1500 Mile Targeted Contact with HF Radio

well it's pretty early on a Saturday morning and the birds are out the clouds are out and we're going to try to make a longdistance HF communication a bunch of you uh in previous radio content have asked in the comments how you talk hundreds of miles little handhelds go a few miles fine sure it's depending on a bunch of different factors but what if you want to talk for hundreds of miles well today we're going to try to make a contact 12200 mil away in Arizona and talk to my friend Gaston of the tech prepper Channel we're trying to talk to him directly this is part of his no random contacts program now ham radio as a hobby uh it's really fun to turn on the radio see what's going on and see who you can get a hold of but in an emergency you want to talk to a specific person and generally at a specific time now right now the conditions are not actually great we're not sure if the band is completely opened up there's a couple of big storm clouds in the way and then over here uh the position where we're transmitting from is going to have electrical noise because of these high tension three-phase uh all these different factories on the industrial park here that's going to be potentially an issue but that's kind of the point of the exercise uh in an emergency the conditions are usually not in their favor uh that's not just Murphy's Law usually the conditions are contributing to the emergency and you may not have all the stuff that you need this may not be possible to make the contact okay we are 30 seconds into the video and we already have our first mistake it is not 1,200 miles it's more like 1,500 miles we're going to talk from Centerville just outside of Nashville to a remote location just outside of Phoenix Arizona and we've got to go over all of these mountains here it's going to be a long shot with the amount of power that we have so we've got our antenna set up and I've used this Compass right here to figure out the 272° that's the heading that we need need to to get to our guy and this is our comm's plan specific times when we actually try to make contact on specific bands using specific modes and then we've got contingency times and our emergency communication is going to be the Garmin inre Satellite Communication to be perfectly honest this is the only thing that I'm pretty 100% confident that it works so we are all set with one one minor issue uh as I was using this radio uh previously this week there's already been a snag this radio inside of this man pack here is a zyu g90 which is a very cheap Chinese radio 400 bucks and its performance is actually fantastic much better than it should be for the price now it's a digital radio inside but there's no digital port coming out so we're going from analog and Cat to digital using this handy little Digi rig thing here but that connect connects through these ports on the side and that is where we ran into the trouble so this is a great example of why you should always be testing and using your gear pretty regularly not just waiting for that emergency uh I discovered this last night while I was trying to do some regular stuff uh and it's a good thing that power was on cuz I do have a USB power soldering iron so I could have done this with no electricity except that the USB powered soldering iron doesn't work so yeah it's nice that we're doing this with power on going to reassemble this thing and see if we fixed it I will say that I kind of like this radio a little less now that I've had it open uh not necessarily just because it broke uh but it's kind of a pain to put it back together I can't help but think of better ways with less assembly that this product could have been made and then there's the durability these armal loock rails do a great job of protecting all the connectors on the back of the radio all the controls on the front of the radio but we have discovered the weakness here on the sides first test is going to be power didn't catch on fire second test is going to be turning it on it's alive so that's all good signs the final test is the most trickiest we going to plug directly into our repaired Jack gently gently all right it didn't fall off so far so good turns out it didn't work the radio works the Port works the digi rig Works everything is working fine but it just won't talk to the computer which is a shame because we have such a fantastic kit here geston has put together a really awesome thing that uh I am disappointed that one part of it is a weak point we have the little tough pad computer with completely waterproof keyboard to do all of our digital modes uh it is extremely cool we have a good lithium iron phosphate battery we have antennas and then of course the radio itself which I realize now is the weak Link in the whole thing the only part of the project that I actually supplied was this radio and it worked really well up until the point that the one little data Port stopped working so the good news is we're not back to the drawing board uh we have a whole bunch of working stuff and it's even color coordinated too uh so that is really nice and all this stuff has been really well thought out but we went just a little bit just a little bit Fragile on the radio again uh this is my radio I've had it for quite a while and it's held up relatively well and gustan got it to work pretty well at his end but something happened to it in between now and then and it's still a great uh still a great analog radio and I I do think that it's probably fixable and it's definitely going to be easy to replace the front end uh since that is where the damage happened so yeah I I I do think that um we'll we'll get it working again but we also are trying I think we're kind of pushing our luck with this radio here because