Kenwood TS-590S update

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Latest news on the ordered Kenwood TS-590S: it will arrive next week!

Ohw mama! :-) I traded in my TS-850S and got a good deal from the Kenwood dealer. Already completely rebuild the shack. The 590 has 2 antenna connections I’m able to connect both my Cobwebb for 10, 12, 15, 17 and 20 meter and my horizontal loop for 40, 80 and 160 meter! So I don’t have to switch between antenna’s no more. In the future I could also use a extra (active) receiving antenna on the receive input of the 590.
Also great: no more need for the SignaLink USB. If I’m understand the manual correctly I can attach the 590 via USB to my computer and both CAT and sound are connected! That is awesome!
So the shackcomputer is already installed with both driver and Kenwood software.
I guess I’m all ready the welcome my new rig :-)

Last week I did get the opportunity to listen to the new rig over at Robs, PA3EKE. Great guy (he did not hesitate inviting me over when he heard I wanted to listen to the new radio before buy one), took the time to show me around, absolutely lovely! He is known for his extremely critical opinion on radio’s. Even he was quite excited about the performance of the 590.
And I’m even more impressed by the real life performance of the 590! It’s really a great radio.

But for now I hope the new one will arrive next week before thursday. Then I’ll leave for another week in the France Alpes. Of course it would be great if I could run it a few hours over there :-) More news and pictures will follow!

Ham Radio Deluxe update

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According to the Ham Radio Deluxe website there is a new version of Ham Radio Deluxe 5: 2777.
Release notes say:
After a lot of hard work with incredible support from Terry G4POP and Chuck K7PT this beta is now available.
Logbook

* Country file upgraded with support for Unique Calls
* ALE window now correctly supports entries with a / in the callsign
* Award tracking rewritten and tested almost to extinction
* ALE custom field titles now user-definable

Ham Radio Deluxe

* Rigblaster support where RTS is toggled instead of sending a CAT command. See Options, COM Port TX.
* Initial support for TS-590S and FTDX-5000

Needless to say I’m cheering of joy because I love to see the award tracker updated. And of course since me catching the TS-590S-virus the initial support for the TS-590S makes me smile! Installing right now, maybe I can report on the changes later.

Kenwood TS-590S dreams

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Lately I get more and more interested in the new Kenwood TS-590S. When I read it’s brochure and manual, when I look at the clips of first runs on air I get the impression this must be my new transceiver!
Last friday I decided I have to consolidate the shack and sell most of it before buy something new. Put on for sale: Kenwood TS-450, Kenwood TS-50 + AT-50, PS-52 power supply, SP-31 speaker, lots of filters, BHI-DSP speaker, Signalink USB, Condor 16 kit, a few SWR/Power meters and a Kenwood AT-130 antenna tuner. It became an unbelievable saturday with lots of e-mails, calls and people coming over to see the goods. Already sold: the TS-450 and the TS-50 +AT-50. PS-52 and SP-31 expected to be sold today. Signalink and 1 SWR/Powermeter already flew out the door.

I’m nearly half way to the new Kenwood. Still one thing I need to do: listen to the thing with my own ears and check if I like the sound of it! Only thing I’m in doubt of: shall I swap my good old TS-850S for the TS-590S or should I keep it as a backup transceiver? Hmmmm, tough one.

Broken antenna-wire due to wind

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Last night a nice storm is raging over the Lowlands. Wind speeds of 9 and sometimes even 10 Beaufort have destroyed my wire loop for 40 and 80m. Okay, it wasn’t very thick wire (0,38mm) but it looked like it could handle a breeze.
Luckily the Cobwebb holds on greatly! Only thing that moves are the wires on it, but I’m surprised the construction hold so well.
Waiting for calm wetter now to figure out a better structure for the wire…

CQ WW SSB 2010

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Last weekend I participated in the CQ WW SSB 2010 contest at our clubstation. First timer for a 48 hour contest. While preparing I decided not to work the full 48 hours. Earlier this year I participated in the PACC-contest for 24 hours and I found that exhausting enough. So I did want to start on saterday morning around 5:00 UTC until 22:00 UTC and return on sunday around 6:00 UTC untill 16:00 UTC. That left sunday evening for breaking up the gear. Everything worked as planned, kind of… We were active from the clubstation with two hams. We had build up 2 seats and there where 4 antenna’s operationable. A 10-15-20 beam, a 80m dipole, a 40m dipole (which hung too low) and a 20m dipole (which hung waaay to low). We swapped seats every once in a while to use the beam for 15m and 20m. 15m and 20m where the bands this weekend. I was able to work a few really far calls and added 19 new DXCC-entities to my log. In total I worked 295 QSO’s. Not too much, but I blame it to the bad antenna conditions (at least for multiple operators).

