The AM Forum

AMers are a fabulous bunch but I left the inefficent but relaxing mode to me, K1OIK, enter a contest!!!

In the WAE contest on September 11 I did a poll as to whether contesters could hear me among the ruckus (QRM or QRMary for those into lingo) and whether they would give honest signal reports.
I was running an FT-817 at 5 watts into a dummy load (Hy-Tower vertical)(exaggeration I know)
So watch and hear were are those into "RadioSport", honest?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93BRFwOowSo

I don't believe you Burt!  You got together with your radio friends to make this video didn't you! You and your cronies are conspiring against the good people involved in the upstanding and impeccable sportsmanship of RadioSportsMen!!  Shame on you!  I bet you had a lenyar amplifier hiding under that table too!!!

What is amazing you saw all the contacts I made. I did not edit any out that would have not served to prove a point. My hope was to prove contesters are not honest but thought I would have to make quite a few contacts to get enough material
Burt

I LOVE to make a few contacts during contests and give them actual honest signal reports..... that's the best part of contests for me! :)

I actually had someone tell me once that it was poor contest etiquette to give out any signal report other than 5-9, no matter  how crappy the signal was.

I do that too sometimes, John.  Just for fun, make a few contacts and give out honest signal reports. Sometimes it seems to temporarily addle them for a few seconds and they don't know how to react until they regain their composure.  And I run AM to boot (even though it is listed as a SSB QuaRMtest). Most of the time they don't catch that.

Once upon a time, as I remember, people did tend to give out honest signal reports in QuaRMtests. That made them serve at least one useful purpose.  You could get on the air and make a lot of contacts with a lot of different places over a short period of time before propagation took a major shift, and get enough signal reports to get some idea where you had an effective signal and where it was marginal.  Maybe they weren't all honest even back then, but if you tended to get an unusual number of weak signal reports from South Carolina and Georgia, while getting mostly strong reports out of Chicago and Minneapolis, you could assume your antenna was effective to the northwest but something was lacking to the southeast.

I once made the mistake of  "you ar S5 to S6"  and got back " make up your mind ...is it a 5 or 6!!!???

' Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it.                                                                                                                                       "


klc

If someone told me that think I would have had to respond with "Could you repeat please?" over and over until he went away.

Burt, in this case you were supurb in proving the obvious!!
Oh BTW, ur 59 in Ohio...... W2OAK de WD8BIL!!! ;D

Well done, Burt. You proved what I've suspected for a very long time. Great video. You're definitely 59 in North Central Texas...

I'm with Don. I appreciate an honest signal report because it lets me know how my system is performing. The only New Zealand contact I've ever made was with Mat, ZL2MAT on 20 meter slopbucket. I was running 100 watts into a 5-BTV on my metal roof. Don't remember what he was running. We had to work for it, lots of "say again" and "repeat, please". Ended up with me giving him a 47 and me getting a 44. Honest reports and I liked it. It let me know that I'm going to have to make some station improvements if I want armchair copy into and out of NZ/Australia area.

Just can't understand the guys that want to be lied to all the time.

One cannot even get a consensus of exactly what 5 and 9 is and when to give that report.

Some want to use the all mighty S meter and others consider SNR.

Still others have a sliding S unit scale. I've often wondered if said scale can hold an alignment while possibly sliding into things around the shack.

They should just change the exchange to "I can hear you".

Please copy I hear ya. Good luck in the contest.

Maybe catchier would even be better. How about one from an old well known SK?

Excelsior you fatheads. Good luck in the contest.

Back in the 90's ( yes, a long time ago, sonny) I found that giving out big reports to European DX stations in the 75M DX window made them feel good and the pileups got bigger. I'm talking about casual, DX ragchewing activity.  I made it a point to give out EXACT meter readings off my FT-1000D meter. This would create competition amongst the callers trying to out-do one another.  

The "secret" was I had recalibrated my S-meter so that it read about 15db higher than a "calibrated" meter. (The S-meter BS factor) The DX loved it!

