Sounds good.  Will try again.  Give me a min to get to the shack

Just threw out a couple of calls. no joy?
I even whipped up a 20m dipole yesterday.  It's broadside to your location at 159 degrees from me.

I picked up part of my callsign and a KD2 something something call sign. Funny, though, I didn't hear the Olivia sounds in the headset like I normally do.

ETA: Noise is actually down to S7 to S8 level today.

I heard some Olivia sounds just as my team mate started a winlink session which blows any reception right out of the water because our antennas are so close together.

CQ ARFCOM De KM4WUO KM4WUO 1515Z 1715Z
Trying a CQ to see if i can hear back
BTU ARFCOM de KM4WUO pse kn.

Copied that Planemaker.
Thanks for the note on my center freq.  it shows right here but might be off by a few hz, will have to check it out.

I only know that because DM780 popped up with a window saying "Olivia 16/500 detected on 1507Hz".

Will try again tonight.  Maybe 40 will be better
73

planemaker, while you're working hard out there, would you mind grabbing a Denver Mint Puerto Rico quarter?  Fatalwishes' son has been promised a trip to Disney World by his grandmother once he collects all 50 state quarters from both mints and memorizes all the state capitals.  We're just missing the one Puerto Rico @ this point - I'll pay you $10 for your trouble.

I'll start looking. I did some laundry last weekend so I may have used one already.

For those that may have missed the qso at 1730e, I heard a rumor that one of the larger towns on the western side of the island ran completely out of water everywhere. No city water, no bottled water in stores, nothing. So, about 20,000 bottles of water were rushed to the scene. Almost 6 weeks since the hurricane hit, and still there are disaster conditions for a large portion of the folks down here.

Reminds me of when El Paso ran out of water due to deliberate power outage. (City bought power on the cheap because power company could turn off power to city departments during periods of high demand. High demand came along power company nixed the power, water pumping didn't happen, water towers went dry. Duh.)

Duh. Was watching the time on my watch. Come to find out, my watch had picked up the atomic clock time and since it was set to East Coast time, it shifted back an hour without warning. So, now I'll have to use my phone's time to make sure I'm not late for stuff.

Bands have been wierd all morning. Some signals were booming in here and 10 seconds later they were gone and 10 seconds after that, they came back but mediocre.

Good QSO OP

Anybody making contact with plane maker?

(Sent from 36000 feet...)

I did at about 22:30 UTC

Had very nice QSO with Mach. Told him that I'll be giving a class and doing some work with the National Guard down here. Evidently several of the Guard units down here have HF equipment that either is broken, sitting in a box, or the people have no idea how to use it or string an antenna for it. So, our team of 10 SHARES folks are going to several locations around the island to fix, educate, inform, and hopefully get these units back on the air. Perhaps not as noble as handing out MREs and bottled water, but needed nonetheless, especially with "ordinary" comms being so unreliable. I've heard some of their radios use N connectors and some use BNC. I have a bunch of those at home but didn't think I needed to bring them. Guess I was wrong about that.

I'd like to point out that part of our noise problem has gone away. The Army unit that brought a bunch of comms gear with them have taken it back to be shipped back home, wherever that is. They had placed a satcom dish that was less than 10ft from our wire antennas and pointed in our general direction. They had a second bigger dish they put just outside the wall of the building right next to where we were set up. No telling what kind of RF that was spraying out next to us. Comms coordination here is non-existent for the most part.

Found one! PM me with where to send it and I'll get it in the mail. Don't expect it overnight, mail service to and from here is still dog slow.

Thanks for taking up the slack, Mach. But you need to post about your qso's so that I can live vicariously through you.

BREAK

I believe all the SHARES radios are ALE. They are a slightly spooky bunch. We expect to learn all about them, now.

When the dishes showed up why didn't you move your antenna in the first place?

I did post about the QSO, 3 and 5 posts above :)

Yes, but there were no details. Of course, planemaker filled us in on those already...

Actually, not all that many SHARES radios have ALE. None of my team has it. One thing they do use is Pactor modems for passing digital messages. I don't have one but the guys who do have a Pactor 4 and the thruput on those is much, much higher than Winmor and establishes a much more reliable connection under noisy/lossy conditions (which is most of the time down here).