We really need to get up more monoband dipoles and get them up high! Problem is there are enough high trees around our clubstation but almost none possibilities to climb them. I think we need to figure out how to get the antennas up. For the PACC next year we want to try a multi-multi-station for the first time. So that is gonna need some serious preparations!

WordPress Plugin HRD Logbook Online

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Some regular visitors of this blog know I’m working on a WordPress Plugin to show your HRD Logbook online. Finally version 1.0 is out now. A brand new page on this blog is dedicated to the plugin. It is a typical 1.0-version so no bells and whistles yet. Just put the php-file in your plugin dir and enable it on your pluginpage.

On the wish list:

- adding visitors interaction with selecting periods, search for call etc.
- adding admin-panel to alter layout and columns;
- adding a log-entry on admin-panel for web entry of qso’s;
- adding the plugin to the central WP-plugin directory.

If you have feature requests, please post them as a comment or mail me from the contactpage. I promise I’ll take a look at it and see if I be able to integrate it in the code.

Kenwood MC-60 microphone RFI

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It used to sit in the corner of my desk, my Kenwood MC-60 microphone. Although it has a suburb audio it also has so much RFI which makes it useless. On my to-do-list: search the internet to fix this problem so I can use this nice mike.
Finally I found the easiest fix there is for the RFI-problem with the Kenwood MC-60! Open up the bottom plate and just solder a 10NF capacitor between the blue wire and on the connector which connects to the rig (see picture). And done you are! No more RFI. If only I had knew this issue was so easy to fix, I could have start use the MC-60 a long time ago!

Holiday to Dordogne France

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Hello everyone! It was a while since I post something here. Thats because we enjoyed a little holiday in the south of France. Not the Alpes this time but we went to the Dordogne. Very nice trip! We rented a big house with swimming pool (although it was way to cold to swim in it) and a nice garden in a place called La Lardin-Saint-Lazare (JN

When we arrived I immediately setup the ‘travelkit’ containing a fishing rod, about 6 meters high, a few wires for a 20m inverted V dipole, some coax cable and ofcourse my good old Kenwood TS-50 and AT-50. Very nice singals from all over Europe! Noise level below S0 what is so rare these days. Even made qso with Cuba and Florida!

HRD on a Mac

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Last evening I was thinking about buying a copy of VMware Fusion. I’ve used VMware Fusion trial to create a vm for hacking the bootROM of a Sun Cobalt RaQ550 three weeks ago. When I was using VMware Fusion I noticed it had seen my Boot Camp partition on my Mac with Windows XP for ham software that only runs on Windows. I enjoyed the fact that I was able to boot my Boot Camp partition in a virtual machine. But I still had to switch to my vm to use Ham Radio Deluxe.
Last week my VMware Fusion was running out of trial and I got the option to buy the software. But 80 euro’s was a little overpriced for me. So I waited. And the waiting did pay off, because yesterday I got the offer to buy the soft for 49 euro’s!
But the best has yet to come: when I entered the bought serial, I got also a new option: Unity. When I started the Boot Camp vm, I start HRD and click on Unity. Now HRD appears in my Mac desktop as a normal application! Absolutely awesome! This is what I wanted! Thank you guys of VMware, you make great software!

Sun Cobalt RaQ550

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We’re in need of a good and stable database server at the club station PI4RCG to facilitate central logging. In two weeks we’ve a balloonfoxhunting thing coming up and there must be 3 operators able to log their QSO’s (80m, 2m and 70cm). Last weekend I ran into a Sun Cobalt RaQ550 server. A nifty little 19-inch server with a Pentium III, 1.26GHz, 2x80GB harddisks in RAID1, 512MB memory onboard. No video/sound so you need to switch on a serial line to be able to see the terminal. You can connect to the terminal with for instance puTTY with speed 115200 and 8N1. The original OS was not reachable because the owner forgot the passwords. Not a big problem because I want to run Debian Linux on it anyway. Since Google is your friend I went surfing around to find how to install Debian Lenny on a Sun Cobalt Raq550. There are some articles but most of it is out dated.
If you’re interested, please read on how I made it work.
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