all of this stuff the software that is on here this very fancy computer setup uh doing all of these things properly is not particularly cheap and then trying to put the cheapest possible HF radio as part of that is a little bit like putting an oite on your Daniel Defense rifle just um you know you're going to have the entire setup it's going to cost a lot don't let there be a particularly weak point so this has been a very educational thing but now I'm curious to see what it is that we're going to replace this g90 with this is where our friend Jason comes in so if this is not able to make analog Communications and our digital capability is broken uh we're a little bit in trouble but fortunately Jason has brought along some other stuff this is a more powerful analog radio and this is another Digital radio option so even if this isn't able to completely make the contact we'll still be able to learn a lot of stuff and we're going to Tinker with and build a few tools to make our chance of success uh even just a little higher now because this is not a real emergency cell phone and internet are working fine I could just put guest on on speaker phone for the entire morning and we could just troubleshoot stuff that way but this is a much more effective exercise if there is zero communication outside of HF radio and we stick to the plan we'll learn a lot more this way and if you want to know why HF signals go so much farther than regular VHF or UHF and why the antennas are so long go check out our radio propagation video from a couple months ago so Jason tell me what it is that we're doing here we've got our communication plan and we've got our 20 M antenna it's up and ready to go and pointed and the uh the meter says that it's it's operating pretty well what you got so what I've done we also have another antenna for the next portion of the coms plan where we're operating in the 18 uh mehz frequency contingency that's a contingency plan what I've done though that's an infit halfwave antenna mhm I'm I'm kind of a uh more of a dipole guy when we're talking about these very directed contacts mhm so I put this together just as a backup plan uh had some extra wire with me and literally Cobble this thing together with a Leatherman in about uh 5 minutes or so we've still got to tune it but uh as soon as we get it tuned tuned up that will give us another antenna now this is an interesting point here because on the tech prepper himself gave us a 17 M antenna and knowing him I'm sure it's great however I've never used it you haven't tested it I've never used it so this is one of those things where if you haven't tested your gear but there's a thing that you know for sure works sometimes the technically inferior option is the safest CU you have the knowledge so yeah just more familiar with the dipole not you know never used that particular antenna that he sent you and I I just want a backup plan yep yeah no this is this is uh I think this is an important thing there's a tendency for uh lots of people probably people watching my channel possibly people watching your channel definitely me to buy the good thing and stick it in the bag and know I have the good thing so I'm going to be good and uh I'm actually more familiar with a technically inferior option I can make it run better than the thing that I've never tested and never tried correct never read about and never uh understood the best gear sitting in a bag does not do you a lot of good you got to get it out and and play with it practice with it learn what it will do and what it won't do all right so uh we're hearing some traffic on the frequency that we have chosen for our comms plan this is part of the reason that we have multiple frequencies meanwhile back in Arizona someone's on our frequency which is is okay well there's the Tennessee station now if this were an emergency we would interrupt yes but because this is a simulated emergency they were here first and there's a lot more of them and they have more power yes uh so this is why we have a contingency frequency because yeah in an emergency well in and the other thing is in a big emergency everybody would be on the radio right so right so having those established windows and established frequencies you know we're going to listen to this frequency for 5 minutes or an hour whatever your plane happens to be and then we're going to shift to U you know a different frequency or a different band all together to try you know at a later Point um can be helpful especially when the bands are congested like this yeah all right so we've only got about 20 seconds left in this window the windows he's established are 5 minutes in length so at uh 1505 Zulu which is uh basically in 10 seconds we're going to roll up to the next indicated frequency on the list now here's the next downside we had a much quieter frequency at 14330 yeah it was so now you can hear all of this which is something giving us interference on this particular frequency yeah just because we shifted a little bitty bit into band may have made it impossible to actually hear Arizona kilo kilo 4 Fox truck Mike Victor from kilo tango7 Romeo uniform November do you think that is our electrical substation down the road or probably um possibly uh it's kind of hard to say um but you don't know this when you're developing a comms plan you know we or months in advance yeah so and it can change this noise might not be here tomorrow if we came back at the same time yeah uh maybe it's a um you know a neighbor that's running a generator or someone else that's just got a temporary solar panel set up to power their RV that goes away this noise may also go away if it is something permanent this is another argument for getting out running stations from your own area so you get to know like