The Super Islander is a hybrid transceiver that yours truly designed using as a guideline CO7PR's famous Islander transceiver that was and still is popular among Cuban radio amateurs, because it can be built using easily found locally electronic components that are recycled from old TV , radios and computers...

The third position at my big workbench is in use by my elder son Arnie Jr. CM2KW, who is attempting to fix a computer UPS that failed after my home was hit by lightning two years ago... What is really outstanding about the failure of this computer uninterruptible power supply is that it was NOT connected to anything when the secondary lightning strike hit one of my towers... This was not a direct hit, but it was powerful enough to cause damages of the home electrical system and the Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP was, in my opinion, what damaged the UPS that Arnie Jr. is now trying to revive, something that I told him would be quite a challenge because the UPS uses many integrated circuits that could had been damaged by the huge Electro Magnetic Pulse generated by the lightning stroke...

All other electronic equipment including TV set, DVD player, ham radio transceiver and computer that were also disconnected from the power line and antennas as well as from the earth ground system were not damaged ... When I asked Cuban senior engineer Enrique Gay Calbo, one of our country's top experts in protection against the effects of lightning strikes, he came back with the following words, that I am now quoting here...

¨ Coro, no one is able to predict the behavior of a lightning strike... what it will damage and what it would not touch.... lightining strikes are capricious to say the least ¨
Then the old master added....your best bet for effective lightning protection is to install a very expensive integrated system that includes lightning rods, a very low resistance ground system and add to that, disconnecting equipment from any external circuits, something that includes power lines, ground connections and antennas.

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This is the weekend edition of Dxers Unlimited amigos, and YES, we do QSL,we do verify reception reports and answer your comments about this and other Radio Havana Cuba programs... send your e-mail messages to inforhc at enet dot cu, again, inforhc at enet dot cu, and if you want to read the scripts of my show and receive updates about HF and low band VHF propagation events, take a look at my BLOG... It can be found
at dxersunlimited.blogspot.com, again http://dxersunlimited dot blogspot dot com, and of course that you can subscribe to the blog and receive every new posting at your e-mail address automatically...

And now as always at the end of the show, when I am here in Havana and can prepare it, listen to Arnie Coro's Dxers Unlimited HF and low band VHF propagation update and forecast...

Solar activity will continue at levels high enough to keep pumping the ionosphere to such an extent that the HF bands between 14 and 30 megaHertz will be open for long distance DX during many hours every day... As a matter of fact, although an eventual M class or even an X class solar flare may disrupt propagation and coronal mass ejections may also cause geomagnetic storms, the upward swing we are experiencing in solar activity has made possible the best HF propagation conditions that we have seen in more than 5 years and some radio amateurs and short wave listeners are telling me that they had never seen such excellent propagation, as many of them joined our hobby when the Sun was at a period of extremely low activity...