The radio amateur who felt compelled to abandon his own call sign

If you mention that you are a radio amateur to any Norwegian who was old enough to watch TV in the mid 70's then he is bound to respond with LA8PV. This was the callsign of the fictious figure Marve Fleksnes in the comedy the "Radiot". To bad for the poor guy who actually was given that callsign some years later. I worked him on CW in 2002 just after I got my license and I just couldn't believe that anybody actually was using that particular callsign.

It was in 1976 that Rolv Wesenlund, one of Norway's most popular comedians, played Marve Fleksnes. As radio amateur LA8PV he talks with his friend, JA1NQ in Japan, speaks a kind of mixed Icelandic/Norwegian with TF3XU, and converses with Norwegian/American WONBF (no zero) in Minnesota. He handles his angry neighbor who suffers from interference (RFI) and finally LA8PV gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he hears the emergency call Mayday in the 15 meter band.

Is the ultimatic Morse keyer really that efficient?

Vintage Ten-Tec Ultramatic Keyer KR50. Nice name but the
similarity to ultimatic seems to be coincidental.

Iambic keying with a dual-lever paddle is by far the most popular form for Morse keying. But in recent years an old alternative has reemerged. This is the Ultimatic mode which goes back to W6SRY in the 1950's.

The experience seems to be that it needs less timing precision than the iambic mode for letters like A, N, R, and K (· —, — ·, · — ·, — · —). When both paddles are squeezed, the last one to be pressed takes control. So when right-left is pressed one gets a dah followed by dits, not the dah-di-dah-dit of the iambic keyer.

It is very simple to add code for an ultimatic keyer to an iambic one. In recent years this has led to an ultimatic option in some stand-alone keyers, such as:

JT9 and 100 Hz ghosts

Multiple decodes at 100 Hz spacing of K1JT
on 30 m on 28 April 2013, 0101 UTC

From time to time I receive duplicate 'ghost' decodes at 100 Hz intervals on either side of the main signal. Last night I saw the phenomenon on 30 m. You will notice here that I have decoded the message: "TNX 73 GL" four times (press image for better readability):

• -24 dB, 1063 Hz
• -19 dB, 1163 Hz
• -8 dB, 1263 Hz
• -18 dB, 1363 Hz

The actual contact took place at the frequency of the strongest one, 1263 Hz. The station is only moderately strong at -8 dB and at +/- 100 Hz the first sidebands are 10-11 dB down and at -200 Hz the second one is 16 dB down.

Which non-English Morse characters are the most important ones?

The Morse code for the 26 letters of the English language and the digits, you can find everywhere, e.g. here on Wikipedia. All one-, two-, and three-symbol combinations are in use, and all but four four-symbol combinations. 

The remaining four-symbol characters are utilized in other alphabets:

Morse	German ++	Norwegian/ Danish	Spanish	Esperanto	Greek	Russian	Arabic
·-·-	Ä	Æ	-	-	-	Я	ع
---·	Ö	Ø	-	-	-	Ч	ز
··--	Ü	-	-	Ŭ	-	Ю	-
----	-	-	CH	Ĥ	Χ	Ш	ش

The two or three first German letters are used in many other languages also, e.g. Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, Hungarian etc. 

Amazing Reverse Beacon Network

I haven't called CQ for a long time on CW except in contests. Mostly I have just responded to DX calls with a super short "5nn TU" and that's it. But this Saturday I heard a presentation at the Norwegian Ham Meeting by Roland, SM6EAT about a Swedish initiative to increase CW activity. It is called Scandinavian Open CW Activity (SOCWA) and it has at present 452 members from Scandinavia in a wide sense of the word. It really got me interested in improving my CW skills.

So now I have started to call CQ SAX and have had my first long CW QSOs for years with SM and OH.

It is also amazing to look at the reverse beacon network and watch your own CQ being reported almost in real time from various Software Defined Receivers with CW Skimmers. Below is the result of the two CQs I have sent these two last days.

Overmodulated JT65 on HF?

Sometimes it is crowded on JT65 on HF due to too little bandwidth. When only 2 kHz is available and each signal needs 175 Hz that's understandable. But then others seem to complain that some overmodulate their transmitters so that they occupy more than the 175 Hz, making it even harder to fit an extra signal in the band.

As I have been running a lot of JT65 lately on HF, I also have seen this phenomenon and it pickled my interest to try to understand what was going on. The image below shows such a strong station to the very left, at about -1000 Hz where the red marker is located. After some seconds I turned on the attenuator of my K3, so the signal was attenuated by 10 dB (press image for zoom).

What one can see is that what appears initially (at the bottom of the waterfall) as a splattering signal, becomes quite fine when the attenuator is turned on. Then it spills into neighboring frequencies again as the attenuator is turned off again.

It appears then that it is the JT65 decoder software which is too sensitive to strong signals. Now, I cannot really say that I understand all of the decoder code, but I think that it has to do with the way the power spectrum is estimated. The FORTRAN code for ps.f is listed below. It comes from the BerliOS repository for WSJT which has the same code for this routine as JT65-HF-Comfort:

QOD7 - Can you communicate with me in Norwegian?

The Oseberg viking ship, 820 AD

Not so many nationalities are included in the exclusive group of countries with their own Q-code. I mean of course the QOD-code. I have never heard it used by radio amateurs, but it must have played a role some time ago in shipping.

The Q-codes date back to 1912 and were meant to be a short-hand for use in telegraphy. According to the list of Q-codes which Ralf D. Kloth (DL4TA) has on his web page, the meaning of QOD with a number added is: "Can you communicate with me in ... 0 Dutch, 1 English, 2 French, 3 German, 4 Greek, 5 Italian, 6 Japanese, 7 Norwegian, 8 Russian, 9 Spanish?" As a response to the question the meaning was "I can communicate with you in ..."

The reason for a separate code for Norwegian must be the historically large shipping fleet in Norway. This is still the case as graphically depicted in this overview of the Top 20 Ship Owning Countries, where we seem to rank as number seven - so QOD7 is appropriate!

But today all of them will QOD1.

Image from Wikipedia, user Karamell

Why do Norwegian callsigns end in A?

Well actually not all end in A, but almost all of the recent ones do. Amateur callsigns in Norway are not so well documented on the web, so here is a short explanation.

Norwegian callsigns are used in these territories:

• LA-LN for use in mainland Norway
• JW is used on Svalbard and close-by islands Hopen and Bjørnøya
• JX is used on Jan Mayen
• 3Y is used on Bouvet Island, Peter I Island, and in Antarctica (Queen Maud Land)

Depending on where I go, my callsign may be LA3ZA, JW3ZA, JX3ZA, or 3Y3ZA. We don't have districts so the number does not mean anything, except for 0. Callsigns with 0 are were reserved for non-Norwegian citizens, but this has stopped so LA0 callsigns are no longer issued.

Usually the callsign starts with LA, but why do so many of the LA callsigns end in A?