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HF JS8call Activity Period

Objectives

  1. To practice using JS8call to relay short messages through other emergency communications groups
  2. To promote the use of the group call ‘@R1EMCOR
  3. To send longer IARU format messages if conditions and confidence allow.

Times

1000 – 1500UTC March 27th

Frequencies

40m — 7.078MHz
20m — 14.078MHz

Remember audio tones <1000Hz MUST only be used for ‘Heartbeat’ transmissions , traffic should be between 1000Hz to 2500Hz.

Procedure

Use ‘Normal’ JS8call speed (15s, 50Hz, 16WPM).
Make sure your JS8call computer is selected to the correct time or that your copy of JS8call matches it’s transmit times to the average of all users heard. If there are >1 – 2 second errors in transmit times then messages will be lost.
Only send heartbeat transmissions every 30 minutes to avoid QRM.
To see who you can reach, send a ‘QUERY MSG’ message to @R1EMCOR, this will make you more obvious to stations listening to that group call and see if they have any stored messages for you, they will auto reply that there is a message waiting with its MSG ID. The end user can then retrieve that message using the QUERY MSG ID xx instruction. Furthermore if a station has a message stored, it will also in the HB ACK have notification that a message is there to be picked up.

Then;
Select a station you want to work and match your transmit frequencies

  • Connect to that station and send a ‘SNR?’ request to get the latest signal report for your station.
  • If the SNR is >20dB then try sending IARU messages to a station by using the ‘MSG [MESSAGE]’ command to store your message in their inbox. The message is not ‘sent’ if you do not receive an ‘ACK’.
  • Use the ‘HEARING?’ command with a station to see who you can relay a message to through that station.
  • Send a message through a relay station.

Messages

There is no control station for this exercise. Messages can be addressed to well known members of the Region 1 Emergency Communications groups.
JS8call was intended to send messages just as a single line of text in any of these ways, but it is easy to force CR-LF to make a message appear correctly on screen by using SHIFT-ENTER. A message should look like;

1 R G0DUB 13 CHESTER GBR 1425 APR 10
STAN OM8ST
KOSICE
BT
MESSAGES SENT OVER CW AND
VOICE MODES ARE ALSO ALL
CAPITALS X 73
BT
GREG G0DUB CHESTER GBR

But, even if you cannot figure out how to use SHIFT-ENTER to get a message formatted like this, the format of the message header line and the BT ( break ) characters show the separations between address, message and signature.

Reporting

After the test it will be interesting to know how many Emergency Communications Groups were able to be worked and how many IARU messages were sent/received.

Expected Problems

It can take ~3 minutes to send an IARU message using JS8call at normal speed. Expect propagation or QRM to break some messages. A message is not ‘delivered’ until you receive an ‘ACK’ from the receiving station.

For help with JS8call a general operation guide can be found here

Print This Page Updated on March 23, 2022

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