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Lately I have been messing around with Esperanto, which like several other hobbies I picked up as a young man and had to drop when I got married and started raising a family. If you've heard of it, it's probably in the context of "it's a language that everyone in the world was supposed to learn to speak, but nobody speaks it any more" or some such incorrect piece of information. It is in fact alive and well, and like many constructed languages (from Solresol to Klingon) the Internet has given it a pretty sizeable boost. It's the 16th or 17th largest language on Wikipedia in terms of the number of articles written in the language, and it's one of 64 or so languages available on Google Translate.

Google Translate is an example of how "it's not so much that the bear dances well, as that it dances at all." Some of the translations I've run through it are pretty good. Many are lacking in one or more ways, primarily in the absence of certain words in Google Translate's vocabulary. For instance, it doesn't know the word "banjo." (For the record, the Esperanto word for banjo is . . . "banĝo." The two are pronounced the same; the letter "ĝ" in Esperanto has the same sound as the g in "ledge" or "orange.")

And this morning, it got one translation very, very wrong. There's a site called "Lernu!" (Esperanto for "Learn!") that sends out a word of the day every day, defined and with examples in Esperanto. Today's word was "veneno," which means "poison." The examples are sentences like "Plena glaso da vino, sed kun guto da veneno." (A full glass of wine, but with a drop of poison.) They show how the word can be used as a noun, a verb, as part of a proverb ("Running like a poisoned mouse" - something I've never heard before) and even as a part of a statement potentially inconsistent with continued viability ("Nobody can poison me - I'm immune!")

I decided to run the examples through Google Translate to see what would happen. Most of them translated closely enough that I could make the leap the rest of the way, and a few contained words that Google didn't understand, like "veneniĝo", literally "becoming poisoned".

And then we got to the last example, "Li povas morti, ĉar ni ne havas kontraŭvenenon." Google translated this as "He can not die, because we do not have an antidote." Kudos to Google for having "kontraŭveneno", literally "counter-venom", in its vocabulary. But the first part of the sentence is not just incorrect, it's wrong. "Li povas morti" means "He could die" or "It is possible that he can die." Google's translation "He can not die" is the polar opposite of what it should be.

I doubt anyone would ever use Google Translate to save someone's life, and if they did I doubt they'd need to do so by translating Esperanto into English. Even so, one has to wonder how Google got "povi" into its vocabulary with a value of "can not" instead of "could."

And for the record, it's not just English. "Li povas morti" comes out as "Él no puede morir" in Spanish and "Er kann nicht sterben" in German, both meaning "He can't die" and both just as wrong as in English.

Machine translation these days is moderately good. It's at least in a lot better shape than it was when I first heard about it in the early 1970s. But it still has a long way to go.

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I haven't been doing a lot of radio lately, but Saturday I fired up the software to see who was out and about. Conditions were good, and I saw signals from France, Germany and England. Other stations were calling hams in Eastern Europe and Africa, but I couldn't hear them.

When the French station ended up a QSO with a station near me and started calling CQ, I decided to answer him. To my delight and surprise he came back with a signal report just on the lower edge of the "good" range. I had hoped to catch the German station too but apparently he went off the air while I was making my exchange with the French station.

There's a natural phenomenon called the sunspot cycle. You may have heard of it. Over about an 11 year period the number sunspots waxes and wanes, and when it gets high, it's good news for high frequency radio communications. At the peak of the sunspot cycle in 1979 I was working stations all over the world on 10 meters. The peak of the sunspot cycle is going to arrive within the next year or so and I want to be ready. Maybe the opening to Europe over the weekend is an indication that it's on its way.

* Within the hour of my contact with PY3ED, Edenir in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I got a confirmation, so now I have ten "countries" confirmed. Yay! (OK, so technically they're "entities," because let's face it, two of those "countries" are Alaska and Hawaii, but you say potato and I say solanum tuberosum.) At 6960 miles, give or take, it's not quite the most distant station I've worked this year. New Zealand and Australia beat it out. But I'm still happy to have worked him and the other Brazilian station from yesterday.

