FCC Corruption Documented

ARRLWeb: ARRL NEWS: It Seems To Us: We Win In Court!

I have posted in the past about the thoroughly corrupt FCC rulemaking on BPL which so heavily favored the BPL providers that sound engineering and common sense were thrown out the window. The ARRL write up on their successful lawsuit against FCC has documented that the entire process was corrupted by a strong prejudice at FCC in favor of this questionable technology, to the extent that FCC redacted individual sentences from engineering studies that would have cast a bad light on BPL as an interference source. The appeals court gave them a good slap to the head for this.

I am a former FCC employee (1974-1976) and I know that the commissioners do not have strong technical expertise in these matters. They are mostly lawyers, not "radio people". It is quite rare for FCC commissioners to hold a license in any radio service overseen by the FCC, which is appropriate, I suppose, to avoid any conflict of interest. (Ironically, the BPL rulemaking reeked of conflict of interest throughout, as commissioners attended industry BPL cheerleading sessions while they were considering the rulemaking, a violation of their own regulations. Even Michael Powell, the chairman, was talking up BPL while the NPRM was before the commission.)

My question is, given that the commissioners lack technical expertise to have doctored the studies to redact material that didn't support the all but unrestricted promotion of BPL, who in the Technical Branch did the dirty work for them? Somebody in the engineering branch knew perfectly well what was going on and compromised his integrity enough to redline the studies so that critical material was kept from public view. Who was this person or persons whose integrity was for sale?

Making Magic

When I got in the truck after work, I turned on the rig on 6 meters and hit the scan button. It hadn't gone 20 KHz before I heard activity.

Six was wide open tonight on east-west paths, and I worked KS7S in Arizona and W4KVW in Florida while driving home, and both had great signals into north Texas.

After dinner, I went out to try some more and got WA7JTM in Phoenix, KI4PKW in South Carolina (new state), and N4LR in Georgia, and then had to QRT because the mosquitoes were forming lines of battle outside the window.

So 5 contacts on 6 meters in 4 hours, not a bad start.

Making the Antenna Work

I have been running the Hi-Q 3/80 using a DX Engineering autotransformer to match the antenna, but the favored way to do this is with a shunt coil.

So today I built and installed a shunt coil on the antenna mount, to see how it would work:

And it works well. With the long (72") whip I can tune to the bottom of 80 meters with a solid 1:1 SWR, and I have less than 1.7:1 SWR on the other bands.

That probably means I could do better with the coil if I tried different turns count, or tapped it, or some such, but I'll leave it as is for now.

See the ferrites on that antenna control cable? I am trying to get RF out of my AM/FM when I am on 20 phone. (Hasn't worked.)

Update: if you want some instructions on tuning of shunt coils try here.

I have the MFJ-459B analyzer which makes adjustment quick and simple. I don't think I would try adjusting the coil without it.

I am thinking I will eventually move the coil inside the mount framework and possibly cover it with a plastic box for protection. My entire mount was inspired by K7PEH's design and howto, so a big thanks goes out to Phillip for his design which got me going with Hi-Q antennas.

FCC Adds Lying Weasel to Long List of Corrupt Acts in BPL CAse

ARRLWeb: ARRL Home Page

The Court of Appeals has awarded costs to the ARRL in their successful lawsuit against the FCC in the BPL case.

Note this quote:

Lying weasels: Q.E.D.

Miscellaneous Contacts

I have been making a few contacts in the last few weeks, my 1st 30 meter contact ever was with YN2KDJ in Nicaragua, made difficult by high noise levels on 30 and fast QSB. Several 6 meter contacts got me a new state, South Carolina, confirmed on LoTW, along with contacts in Arizona, Georgia, and Florida.

Tonight I tried 30 meters again and had a nice quick chat with Andy, UA3TCJ, in Dzerzhinsk, Russia, for my 1st Russian contact. He was a solid 569 on this end.

30 meters is the Charm

TV was bad tonight so I went out to the truck to see who was on. Worked Phillipe, FM5LD, on 30 meters. I heard RN3OK among others from Russia also.

Computers Are Our Friend

Going by a clue from the Yahoo! IC-7000 group, I finally got the 7000, the Dell Vostro laptop, and N1MM Logger all working together happily (more or less). I used N1MM's logging program to log and score my QSOs in the Colorado QSO party, but the logger and the radio weren't very happy with each other. A new version of the software has made IC7000 compatibility much better.

But the Radio Shack scanner programming cable was still giving me timeouts. The clue from the IC7K group was to turn RTS OFF in the logger setup, causing the interface cable to go into half-duplex mode, which is apparently the desired way to go. I still had to use the little stereo-mono adapter cable which comes with the interface, but everything worked as it should.

I also worked (and logged in the software) Jay, HP3AK in Panama, on 17 meters SSB.

Now that I have the Radio Shack cable working, naturally I just ordered the XGGCOMMMS cable. But that one promises to make PSK work, so it should be okay.

Now if I could just figure out where to put the laptop in the truck while I'm operating, everything will be good.