It hard to find VHF radios that have the ability to run VARA FM WIDE.?

Right now there are two ALINCO dr-150T radios on Ebay.
This radio was released prior to 2000, and as packet was still common, it has a "9600" connection.
I have been using one on VARA FM Wide for several years.? It will pass Vara FM up to ABOUT 10,000 bps. The book says if you exceed 9600 packet it won't work due to Gaussian errors.

The connector on the back is a1/8 stereo, tip transmit, ring receive.? You have to use the MIC ptt terminal for ptt.
Note that one of the radios has no Microphone.? ONLY the original EMS12 mike (not available) will allow direct frequency entry, but any Alinco / Kenwood microphone works for Voice and DTMF.

--
KA9CAR

Hi Bill,
Just to add a little to this thread. ?I had been running WE/VARA HF using Parallels and Win 11 (ARM) on an M2 Apple laptop. ?Recently I noted that after several assorted upgrades, the Signalink would no longer key/Xmit even though I had a clear waterfall
Ventura 13.6.7
WE 1.7.16.0
VARA HF 4.8.7
Parallels 19.4.0

I have been using a UNI USB-C to USB dongle. ?I checked out the cabling and connections using my old Intel MacBook Pro and also a PC laptop. VARA HF connections played fine. ?Figured it was either the dongle or a software/setup issue. ?Since the dongle worked in the past, started looking for a software/setup cause. Did some digging and found info on the signalink site for Win11 configs:


Setting the parameters as per the tech note and adjusting the Volume slider in Sound properties was the fix.
Hope this helps.

How does the "Random Negotiated" part work? How many random characters are given? Do you have any information on this?

How can I access version 4.3.6 of VARA HF? Also, I am curious about the experiences of those who have tried the encryption in VARA HF. One thing I noticed is that a user with encryption can communicate seamlessly with a user without encryption. What do you know about this topic?

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I wish we could get you to join us on 40m. We've been doing it since November. We've tested every which way and it's amazing stuff.?

I'd say all your previous tests pretty well shows what works.

_._,_._,_

---

?

At the moment, I only have mono-band hamstick-type antennas for 60 and 30 meters for the dedicated APRS-HF (AX.25 & VARA) radio in the mobile. I am considering investing in a pair of 40M hamsticks. One would be used on the car for mobile, and both would be used as a mini-dipole on "Studio B" (my radio trailer) at halt.??? (I'm using pairs of the 60M and 30M sticks this way now.)?? I am departing on the great road trip later today, and don't have time to acquire 40 sticks.

Today, I'm only going about 90 miles to my sister's farm in Kalamazoo, MI. The "real trip" begins tomorrow [Sunday] - 60 meters between Kalamazoo and Cedar Rapids, IA. On Monday, I will depart Cedar Rapids with the 30 meter setup going for the rest of the trip.

---

Stephen H. Smith??? wa8lmf (at) aol.com
Skype:??????? WA8LMF
EchoLink:? Node #? 14400? [Think bottom of the 2-meter band]
Home Page:?????????

APRS-over-VARA igates now operating on 30 & 60 meters
??

"Studio B" Ham Shack on Wheels
??

-- APRS over VARA? --
??

?

I wish we could get you to join us on 40m. We've been doing it since November. We've tested every which way and it's amazing stuff.?

I'd say all your previous tests pretty well shows what works.

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We ran the "live" test today - a simulated emergency based on an actual one 5 years ago with all the public safety services involved.

?
?This time, we had a 3 element Yagi instead of the J-Pole used previously at north, with the same 3 element Yagi at south. We found that voice communications through that system went from a bit scratchy to full quieting with the new antenna. This was all at about 9:30 AM.

This just conforms what I said in a previous post -- that FM voice comms must be fully hard-quieted before data is going to work decently.? Signal levels with hiss or "popcorn" on them, that remain intelligible on voice,? just won't work for data.? At least for high-speed data.??? 300-baud HF-style packet or VARA-HF run over VHF/FM radios can tolerate a bit of noise but will be VERY slow.

