Next Saturday, May 11th, we will be activating Windmill "De Blokweerse Wip". This windmill is one of the 19 windmills of the Unesco World Heritage Kinderdijk.

In the Alblasserwaard, the area to which Kinderdijk belongs, problems with the water level became more and more apparent from the 13th century. To get rid of the excess water in the polders, long canals were dug. These canals are called "weteringen" and you can find them all over Holland.

This method remained sufficient for only a few years. The ground level fell yet again because of a structural issues (veen) and the level of the river rose at the same time, requiring an additional way of keeping the correct level of the water in the polders.

It was decided to build a series of windmills which would pump the water into a reservoir (boezem) until the level of the river had reached a level that pumping the water into the river was possible again.

In 1869, the windmills received assistance from a steam "mill" or pumping station, which was replaced by a diesel pumping station in 1927. The pumping station was not able to function properly in the second world war, because of lack of oil. The windmills proved their usability and functioned again as never before.

The "Blokweerse Wip" was originally build around 1532. It was set on fire by the Spanish troops during the Eighty Years' War and was rebuild at the beginning of the 17th Century. The last restoration took place in 2001 after the windmill was partly destroyed during a fire in 1997.
Up on today the windmill is operational and is still pumping water from the Blokweerse polder to the Nederwaard Canal.
We would like to thank the millers Wim and Cees van der Wal for their hospitality.

Rob and I are operating on HF and VHF on Saturday May 11th from around 8 UTC until about 16 UTC. We will be using PA3BXR/MILL as our callsign. Locator: JO21hv. Occasionally you may hear one of our ham radio friends on the mike.

It has been a while since I posted an article on my website... Way too busy with all kind of things both inside and outside my shack ;-)

I recently started to build a FSK/CW interface for portable and holiday style operations. The interface is build with the kit from Bob W3YY. I made one change as I wanted to see the serial communication on the interface. So I've added three LED's for PTT, CW and FSK.

For RTTY decoding just one-way audio is necessary, but when I change my mind and want to do some other digital modes, I've added two-way electrical isolated audio via two 1:1 600 Ω transformers.

In the mean time, my father has been taking care of the case. He drilled holes in the front plate for the three LED's and a few more in the back plate for all the connectors.

With a couple of days all will be mounted and ready for a first test. Hopefully with some nice weather so I can test it outside in the fields.

It has been a while ago since I retrieved the BallastHalo 4 Balloon but the last few months I regained my interest to High Altitude Balloon (HAB) experiments.

Almost every week one or more High Altitude Balloons are launched in Europe by radio amateurs and students. The balloons are made of Latex or Mylar with a parachute and payload underneath.
In the payload the hardware varies but always contains a GPS, micro-controller and a small transmitter. Most payloads also have sensors (eg. for temperature and air pressure) and sometimes photo and video equipment on board.
All the European HAB payloads uses small 70cm band transmitters with an output power of 10 or 25 mili Watt which can be tracked with a receiver capable of SSB reception and a PC for decoding the rtty data.

A lot of information about High Altitude Balloons and the technique can be found on http://ukhas.org.uk/. Tracking and balloon position can be viewed live on http://spacenear.us/tracker/.

At the moment I'm busy designing my own High Altitude Balloon payload. It's build around an Arduino Uno micro controler. On the bread board you can see the Radiometrix NTX2 70cm 10mW transmitter, UPU/uBlox GPS , Parallax Pressure/Temperature sensor and a SD card module for storing all the data.
The final goal of the design is to replace the Arduino Uno with the Pro Mini (the small PCB on the bottom of the photo).

When the payload and software are ready I hope to launch my HAB into near space. Near space is a lot higher than airplanes do. They fly at an altitude of 10km and High Altitude Balloons go above 30km. The current Amateur HAB altitude record is almost 43 km (42687 meter)!

Yesterday my hosting provider had to do an urgent update on some of their servers. Due to that update, my website was not accessible anymore.

I had to tweak some of the core files on the webserver to get my access back to the Content Management System. After that I was able to update and tweak some more to get the website up and running again.

The website is back to normal operation as of now. Only on the backside I have a few small problems left to solve.