One day, about 5 years ago, a German station told me my S-meter was VELY generous after I gave him an S9 +40 on 75M.  Most Germans are very exacting in their ways, so he couldn't hold back.  I decided right then to calibrate my S-meter to a true S9 with a 50 uv signal. It tracks true now, being off only 2db at S9 +60 over. (that's 50 mv, IIRC)

So now I give out reports the same exact way, but it is rare to see guys over S9 +20. I say every so often that it is a CALIBRATED, stingy, S-meter. Most DXers seem to appreciate that.

The thing is that MOST hams want to know how their signals are coming in. Giving out an exact signal report on our meter gives them a chance to compare it to reports we give to other stations, if they listen for a while to our activity.

The problem with the corntesting is that I believe the logging programs automatically input "59" without operator intervention. I also enjoy giving a corntest station a "57" once in a while. But it throws them off and I'll bet they just log it as a "59" anyway.

There is a log cross-check procedure in some corntests that looks at the two stations data to see if they match. I wonder if they even bother to compare all the "59's".. ;D

T

that was actually pretty good. It reminds me of when we used to do field day with a local club that I used to belong to. We were always pressured by the "club elders" to make the maximim number of contacts that we could.

We were also supposed to be running QRP @5 watts. What a pain in the a$$! ! ! !
the Field day coordinator would walk by all of the stations periodically to make sure we were only running 5 watts. He would look at the power meters and adjust our power down to 5w and walk away leaving us screaming our guts out into the mic.

As soon as he turned his back and took a couple of steps we would immediatly crank them back up to 100w.  ;D  ;D

Getting "squashed like a bug" was absloutely no fun, especially in a corntest!!

Life is absolutely to short for QRP ! !  ;)

even IRB ran 100 watts

Oh, Yea, everyone was always 59! ! !  But......................

I would always compliment someone on a very good STRAPPING signal.

Even if you give the exact reading in microvolts, the report is meaningful only if there is some kind of reference.  When listening to a European on 75 or 40, I often get as much as a 40 dB stronger s-meter reading with the transmitting dipole than with the beverage, but the signal/noise ratio is still much better with the beverage. There are many factors that could cause the same signal to display widely different meter readings at two nearby stations.

I usually just give signal reports by ear, essentially one of three levels: strapping, reasonably good, and marginal, and don't pay much attention to the meter.  Sometimes, a station will ask for an exact s-meter report, so I tell him what the meter reads while he is transmitting, but also include what the meter falls back to when he is not transmitting.  To me, a report of S9+10, and the meter drops back to S2, is a much better report than a report of S9+30 but the meter stays up past S9 when he quits transmitting, due  to the background noise.

IMO, five steps as in readability is all that is necessary, and anything more than five steps for signal strength is too many. 5-5 should be the equivalent to what we call 5-9. In fact, in French, there is a slang expression cinq sur cinq (five by five), that originated from military communication, which means "I understand perfectly" (I read you loud and clear). Now, can there really be even a vague agreement over what exactly would make the difference between an S6 signal and an S7? Interestingly, the early 1930s HRO receiver originally used an s-meter with S1-S5 scale, changing it to S1-S9 in later runs.

I once read an interesting story suggesting that in the mid 1930s, when the League was first promoting the new RST system to replace the old Q5/R9 method of giving reports, that the original proposal was to use nines for all three numbers, but that ARRL wanted to keep five for the first number to discontinue the possibility of "R-9" in a signal report , purportedly because it too closely resembled the name of a competing amateur radio magazine, R/9. They should have instead changed it to 5 levels for all three dimensions of the report.