Yup, P4 is the heat. Too bad it's not legal for ham use (exceeds the stupid 300 baud "speed limit"). Also too bad that nobody has decided to build a sound card modem with channel estimation in it like the Pactor modems. Winmor could have been a lot faster.

So what radios are the SHARES guys using then?

Interestingly enough, the FCC has waived the speed limit regs in order to facilitate communications in the disaster zone.

Since our team had to bring our own gear, it's a mixed bag. I've got a Yaesu FT-991. I've seen two other Yaesus and two Icoms. Not sure about the rest. I and my team mate here in Ponce also have one of those CS-108G+ radios. It works OK, I've made a couple of contacts with it. It's much smaller and uses less power (because it's limited to a max of 20W output) but it's also not as good a receiver and doesn't have a lot of the noise reduction my 991 has.

Winmor could benefit from a lot of the weak signal stuff that some of the other digital modes (like JT-65, FT-8, WSPR) use. What seems to happen is that the RMS Express gets connected to a server station but somewhere along the line, either the band fades or the client/server synchronization goes south and eventually disconnects. Some days, it works great (other than the speed limit) and on others, can't send for jack.

Planemaker,

Next time you connect to a Winmor station, try setting your filter width to 500 hz first.  I always do this on Winlink and it has dramatically increased my success rate, even when QRP using an FT-817nd, I have a 500hz filter installed for Winmor.

If you already do this then, disregard.  :-)

BTW, I had some notifications on my screen when I got home saying that your call sign had been decoded in my waterfall.  Were you doing some PSK on Sunday?

Probably. It's a better way of figuring out what's propagating to where than the thing in Winlink. I've found those not to match reality much. Get a QSO on PSK, you know signal is propagating in that direction. Then presumably you can contact a winlink station near there. That ignores antennas though as it appears some of the winlink stations have turned a beam antenna towards Puerto Rico specifically to help out. Glad they did, it would suck most of the time otherwise.

I'll see if I can dial the filter width down and see if that helps.

One other setting that helps increase reliability (but sacrifices some speed) is to limit the inbound session to 500 hz.  You can still connect to 1600 hz stations, the protocol will negotiate back to 500.  That setting is in the Modem settings section once you open a Winmor Winlink session.  This constrains both directions of the session to stay within the 500 hz filter.

Yes, they waived a lot of things for this emergency. But of course I was told it was "impossible" for MARS stations to work inside ham bands for the exercise last weekend Obviously not!

I'm sorry if I missed it, but are you there as part of a SHARES team?

I've mentioned several times in the forum that I was on the Winmor alpha test team and ran a scanning Winmor RMS for two years. Winmor can not do this or benefit from weak signal waveforms in any way. Winmor, and Pactor, because they are ARQ modes with extensive link layer protocols, and because they are intended to move a relatively voluminous amounts of data, would take all day to move a message at the data rates available in weak signal modes.

The important thing to understand is that neither Winmor nor Pactor are weak signal modes. In fact they need link margins that are generally in excess of that required for an equally effective SSB phone contact.

If they have not done it already, they should set up an RMS station that scans 60 and 80M on the island, and provision it with a satellite backhaul. If this has not been done already and there are organizations that are absolutely hard over on using Winlink then that is just flat out beyond ignorant, i.e. stupid

You might think that as an early Winmor supporter, that I would also be in support of Winmor for so-called "emcomm". In fact I am not. It is a terribly inefficient way to move messages even when you have a good and reliable path to one or more RMS stations. If you absolutely need to send a perfect and lossless message, then it is a good thing. If you are a single user trying to communicate with people that are not equipped to communicate by HF amateur radio, also good. But for public or para-public use, where one would expect to find a proper headquarters HF communications node, it is horribly inefficient. In the time it takes to move even a single short email you could pass many more messages either by phone or conventional digital. Sure, there might be some errors, but IMHO 95% accuracy with 200% better throughput (that last number is a SWAG, but I think reasonable) is a much better solution.

However, HF RMS propagation is rarely good and reliable. Combine that with the need for good link margins and the low effective throughput on a per message basis and Winlink is not a good solution for emergencies where a large number of messages must be passed.