* The reverse beacon showed that my signal was getting out all over the place last night, including Japan and South Africa. I tried calling the South African station on the off chance that he was in his shack and watching the software when I called him instead of whatever South Africans do in the morning, but no such luck. Someday . . . someday.

* Or . . . maybe? After I tried calling him I went back to calling CQ before I went to bed, and after about the third try I saw a very faint signal on the waterfall. I could tell it was there but the software wasn't decoding it. At one point instead of CQ I sent QRZ? ("Who is calling me?") in the hope that he would keep trying and conditions would improve, but they never did before I had to switch over to monitoring and go to sleep. When that happens I occasionally tell myself it's some rare DX trying to get in touch with me, but it's much more likely to be a station in the gray area where their signal has gone up into the ionosphere but not come back down yet. Rare DX from Boise or Medford. :-)

* I am waiting to hear back from a recruiter on a job I interviewed for on Thursday. This would be a good job, but it would mean I'd have to commute to the Eastside again. The things we have to put up with to do mundane stuff like pay the rent.

* Igor the Younger banged into my banjo the other day. He knocked the bridge flat, broke the first string and knocked the tailpiece a bit out of line. I wasn't happy about this, but I'm glad he didn't put a hole through the head. I'd been thinking I can't remember the last time I changed strings, so it was time to do that anyway. Now I'll probably just take all the strings off, clean everything that looks like it can be cleaned, realign the tailpiece and put on new strings. If I do that it probably won't take much to get it into shape for my Interfilk gig at Conchord when that gets ready to roll around.

When I inspected the damage I found a crack in the bridge, so I'll also need to order a new bridge. I use a compensating bridge these days and the local music store doesn't carry them. Dusty Strings might, but I never make it to that part of town anymore. Honestly it's easier to order one over the net.

The Igors are spending time with Mom and Dad this weekend so no playing fish or facilitating Officer Igor. Which is fun and all, but there's a bunch of stuff coming up the littles wouldn't be interested in.

* Folklife!

OK, the littles would love some parts of the Northwest Folklife Festival, and I hope their parents take them, but I for one don't envy anyone trying to chase Igor the Younger around a cheek-to-jowl Seattle Center. He's just too big and too fast and could be in the wading pool next to Key Arena before you can say "Bob's-yer-uncle."

Some of the things I like about Folklife:

. The price is right. It's free (funded by donations actually).

. Picking a spot and just watching "the free show" as my dad used to say. Just seeing the amazing variety of people going by.

. Listening to the buskers performing along the walkways and under the trees.

. Wandering around through the vendor displays. All kinds of food and lots of cool items I can't afford. I really miss the Musical Instrument Showcase; they used to have an entire room dedicated to selling instruments topped off by an auction, but the auction closed down several years ago and the Showcase wasn't far behind. I bought a didgeridoo and a Pyrex flute at the Showcase in years when I was a bit more flush; I still have both of them.

. Plopping down in a performance venue without knowing what's going to come up. You could get old novelty tunes from the 20s and 30s on fiddle and uke, followed by a bandura concert and then by a traditional Thai dancer. We've seen gamelans and zydeco, storytellers and Irish bands.

This year we have a destination in mind rather than completely surrendering ourselves to serendipity. Miss Thing, our 15-year-old choir student, has an assignment to go to a choral concert and write a report by the end of the school year. Folklife is showcasing the Seattle Women's Choir, the Seattle Men's Choir, and the Seattle Girls' Choir on Sunday. I think that should qualify.

* Radio!

The bands have been a bit more active lately. I'm still not hearing anyone outside North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand on HF, but that doesn't mean I should quite looking. I still need to get the antenna up in the air.

* Contest!

Ham radio contests are interesting critters. The idea is to make contacts with as many participants as possible during the span of the contest. Some contests are limited in scope (hams in Michigan, for instance, or veterans), and the idea is to contact members of that scope for contest credit, or if you're a member of the scope, make as many contacts with anyone participating as you can. Some are open to everyone who wants to participate, and everyone contacts everyone else. There are byzantine rules about how to calculate your score, but the basic idea is, work as many stations as you can. Contacts tend to go pretty quickly.

