WDØDXD

I was tooling around on the Android Marketplace awhile back and came a crossed the Echo Link app.  I installed it , but didn’t try it out, since I didn’t want to mess with faxing a copy of my license in and so forth.

Motorola Droid

Well I was going through my emails yesterday trying to weed my inbox down from over a thousand and found the Echo Link registration email.  I click on the embedded link and went to their site.  I couldn’t use the phone authentication since our private line is unlisted, but I noticed that you could use TQSL to authenticate.  So I downloaded their small utility and ran it.  put my cert password in and in literally seconds I was authenticated.

I haven’t made any contacts yet, but plan to in the next few days.  I still have to get over the idea of Amateur Radio without a radio, but we won’t re-hash that argument here.

I received the Zoom 3G Wireless-N Router model 4501 today.  Took it out of the box, put my Verizon (Alltel) 3G USB Huawei EC168 card in and fired it up.  The only thing I had to do is log into the console and enter the Phone number for it to dial.  I got that from the properties of the software that the Huawei had installed on my laptop.

Connected right up with no problems.  From the basement where my cell phone shows only 2 bars, I was able to get about 500k down and up.  I took it upstairs where I get a full 5 bars and I got about 1mb down and 500k up.  About what I expected.

I used my logmein account and remotely controlled my Hamshack pc for a test.  Not sure I will be able to use DM780 at that speed, too many screen redraws.  But it worked fine with JT65-HF, I even made one contact with it.  I will do further testing and see how it goes.  Next step is to get the Maximum Signal Amplifier hooked up and test it’s performance and the performance of the two together.

A word of caution from an experienced computer guy certified on security.  Make sure you change the default passwords.  Set a non default SSID if you have to broadcast it and use at least WPA2 encryption.

The New York times has an article about the new Commodore 64 that recently has been released.  You can read about it here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/the-new-commodore-64-updated-with-its-old-exterior/ .

I broke my teeth in on the original Commodore 64 back in the 80’s.  In fact you could say it is partially responsible for my adult career.  I purchased one along with 2 floppy drive units, a Okidata 82a printer and some accounting software for a grand total of $2500.00.

I could never get it to work with both floppies and the accounting software stunk, but I spent many wee hours into the morning learning to program the thing in basic.

Commodore 64

Would I buy one now?  I am sentimental about a lot of things.  Old pickup trucks, old ham equipment, but not computers.  I make my living with them, so I want the best most reliable units.  My work workstation is a HP XW4200 work station with dual monitors, that I am going to be replacing soon with a newer HP XW4600 with dual 22″ monitors.  So no even though the guts of this new Commodore 64 is basically a modern PC, I won’t be buying one.  It is however kind of neat to see them try again.  I wish them the best of luck.

I received an email from Glen K1GW with a question about importing his JT65-HF logs into HRD. He followed my instructions in a previous post and upgraded HRD to the latest build and then tried to import the ADIF from JT65-HF. When he did this it said the file had 150 lines but no records.

He let me take a look at the ADIF file and the only thing I could find was that there was a blank line at the beginning of the file. I had him remove the line and then try the import again. Sure enough, now it had 149 lines and 149 records.

We aren’t sure where the blank line came from, but check it if you have trouble importing the ADIF file from JT65-HF.

I was going to investigate and post information about HRD’s new Award Tracking features, but I found that K2DSL already has an excellent post on how to utilize them.

http://www.k2dsl.com/2011/04/05/updating-hrd-for-award-tracking/#more-1503

Well that may be a little exaggerated, but I do enjoy the Black hills and vacationing in the Custer area.

What I am rally talking about is getting a eQSL contact from a South Dakota station.  The last 5 or 6 months I have been 2 states away from my eWAS award until this weekend.  I made a contact with AL7GA on JT65 and finally got Alaska.

So now I just need a South Dakota contact to complete that quest.  So look out South Dakota, I am on the hunt.

The latest version of HRD 5.0 was released today, build 2893.  This included the fix for duplicate entries in the JT65-HF ADIF file.  I downloaded it and installed it with no problems.  Sure enough, it fixed the duplicate entry problem.  That removes one step from my import process.

The new build of HRD also includes LOTW support natively, so I will be using that from now on instead of HRD Utilities.  The eQSL import is now native.  Not sure if I will use it for now since HRD Utilities also downloads the QSL card images.  I like that since I then ftp them up to the website.

To setup the LOTW process in HRD, you just select Logbook->LOTW->upload menu and enter your LOTW login info and point to the TQSL exe file on your computer.

That’s it for now….

I earned my first operating award last week.  I finally got enough contacts for the eQSL eDX 25 award.

It was mostly due to the opening of the 15m band and JT65.  I made a ton of DX contacts on 15m using JT65.

I did find out one thing.  LOTW was rejecting my JT65 contacts when I tried to use HRD utilities by WD5EAF to upload them.  A little investigation revealed that it was an old version of TSQL that I was using, not HRD Utilities.  I just downloaded the latest version of TQSL (1.13 as of this writing) and installed it over my existing version.  No need to reinstall the cert.  Then I was able to go back and re-upload my JT65 contacts without any issues.

Had a chance to get the RV out this weekend and take it over to Fort Kearney State Park.  We love this time of year, because it allows us to if not partake in the annual Sandhill Crane migration, to at least admire it.

From the RV park, you can sit outside and watch the cranes fly over in the morning as they leave the Platte river and go to nearby corn fields to feed.  Then the reverse happens at sundown as they return to the river.

So this year, I thought I would do a little JT65-HF from the RV.  Well remotely from the RV.  Didn’t work out too well.  I only got one bar from out of my Verizon wireless internet card at the campground, so it was too slow to remotely control the HAMSHACK computer.

When I got back, I did a little research and ordered a Zoomtel 3g wireless router and a Maximum Signal Amplifier.  The 3g wireless router will let me hook up several laptops at the same time.  The Maximum Signal Amplifier is touted to boost the 3g signal strength for areas that have poor cell reception.

I will post my results in a few weeks after installation and the next camping excursion.

I have been using JT65-HF for about a week now.  It has been really fun.  I have made about 30 contacts on 15m, 20m and 40m.  Most of them DX.  Ranging from Japan, to Wales to Russia.  It’s alot of fun.

Setting it up was pretty easy and I also installed JT-Alert which helps keep track of previous contacts.  I have it set to scan my HRD log book.  I have been importing the JT65-HF log into the HRD log book and then manually uploading to eQsl.  I did discover that the is one problem with the import process.  Because of an importing problem HRD doesn’t recognize duplicates and will re-import existing records.  On the HRD forum I found that they had worked on the problem and it will be fixed in the next kit.  In the mean time, after I import the ADIF file from JF65-HF I just delete the ADIF file and start over.  I hope in future editions of HRD-HF it will be programed to write directly to the HRD logs.