I have actually experienced this.? Several years ago, I was experimenting with APRS tracking for an event in Evergreen Colorado.? Evergreen is located in an L-shaped canyon in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, with mountains thousands of feet higher all around it. VHF radio is a nightmare of non-line-of-sight paths with massive amount of multipath reflections, even on strong signals.? 1200-baud packet APRS failed miserably, even on paths of only a few miles.??? On a hunch, I tried switching my UZ7HO Soundmodem soft TNCs to 300-baud HF-style packet.??? BINGO!?? Things worked perfectly even on noisy non-quieted multipath-riddled paths.? Over TEN TIMES as many posits succeeded compared to the 1200 baud built-in TNC of the Kenwood D700.????

For passing substantial amounts of traffic, the speed hit might be a problem, but in my case I only needed to pass compressed position reports.? Even at 300 baud, they were only about a second each.

On the issue of paths working in the morning but failing later in the day, this is quite normal for marginal horizon-grazing non-line-of-sight. paths on VHF & UHF.???

Beyond the optical horizon, VHF propagation depends on refraction (bending of the wave front).? In turn, this refraction depends on air masses of non-constant density. ? In the morning, when the ground is rapidly heating from the sun, temperatures near the surface rise faster than a few thousand feet up, creating a layer of less-dense air near the ground.? This bends VHF signals beyond the horizon.? By noon, when the air has heated more uniformly up to several thousand feet, the refracting effect is far far less - signal levels can drop by 10-20-even 30 dB on non-line-of-sight paths.??

At sundown, when the solar heating of ground & air stops, the same thing happens.? Signal levels in the early evening shoot up when air near the ground doesn't cool off as rapidly as air higher up.? By several hours after sunset, when air has cooled off more uniformly at all levels, signal levels drop off again, until the next morning's sunrise.?

The key to reliable paths is to have enough excess signal level (power plus antenna gain) that even with 20 dB or so loss, you remain hard-quieted at the receiver.?

---

Stephen H. Smith??? wa8lmf (at) aol.com
Skype:??????? WA8LMF
EchoLink:? Node #? 14400? [Think bottom of the 2-meter band]
Home Page:?????????

APRS-over-VARA igates now operating on 30 & 60 meters
??

"Studio B" Ham Shack on Wheels
??

-- APRS over VARA? --
??

?

?

Chris et.al. Congratulations on a job well done!

The observation that the VHF path deteriorated as the sun came up is normal VHF line of sight propagation. This effect is also seen on VHF repeaters where it is possible to get into far away repeaters in the morning, and then the path deteriorates over time and the link is lost until the evening.

Lots to still learned from focusing on all the factors of Effective Radiated Power (ERP).? This includes RF power, Coax type (loss), coax length, antenna gain and antenna height above ground.?

You also raise some of the issues of "The Last Kilometer" communications and the placement of the longer range VHF Winlink station and RF control by ARDEN Mesh.? This is an area that needs more research and solutions.? We have access to all the tools.? Just need to package it into a easily deployed solution.?

For interest, I will attach some images from an exercise we did this spring providing radio communications for a Scouts Canada event (Rideau Challenge Journey) in an area without complete cell service near Ottawa.? For this two day exercise for my vehicle (1986 VW Vanagon Westfalia pop-top hippy bus) I used a trailer hitch mounted mast consisting of five (5) sections of four (4) ft aluminum military portable mast sections with an Arrow dual band VHF/UHF j-pole antenna.? This was approximately 20 ft of mast plus the length of the J-pole which provided excellent coverage of the area of operation.?

This exercise was conducted over two days.?

Ref:

?

Image 1: ?Rideau Challenge Journey 2024 Checkpoint 14BA

?

Image 2:? Rideau Challenge Journey 2024 Arrow J-Pole VHF/UHF antenna on 5 x 4 foot masts mounted on rear hitch of vehicle.? Power supplied by 1000 watt Honda Generator feeding 120 VAC to variable DC power supply.? This used a PwrGate to operated VHF transceiver and charge a nominal 13.8 VDC deep cycle battery.? All power system on Anderson Powerpole connectors.?

?

?

Image 3: ?Rideau Challenge Journey 2024 Close-up of Arrow J-Pole VHF/UHF antenna on top of military mast sections. This antenna has a low angle of radiation and great characteristics for this work.?

?

?

I have used this portable stations for many public service events such as the Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour where I was positioned at the last station of a multi-operator chain of stations.? When mobile administration vehicles with? 5/8 wave antenna passed through or stopped at my location, they would not be able to communicate with Net Control Station (NCS) who was operating on a regional repeater in Ottawa. This portable station was usually full quieting into net control. As noted above, it is normal for the VHF signals to drop from the peak in the early morning.? With this I was always able to communicate into the NSC.?