This weekend will be the CQ Worldwide WPX Contest, CW (Morse code) version, sponsored by CQ Magazine. It's a free-for-all where your score is in part based on the number of different prefixes you work during the contest. In this context the "prefix" is the part of a radio ham's call that precedes the block of identifying letters. It generally has both alpha and numeric characters and ends in a number. So for my call, WA7KPK, the prefix is "WA7". It's not as common a prefix as it used to be, but it's by no means rare. Then there are calls like 4U1ITU, the ham radio station at the headquarters of the International Telecommunications Union, the UN body charged with international radio regulations. Their prefix, 4U1, is literally unique. There's only one station with that prefix.

CQ Magazine sponsors an award called the WPX, which you can earn by getting verified contacts with ham stations with 300 different prefixes. It is probably possible to work enough stations for the WPX during a contest weekend. Certainly if you're attacking the contest seriously, you can do it if you can get the contacts verified. It's been many years since I did any heavy-duty contesting, and I don't know how involved I'll get with this contest. I may just hang around, give some participants a new multiplier, and not take it too seriously. The contest starts at 5 tonight and runs for 48 hours; there's no way I'll spend that much time at it (especially since you're required to take some time off during the contest). Or I may see how close I can get to that magic 300. I have over 50 now in about two months of operation, so who knows?

* General hamming!

Just getting on, doing some casual and digital operation. One of the interesting things about contests is that a big free-for-all like WPX can crowd the bands, leaving hams who don't want to participate grumbling about "those *%!@(& contesters". Some years ago three new bands were added to the ham radio spectrum; part of the deal for allocating those bands to us hams was that contest activity would not be allowed on them. I may meet up with some refugees from some of the more crowded bands on these so-called WARC bands if I decide the contest has crowded everyone else out. That, and my normal nets on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

* Work!

Yes, the curse of the working class. I'm a contractor and need the money and don't get paid time off on this contract, so hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go. I have a couple of jobs I can do while everyone else is off enjoying the weekend.

Here's hoping you enjoy your weekend and get to do something fun.

Oh wait, that title is kind of a spoiler, isn't it?

For several days since I got the computer back up and running I had been having trouble making contacts on JT65, my current favorite digital mode. I wasn't showing up on the reverse beacon page when I called CQ and I wasn't seeing anyone on the waterfall (the scrolling signal display).

I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was sure I had transmit power. The audio was working OK, at least to make contacts on the local repeaters. I could hear Morse code signals. Everything was connected properly. I was starting to wonder if someone had taken down my antenna and replaced it with a dummy load - basically a big resistor used for testing that acts like an antenna except it doesn't radiate.

Then last night I looked down at the waterfall and saw a signal. I don't know who he was because the software hadn't decoded the message. I took a closer look and saw that the transmission had apparently started several seconds after the beginning of that minute.

It was then that a bit of enlightenment burst through the fog banks of my mind. Everything I had read about JT65 said you need to have absolutely accurate time because JT65 uses the current time as part of the decoding mechanism. If your time is off by up to about a second you're probably OK, but any higher delta can be a problem. The emphasis was on setting up a time synchronization program like Dimension4 in Windows, because Linux has the ntp protocol to keep machines on time.

Could it be that simple? This was a freshly installed Linux machine, and I thought Linux always installed ntp (the Linux time sync program) by default. Maybe I was wrong about that. Sure enough, "sudo install ntp" installed a new program instead of telling me I already had one running, and "ntpdate time.nist.gov" told me it was updating the clock, setting it back seven seconds. That's probably about how much the signal had lagged behind the start of the minute.

So that explains why signals weren't decoding, and conversely, why no one else was able to decode me. As for not seeing any signals, I chalk that up to a combination of the time differential and fairly poor band conditions the last few days. That's my story and I'm stickin' with it.

