Radio Havana Cuba --Dxers Unlimited midweek edition for Tuesday 19 July 2011

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By Arnie Coro

radio amateur CO2KK

Hi amigos radioaficionados.... I am Arnie Coro, radio amateur CO2KK your host here at the mid week edition of Dxers Unlimited and here is item one of today's program.  

Solar scientists are very concerned about the evolution of solar cycle 24, and as a matter of fact at least two prominent heliophysicists are warning about the possibility that cycle 24 has already passed through its peak month.

If that is true, then the possibility of a new Maunder Solar Minimum activity period is going to be very high indeed. Other scientists keeping a close watch on the Sun think that the diminishing solar activity during the past several weeks is just part of the ups and downs of a standard cycle, but they do admit that the similarity of the behavior of cycle 23 with earlier ones that reached very low value peak sunspots numbers is certainly to be taken into consideration.

For short wave listeners within the frequency range between 3 and 30 megaHertz, that is from just 99 meters to 10 meters wavelength such a weak solar cycle means that the higher frequency bands are going to

be simply dead most of the time...  Sustained periods of sunspots numbers below 30 at this stage of the cycle will certainly have a really terrible impact on those areas of our hobby like amateur radio, short wave broadcasts listening and utilities monitoring on the HF bands that are totally dependent on the behavior of the Sun.

Item two:  With just 10 Watts and a half wave dipole wire antenna, a Cuban radio amateur, CO2WF Winston  was able to make a two way contact with Ireland... and that contact was on the 50 megaHertz or 6 meters band, using what I believe was the whispering gallery mode of propagation, when the 6 meters signals were trapped into two layers of the ionosphere near Cuba, and descended to Earth when the two layers splitted near Ireland. 

An analysis of this very interesting low power contact on the 6 meters band shows that there was not enough radio frequency energy radiated from CO2WF 's antenna to support multi hop sporadic E propagation across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Just another excellent example about how fascinating the 6 meters band can be at anytime of the year, even when the solar cycle is showing such a low number of sunspots. Item three;  If we want more people to be motivated by amateur radio, we must make the hobby much more visible to the general public, and also efforts must be made to design and build ham radio equipment that may be sold at much lower prices of the present generation of all full of bells and whistles transceivers. 

According to a recent meeting that we had at our Plaza Radio Club here in Havana, it is quite clear that the newcomers to the radio hobby, especially the younger generation can not afford to buy expensive equipment, but they are certainly able to assemble much simpler radios under the guidance of more experienced radio amateurs.

Stay tuned for more radio hobby related information, coming to you from Havana, the beautiful capital city of Cuba where we are now watching the every day afternoon thunderstorms that require to disconnect all radios and electronics equipment when they approach.

I will back in a few seconds after a short break for a station ID.

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You are listening to Dxers Unlimited, our Radio Havana Cuba, twice weekly radio hobby program... and here is a bit more about item three... the great concern among old timers in amateur radio about the future of this hobby. 

In many countries around the world, the amateur radio population is either at a standstill or dimishing at a more or less fast pace. 

Only a few nations can show statistics where the number of amateur radio operators are growing year by year , and such is the case of Cuba, where in a ten years period, the number of licensed radio amateurs has increased significantly. 

It is true that not all the members of our national amateur radio federation own a station, due to the lack of equipment, but it is also true that more and more radios are becoming available by means of the recycling path, as old equipment is phased out of service by professional users who then pass those radios at no cost to the national amateur radio association.

Many of those radios are single band rigs for the VHF Hi band, that can be reprogrammed to cover a part of the 2 meters amateur band, so as a matter of fact the number of 2 meters ham FM stations in Cuba has increased dramatically , helping to provide a very effective emergency communications system that acts as a backup of the normal wired and over the airwaves sytems. 

Ham radio operators here are well trained in the deployment of their equipment during emergencies and this one of the main reasons that our hobby is so well known by the Cuban public, who watches TV reports during the hurricane season where amateur radio is shown in use to handle emergency traffic.  

But that is not the only socially positive activity of Cuban hams, we take part in a lot of sports activities like the all over Cuba bicycle tour that spans from East to West all along our main island, and also during the marathon events that take place several times every year of which the MarHabana Marathon race is the most well known internationally with several thosuands of participants coming from many countries around the world to compete.

Again, we do need to design a simpler short wave transceiver, with a minimum parts count approach, in order to help not only the newcomers to the hobby, but also those old timers that are now having trouble with their antique radios which are at the end of their useful life and use parts that are now almost impossible to find in order to fix them.

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Si amigos, yes my friends , oui mes amis, twice every week you can listen to our radio hobby program and it is on the air several times during the mid week and weekend editions so that you can find the show at the time that you can sit down and listen. 

I am now once again working to try to make it regularly available in written form, so that the scripts can be read at anytime by visiting one or more websites. 

My daily workload is really impressive, so I am trying to automate that process, so that as soon as the script is finished it will be immediately loaded to the website , even before we go on the air for the first broadcast of Dxers Unlimited !!!

Let us see how it works... in the meantime, I will try to revive my BLOG  at http://dxersunlimited.blogspot.com and see how it works ,

So please check it during this week and tell me if it is working OK

Again the URL is http://dxersunlimited.blogspot.com....  

Item four: A large number of small portable radios that include short wave in their frequency coverage are unfortunately nothing else but junk. 

And they do a lot of damage to the short wave listening hobby due to their

very poor performance... 

Those very cheap AM FM and Short Wave portable radios that are sold at rock bottom prices are absolutely useless for listening to international short wave broadcast stations, because of their poor design and very low quality standards... 

If you really want to enter into the world of short wave listening it is really important to buy a REAL RADIO,  something that will cost you a lot more than what you pay for those useless pieces of junk sold at very cheap prices, BUT, the more expensive radios coming from well known trademarks, although nowadays are also made in cheap labor countries, are in general of much better quality and should last a lot longer.  

And now amigos, here is as always at the end of our program the HF plus low band VHF propagation update and forecast. The most relevant propagation events happening now are related to the sporadic E highly ionized clouds that made so many participants of the CQ Radio Amateur Magazine VHF Contest, where another Cuban station CO2OJ my good friend Oscar Morales Jr. was able to work more than 120 stations on 6 meters while running just 5 Watts and a simple half wave dipole antenna. 

Oscar is one of our topmost VHF operators and once again he was at the forefront of a VHF contest. My forecast calls for several more days of sporadic E events, with maximum usable frequencies going as high as the FM broadcast band in many instances.

Solar activity continues to be baffling scientists, and algthough we do see some sunspots and the solar flux has moved again above the 100 units mark, the  HF bands are in very poor shape to say the least, especiallly frequencies above 18 megaHertz. Please send your opinions about my

SOURCE: Dxers Unlimited's mid week edition script 19 July 2011 http://bit.ly/oPUaQv

Via Yimber Gaviria, Colombia