My recommendation for this sort of work is to work on creating robust antenna masts that are safely deployed, use of VHF antenna with low angle of radiation, and run at least 40-50 watts RF.? The mast sections should have the capability to support multiple guy ropes. Practice, practice, practice.?

?

Have fun & be safe!

Cheers!

Stuart VE3SMF

We ran the "live" test today - a simulated emergency based on an actual one 5 years ago with all the public safety services involved.

We were handed several files on a USB stick to send. Most were photographs with resolutions of a 1.3 to 4 MB. Another was a floor plan in PDF format about 1.2MB. We used Winlink to shrink the photos to 100 to 300K, without meaningful loss of quality. I converted the PDF to JPEG (I happen to have Adobe Acrobat DC pro on my laptop) and we shrunk it to 300K.

All transmitted in reasonable time, with the 300K files taking 8 minutes, going from north to south. I think we could have shrunk them further. This time, we had a 3 element Yagi instead of the J-Pole used previously at north, with the same 3 element Yagi at south. We found that voice communications through that system went from a bit scratchy to full quieting with the new antenna. This was all at about 9:30 AM.

At 11:30 AM, south was given a 1.2MB .doc file to send. No compression was tried. We had noticed the communication path deteriorating with the passage of the day, and I think propagation conditions had changed. We noticed the same thing on Wednesday. To make matters worse, we believe that the metal buildings not only obstructed our signal, but caused multipath problems which explains the lower performance (50%) of the south to north path through the day. Sending the large file both direct and through west were unacceptably slow, levels? m1-3, with lots of retransmission. One building was directly in our path, another directly behind and others to the side.

So we have a bit of work to do. We will need to see if we can use Wi-Fi technology to remote the VARA-FM station from any obstructions or reflectors. We need to try antennas with higher elevation and/or gain. We also need to look at ways to make files smaller without meaningful loss of fidelity.

The chief was happy with our performance despite the issue with the last file and wants to continue working with us, so overall a success for getting a job done and success for learning and understanding the issues we face in point-to-point portable terrestrial communications, which are changing propagation, obstructions, reflections, file compression and separation of the document injection point from the transmission site. The other good point was our ability to set up in less than 10 minutes. I owe him a report.

We noted that whilst we've been practicing Winlink with an emphasis on ICS forms, the requirements in this case - a simulated chemical fire - were primarily the transmission of photographs, floor plans and documents in image formats from the field (wherever that may be) to the EOC (we have 14 of them in our region,).

73,
Chris

Mark,

This is what we found through experiments and looking at schematics. ?I think Vara is a great program. ?We have done a good amount experimenting and training in our ARES group. ?For the most part, it is easy to set-up and get people running in a short amount of time.

My only criticism is that the initial handshake and S/N checks for Vara Wide are only done in the lower 3 kHz, not the whole 6 kHz. ?This makes operators think their set-up is Vara Wide capable, when it isn’t. ?This can give performance that is highly variable as the title of this thread implies. ?There are free programs and SDR receivers that can be used to verify radios are capable of the full 6 kHz with a flat profile.

I think a future Vara feature that would be nice is a Vara Wide check to ensure the whole 6 kHz is being sent and received.

Jeff
WX7OR

On Fri, Jun 14, 2024 at 07:37 PM, Jeff WX7OR wrote:

We tried to get the FT-991A running Vara Wide with the internal soundcard

Jeff;

There currently isn't any "all ?band" (HF + VHF/UHF FM) transceiver that will support full-throughput 'WIDE' mode VARA FM (or 9600bps PACKET), on 2M or 70cm, using the internal USB sound-card system.

Studying the schematics and/or block diagrams of these radios, I've found that the same tx audio channel is used both for HF operation (SSB or FM) and VHF/UHF FM operation. It seems that manufacturers have limited the bandwidth of the tx audio channel their transceivers to 3KHz, to ensure compliance with FCC HF bandwidth restrictions.