Last night I made two contacts, one with Michael in Plymouth, MI (a new state for me on JT65) and one with Richard in Vancouver, WA, who I've worked before. And I was very happy to have both contacts.

Now if that South African station would just reappear . . .

Yesterday it occurred to me after posting my journal entry entitled "Yemen" that for an American to make a public post on a major discussion forum with a title like "Yemen" might show a lack of common sense.

To that I say, pfffft. Here's why.

Someday I'll post the story of how I got bitten by the radio bug. For now, suffice it to say it happened when I was 8, and by the time I was 11 I was sending reception reports to stations overseas and getting QSL cards - postcards confirming my reception report, almost always with a picture somehow related to the culture, history or scenery of the country in question. One notable exception was HCJB, a primarily ecclesiastical station in Ecuador, whose QSL card just showed their call sign and slogan "Heralding Christ Jesus' Blessings" along with details of the reception confirmation.

Many stations had "listeners' clubs" you could join if you sent in a certain number of reception reports in a year. Members of the club got special stickers, pennants, newsletters or other mementos. The stations loved them, as it was a way to judge who was listening, where, at what times of the day, and how well the signal was getting through.

Some just sent packets of such goodies as a matter of course. The most notable of these, at least of the ones I was able to copy easily, were Radio Prague, Radio Warsaw, Radio Sofia, Radio Bucharest and Radio Moscow.

Notice a pattern there, other than the word "Radio" followed by the name of a national capital? (Back then Prague was the capital of Czechoslovakia; nowadays it's still a capital, but of only about half as much territory.) If you're under about 30 you might be forgiven for thinking they were all just in the eastern part of Europe.

Back in the 1960s, though, these countries were all members of the Warsaw Pact, a mutual-defense organization set up to keep NATO in check. McCarthyism had mostly ended, the John Birch Society was a footnote to politics and Pete Seeger had recovered from the blacklist to perform on TV, but make no mistake, the Cold War was still going. We were only a few years out from the Cuban missile crisis. Propaganda ran hot on both sides, and we and the Soviet bloc countries used any means we could to get the word out. For our side, that included Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. For them, it meant the North American services of their international broadcast operations. Interspersed with music and verbal travelogues were editorials toeing the Soviet line on international policy. Radio Havana Cuba was perhaps the most strident of the ones I could hear; I was later able to find others that were even more so.

None of that mattered to me. For me this was a hobby. I was mostly interested in the music and cultural programs and would usually just suffer through the editorials (whether from an eastern European station or the Voice of America) to get to the good stuff. And to get enough information to send the reception report that would get me the QSL I wanted.

One other thing I should mention is not just when I grew up, but where. Richland, Washington was created as a bedroom community for people working on the Hanford portion of the Manhattan Project. Pretty much over one summer weekend in 1943 it went from a sleepy little farm town of about 200 people to a city of over 20,000. And it was all run by the government, and for several years it didn't exist. Mail was postmarked "Seattle." Phone calls either weren't allowed or were tightly controlled. Saying the wrong thing could get you shipped out of town. By the time I arrived on the scene a lot of that had cooled down but we were all very much aware that we lived 30 miles from a first-strike target if the Cold War ever suddenly turned hot.

I have no doubt that the national security apparatus was keeping an eye on the mail at the Richland post office. I don't have any direct evidence that they were reading my letters to Prague and Vienna. I don't have any evidence for any of my suspicions. But I have long believed, given the people we know the FBI was keeping files on in those days, that my overseas correspondence with Foreign Powers did not go unnoticed.

And it tickles my heart greatly to think that somewhere in the other Washington, there is a file folder with my name on it that details the subversive correspondence of an 11-year-old, writing to Radio Warsaw that he had received a news broadcast anticipating a visit by Leonid Brezhnev to Poland followed by a report of an agricultural festival in Lodz.

Oh, and if you ever have occasion to find out that there was no such file, please. I don't want to know about it. I want to go on thinking that I grew up to be nowhere near the threat they thought I'd become.

