WICEN Vic: WICEN 80m Net 29 June 2012

[John & Bronwyn]

Net opened at 20:30 hrs on 3600 kHz with VK3ZRX as Net Control.

Checkins:

Mark VK3MDH  /P Cobram, 59, reports lots of Vicpol activity along the 
NSW / Vic border to do with Covid bans on people entering Vic from any 
NSW 'red spot'.

Paul VK3FPDA, 57, reported poor sigs from everyone

Rik VK3EQ,  58, check in only,

John VK3MS Milawa, 59, working on getting his shack set up & functional

Peter VK3YG Glenmaggie, 59, going interstate for a few days, also 
celebrating 57th wedding anniversary.  Congrats Peter and Jen!

Peter VK3YZP Alexandra, 58, using a Codan radio with tunable vertical (a 
Codan screwdriver with extended whip), reported my sig as +14dBuV (see 
below)

All greatly saddened to hear of the passing of long-term WICEN member 
Fred VK3JM.  Vale Fred.

Coming events:

Saturday August 7th 2021
Gippsland Rally
Heyfield area
Contact: Ross Sargent VK3SF phone: 03 9736 4020
Email:vk3sf at outereast.com.au

Sunday August 15th 2021
Commanders & Co-Ordinators Meeting
ZOOM (TBC )
Contact: Ross Sargent VK3SF phone: 03 9736 4020
Email:vk3sf at outereast.com.au

  Net control next week:  Paul VK3DPW

Change of Net Control Roster:  With Fred's passing and another Net 
Control station not available for the foreseeable future (due to other 
commitments), I think it is time to revise the roster.

Anyone interested in being added to the net control roster, please 
contact me.   It is an interesting role and a valuable skill to have!


And lastly, an explanation of Peter 3YZP's signal report.  The most 
common signal report is "S" units, with (on HF) S9 defined as 50 uV at 
the antenna terminals.  Then each lower "S" number is half the signal 
strength (-6dB) of the one just higher.  Another common specification is 
the actual signal strength in uV, most radios are specified in this way 
for sensitivity. Then there is dBm, which is the signal level in dB 
referred to a signal level of 1 mW into 50 ohms (this is about 0.224 
volts).

As well, some radios define signal levels in dB relative to 1uV, with 
abbreviation dBu.

  For comparison, here are the various "signal strength" scales:

'S’ Units (HF) 	uV 	dBu 	dBm
9 	50 	34 	-73
8 	25 	28 	-79
7 	13 	22 	-85
6 	6.3 	16 	-91
5 	3.2 	10 	-97
4 	1.6 	4 	-103
3 	0.8 	-2 	-109
2 	0.4 	-8 	-115
1 	0.2 	-14 	-121

And just to confuse things further, there are actually two "S unit" 
scales.  On HF, S9 = 50 uV.  But on V/UHF, S9 = 5 uV.  This makes S1 on 
V/UHF = -141 dBm - pretty much at the noise floor of a very good VHF/UHF 
receiver.  So it makes sense.  And there are two dBu scales - the one 
above which uses 1 uV, and another which uses 0.5 uV as the reference, 
which is used by some Japanese manufacturers.

In practice the "S-unit" scales are nominal, not all manufacturers 
follow the "S-unit" standard and even then, radios often don't follow 
the scales accurately.

So my report from Peter of +14dBu was about S6.

Cheers,   John VK3ZRX


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://vic.wicen.org.au/pipermail/wicenvic_vic.wicen.org.au/attachments/20210703/3fd4f337/attachment.html>