Keep in mind that VARA FM first came on the scene in early 2019, after most of the current crop of "all ?band" transceivers were being developed. I believe that, from the manufacturer's perspective, there wasn't any justification for the additional design effort to support wider bandwidth tx audio, exclusively when the radio was being used for VHF/UHF FM data communication... particularly when this capability -was- supported with external hardware connected to the miniDIN-6 "DATA" (or similar) connector.

Mark - AD7EF

Phil,

We tried to get the FT-991A running Vara Wide with the internal soundcard by changing the different settings.? We could not find any settings that would produce a flat signal with a ~6 KHz bandwidth.? Here is the what the output looked like:

?


With a DRA-SR and the set-up described by Mark with the radio in DATA-FM, here is the output:


We didn't find settings to get a flat response across 6 kHz with the internal soundcard.

Jeff

Jeff,
Using the 991 usb sound device the audio passed through the USB is not emphasized.? ?I don't know why you might be using an external sound card.? I connect audio and CAT through the USB on the FT-991 running VARA HF or FM with no issues.? I use varAC as user interface and do not run under WINLINK.? The first casualty in to many ECOMM situation is ISP failure so don't consider the internet as a reliable emergency comm tool.? ?We all now mostly depend on VOIP for our phone services cell or otherwise.? The days when often the last thing to go silent was ma bell are gone.? Regards, Phil?

Chris,

I just tested the FT-991 today to confirm it is capable of Vara Wide and it is.? It wasn't mentioned before, but make sure the radio is in DATA-FM mode.? It will appear to work in FM mode, but the emphasis/de-emphasis circuitry is not bypassed.? Vara Wide will have variable and less than optimum results in this mode.

Jeff

Hi Stuart and others,

Yes you can use a phone repeater BUT you have to set in VARA-FM program via "Settings" and "VARA setup" at "FM system" in NARROW and not in WIDE.
This is for the all users of VARA-FM via a phone repeater.
Nothing have to change in the repeater itself.

This all means that the the audio-bandwidth is less and thus the level speed is max 11
I did some testing here and NARROW versus NARROW works OK.
NARROW versus WIDE and WIDE versus WIDE is terrible and slow.

Good luck with testing!
' 73
Peter, PE1DCD

Thanks, Wheez.
That may be the piece I need. I am still muddling my way through Linux but I cut my computer teeth in CP/M on Z80s.

Dave
WB9TEN

Chris, et.al. Lots of lessons learned in preparation for the actual exercise.? I look forward to the after action report of the event.??

Another option you may wish to test is using a VHF repeater to act as the P2P repeater.? I think you have an FM repeater in that location that may be used.? Talk to the repeater owner, as you may need to turn off a few functions such as the repeater timer length.? The nice thing about using the repeater, is you can carry on both voice and digital communications on the same channel.?

VARA FM when set up as a digipeater can really extend the range. In the Ottawa region, we have set up most of the RMS Gateways to operate both as RMS Gateways AND as VARA FM Digipeaters.? Home stations can also be set up as VARA FM FM Digipeaters.? Licensed VARA FM digipeaters can be linked for up to two digipeaters.?

Please write up your complete report so that other can benefit from your hard work.?

As we collectively move from using Winlink and VARA FM from established home stations and move to being deployed and setting up temporary stations, there is a new set of skills to be developed.?

Thanks for sharing you lessons learned in live time.?

Have fun

Stuart VE3SMF

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John. Congratulations on getting VARA Running. I didn’t think of the antivirus firewall.?

Today we tested again. We moved to a less desirable site at the request of the Fire Chief. Unfortunately a large metal building was in the way which impeded signals sufficiently to make file transfer impossible (between north and south). So we tried using west as a digipeater and it worked quite well, giving us about 20kB/minute transfer rate. I thought that was a slow but the Fire Chief was pleased and that's good enough for me.

We will have a Yagi at north as well as south for the final test on Friday. We are also thinking about using Wi-Fi (or derivative like AREDN) for short range communications at any site where we can't otherwise locate near to the client due to obstructions like the metal building. The idea would be to put a router in between the Winink operator and the operator working with the client. We might get a chance to experiment with that a little on Friday.

Thank you for all the suggestions. They've been very helpful. P2P is the most efficient for us at this location, and provides the ability to exceed the 120kb file limit.?

One anecdote from today was that our south operator created a 100kB text file by repeating the same text over and over. It transmitted in a few seconds. We concluded that the data compression for repeated text is quite good.

73,
Chris