Finally, if you are not matching your receiver passband at the IF level to the digital mode in use, then you are seriously shortchanging yourself with respect to link performance. If you are chasing DX, sure, keep a wide passband, you have to find those signals after all. However, if you are on a net with a known frequency, it's just a no-brainer to squeeze things down to match the required passband. I suspect most of the arfcom digi net regulars have learned this lesson by now. Note, if you are using Winmor, you can't automatically select 500Hz. If you are connecting to an RMS that supports the 1600Hz modulations you need to leave the passband at 1600Hz in case conditions are good enough to allow the link to ratchet up to the faster modulations.

Agree with everything except I am curious about the final statement.  I set my Winmor TNC  to 500 hz on the "inbound session bandwidth" setting and have never had an issue connecting to 1600 hz (I mistakenly said 1200 hz in my previous post) RMS nodes when using a 500 hz filter.   Can you shed some light on that?

My experience down here has re-shaped my opinion on "emcomm" as well. Some of the more mundane digital modes are much faster at passing messages (PSK-63 comes to mind) but their error correction is maybe not as good as something like Olivia. Olivia has the drawback that when it burps, you lose 4 characters at a time. Winmor is fine if the disaster is localized and you can reach a gateway that has internet someplace else. It is a nice "lossless" system, assuming you can transfer data. I've seen some issues where the synchronization gets dorfed up in an unrecoverable way more than once. I've been sending my wife a howdy message to her cell phone every day because the ability to make a call or send a text here is really, really sketchy. Internet here at the office was down yet again early this morning.

I'm going to have to get my wife interested enough to get her ticket so that if this kind of thing happens again, we can do voice on HF SSB or digi modes of some sort. It's been extremely helpful that you guys have been listening and interacting. Seeing not just <what> but <when> it works is extraordinarily valuable. Hopefully, I've at least provided sufficient entertainment to make it worth your while.

ETA: Forgot to mention that the antenna is back on-line now. We needed to take a look and see how the salty moist air was treating all the connections. So far, so good. One of the other teams had been using an antenna that was put up by the ARRL folks nearly 6 weeks ago. It had some nasty corrosion already so the remaining teams have been checking their connections today.

Also, the regular frequency of 14067.5 has less noise today than 87.5, probably because there's a lot fewer radiators on the roof now and some nearby CW. I'd like to switch back to 67.5 since I'd programmed that in as one of my memory channels on the radio.

The server side is what controls the bandwidth of the connection. The inbound session bandwidth setting only restricts how your system will respond, as a "server", to incoming peer-to-peer connection requests. With that box checked, your system will not ratchet up to 1600Hz. It will not control how your system coordinates with a regular RMS station. If you connect to an RMS that has not checked that box on their end, then the RMS will attempt to ratchet up to 1600Hz modulations if link performance indicates this is possible. If you have limited your radio filter to 500Hz, then any such mode change will fail, and the system will fall back to 500Hz, but this wastes time, and, for long messages, this can happen multiple times.

If you've never had a problem limiting your radio filter to 500Hz, there could be many reasons for that. For example, you are only connecting to RMS stations with 500Hz settings. Or you are sending messages that are so short the system never attempts to ratchet up to 1600Hz. Or 1600Hz connections have failed and you simply didn't notice because if fell back and you weren't watching.

@planemaker:

Roger that on SHARES--interesting, thanks. Any other comments on SHARES would be of great interest.

Good to hear that they in fact did attempt to get some island RMS stations running. That just makes plain old common sense. Too bad they can't make it reliable. Obtaining reliability in an RMS is actually not an easy thing. Things like UPS performance, PC maintenance and maintenance reboots, lightning protection, internet uplink reliability, etc., etc. all come into play, obviously.

Yeah, one of the team members had something like a lightning strike or close hit. Evidently, it smoked a barrel connector and ruined 50ft. of coax. Luckily it didn't clobber the radio. Another pair in our group just had 2 power supplies destroyed by a power spike. I can believe it based on the funky power situation here. So many places are on generators and they're trying to get grid power back up in spots. Sometimes when they connect a feeder line, something downstream arcs like a mofo and then they have to shut it down abruptly. Does wonders for delicate electronics.