That's what the person told me who said a non-5/9 report is a QuaRMtest etiquette violation. He said that some contest cross-checks do compare the entire exchange, and penalise far any errors, including the signal report. Therefore just to be sure, the QuaRMtest operator must stop and manually enter the 4/7 or whatever it was, and that confounds them because of the extra time it takes. ;D

by coincidence I talked a bit about s meters on BA receivers with Mike CVY and Steve TOW last night.  The R388 really has it right imho with a dB meter and none of that S number b.s.   S meter readings are a joke at my shack because since I started operating AM I have had to resort to various rx antennas and the phasing network with leveling pots to null out noise.  That completely alters the s meter reading.  I like to give a reading with the RF gain all the way up and the antenna right into the rx.  pretty much can't do that anymore. Another issue is that the 75A-3 meter is pretty accurate for a 60 year old rx on signals that are ~ 30 uV and lower but then it becomes wildly inaccurate with stronger signals going by modern agreed  upon S meter standards.  Signals that should be 5 or 10 dB over S9 are shown as 40 and 50 dB over nine.   With all that going on the S meter is meaningless. 

That's the point. There IS a way to provide some kind of reference.  The reference is using an accurate (linear response)  S-meter to give reports to many different stations in a short period of time - to minimize changing condition effects. The stations  must then compare reports against each other within a brief session. Working DX, I have times when there are 3 or 4 DX stations in a group and they want comparison reports. If each socks a few Yallos, one after the other over and over, then the readings can be quite revealing. I am talking now of Europeans who are 4,000 miles away where propagation and distance anomalies even out.  

There have been nights when I've compared my transmit signal against other transmitting USA  stations and we were consistently within 5db of each other night after night into DX-land.  However, for close-in stations on 75M, comparisons become meaningless cuz heavy local fading and QTH distances become a large percentage of the equation.

Yet another service to provide is when hams are looking for the difference between antenna A and antenna B. I use a step antenuator to equalize the two signals and then read off the difference.  

We must look for the PEAKS in signal strength when taking readings to even out the fading. This is an art of sorts.

The bottom line is, yes, getting signal reports from two separate receiving stations will be meaningless because of vast differences in receiving equipment, location, antennas, etc.  If one station gives you an S9 and the other gives you an S9+20, it means little. But if ONE receiving station with a linearly calibrated S-meter gives out reports for your antenna A/B tests or looks for comparison differences between two stations at a great distance away (and the two TX stations are relatively close to each other) then "relative" reports can really show something of value.

The first steps are to accurately calibrate your S-meter for linear accuracy across its range and also use a step attenuator for comparison measurements.  Take peak readings on the meter and ignore the lower fades.

T

If you run a smug radio you have an accurate meter..R390A also very good

Obscene power.

Actually Dave's response is probably the most accurate in today's contest world. Back in the "good old days" of contesting, the RS and RST reports really meant "signal report". Over the last 20 to 30 years, the carry-over RS/RST report is merely meant as an acknowledgement of "OK", "finally got your call", "I finally heard you enough to identify you as a contact", etc. There have been discussions for years to drop the RS/RST report in HF contests, but many feel it's part of the tradition in contesting report exchanges, even though its real meaning disappeared years ago. The VHF/UHF contests dropped the RS/RST reports years ago, but even during the last VHF/UHF contest, more then 50% of the stations I worked gave the exchange 59 in grid square XXyy. Some traditions are hard to drop.

Burt's video highlights the lack of operator contesting savvy as is typically found in a non-contester or a novice-type contester. Or maybe, it's just to make another video about anything to get the YouTube $$. How about a video on hams ending their final transmission on phone with "73" or "73's"? That should spark interest. Most contesters have some of the best operating skills you can find in the amateur radio world.

What?  The 59 report I got from a Moscow station while running 100w SSB into a trapped dipole folded into a Z shape in an attic wasn't accurate?!  No wonder I can't bust into the 3885 ghetto with my DX100 -- stealth and AM are mutually exclusive.

