simple update

Lorraine passed away quietly surrounded by Her Family.


Ham Radio will be the subject after a time.....
Tim

Rotator resolved!

I was hoping the warmer temperatures would help My rotator thaw! Happily this morning when I tried it-- viola! Its back ! So I'm happy bout that. Still not much time for Radio. Several new inches of Snow to take care of. My Mother-in-laws condition about the same. Kids are sick and thats just the way it is. We'll get through this as We've always done- resolve ,determination, and strength from Family.
On a much lighter note-- 160m CW contest this weekend- I've heard several good DX reports.
All partipants--good luck!
73--Tim

Too Busy for radio...

Yes, too busy and the mood is all wrong for Me to tinker in the basement. Minnesota QSO party is approaching February 5th and the local email reflector is bustling with contest emails. On the home front-- My wonderful dedicated Wife is spending time with Her Mother who is slipping away to Heaven. This means a little more duty on the homefront for Me-- the easier job by far.
Its always sad to see suffering -both sides of it!
God bless all
73---Tim

Echolink and iPhone

I tried using Echolink on an iTouch but at the time We used a Satellite internet company and a local router. I could never even get the connect test to pass and always assumed either My router or Satellite delay were causing issues. Guess I'll never know because We have had DSL since before Christmas and I just recently upgraded My old phone to a iPhone. The Echolink App works great and tonight I checked into a local Weathernet thru Iphone and Echolink . The local repeater I access seemed to be down and other link repeaters are only accessible when My 2m beam is working. The rotator is froze and so My directional antennas are not!!
I was totally amazed at the ease of connecting tonight to the local echolink repeater access. Did the connect test and tested My audio and when the net started-bingo!! I heard net control and saw the users on echolink!
Try Echolink- sign in on the Internet, You'll receive an answer back to your email and the fun begins.Not a huge repeater user but this is neat!
73---Tim

Snow and future Antenna plans

I like Winter but the snow depths and frequency of new snow is starting to wear on Me. Spent all day Saturday with snow removeal, roofs,sidewalks, driveway and dog trails! The snowbanks are getting huge! Will it ever end? More snow predicted for tonight. Just in time for back to work and fighting snow removeal in the dark!
The Ham radio end of all this mainly the lack of time to play on the radio.I did listen for a short time to 160m before bed and the band was fairly active with the North American QSO party contest. Heard most of the US from East to West coast, would have been fun to participate but by this time only about an hour and a half was left and I was just too tired! My 160m inverted "L" was definately hearing very well!
Earlier this week I was attending a retirement party and happened to meet several Hams there. Discussion turned towards antennas and the bottom line is this-- I have decided to remove both VHF antennas on My tower and put the ATB34 tri-bander up there instead. I will probably also put a new smaller 2m beam up but refurbish the old 6m beam and put that back on the pole building mini-tower. I am on HF lots more now than VHF and the tri-bander would really help My contesting efforts. Early this Spring I need to assemble and test the ATB-34 and get it ready to put up. The 2m beam i either need to buy or refurbish an old one-- we'll see what the old one looks like. I truthfully don't remember its condition. Love the options!
73-- Tim

ARRL RTTY RU 2011

Well considering some of the pre-contest issues I had with equipment, this contest turned out to be another fun experience. I never tried to use My main set-up or My back-up but used the back-up to the back-up!! Confused? Don't be! I'm lucky to still have several radios and I do think eventually I will have problems ironed out.


The virus on My back-up PC has been eliminated, the FT-950 is mysteriously working on the digital modes again--go figure! The radio of the hour (or contest) the Yaesu FT-857 worked well even with its limitations. The most glaring limit is only having the factory filters (2.4 khz) and not the CW filters in. The front end tends to overload with close adjacent ,strong signals and this did interfere when trying to receive info during QSO's. I firmly believe I could have doubled or tripled QSO count but for this shortcoming!


I was able to start the contest at the beginning,but Dog,chickens and family also need attention so it was on and off for most of Saturday. Sunday was able to get back on the air towards the end and then I scrambled trying for multipliers mostly. I noticed a lack of multipliers, espcially DX. I had several memorable contacts, one being 4U1WB from Washington DC and Don- AA5AU who I contacted on several bands. Don wrote an excellant tutorial on RTTY setup I have referred to many times. Also had the usual suspects from South America and a new one for Me-- J39BS from Grenada. Also some Europe but not as much as last year.


I also seen "printed" some fellow MWA members who I missed-unfortunately and a fellow blogger I follow- Dave-K2DSL. Very fun contest- -really enjoy RTTY, hope to resolve radio and interface issues for the next one.Very thankful I was able to participate. Thanks for all the Q'S


My meager but hard earned results:


Band- QSOs-- Sec- Cty
3.5 -9- 3- 0

7- 40 -8 -0

14- 59 -15 -4

21 -54 -12 -5

28 -1 -1 -0

total: 163- 39- 9

score: 7,824




73---Tim

RTTY Fiasco!

