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Ham Operator Sets New Miles-Per-Watt World Record
DoctorPepper writes "A ham radio operator in New London, North Carolina correctly copied an 80 meter CW beacon in Wappingers Falls, New York, a distance of 546.8 miles. The kicker is, the beacon station, an Elecraft K1, was putting out 40.6 uW (40.6 millionths of a Watt) -- which works out to 13,467,980 miles per watt!"
Ham Radio continues to excite. I think there's something romantic about it that draws geeks towards its coils - how else do you explain the way it has enthralled so many in its history? The venerable Woz is one. Can anyone else recall any Ham Radio enthusiasts who went onto bigger things in Tech?
In english, please?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Ham radio people are are truly the geeks' geeks. The mad-science of it all truly inspires.
So will this make it easier to bring Dennis Quaid back from the dead?
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Does anyone know what the previous record was? I'm not at all familiar with hamming, though it strikes me as quite interesting based on this and the recent tsunami-related story (primarily the ensuing comments).
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
Man B: what?
Man A: 13,467,980 miles per watt
Man B: What?
Man A: Watt?
Man B: What!?!?!?
Man A: Watt!!!!
Man B: Forget it, I'm not playing this stupid thing, go be an A$$.
omg.. after reading that article I got the feeling that there are people even more geeky than computer geeks.
"I'm thrilled the record was set by an all-American team using all-American equipment." The Ten Tec receiver is manufactured in Severville, TN and the Elecraft transmitter is produced in California and offered as a kit.
yes, so relevant...
I don't think the math is right there. If it's a straight mast then the wave front will spread out radially.
So increasing the power wouldn't give you a linear increase in distance like the OP seems to believe it would.
Simon.
it would be like running doom 3 on a 286.
Ohm my! That Hertz!
Even most directional antennas will not give you linear 'watt to distance' amplification.
In worst case it is a power^1/3. So for 40 milliwatts to 1 watt amplification you'll get some 30x distance (at worst), but never 2500x, unless some wicked atmospheric conditions happen.
yeah? so watt?
From the comments at the article site:
While the ability to receive a very weak signal is always interesting (and exciting for QRPP operators), converting results into "miles per watt" is an absolutely useless way to express results!!
The whiner goes on to say:
At 1.5 MHz data in CCIR Thirteenth Plenary Assembly (vol VI report 264-3 p 108) shows attenuation increases ~10 dB when path length goes from 500 km to 1000 km. Doubling skywave path length at 500 km when at 1.5 MHz increases loss 10dB, NOT 3 dB. Doubling distance again (same frequency) from 1000 km to 2000 km results in an additional ~15 db loss! 2000 km to 4000 km is about 22 dB more loss. This is based on measured data.
While most of the numbers leave me with a blank look, one thing is clear: the poster missed the point. The accomplishment is cool because of the geek factor, not because it's going to lead to a new radio in your car. Therefore, the measurement of the achievement doesn't *have* to be "useful".
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
According to the article, the receiving operator was using a 1,000 foot antenna. I'd be more impressed if the antenna were smaller.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
This seems an odd way to compare accomplishments. If you use this metric, then you reach the false conclusion that doubling wattage doubles distance. Since signal strength deteriorates with distance squared, a better metric might be miles^2 per Watt.
Example using round numbers. Philip transmits 10 miles using a 10W transmitter. Sally transmits 19 miles using a 20W transmitter. If you use miles per Watt to compare, it looks like Philip achieved better results, when in fact Sally did.
My cell phone can talk around the world on it's itty
bitty power output.
Got Code?
It's as sensible as measuring distance travelled/max acceleration of a car. There simply isn't a linear relationship between these things and so dividing one by the other doesn't give you anything interesting. If we start dividing random variables by each other and reporting the result on /. we'd never get to read any interesting news.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The record is quite impressive given that there is more land and civilization between the new points of the new record. Still probably used ionsphere to bounce it forward, but there would be less ground effect in the new record than in the old.
These guys have advanced antennas but its still way cool that with a QRP rig and even a simple wire antenna, you can communicate over great distances with the juice of a 9 volt battery.
