Escaping from the shack between snowstorms

HamClock – or Open Ham Clock?

It was recently announced that the popular HamClock program will cease to function in June 2026 due to the death of its creator. HamClock has been running on an Inovato mini computer in my shack for a long time now. It has given instant access to a wealth of information important to the operation of my home shack. A rescue attempt has been announced that will restore access to the databases HamClock relies on to display its information. I hope that attempt is successful and will follow that project closely.

Meanwhile, there is now a competitor called Open Ham Clock. For the last few days I have been displaying both HamClock and Open Ham Clock on my shack computers and I have to say that I currently find the open version more useful and much more informative than the original. Both programs provide a VOACAP display that provides an instant view of band conditions for a selected “DX” location. In this context “DX” refers to any station or location selected by clicking on the map display, but not necessarily a long distance location.

Have you tried either program; if so what is your opinion? Let me know in the comments.

Life is tough and then it’s winter again

I am not a great fan of winter. I might think differently if I owned a snowmobile and could carry my portable radio gear for miles and miles along the extensive network of trails that cover the area where I live. Unfortunately I do not own such a vehicle and I’m a bit long in the tooth for snowshoeing through the woods wearing a backpack full of gear. Even if I did still have the stamina to get out into the back country in winter it would still be difficult to erect an antenna. Canada’s (literally) billions of evergreen trees have dense brush that catches the snow. Try to launch a wire up into the tree canopy and you can expect a small, cold avalanche to come tumbling down on top of your head. Guying a mast takes a lot of ingenuity because trying to drive stakes into the ground at this time of year requires something like a jack hammer – and that’s if you can even find the ground beneath a couple of feet of icy compressed snow.

But then, sometimes an idea occurs which is borderline genius but, at the same time, very simple. So when I wanted to take advantage of a recent day when the temperature managed to creep above freezing for the first time in weeks, this happened. I carried my Spiderbeam mast out onto my driveway looking for a way to secure it well enough to test an antenna idea. My driveway is regularly plowed and although I haven’t seen the concrete for months, the compressed layer of icy precipitation is sufficiently thin that my 4×4 truck can complete its passage between house and road without difficulty. But the rest of my suburban lot still carries the accumulated snowfall from weeks of winter weather. At the side of my driveway the snow is a couple of feet deep. Would it be firm enough to support my mast I wondered? I decided to find out. I pushed the mast down into the compressed snow and it felt firm enough. It penetrated 19 inches into the snow before meeting a firmer layer. A swift encouragement with my right foot inside a heavy snow boot sealed the hole at the top.

This particular mast is Spiderbeam’s 7 meter (23 feet) model. Would the snow holding less than 2 feet of mast at the bottom be sufficient to support the full extended length? Yes. Not only that but when I used it to support a 40m EFHW wire the mast bowed with the strain of the long wire, yet did not show any sign of dislodging from its nature-supplied support. Success! Maybe winter ain’t so bad after all!

The antenna was a half wavelength long on 40m, with links for 30m and 20m. It allows me to set up the antenna for operation on its fundamental frequency for the 20m, 30m and 40m bands without relying on harmonics, although it does also work on the 2nd harmonic of 40m (i.e. 20m) when operated at its full length. Note that the CW QRP calling frequencies of 7.030 and 14.060 are very conveniently precisely related.

I have used this wire many times for POTA activations but on this occasion I wanted to test the ability of my version of AA5TB’s parallel tuned circuit to find a match on each of the three bands (it did, easily). I also used the occasion to test my newly completed QRP L-match (with binary selectable inductances) to see if that would also find a match on the same three bands. It did, again easily. I’ll be writing more about that project in an upcoming post.

What happened?

I skipped a light Fandango when I received this week’s report from WordPress. Although I don’t fixate on Ham Radio Outside the Box’s visitor numbers, subscriber count etc, something unusual must have happened. In the last 7 days this humble little blog received 5,350 page views which is more than double the regular weekly number. Compared to major websites that statistic may be underwhelming, but for a tiny one person amateur radio hobby blog from the Great White North it’s an achievement. A big thanks to all Ham Radio Outside the Box subscribers and visitors; it is folks like you who make writing this blog so worthwhile.

I don’t want to belabor the point but this is a non-commercial site. Any links in the posts here are not “affiliate links”. I do not solicit or accept financial donations from any source. Amateur radio is my hobby, not a business. Participating in the hobby often costs money – particularly for experimenters like myself. The costs associated with maintaining a domain registration and site hosting fees are just part of the investment in a hobby that carries its own reward through the enjoyment and thrill of communicating with others by radio. We should keep in mind the definition of “Amateur service” from the FCC Part 97 rules (para 97.3, section 4). Note in particular the phrase “without pecuniary interest”.

Amateur service. A radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that is, duly authorized persons interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest.

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