off grid

ARRL Field Day – With A Real Grid Down Event Right Before

Grid Down Before Field Day

The past couple of years, my daughter, KC8GRS and myself, WB8ERJ have been doing Field Day from my home. We operate Field Day using the special event callsign N8A. Since my Amateur Radio station is off-grid, I am always ready for 1E operation, which is a home station with emergency power. Interestingly enough, two weeks before Field Day, two tornadoes went through our area and came within earshot of the home QTH. The neighbors heard the “freight train” twice! Silly me, I slept through both of them until the power line got ripped off the side of the house. Yeah that woke me up. Turns out the big Maple tree out by the road fell over and took out the power lines.

When it comes to Field Day, our primary concern is communication which is good, but in a real grid down situation there are several other life needs. I believe that we hams need to consider these as well. So here are a few things I will share from my pre-Field Day power outage.

As it turned out, I had no grid power for 4 days. Fortunately I have been through this several times. Each time I use it as a learning experience so I can go through a power outage better than before. Having my own well that requires electricity, the first thing I do is draw drinking water from the holding tank until there is no pressure left. Doing this simple thing gave me more than enough drinking and cooking water for the outage. I also collect rain water for watering my garden. Since I had no water pressure, I used this for flushing the toilet. In addition to my amateur radio station being off grid, I also have another solar panel system that powers a 12 volt backup sump pump and my refrigerator. This was a game changer, as the 12 volt sump pump ran the first night of the outage, and probably kept my basement from flooding, which is often a concern here in Ohio. With the fridge on this system as well also kept the food in the fridge from spoiling.

EMCOMM With Winlink

One thing I participate in is WinLink Wednesday. As it happens, Wednesday came and I still had no power. No problem – my station is off grid, so it was Winlink Wednesday as usual! And just for fun (OK I was bored…) I sent out a few additional emails to a couple of non-ham friends to demonstrate Amateur Radio’s off-grid capabilities.

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How to Run Winkeyer on a Raspberry Pi computer

Being a Ham Radio operator that likes CW (Morse code) and contesting, it helps to have a programmable keyer that will get text from a computer. In my search, I found the Winkeyer USB by K1EL Systems. There are several variants of the Winkeyer that include kits as well as fully assembled keyers. In this post, I will show you how to run Winkeyer on a Raspberry Pi computer.

Most logging programs have some way to send a pre-set string of characters to your rig, such as “CQ CQ CQ FD DE WB8ERJ WB8ERJ FD AR”. which is fine however when running CW at any speed faster than say 13 WPM, the computer is prone to timing problems and your CW comes out like you have terrible CW skills. This is because sending Morse Code that is generated by the computer has timing problems – especially in a Windows environment!

So by using the Winkeyer instead of the computer to key the transmitter, the task of actually generating the Morse Code is off-loaded from your computer, and your Morse Code is sent perfectly.

I have used Winkeyer with N3 FJP‘s contest logging software and it works just fine with that logging software, and I am sure many others. But there is a problem, I rarely run Windows computers and usually run Linux on a Raspberry P i computer. Specifically an install package by Jason, KM4ACK. Now this particular install package is targeted to portable / off-grid Ham Radio Operations. Since I have been doing POTA acvitations, Jason’s setup works great, and I highly recommend it.

So I needed a way to run Winkeyer in the Raspberry pi. On K1EL’s site there is this page that mentions winkeydaemon. Which is the answer to the problem. However not being completely fluent in the world of Linux, the task was a bit daunting. Maybe its just me and my lack of Linux knowledge, but I found the documentation to be rather difficult to follow.

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Solar Panel Installation On The Roof Of My Home

The idea of having solar panels generating my electricity has always interested me. There is just something about generating your own power that is satisfying. Recently, I was in a position to be able to start looking into the possibility of installing solar panels on my roof, however I had some questions. Mainly should I go off-grid, or have a grid-tie solar system. I also wanted a system that I could easily add on to in the future. Doing a solar panel installation isn’t for everyone, but it might be something that could work for you.

Grid-Tie or Off Grid Solar Panel Installation

When people think of Solar panels, they typically think of what is called an off-grid system. That is, one where the Solar panels, and the electricity generated from them are separate from the traditional power grid. However with improved technology of micro-inverters, it has become much more cost effective to go with a grid-tie system as opposed to an off- grid, if you already have conventional power in your house.

By choosing a grid-tie system over an off-grid one you are cutting the overall cost by over half. You also eliminate the need for having batteries, which is where most of the cost savings are. Not to mention having to replace the batteries every 5 to 10 years. Additionally, there are serious power losses in charging batteries for solar. One source puts that loss as much as 40%.

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Stop EMI / RFI Interference in Off Grid Solar PV Systems

Stop EMI Interference from Off Grid Solar Being a Ham radio operator, I am quite aware of EMI and RFI radiation interfering with my radios. Recently I added an Off Grid Solar PV system to my ham radio station. Using solar panels is great for ham radio, especially for emergency communications when the grid is down, I am still able to operate. However it was producing a lot of EMI /RFI interference on my lowband rig.

What I did was purchase a 100 watt off-grid Solar PV kit on Amazon, similar to the one to the one on the right. (Why yes I am an Amazon Afilliate) Solar PV kits such as this one comes with everything you need. The photo above shows the solar panel mounted on my ham radio tower. One thing on my installation, I had to come up with my own brackets to mount the solar panel to my tower. So if you are thinking of doing a similar set up, you will need to figure out your own tower mounting arrangement. The Solar PV system works great charging my deep cycle batteries that run my Ham radio station. The problem however is the charge controller, which is a PWM type charge controller, generates a lot of EMI interference. The particular charge controller that came with my solar PV kit, is a WindyNation P30 Charge Controller, which is typical of all the other inexpensive PWM type of solar charge controllers.

Track Down The EMI / RFI Source

Before I tell you how I resolved my EMI / RFI interference, I would like to tell you how I was able to track down the source of my EMI noise. I have a small portable AM/FM radio that clips on to your arm. All I do is switch to the AM band and tune around. Usually EMI interference is a harmonic of its fundamental frequency, so just tune around until you hear a strong EMI noise. Then its a matter of walking around until you hear the noise the loudest.

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