So as I often do I got up at 3:30 this morning to go to the bathroom, and stopped off at the radio to see if anyone was on. (This is one great thing about digital modes like JT65. You can turn the volume all the way down because the signal is delivered straight to the computer through an audio cable. I can operate without bothering anyone.)

Guess who was calling CQ?

The same Australian station that had swamped me earlier calling Gabon.

So we made contact and now I have something like three or four Australian contacts and one New Zealander, the last couple of which were with the loop.

Have I mentioned how much I am liking this loop? I may just take the previous antenna down.

The next step is going to be how to make the loop work better. I have two projects in mind:

1. Adding about 60-70' of wire to the loop to make it work properly on the lowest frequencies I intend to use.

2. Raising the whole shebang to 20-30 feet in the air. At least up to a point, the higher up the loop is, the better the signal gets out.

The first should mostly be straightforward. The second will require a bit of ingenuity. Any ideas? (I have a couple that will require PVC pipe and sandbags.)

Oh, and I'm tired at work again, and once again it's my own darn fault.

Last week I got 200 feet of hookup wire from a supplier on eBay. I wasn't sure at the time what I would do with it, other than put it to work pushing radio waves. So I did some thinking and some planning, and about two hours ago I took the wire outside and started making a loop out of it along the back yard fence. The back yard fence is only about 8' tall, and taller is always better, so I wasn't sure what results I would get, if any, but I figured I'd give it a try.

I got the loop hung, ran the lead-in wires into the shack, and hooked everything up. Now it was time to test. The first test is, can I hear anything? I tuned to the 20 meter band and heard one of the "regulars" there calling CW. So far so good.

Second test, can I tune up the loop? That worked fine too. Now it was time to test.

20 meters was pretty quiet, so I went up to 17 meters, an underused band that hams have only had access to for about 30 years, to see what would happen. On the frequency the radio was tuned to, I heard something interesting going on, so I stopped to listen.

Time for a brief historical diversion.

April 2012 marks the 95th anniversay of the Battle of Arras, a major offensive during World War I near the town of Arras in northern France. Radio clubs often have special station setups and callsigns for big events like World's Fairs and Olympics. There were several special event stations to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic during April; I heard one but wasn't able to work him.

Up until today I had only ever heard about three or four special event stations and had only worked one, and that one was for Mt. St. Helens. The station I was hearing was using the call sign TM95BA. "TM" means the station is from "continental France," presumably as opposed to overseas possessions like St. Pierre et Miquelon. "95" represents the 95th anniversary, and "BA" for "Battle of Arris". Presumably the initials are the same in French.

TM95BA was coming in reasonably clearly and was firing off signal reports in rapid success. If there's one activity that makes JT65 seem leisurely by comparison, it's a rare station making his way through a gaggle of stations trying to contact him (this is called "working a pileup"). He wasn't swamped as far as I can tell, but he was going at the rate of about 3 contacts every 2 minutes, mostly to North American stations with a few Europeans in the mix.

I moved off frequency, made sure the new loop would tune up, boosted my power a little and moved back onto his frequency. Proper etiquette is to wait until a station finishes a contact before calling them, so I dutifully waited for him to signal QRZ? (which is used as an invitation to call) or 73 ("Best regards" - traditional ham signoff) or something similar before I called.

I started calling about 4:45 in the afternoon and he kept coming back to other stations. I don't blame him; they were probably swamping me and my Morse code is pretty rusty. Finally, at 5:03, he sent out a WA7 call. It sounded like what someone might think I sent, but I couldn't be sure. Was he calling me back? I didn't answer, but waited to see what he would do.

WA7? WA7 PSE K. "WA7 station, please go ahead." I slowed way down, both to send better Morse and to make sure he got my call right. If he misheard my call, I would get no credit for the contact.

WA7KPK 599 TU. "Your signal is excellent, thank you." In pileups and contests we hams always lie about our signal strength. It's always the best it could be, even if you have to dig the signal out of the noise. It's faster that way. The DX station knows he's getting out, and the other station just wants the contact. He can get a signal report from ordinary, non-rare stations.