that substation yes you got to be this part away uh the three-phase inverters that CNP uses down here to run their giant hos machines it's a good thing at Saturday but I happen to know those makes the noise you've played this game before huh we're pumping 80 Watts guys let's do 100 kilo kilo 4 Fox Dr Mike Victor from kilo Tango 7 Romeo uniform November qsl so he calls us on the even minutes we call him on the odd minutes and uh it's his time to talk nothing kilo Tango 7 Romeo uniform November this is kilo kilo 4 Fox Trot Mike Victor come in his call sign has a lot of syllables all right so I'm guessing we're not going to make this window yep let's look at okay so our next one is going to be js8 call uh at 14078 y uh and that'll come up at 1515 so this is a longer window he's given us 10 minutes inside of this window so we'll wait till uh 315 Zulu and then we'll just swap over from this radio and we'll be using the 705 uh for that digital section this radio is what we're using for analog Communications because of its greater power output right yes and that is both a strength and a weakness M if we're running on battery we're going to be eating up more battery because we're pulling more power from the battery um and when we're using digital we don't really need that much power so that's why I set up the 705 to do the digital side of it it's only going to be putting out 10 watts we do have the external battery hooked up to it uh but that's really probably all we're going to need you're going to need some calcul to do some calculations so you know all right I'm only going to go out for 6 hours I can get away with this size battery but if I'm going to be going out for multiple days I either a have to put a solar panel in the you know in the mix to help recharge that or I've got to carry a larger battery to get me by yeah the other part of that equation how much are you going to transmit yes I was going to ask about that cuz me personally uh I generally don't like to talk on a radio I like to talk even less I like to listen so what's the power draw for this listening that we're doing right now this particular radio is around 600 milliamps power draw on receive this one is half that even though it's got the nice large color screen it's still half the draw to this radio so we can listen for days yes and one of the reasons I like this particular radio is because of its low draw while receiving yeah now before we go into the digital part of the comm's plan let me explain why we're doing digital uh do you remember remember Morse code Morse code is so much better at longdistance low power communication because it's a single Clear Tone It can be on a narrower piece of bandwidth and it's easier to hear when it's on and off as opposed to human voice that's often really hard to interpret it needs more bandwidth and it's just harder to hear through noise and other obstacles and then digital modes are like uh that Morse code they are specific tones and they can be designed around cutting through interference and error correction uh and just communicating data faster than simple dashes and dots and the one that we're going to be using is called js8 call it's based on the ft8 protocol and it's incredibly good at exactly what we are trying to do very little power it's going to go a long distance and be intelligible at long long ranges uh we hope another thing that I want to talk about is timing for the analog voice parts of the plan we have been broadcasting no that's wrong we have been transmitting and we have been listening on Alternate minutes so this is a great way to make sure that you are listening when the other person is talking and you are talking when the other person is listening but it requires that you both have pretty accurate times to do that in obviously this is where GPS watches actually come in really handy if you can get a GPS signal on your watch you can have really good time signatures the other thing you can do with your ham radio is you can tune into the Fort Collins uh radio stations that broadcast time on these frequencies over here uh there's a bunch of different ways that you can get timing so that you're actually on the same plan as the other guys once you go to digital though occasionally you need more accurate timing than just being more or less on the right minute JSA call requires that you be less than 2 seconds uh apart I believe now the good news is that you can get that with a GPS watch you can get that the internet if the internet is working you can get that from the Fort Collins radio stations if those are running I think that's where the atomic clocks are but the other thing that you can do with js8 call is you can get it from other js8 call guys so we don't have to be on exact perfect time I just have to be able to see js8 call messages coming in and set my clock based on those and then I can and then I can talk to those guys the other thing that you could do is if you were trying to work around other js8 call messages you could be running at a different time signature that they are maybe squeeze uh squeeze some extra stuff in so that is something that I want to tinkle with and learn more about but JSA call is fascinating piece of software and um Gaston has built his own uh software package called uh mcom tools that you should look into but I'm going to let him talk about that on his own channel Now using this Panasonic tough book and sweet metal keyboard here that uh gueston has set up we have our js8 call setup um this is my call sign this is where we control the radio these are past messages that we have received and this right here is where we type the messages that we want to send uh the other thing that we have down here is the waterfall if this were connected to our radio we would see