The units here are watts per square mile. Your typical FM radio station has a range of maybe 50 miles and is running maybe 10 kwatts, so they're doing 4 watts per square mile. This guy is doing much better. My own power/distance record, back when I was active in ham radio, was 7000 miles on about 25 watts, or 5.10204082 × 10**-7 watts per square mile.
You might wonder how it's remotely possible for there to be a gap of seven to ten orders of magnitude. Why aren't we bothered by FM radio stations on the other side of the world? There is a qualitative difference between the behavior of radio waves above and below about 30-50 MHz (the FM band starts at 88 MHz). Conditions permitting, the lower frequencies can refract in the ionosphere and come back down to earth along non-straight-line paths. That's why shortwave radio stations on other continents can be heard.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Commenting on his remarkable success, Bill said "I've spent 25 years on 80 & 160 listening to below noise level signals ..."
Below noise signals sounds paradoxical, but people do it all the time. If you're in a noisy restaurant, you can pick out individual noises even though they are much quieter than everyone else. The key is that you have an idea of what you expect to hear - you generally know the tone of their voice, know what sounds make words, know what words make understandable sentences.
Imagine if the signal had been spread-spectrum. Spread-spectrum signals are stealthy because, they to, can be recovered from below the noise floor. Basically, with an idea of what to expect, the receiver's processing can effectively raise the signal above the noise floor. Instead of sending short tones for each bit, a series of tones are sent for each bit (a chip) - one chip for zero, and a different chip for one. It's a lot easier process a sound and see which chip it sounds closer to than it is to see if one particular tone is there or not.
So, in summary, this guy's brain played a lot in the reception to pick out a signal from the noise. I wonder if the next record will be set with a spread spectrum transmitted signal and a digital processing receiver.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I'm not a ham, but it seems to me that there isn't much basis in fact for an assertion that amateur radio is "horribly outmoded".
My guess is that you think it has been made obsolete by the Internet. That strikes me as being palpably untrue, as well as a bit like saying the fact that so many people eat pizza means good restaurants are outmoded.
Two different technologies, two different sets of purposes and abilities.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Those cellphones don't work well in emergencies. Systems get overloaded, cables break/get washed away, towers crumble to the ground.
Just ask people from NY City how well phones worked on September 11th.
-- Chris A. Epler - K4UNX
Okay.. Ham Radio is dead, right ?
:5 6&tid=215
And you say this 2 days after the Slashdot article entitled
Ham Radio Served as Main Link to Disaster Area
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/02/23432
That's a quick death it died after having proved that it's still worth having as an alternative.
For maximum pessimism, say that it's currently putting its maximum 315 watts into "phoning home" -- I work this out to 26.1 million miles per watt. (My guess is that realistically it's more like 1e3 times that.)
Sorry HAM-guy, but Voyager still kicks yer butt.
Cheers,
Richard
The 1000 miles per watt award is fairly easy to get. I exceeded it twice recently, when I worked ES5MC in Estonia from California with 4.5 watts with my Elecraft KX1 and a pack of AA batteries and a 28ft wire in a tree in central California, and OH9SCL in Santa Claus Land (Rovaniemi Finland, news, news) with the same radio from a parking lot by the San Francisco Bay.
It's more like hearing a whisper across a huge crowded stadium.
The listener had really good ears and was able to pick out the code from a lot of background noise, with a really good antenna setup.
/sig
2500 kcal * 1000 cal/kcal * 4.184 J/cal = 10.4e6 J/day
1 J = 1 Watt*second, so:
10.4e6 Watt*seconds/day * 1day/86.4e3seconds = 121 Watts
or 1 Watt ~ 20.7 kcal/day
Is there a theoretical maximum limit to how far a single bit can be propagated in 1.0 watt of laser power at, say, 1m wavelength? Photons don't seem to accelerate from their quantum ground state before emitting from an electron shell, so does their max-velocity travel consume any energy? Aren't the photons traveling in a spiral path around the axis of their direction, which consumes energy to move their tiny mass equivalence off their inertial path?
--
make install -not war
Yes it is out moded and full of old geezers that sit in their garages and talk to others like them. But I never cease to be amazed that I can sit at my meager station and with 25 watts talk to someone in Nome, AK or in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Nerdy and Geeky for sure but still totally interesting.