Alex

 
[/quote]

Burt's video highlights the lack of operator contesting savvy as is typically found in a non-contester or a novice-type contester. Or maybe, it's just to make another video about anything to get the YouTube $$. How about a video on hams ending their final transmission on phone with "73" or "73's"? That should spark interest. Most contesters have some of the best operating skills you can find in the amateur radio world.
[/quote]

I was wondering when someone would comment on my lack of contest savvy. That was my weak point. In 6 years I have gotten some money from You Tube, enough so that I make about 5 cents an hour for the time and effort put in. The pay both on You Tube and teaching is the appreciation of the viewers/students. I recently told a Principal I would pay the school to teach there the children are so delightful.
Burt

That would be a fun video, Pete. "73's" always bugs me because "Best Regardses" just doesn't make any sense.

But the S-meter reading still depends on what kind of antenna you are using, orientation and height of the antenna, obstructions, ground conductivity at your QTH, propagation conditions at that moment, etc.  Even with a precision laboratory instrument for measuring field strength, the absolute reading is meaningless unless you have some kind of reference point to use as a standard for comparison.

Burt
The video or Youtube had some echo in the audio...were they bad edit points or was the internet hiccuping in my computer last night........

I agree 59 is just a thing of the past.......it would be nice to talk to some of these folks, instead of only 2 minutes of making a contact miles away half way around the whirl.
Fred

"Now, that's quite a message............."    ;D  ;D

Not really, Don. From the antenna feedpoint back to the receiver, including cables, wattmeter, amp or any other insertion, the absolute reading can be made with reasonable confidence. I do it all day here at work.

Your inclusion of the antenna uncertainties is right on the money. As with any measurement device in a lab enviroment, there always is a level of tolerance. But after one gets to know the ropes that uncertainty can be minimized significantly. My antennas here in the lab have known correction factors gathered from the actual STABLE enviroment they are being used in. If I see a signal measuring 30dbuv I can be comfortably sure it's accurate. This has been corrolated by measurements from our 3rd party verification lab in Tenn. We rarely vary by +/-3db.
The problem with outdoor real world antennas is as you mentioned plus, we can never be certain about the signal path, reflections, angle of arrival .... ect

That being said, if you can determine the loss in your antenna you can come close enuf to give a report of 20 over S9 (50mv) +/- 3 db or so.

After months or years of experience at a given QTH and with various antennas, you can develop a sense of how well a signal you hear is coming in, and meaningfulness in the signal reports you give out. Problem is, the bloke at the other end doesn't have that sense, and he hears the same report in the S9+10 that you give out, as in any one of the other S9+10s that he hears. But if you compare his s-meter reading with the background noise when he drops his carrier or stops talking on slopbucket, he at least has some idea of how well his signal is really coming through the background noise and QRM.

Probably the best indicator of absolute signal strength to the antenna terminals of the receiver would be something like a "dB over a microvolt" scale, since just as in the case of audio, the range of signal strengths is too great for a simple linear-reading meter calibrated directly in microvolts, and a logarithmic scale is needed.

Without a meter, five levels of S-units would be sufficient, and can be estimated reasonably well by ear: (1) barely perceptible, (2) weak but clearly audible, (3) fair, (4) strong, (5) Extremely strong, aka "strapping".  You could take the existing 9-step scale, eliminate every other number, and simply call those 5 steps described above S1, S3, S5, S7 and S9 and no-one would ever suspect the difference.  After all, who's going to argue over whether the signal is S7 or S8, or notice that you never give out reports of S2, S4, S6 or S8? But on phone, I usually just verbally describe what I hear, without s-numbers at all.

Right now, my s-meter is inoperative; I have a long-standing, pesky, persistent flaky problem in the 75A-4. The meter won't stay zeroed; one time it is trying to peg backwards, another time it drops only down to mid-scale even with no antenna connected. Replacing tubes hasn't helped. Every time I think I have fixed the problem, it re-occurs after a few days or weeks. Like 99% of my  radio malfunctions, it is intermittent, and I haven't taken the time to monitor all the associated voltages, currents and resistances in the agc-controlled stages and meter bridge circuit to chase it down, since that would likely involve running the receiver on its side with the bottom cover removed for an extended period of time to catch the culprit in action.

Ahhh yes. The historical self calibrating GUESS METER!