TU 5NN E E. "Thank you. Let's stipulate that you have a perfect signal. Dit dit." The "dit dit" is the end of "shave and a haircut" and often tacked on to a final transmission to mean "I'm done." This is a very minimal contact. He already had my callsign, and I wanted to finish the contact quickly so he could move on to other stations. That's also proper etiquette.

E E QRZ? "Dit dit. Next??"

I had worked Europe! First time in over 30 years. I have to stress that France is by no means considered a rare station, but I managed to get the attention of a station that a lot of hams were looking for. It's always a very happy feeling. And there might be a nice commemorative QSL card in it for me.

I think I can safely say the loop works. Now for the big test. Does it work on the lower bands where I want to be able to check into some of the local nets? That's the real purpose of the project; anything else is gravy.

Now that I've proved the radio works I think I'll go chase Igor the Younger around for a while. Time for more contacts later.

I managed to get my Montana contact, without having to do it through the countest. I had a contact with a guy from Hamilton, Montana the other day. If I think hard enough I might be able to remember where that is. I'm sure I knew once when I lived in Billings. (UPDATE: Yeah, I thought so. It's in the valley south of Missoula where my wife spent several years of her childhood.)

Then this afternoon I had a brief contact with a station in Australia. So much for being confined to contacts in California. Actually I currently have contacts with about half of the states and six "countries," but that doesn't stop me from being insecure about my ability to get my signal out.One thing about hams, we always want better antennas.

I've mentioned JT65 before, where the contacts are pretty minimal. That means I don't know much about the people I contact unless I look it up on the net, but JT65 still has its advantages apart from brevity and the ability to make contacts in rapid succession. When I send out a transmission there's usually about 90 seconds before I have to react to any reply that comes my way, and the reaction usually consists of clicking a radio button or typing a brief (10 characters) message, so I have time to do things like practice my banjo or work on the low whistle (which is coming along better than it was, but it's still not as natural as the recorder). You can bet that when the Australian station called me I was paying my full attention to him, though.

So as I said in the previous post I missed out on South Africa. I got a consolation prize, though. This afternoon in rapid succession I got a contact into Hawaii, plus another one into Japan.

Under the somewhat arcane rules governing ham radio awards, Hawaii counts as both a state (for the Worked All States award) and as a country (for the DX Century Club, where you try to get contacts with hams in 100 different "countries.") Same with Alaska. This means that since March I've worked something like ten states and three countries. You'd think Canada and Alaska would be easy contacts, but I haven't managed to get them yet.

A quick word about countries: somewhere there's a definition of what constitutes a country for award purposes, but it's been a very long time since I've read it. The list includes over 300 entities, including such "countries" as the Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales, the Galapagos Islands, Asiatic Russia (as opposed to European Russia), St. Pierre et Miquelon, the naval base at Guantanamo Bay and the headquarters of the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva - as opposed to the United Nations headquarters in New York.

I earned my Worked All States (WAS) award the last time I was on the air for an extended period of time and got something like 45 countries toward DXCC. I want to try to get WAS again, and to get DXCC this time. Both are doable, but can be tricky. With DXCC, once you get past the countries with large, active ham populations - maybe 50 of them - you have to start digging for the rest.

Stateside, the tough part is working the states that have low numbers of hams. Wyoming comes to mind, as do both North and South Dakota. I remember reading recently that there are about 1500 hams in North Dakota, of which maybe 10% are active on the shortwave bands. So, now that this post is over I'm off to participate in something called the Montana QSO Party, where hams from Montana are encouraged to get on the air so the rest of us can contact them. When I earned my WAS, I was living in Montana, and for more than one ham I was their last state for WAS.

And one final note: Guess which states have the highest numbers of radio hams? California has the most, followed by Texas, Florida, and . . . for reasons unknown to me . . . Washington. Yeah, not too many people need me as their fiftieth state for WAS.