Well just when i thought My RTTY setup and backup were in good shape-- tried the pre test on Thursday and Friday and very inconclusive. OK- total failure although I really don't want to admit that. I had an occasional broken reply with My callsign but could never really complete a QSO, so have finally fallen back to the FT-857 which I think is working but, "moni" on this radio doesn't appear to work! So I can't hear My "diddles" ! The FT-950 seems to work for a bit then I lose Rx audio and I can't figure out what is happening to it. My Kenwood TS-850 is hooked to a PC with a bad soundcard or driver and unfortunately in trying to reload a different driver- I now have a virus!!
Contest starts in an hour-- I hope I can cobble something together!
73 for now----Tim

The good and bad with SKYPE

I became a Skype member several Years ago when I aquired an itouch. I used it for awhile to chat with My family thru Instant messaging when out of town. Recently with PC upgrades, several laptops now have built in webcams,so leave it to My Girls to try video calling. It works really well and I'm impressed but Skype lets new accounts start with privacy wide open and one of My Daughters had an"ishy" person try to contact them.Scary!! Needless to say the account is now locked down very tight. Word to the wise- new accounts need privacy invoked right away! That was several several weeks ago and all seems to be OK now. I've recently bought a Logitech C150 webcam for My hamshack PC. I'm waiting to install it till after ARRL RTTY Ru this weekend- don't want any conflicts to interfere with the contest! I'll let you know how the Webcam install goes and the contest results. Hope to log a QSO with many out there! :) 73----Tim

More RTTY

Monday at work wasn't too bad and I still felt energetic after Supper so here I am in the shack working on My RTTY setup. I've decided to concentrate on the Yaesu RTTY setup and wait with the Kenwood because of the sound card issues. The PC I'm using with the Yaesu setup has a RS232 com board I added and it works Ok but seems to lose the last settings after power off. This means I need to always check Playback control properties or start a program like "Digipan" and set waterfall drive properties. It always wants to use "mic" instead of "line in". Beats Me why!
For most contests I use N1MM logger and for the RTTY portion, N1MM works well with MMTTY. In the config of N1MM, I just needed to direct the logger to bring up the RTTY engine from MMTTY. Sounds complicated and quite frankly I needed help the first time to get it working. Some of the help files in the logger should be a good starting point. Since this is a different PC since the last RTTY contest I needed to set up all new parameters. Changing from AFSK to FSK only required a change in the TX field.
The major change ended up being the macros-- all wrong! I spent quite awhile retyping them and saving to file. I also tested them when I was done into a dummy load- its diddleing and i also caught several typos. I'm getting close to being ready for Saturday! The club I'm a member of will probably have a pre-test to check out Our set-ups! Hope i find the time to participate!
73--Tim

RTTY Interfaces..continued

I finished assembling both homemade interfaces- the original interface needed the FSK keying circuit added and the new interface needed final assembly. For the FSK keying and in fact all PTT keying circuits I use Opto-isolators. The old interface had no room on the original circuit board so I added a very small universal board with the opto IC,resistor and LED indicator. I did need to add addtional wiring thru My RS232 switchbox and another wire pair to the radio Din connector.
The new box is strictly for the Kenwood TS-850 and I just needed to finish mounting parts and adding all the wiring interconnects. This interface turned out OK, although I would like to have added level control for the transmit to the radio and PTT inhibit ( simple switch). Ran out of parts and wanted to finish-maybe a future addition.
The older modified interface is for both Yaesu radios and after hooking it back up was disappointed to not see hardly any activity on "Digipan"-although the radio was hopping with PSK signals!
This PC has had several upgrades and upon remembering this I went back to square one to set it up. I needed to go thru the Config menu to setup waterfall,transmit and com ports.The setting for the waterfall Soundcard settings was using the mic input instead of line in. Now I had signals and was ready to try RTTY . I use MMTTY and a good tutorial to set up this program is online at AA5AU's website. I highly recommend it! Since the settings vary alot depending on radio and interface, I won't go into detail except to note for FSK keying, make sure follow the FSK setup and not the AFSK!! Now I was decoding the "diddles" and could hear the shifting tones on transmit, something I could not hear before setting up MMTTY for FSK keying.
Next I wanted to try the interface for the Kenwood radio and everything appeared OK except all I've been able to decode thru Digipan is garbage characters. Not trusting My interface, I hooked it to a laptop and right away had good characters. I've had issues with bad soundcards and drivers so this will be My next step.....but now the weekend is almost over so time to focus on the work week ahead. Remember-next weekend is ARRL RTTY RU!!!
73---Tim