I got one of those on my Scott RCH Receiver. Don't dispute it. You'll be wrong! ;D

I get a chuckle out of receiving a "booming signal" report, but afer two or three exchanges, the other station still hasn't figured out my name, or what equipment I am running. :P

This tells me that my signal is probably even with the noise level, or that the guy is as hard of hearing as I am.  :D

Regards,

Jim

Jim, don't be too hard on him.  I do things like that too.  I work a guy who is new to me and he tells me his name and I call him something else because lately half my mind is on monitoring the gear to make sure changes I have made are okay.

Don,  maybe the meter shunt is flakey.  If it is like the A-3 it is 1/2 w. 220 ohm.  maybe the prob's in the meter itself.  I have no idea how hard it is to get a replacement but it looks like a common meter.

It doesn't show any of the symptoms of a bad meter or bad shunt. I don't think that could cause the meter to flake between a negative reading and a mid-scale positive reading with no signal and the rf  gain fully open. I can re-zero it with the meter zero pot, and within a day or so it either won't go below mid scale with no signal, or else it tries to peg backwards.  If I cut power to the receiver, it drops back to zero. Turning back the  rf gain causes the normal effect of the meter to deflect to the right without a signal. There seems to be something out of balance in the bridge circuit.  But since it  changes from day to day, or even hour to hour, I haven't been able to narrow down what is acting up. Too many components working together simultaneously to figure out what is wrong without checking each component at a time.  Not sure a working s-meter is worth the trouble.  The receiver otherwise receives normally. I may just disconnect the meter so  that I am not constantly distracted by the silly thing, till I have time to put the receiver on the bench and seriously chase the problem.

To top it off, Collins revised the s-meter circuit sometime along the way, and apparently the actual circuit doesn't correspond to the schematic in the manual, even though I think I have the original manual that came with the receiver.  I have a schematic of the other circuit round here somewhere, but "round here somewhere" doesn't cut it when you need it right now.

I tell someone they are "Above the noise and full-quieting, beautiful signal"... or "I have a good copy on you, you're riding just above my noise floor but I have no problems with the copy."  or "Sorry OM you're right in my noise and it's difficult pulling you out... maybe we can try again another time." 

I'm starting to realize S-meter readings do not mean much except like Tom says, in the context of a lot of different signals on the frequency at the same time for comparisons.  My ricebox easily comes over S9 on a decent signal but rarely goes of +30 unless it's Don KYV or Brandon IIA ... but my NC-300 will hit the 60 over mark on these guys usually. 

QSL? QSL.

Irb had some good phrases and expressions.  Got to keep them alive!

Like him or dislike him, Irbisms will be around for a long time to come.

"Just listening for that little voice in the wilderness"..............................

Or these...........................

The following is my all time irb favoright.


http://amfone.net/Amforum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=28951.0;attach=28570

 I just wish someone had rolled tape on the famous " payfone QSO from jail"

Thoes wer the days


klc

Nah........... My favorite one of all time is the Prime Minsta screaming at Irb to "shut
the f@#% up." I roll on the floor every time I hear it! !  I would have posted it with the others, but this bbs software wont accept a .ram file.

I guess if it were me, my next step would be to try two things, go in with rubber coated tongs and give a few tubes a wiggle, and shoot some freeze spray on some of the resistors and solder terminals around the meter (but avoid the tubes  ;D ). and see if the meter says "ouch" on any of the joints or resistors.

Yep, good advice, Rob.

I know of *several technicians who alternately use a heat lamp and then freeze spray on suspected areas. (with the rig on and a signal/ tone injected to listen to)  It's amazing how this will cause intermittent connections and faultly components to show themselves.  Then use a plasdick handle to tap everything.

Heat, cold and vibration is an effective combination for troubleshooting.

* BTW, I am one of those techs... ;)

T

Thanks Tom but if there is any success in my advice it is only because it is not my problem.   If it were my A-4 and my meter problem I'd be sitting looking at it with no clue about what to do.