Amateur Radio news from Italy

IW5EDI Simone – Ham-Radio

Florence HamFest 2013

Posted in Featured, Ham Radio Events Leave a comment

FlorenceHamFest2013Quadrato250

A new interesting HamFest has been announced from my local ARI club.

The Florence HamFest, is a Flea Market and Ham Radio Convention that will take place on 6 April 2013 in Florence.

Link to english page of the Florence HamFest

During the last year edition, visitors were almost one thousand with 84 expositors.
Along to the flea market, has been reserved a space for local Amateur Radio Associations, including AMSAT, local ARI Sections and some DX Peditions crew like the guys from II0MZ Antartica.

Well this year looks like it will be more ham radio events scheduled, as member of the organization team I’m really pleased to see so much interest and enthusiasm around this event.

If you are interested on joining or simply visiting the HamFest  we can reserve you a place to stay in Florence at a reasonable price.
This could be an interesting opportunity to mix ham radio with a Florence Tourist Tour.

FlorenceHamFest2013Footer

80m 40m Inverted L Antennas

Posted in Antenna, Articles 1 Comment


Inverted L AntennaThis week I’ve started investigating on Inverted L antennas for low bands (160 to 40). Expecially for restricted space scenarios, like mine. I found some interesting articles on the net, and a couple of PDF that I’ve embedded in an article dedicated to Inverted L Antenna for Low Bands

Postage rates increase again.

Posted in QSLing Leave a comment

According to a recent AGCOM news, postal rates for letters will increase starting 1 January 2013.
Local newspapers reports that increase for european postage will increase by 10 cent. From 0.65 euro to 0.75 euro.

Sending QSL via Direct will be therefore more expensive, expecially to sending to Asia and Oceania

I’ve discovered, that for
Zone 2 (America and Africa) postage increase from 1.60 to 2.00 euro.
Zone 3 (rest of the World) incredibly pass from 2.00 euro to 2.50 euro.

In December 2010 , (just 24 months ago) sending a QSL in ZL costed 1 euro, in the States 0,85 and in Europe 0,65.

Direct QSLing from Italy

IP Sound

Posted in Ham Radio Software Leave a comment
ip-Sound Sample

ip-sound

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IP-Sound is a windows based  application for audio exchange in a pont to point mode.

It has been designed to work over a TCP/IPv4 network (internet).

The main purpose of IP-Sound is to provide low quality audio 8-16kHz, with low latency for use together with remote control software for amateur-radio amateur equipment.

I’ve used this cool application exactly to test my radio remote control over the internet.

IP-Sound is developed by SM5VXC and  can be downloaded fron here IPS-v0.57a

Yaesu FT DX 3000 Sherwood Eng. Review

Posted in Equipment, Featured 7 Comments

FT DX 3000 Sherwood Engineering

As promised me in November by Rob Sherwood, the new Yaesu FT DX 3000 has been reviewed and added to the world famous Receiver Test Data comparison table.

Table is sorted by dynamic range – narrow spaced, means tat when you are listening to stations with signals close up the one you are focusing, you will hear it better…

According to Rob measurements, the latest Yaesu HF transceiver, considering tha dynamic range values, places right under the entry lever line Kenwood TS-590s measured in donwconversion (20 m) and even the smallest FlexRadio 1500 it’s above it.
This confirm the excellent perfomance / price ratio of the 590’s receiver.

 

Personally I expected the Yaesu FT DX 3000 for the price being aproximately around 3000 Euros, to have superior receiving performance, considering that the 590 can be found here in Italy at almost half the price and decreading.FT DX 3000 by Yaesu

Honestly I’m a bit disappointed, since my expectations, reading Yaesu specifications table where much higher. Being a Yaesu Fan.. I expected a receiver performance in line with the price.

Thanks to Rob Sherwood for being in time as promised.. Great job ..as always.

LoTW delays

Posted in QSLing Leave a comment

As  Ham Radio Deluxe user, and faith LotW subscriber, I’ve ever upladed my logs to the ARRL LoTW system.

Since HRD started offering the automati upload / download I’ve enjoyed using this function.

Starting october I’ve noticed a delay on receiving confirmations… and curious of this I’ve logged-in to LoTW page

Since I was using the HRD upload system, it was a log time since my  last direct login.

Well, I’ve been surprised to see that my most recent QSO was of late August ! I decided therefore, supposing a bug in HRD to re upload all my logs back again. A message was warning that Queue took 6 days.

A week later I went back to see if my logs where uploaded but , astonished, my most recent QSO was still the same, in august.

I noticed a warning message saying that IT guys found a bug making logs disappear randomly. They explained that cause was because of a non unique key used to rename uploaded logs.

Well, I re-uploaded all my logs, but now after 4 days my latest contact is still the one in August.

Will wait a little bit now to see what’s happen..