Yesterday I received a package in my mailbox with the TF/PD3EM QSL cards for my last month holiday activities on Iceland.

The QSL cards are again printed by Gennady UX5UO. The QSL cards are very high quality, printed in full color. I've designed the QSL cards myself and sent a ready to print design. The colors are exactly as intended, even with photo's that can be messed up when the wrong color profile is used. When you can't design it your own, Gennady will do that job for you. Gennady delivers QSL cards fast and with great service! More information can be found on his website http://www.ux5uoqsl.com/

At the moment I'm busy writing and sorting more than 1000 outgoing QSL cards that will be sent via the bureau later this month. If you want a QSL card for my TF/PD3EM operation, please sent your QSL card via the bureau or direct to my home address.

Time flies when you're having fun..... It is 2 weeks ago that I returned from my 9 day trip to Iceland (TF).

Iceland is an amazing country with beautiful landscapes and very nice people. I've visited great places like the Jökulsárón Glacier Lagoon, Gullfoss Waterfall and many other with amazing Lava fields and black river beds and beaches. I also had the chance to photograph some Aurora during one of the first nights after I arrived on Iceland.

It was great to visit Heimir TF1EIN, Hal TF3GC and have some great time with Seli TF3AO in Reykjavik and at the TF3IRA Club station.

As a Ham I took a rig with me, the Yaesu FT-450 and a HyEndFed wire antenna for 20 meter. Next time I'll bring antennas for more bands ;-) I had much fun on 20 meter during both the rag chewing and pile-ups.

A special QSL card is being printed at the moment and will be ready in a few weeks. You can QSL direct and via the bureau for my TF/PD3EM operation.

It looked like it has been very quiet with my ham radio activities as you checked my website. But it has been a very busy couple of months. Just lack of time for writing updates.....

With two rigs in my shack with different microphones, speakers and a headset I disliked the continuous changing microphones and plugging them in and out. It was time to search for a good piece of equipment that was capable of connecting all together.
After comparing different brands and models it was very clear what it would be: the microHAM KM2R+. Not only it could switch between two microphones and speakers but with the build-in keyer and sound cards it could do all modes in a SO2R environment!
I redesigned the shack a little bit and made a new shelf and put some extra LED lights on the front of the top-shelf.

Well, that was two months ago and in the mean time the conditions on HF went up and I joined some contests with the new setup, not yet as SO2R but single radio. Especially 10 meter was great the last couple of weeks and I logged a bunch of new DXCCs on that band!

With all the QSOs of the past few months my stock of QSL cards had gone and I designed a new one. At the moment it's being printed by UX5UO and will arrive within the next two weeks. That means that for the last 600 QSOs I made a new card will be sent out soon.
As I'm a regional QSL manager for the Dutch QSL Bureau, I'm at the moment busy sorting about 15 kg of QSL cards that will go out to the bureau this Saturday.

Last Friday I received a package with a great new toy for my shack.

It's an IBM Customer Display used with cash registers in shops. The display is a VFD type with 2x20 characters and suitable for displaying much more than the amount of money you'll have to pay in shops.

The VF Display is connected via a serial cable to the PC and can be controlled via software like LCD Smartie. With that, a lot of information can be displayed, mostly related to your PC health and RSS feeds. But the information you would want to know in your shack is quite something else.

I got the display as a present from Tomas OK4BX and I'm him very thankful for this great present! Tomas wrote a Perl script for displaying live DX Cluster spots on the VF Display. And it's working great! The Perl script connects to a telnet DX Cluster and puts all the spots on the display in real time. On the first row the frequency, spotter prefix and DX callsign are displayed. The bottom row shows the comment.

The display can be viewed even from outside of my shack and gives information about the DX spots and current conditions. So even when I'm not in my shack I can react on DX spots!

More information can be found on the website of Tomas OK4BX and his father.

At the moment I'm working on the Dutch HAMnet wiki. It's all about the design, planning and implementation of the Highspeed Amateur Network in The Netherlands.
In the mean time I'm still looking for (Dutch) Radio Amateurs to make this HAMnet project possible, so if you're interested please get in touch with me.

Check the wiki at http://hamnet.pd3em.com/

Remember that this wiki is just the beginning. A lot of work will have to be done!