Between power issues and internet, and cell connectivity issues, it's pretty rough down here comm-wise. And, it's been almost 6 weeks since the hurricane hit.

Any comfort items we can send you?  Wet wipes, AA batteries, etc?

No, but I'd strangle a kitten and kick a dog for a Dr. Pepper. They don't have that stuff down here. It's Coke or Pepsi, and not even a lot of that since the local bottlers switched over to bottling water to be distributed island-wide. Can't wait to get back home....

Thanks for this info.  I've been using it this way for a long time and you're right, most of the time I have just done it with short email messages.  I have been using the .grib file feature more often lately within Winlink and I will try opening up the filter when I know one of those is coming in so I can observe the difference in behavior.

I did not realize was that the RMS station would continually attempt to go back up to 1600 Hz once it fell back to 500 Hz.

Had a nice QSO while it lasted. I got two good receptions from an ARFCOMMer before the Russians could hack the ionosphere and I lost him completely.

As I told him, it looks like I'll be leaving out on the 19th. That will get me home in time for Thanksgiving so I can keep peace at the house. I got on an airplane October 9th to go to Anniston, AL. I've been down here in PR since Oct. 13th.

Depending on the weather, we will probably be going to Aguadilla tomorrow to meet up with a couple of our team mates there. We may end up taking MREs and water to them the way it sounds. It might be prudent for all of us to make sure we have a good surge suppressor upstream of any of our gear. Between sudden storms and ridiculous power surges from the grid, it's risky. I didn't bring my lightning arrestor from home to put in line with my antenna.

Best thread ever.  
Thanks for the tips on the Winmor.
Finally caught a clear path to Planemaker for tonights 40m window.  He already reported on checking the antennas for corrosion, but everyone should be aware he's been there since 10/09 and doesn't get to go home to his family until 11/19.   That's a looong volunteer deployment.
Thank you Planemaker for your service to the people of PR.
Probably wouldn't get to you in time anyway, but send an address and we'll send some Dr Pepper your way.
Stay safe 73

Not ready for a QSO yet. Am working to get a QRP/Mobile rig ready for action. It's one of those CS-108G+ units. I tried it out on SSB with the Comet UHV-6 mobile antenna on top of the rental Jeep. Was able to talk to Florida and near Atlanta on 20M this morning. Not bad for a max of 20W.

Drove up to Rincon, just south of Aguadilla. They got hit really bad. It's still bad. Far fewer places with grid power than in the bigger cities. Very few homes with power. There were power lines hanging so low over the roadway in one spot, I had to drive a slalom just to weave around them. I didn't think it wise to test to see if they were live with a nice stainless steel mobile antenna.

Rincon was known as a "resort" spot here in Puerto Rico. Now, not so much. While the center of town has a quaint fishing village aura about it, the stupidly narrow roads make getting large trucks in to help recover almost impossible. I was told that going to Aguadilla from the north side (from San Juan) took more than 3 hours due to debris removal activity. There was some mention that something like 45,000+ cubic yards of debris was removed yesterday just in the Ponce area alone. Two of the temporary debris collection sites are now full. Nobody knows where the rest will go.

I can't imagine what the interior of the island must be like. Evidently the roads there are far narrower than in the bigger towns and many of them are unpaved. Add to that the number that were washed away and/or buried in a mud slide or have a bridge out, and you have a large swath of folks with no access out of their neighborhood.

The one bright spot was that all the signal lights (at least the ones that didn't get ripped off the poles) on the main road in the city of Mayaguez are working. Made traffic flow much better.

I might be going down there to hang some microwave shots for my employer, so I want to thank you for posting your reports from the ground here.  They've been very valuable to me, and I've shared a lot of it with my coworkers.

I haven't received word yet on whether I'm going or not, but if I do I'm not sure I'm going to be bringing any HF stuff.  I'm already going to have my hands full with tower climbing/rigging gear and tools.

edit: inglish iz hard

Sorry I haven't been on the air as much today, been busy doing stuff. Not that it would matter since the bands have sucked most of the day. I wasn't able to Winlink any e-mail until after lunch. Even psk sucked due to bad/no propagation.