Miles per watt indeed! What tosh.
'Miles per watt' is a stupid, meaningless metric. Since watts dissipate by the inverse square law, it's completely false to say that (for example) a an efficiency of 0.001 watts at one mile equates to 1 watt at 1000 miles.
If I wanted to break this 'record' I would simply replicate the experiemnt from a distance of 273 miles (half the distance) where I could pick up the signal with 1/4th the required signal strength (inverse square law) and suddenly I have a 'record' of 26,935,960 miles per watt! Heck, if we put the transmitter on the same circuit board as the receiver I could create an 'efficiency' that would let me contact quasars with a hamster wheel.
Bah.
Kevin Fox
Try channels 11 and up. Amateurs only go up to 2.450GHz.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
Fully attracted by Milli's characteristic-curves, he soon had his resistance at a minimum, and his magnetic field fully excited. He laid her on the ground potential, raised his frequency, lowered his capacitance, then pulled out his high voltage probe and hit resonance. He inserted it into her socket, connecting them in parallel, then began to short circuit her shunt. Finally, Milliamp cried MHO MHO MHO !
With his plate tube generator at maximum plate dissipation, and her coils vibrating from the excessive current flow, Microfarad soon reached his peak also. They fluxed all night, trying various circuits and combinations, until his bar magnet lost all of its strength. Milliamp tried self induction and self excitation, but it damaged her solenoids. With his battery fully discharged, they were unable to excite their generators any further, so they reversed polarity, blew each others fuses, and went Ohm.
Cheers, Peter, W2IRT
That is true, but the Technician license doesn't allow one to use the HF bands unless you have also passed the 5 words-per-minute code examination.
The General license, which requires passing another written exam beyond the Technician level and the 5 WPM code test, allows for far greater privileges on all the amateur bands.
I studied code and took the exam just so I could get HF privileges. I have not used it a whole lot since then. I only had to use it a few times to realize that I really dislike code. Not because it's obsolete (which it is beyond amateur radio) but because it's a slow way of holding a conversation, and I just don't have the patience for it.
On the up side, I was able to nab a couple of countries using CW (Morse Code) that I didn't yet have in my log book-- Australia and Poland.
What kind of unit is miles per watt? I could see watt per square mile, or preferably watt per square meter.
If 80 meter radiation penetrated the ionosphere, the detection at a range of 880 km would be about 5*10^-17 W/m^2. I'm fairly sure 80 meter bounces both from the ionosphere and the earth itself, which results in some amplification over the inverse square law value.
In contrast the detection threshold for SETI@home is about 5*10^-25 W/m^2, or a factor of 100 million smaller.
Support SETI@home
... in "miles per watt" anybody can beat this "record" pretty much anytime.
As many people have mentioned, the unit chosen is stupid. It is not about nitpicking, the unit has no meaning: this guy could easily beat his own record, not by going into space but simply by sitting half as far, or (even better) right next to the transmitting station. Indeed, all things being equal (hardware used, the ham's ear), the chosen measure increases linearly with the inverse of the distance, and more if the fall-off is higher (usually 3 or 4 in "real life").
As many people mentioned, power fall-off is inverse-square of distance in free space. That means that if the guy had stood half as far, all other things remaining equal, he would have received four times as much power. He could have then halved the transmitted power, he would still have received twice the power as in the reported experiment (making things easier for him to hear). But because the power halved and the distance halved in the process too, the "measure" of distance per power didn't change.
Is this a joke by radio amateurs trying to get the media or Slashdot to publish stupid claims?
In my amateur radio days, I was a very popular conversation - I had a small 5W radio, and I built my own di-polar antenna, I was in Nuuk (capital of Greenland), and I had conversations with southern Brazil, Japan and others - I talked to a lot of people in the UK, and they had trouble believing that I was in Greenland - They said that it sounded like I was in their back yard with a 50W radio ;) ;) ;)
They were all VERY happy to receive my QSL-card
Oh, if anyone remember me, I was 45SR101
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
the above story was taken from webskulker or rec.humor and possibly other places.
Yes be creative and pass the funnies along but please give credit where credit is due.