signals coming in across these bands and we would be able to know when somebody is transmitting in a specific spot and we would know not to transmit over over top of them so even if our time signatures were out of sync at the beginning we would still have a visual representation of what is going on and we could kind of figure some stuff out so it is really robust for situations where there has been maybe less coordination than we have now okay so we struck out on our first band cuz there were people talking over us we struck out on our second band cuz there was RF interference so we're switching to digital we're going to alternate where I transmit on the even uh minute and Isaac Andor Jason will transmit on the odd ones signal so we're getting a message directed to me all right you can see this K7 uh kt7 run km4 a and then MSG that means he's sending a message direct to us we can see it on the waterfall correct a new message was received I do see some activity on the waterfall on 1500 this could be them guys yep we got km4 AK awesome he wants us to acknowledge send him uh we're looking at alpha alpha November and we will here backa 7 yes if it's him so this is a very important part of emergency communications we want to make sure this is actually our friend in Arizona not a man in the middle so these are the authentication tables that he made top grid first side grid second and there's multiple versions so he asked for a a n alpha alpha November that is this grid this column that row it is a seven so really quick and easy way using very few characters to verify that the message is authentic and secure although it's not secure now because you can see the One Time Pad here on YouTube Wildfire evacuated Running Oh battery self- support seven days all right what so we'll just click okay here my station is automatically acknowledging that we got a full copy on his message nice so one of the things that JSA call is great for um so obviously it is defeating some of the propagation and interference issues that we've run into we're only just a little bit off from The Voice channels where we were running into yes stuff uh but what this would be great for is not so much back and forth Communications but updates where you and I go deal with an emergency thing come back and see what messages send updates go continue to do our thing come on back check on those aircraft come on back Etc so we have bidirectional communication right now fellas and uh he basically put Roger Roger 17 M at the top of the hour question mark all right so we have succeeded on the 20 m B voice failed secondary voice failed primary data succeeded so that is a win we made contact but we're going to try again on our contingency with voice uh on a couple of different channels and then digital again using our field experience 17m antenna we'll see how it goes we'll try voice again first so hopefully the nice thing about the 17 meter band is that it's a work band and not terribly crowded Yankee Oscar out here in the high Des well I got good news and bad news that signal sounds great but it is not the tech prepper in Arizona so if you get a crystal that's lower in frequency say you buy one that's on oh mey no b rock at all but hydropic acid by God that'll have an impact on it h our channel is being used by some other ham radio guy he's talking about something cool you want but he's definitely talking about uh stuff on the whole band what all right we're coming up on the time to switch to our next frequency second try at voice on 17 m and once again our second channel has some interference on it a little bit more noise than where we just were this is RF interference or electrical noise not people talking it's going to be hard to hear through that kilo tango7 Romeo uniform November this is kilo kilo 4 Fox Trot Mike Victor and then what's our time to roll to digital we will roll to digital in 3 minutes okay voice appears to be a bust today even at 100 Watts all right we're going to switch from our analog radio to our digital as simple as swapping the antenna if there's a signal there I am not seeing it okay just noise y I'm seeing this noise over here but I'm not seeing anything mhm in the middle okay so it is no longer early in the morning and this is not the most grueling test environment since we're literally right in front of the shop but here is the final score we essentially had four different ways of communicating across two different bands and our success rate is one out of four which in one sense is a fail but overall it is a success because the goal was to make contact we managed to do that and there is actually a emergency communication method the Garment inre that also worked perfectly I was able to send a message to a guest on he was able to send a message back and it went all the way up through space with I think less time than it took to transmit over js8 call so infrastructure is cool when it's there this is cool when it's not there so now we're going to start to pack up this stuff another experimental training day over and uh we're going to have some thoughts about how we do this next time minor tweaks minor changes but all in all a tremendous day so all in all it was a success but more important it was a great learning experience it felt uh like we overcame a few obstacles but there were a lot of obstacles we didn't overcome and those are great learning opportunities kind of like your first uh competition where you are actually shooting against other competitors and on the clock for the first time you will learn things you didn't know that you were actually going to learn and you will change your opinion of some of your gear in that circumstance and I have kind of changed my opinion of this radio a little bit based on that digital port now