BTW, less than half of the cell towers that were working before the hurricane have been repaired. It's a dicey proposition since a lot of climbing crews don't know the condition of the tower and don't want to risk getting their teams hurt or killed until the can inspect the towers. Perfect use of a drone but from what I've heard, there's only one drone crew on the whole island. Heck, <I> could have been doing those types of inspections with either my personal drones or my work ones.

Remind me once I get back to post some of the pictures of cell towers with their antennas pointed towards the sky, ground, next door, etc. I missed getting a picture of the tower that was broken off about 20 ft. above it's base.

Had a visit from the team that's stationed in Aguadilla (actually Rincon where we went yesterday). They still don't have a FEMA Branch office to work from yet. So, they've been doing comms for the locals, including the Red Cross local office and while doing that, they helped take pallets of water with them to places that needed it.

A 230kv power transmission line failed today. Roughly 80% of the island is now back in the dark. This includes the big cities of San Juan and Caguas and the town of Aricebo, 3 of the places we have team members. It may be tomorrow some time before the line gets fixed. Those teams have essentially shut down because they were not set up to bring their own power and continuing to use grid power is risky to the equipment. My guess is if anybody left their gear plugged in, when they fire that line up again, there will be a massive power flux, causing untold damage. Luckily for me, I brought a surge prtotector for my stuff and my QRP rig is running from my LiFePO4 power pack:

While I have some semblence of internet, I thought I'd share some pictures.

If you want to know why the power is so messed up and the level of damage the hurricane caused take a look at this picture. This was a MASSIVE tree. There are thousands of pictures like this all over the island:

Had bizarre issue today with the QRP rig. Well, actually, it wasn't the QRP rig. I was seeing vertical lines (tones) in the waterfall when running DM780. They weren't there yesterday. So, did a bunch of sleuthing. Turns out, the USB cable going to the radio was causing the issue. Not sure why/how a usb cable could do that, but replacing the cable fixed the issue.

FYI, I read that in just the Ponce area, there was 51,000+ cubic yards of debris removed yesterday. That's up from ~45k yesterday. Island-wide, saw where over 200,000 gallons of fuel were delivered to fuel generators and vehicles, 136,000 gallons of potable water, and over 1 MILLION liters of bottled water were delivered. Yesterday. In one day. And, over 750,000 meals were delivered. I cannot imagine this pace can be kept for any length of time. What happens then is anybody's guess.

I should be able to do the 2230Z, 1730Eastern, 1830L time on 7.114 this evening. I tried last night but didn't hear any replies.

I actually bailed from work early enough that I can be on. Now if the bands cooperate is another hurdle.

How does that MFJ-939 work with the CS-108G+.

I have not tried that combo yet.

So far, so good. It's a little clunky to use since it doesn't talk to the radio. You have to manually go in and set mode for AM, set power down, then key the mike and the tuner will tune (most of the time). Then once it gets done tuning, you have to go back and use reset the mode to LSB/USB and set the power back up to what you want.

The Signalink is working good with it as well. There's a post on how to set the jumpers. 6-pin mini-din connector from SL to CS-108G+. Audio cable from radio's speaker jack to audio in on SL. That's pretty much it.

Sorry I wasn't able to decode much of anything tonight. I don't know where the carrier is coming from but it's really, really strong. Between that and the chatty Pedro a khz away and it makes for not much fun here in the disaster zone.

Solid copy on all but planemaker. The photons must be tired from all that swimming.

*4CQ ARFCOM CQ ARFCOM CQ ARFCOM 3ØZ 223ØZ
Power has been restored to San Juan for the momentDz5wer fluctuatiM= continue. Lots of deliveries of stuff like one million liters of water and 75Ø,ØØØ meals happening on ab ai=asis.(D1n't know how g that canlast. BTU ARFCOM de K***** pse kn

yC[=7#[email protected]*** W*** de K***** K*****
I just barely caught your call and not mKh else. S9 nose level again. Really need to make that horizontal antenna. BTU W*** de K*** (lost signal)



...K***** de W***



Hello Mike. UR ghost print ghost print 5Ø% 5Ø%.



btu Mike K***** de W*** k
2:35:17> Main

-
yC[=7#[email protected]*** W*** de K***** K*****
I just barely caught your call and not mKh else. S9 nose level again. Really need to make that horizontal antenna. BTU W*** de K*****



...K***** de W***



Hello Mike. UR ghost print ghost print 5Ø% 5Ø%.



btu Mike K***** de W*** k


22:41:12> Main
... K***** K***** de K***** (OTAR)copies 1ØØ%. also copies most of W*** relay?
QRU KN
[YRZcode anything. There's an SSB conversation going on close to frequency and a carrier tone of 1khz that's dwarfing everything. W*** de K***** sk sk6





...K**** de W***



Can you copy K******?



