WDØDXD

Last night I got to thinking that the ability to remotely control my rig would be nice.  I have looked at this in the past, but setting up skype and hrd, etc. seemed like more than I wanted to mess with at the time.

In our Managed Service Business we use a version of Logmein remote to do about 90% of our work.  So last night I signed up for their free account and installed it on one of my Ham pc’s.  I have been running HRD and just installed JT65-HF on it the previous day.

It worked great.  I went up to our bedroom and logged in with my laptop and ran JT65 for about 2 hours last night.  I made 4-5 contacts that way on 20m.

The free version of logmein will work great on digital modes.  It won’t send sounds from the remote computer, so if you want to run voice, you will have to pony up for the paid version.  For more info go to http://www.logmein.com

This past weekend I made several short PSK contacts with Amateur’s in Japan.  JM1VWQ, JM7OLW and JH7VHZ.  All three of them were very gracious and I appreciated their taking the time to reply to my call.  They all thanked their contacts for their thoughts and prayers.  I know I have found a new level of respect for our fellow Ham’s in Japan, I can’t imagine what they are going through.  It makes me think twice about complaining about the trivial problems I encounter every day.

I have always wondered about something.  After being the only country to have an atomic bomb used in war on their soil, how were they able to clean up the radioactivity.  Seeing what they are going through now, I finally decided to do a little research on the internet to find out this weekend.  Pretty interesting.  If anyone out there has any first hand info, I would be interested in hearing about it.

In the meantime, I and my family’s thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Japan.  Here’s hoping that we have many fine QSO’s in the future.

Tried a new mode today.  I downloaded JT65-HF and installed it.  After getting it set right to work with my Signal Link USB sound card, I was off and running.  I have it controlling my ICOM-746Pro using HRD.  Found that I could export the logs and import them into HRD Logbook, so far it seems to work seamlessly.

ARAN finally moved our IRLP Node from a simplex transceiver over to our 443.200 uhf repeater.  We are using a CAT400 controller.  For anyone who is trying to make a cable for this, here is the pin out:

CAT RX Audio Port#X pin 5 -> Sound Card Line Audio Out
CAT TX Audio Port#X pin 4-> Sound Card Line Audio In and IRLP Card pin 8

CAT Port#X pin 9 -> 10k resistor -> Port#X pin3
CAT Port#X pin 9 -> 10k resistor -> Port#X pin1

CAT Port#X PTT pin3 -> IRLP Card pin 7 COR In Control
CAT Port#X CORT pin1 -> IRLP CARD pin 2 PTT OUT Control
Cat Port#X Ground pin 8 -> IRLP Card pin 6 Ground

Tip and middle ring on the sound card jacks got tied together and I tied the grounds together (bottom ring) and connected them to Cat Port#X Ground pin 8.

Substitute your CAT port number on the controller for “X”.

Then set COR LOW on the CAT Port (dip switch 4 on in our case since we are using port 3) and make sure COR is low on the IRLP controller board.

Then  you good to go.  I just need to figure out how to disable port 3 on the CAT if port 2 is active and vice-versa.  I will explain the reasons why later.

Things have been kind of crazy around here and I have neglected the blog.  I am kind of getting things turned around, so I plan on posting more often.

I have 3 projects that I am or have completed lately, so I will post more on them.  The first is moving the local IRLP node to a repeater.  The second is finishing the Sienna and lastly I have started a Genesis G59 SDR project.

More on those in the coming days.

Like all Amateurs, I ran into a problem with RFI in the shack.  I have a 100′ Windom setup that is feed with dual RG6 coax that goes into a MFJ-962D antenna tunner.

For the most part the setup works pretty good.  I have never been able to tune 15m or 160m, but I could the rest of the bands.  I always got a little RFI on 40m, but not so much that I couldn’t work it.

Well something changed over the winter.  I don’t know if it has anything to do with the antenna, or the ham shack.  I just got done rack mounting my main rigs and I suppose that may have changed something.  When I ran psk on 40m and 80m, I would get RFI and the rig would pulsate output so bad it was unusable.

So this weekend, I tried a trick that Woody KCØWA told me about.  I took a 1000pf ceramic capacitor and soldered it from the shielding to the center conductor of an old piece of RG-8 that Gary NØSJM gave me on BOTH ends.  Then I connected one end to the ground in the shack and the other end to the ground rod just outside the shack.

It worked for the most part.  The plusing is gone and I can work 80m again.  On 40m, the pulsing is gone, but I still can’t eliminate the ALC when I try to run PSK.

So I am going to try one other thing over the memorial day weekend.  Then maybe I can be conpetative when the next contest rolls around.

Just got done participating in my first contest.  At least the first one that I made a real effort to participate in.  Not sure how well I did, but I did try.

I learned a few things along the way that I will share with you for better or worse the next few days.

First, logging.  From the 070 page I followed the link and downloaded GenLog from W3KM at http://www.qsl.net/w3km/gen_log.htm.  Pretty neat program.  It took me about 10 minutes to figure it out and get started.  I have to say that I am impressed at how he updates it for all of the contests.  I logged the contest and then uploaded the ADIF file to the KJ4IZW  Scoring Tool http://dwestbrook.net/projects/ham/scorer/ to create the file that I emailed in.  Then I imported the ADIF file to hrd and eqsl.  Worked well.

I learned a couple of things about my antenna setup also.  I will share with you what I did to fix the problems as I go along this week.