on the plus side this is a great radio it performs incredibly well it gives you great bang for your buck it has fantastic features like an automatic tuner so you can use just random pieces of wire for antennas uh barbed wire fences and all kinds of just pieces of metal L around it's very very cool but it has a specific set of weak points and the annoying thing is this is a great budget radio but for $2 they could have fixed some of the weak points so I'm not as interested in using this radio for anything other than just sort of local analog HF at 20 watts I'm probably going to put this in a car and do some envis experiments with it but I am far more interested in doing the digital uh communication methods I want to spend a lot more time in j say call figuring that out and until we fix this Datacom Port right here this isn't going to actually be any good for that I actually want something smaller and more lightweight I'm very intrigued by the radio that Jason had but you know I could buy three or four of these for the cost of that radio so the cost is kind of a thing and that's where we run into a bit of an issue I would love to see radio manufacturers lean into kind of a new breed of ham radio uh guys guys who are more like gon guys who are more like me um guys who are a little bit different than the ones that we heard on the radio uh people who are less interested in tinkering and experimenting with a whole bunch of different random bits and pieces and people who want uh kind of HF radio appliances that work like tools and the g90 is actually a perfect example of that kind of older ham mentality because this is a digital radio it is probably running Linux under the hood it is an SDR there is very little analog inside of this thing and yet there is no USB port there's no way for me to talk to the computer that is this radio except through this analog headphone jack that uh is just barely held on that demonstrates that this radio despite being a very advanced modern digital computer uh the manufacturer still thinks that we want to talk to it using a whole bunch of different little adapters old school ham style but I would prefer that uh there be options out there for people that just want to use this device as a tool the other thing that I want to do is uh I would love to get a js8 call app for Android because you could build a very small and simple HF kit there are small HF radio transceivers that come in kits and they fit in altoy tins they're just extremely minimalistic and you can run those off of you know your USB power powered batteries and then you can connect stuff up with short cables and obviously there are still some physical limitations to HF you need very long antennas but those wrap up in a really small space as well so you could build an extremely capable long range HF rig using really lightweight pocketable parts that would give you a huge amount of distance uh with not very much power that's something that is really fascinating to me it's kind of like the old uh the old days of the alltoys qrp radios where people would try to run on just a tiny amount of wattage they'd give themselves really significant weight uh restrictions to try to operate inside and then make super long contacts with very fascinating actually that reminds me of World War II spies that used to have HF radio or back then they called it shortwave radio equipment they would sneak Behind Enemy Lines they would string up wire antennas in places where they wouldn't be noticed and then they'd send as fast as possible short of abbreviated military information back to the front then they'd pull down the radio stuff and disappear with it as quickly as possible this is more like this kind of stuff that they wanted to carry around back then to communicate Vital Information uh with some other constraints that they were working inside so uh I would like you to follow the tech prepper on YouTube not only uh is he doing the actual work on a regular basis of building and experimenting with stuff he's also building out that software where he's building out that software around radios that are off the shelf but also is working on firmware inside of other radios so he is a fantastic resource and then also Jason we couldn't have made this video uh we couldn't have made contact we couldn't have made any of this work without Jason so follow his channel as well link to those and uh yeah let us know in the comments what stuff you would like to try to do with this radio stuff there's always handheld radios uh and talking to people that are very nearby but as soon as you want to go hundreds of miles thousands of miles you are entering an entirely new universe of stuff and an entirely new world of RF propagation that needs to be figured out so it's very interesting stuff but it has tremendous tremendous uh opportunities [Music] so this Mast made right here in Tennessee is fantastic it just friction locks it is made of fiberglass and uh super lightweight goes 30 plus feet in the air I believe um yeah I'm getting one that's that's a good takeaway so this field expedient 17 mm antenna now on the one hand we failed to make contact on 17 M with geston but the antenna did not fail we could hear an awful lot of traffic on 17 M So the antenna was a success uh these field expedient kidex tent pegs are super handy flat fit in the bag weigh nothing work pretty well in normal soil so that worked well

Channel: TREX LABS

Views: 86,614

Keywords: radio, hf radio, comms, ham radio, digital radio, parks on the air, tech prepper, km4ack, emcomm, decentralized comms, commo, shortwave, qrp, js8call, isaac botkin, trex arms, trex labs, no infrastructure, inreach, satcomm

Id: 7UxiOejlRxU

Length: 33min 29sec (2009 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024