BREAK



K**** de W***--give him a try, he can't really here me.



btu K***** de W*** k






22:45:34> Main
... K***** K***** de K***** (OTAR)copies 1ØØ%. also copies most of W*** relay?
QRU KN


...K***** & K***** de W***



Pulling the plug. Dinner time. Bad conditions.



73 to all!



de W*** sk


22:51:20> Main
... W*** de K***** lost K***** to the winds. No copy anymore.
Break
K***** ******* de K*****. No copy on last. Will try again tomorrow.. Good luck...
SK SK

edit cuz I missed one. Srry.

Conditions were "non optimal" for tonight's QSO. We might have been better off on 20m. Too bad you can't predict ahead of time. PSKrepoter was saying on 20m that I was getting to Kalifornia. Figured 40m would be as good after dark. No such luck.

Thanks for all the folks listening. With power, cell, and internet all shaky simultaneously, it's good to know I can call for help if need be. The folks here are still mostly disorganized. The 911 center, which you might or might not be able to contact via cell or land line, doesn't have a consistent link to police, fire, and EMS throughout the island. So, even if you call 911, you might not get help. For a long time, there were NO links between the 911 center and anybody, particularly fire stations. So, if you're house caught on fire, you'd have to physically go to the fire station to report your house is burning down.

Made a trip to a Federal Medical Station that was having some comm issues. They have roughly 125 beds and 37 patients. Some of them are somewhat acute care, some are elderly whose homes have been destroyed, and some are in for hospice care. It was sad but the medical folks there are doing a great job. It seems like they rotate teams every couple of weeks, though. That seems odd to me but maybe I don't understand the rationale.

There are still places that have no running water. And, yesterday's power outage cause a ripple effect in the generator distribution chain. Once a place gets grid power, they relocate the generator they were using to the next place that needs one. Then all of a sudden those places don't have grid power and they shut down like the water and sewer pumping stations. Of the 67 operational hospitals, 13 are still on generator power. Six weeks after the hurricane hit.

I go home in 9 days. It will certainly be better here when I leave than when I got here. But not nearly enough better.

Won't be able to do this evening's QSO at 2230Z due to scheduling conflicts. However, if you had any questions about how things are going, this map shows the state of roadways down here. And, it's not good:



What this basically shows is that only the perimeter main roads between bigger cities are really open and usable. Most of the interior roads are not.

Well, the training session for one of the PR National Guard units was a success. It was interesting that they had an HF radio but really didn't know much about how to use it. And, the dipole they had looked like it had not been used for years based on the corrosion on both the connectors and the antenna wires themselves. So, the trainees got a brief introduction to HF radio, some description of the ionosphere and how propagation occurs, NVIS, and some simple antenna examples. After the classroom part, the group had to build an antenna and string up an inverted V. I couldn't believe how many dangling power lines there were all around this building. No idea how many were hot but I would imagine not many since they were running the building off a generator. I had my RigExpert with me and we used it to adjust the length of their wire antenna to match the specific frequency they needed to use. Once it was fairly close (I would have made it a bit longer but they'd already fiddled with the length twice), they got on a Micom radio and tried to make contact with San Juan, which is only about 45 miles as the crow flies from where they were. They got a "Loud and Clear" from the MARS folks in San Juan and were happy.

It was abundantly clear that these folks had not seen this material or used the radio gear that was available. Seems to me like a group that has to respond to a disaster (like a NG unit), really ought to know about HF comms. In some portions of the interior of the island's mountainous terrain, HF is probably the only method of direct communication since neither cell nor VHF works out there.



ETA: Forgot to mention, I gave the young lady who was making the first call on the radio one of my ARFCOM Ham patches. She slapped it on her sleeve immediately and said "That is so f---ing cool!".