With the PACC 2010 coming up, I’m getting all jumpy to get my “ultimate contest setup” complete. My plans are to participate in the PACC this year from our club location NERA. Last year I’ve take a look and made a few QSO’s from that location and it is fantastic to operate from there. Far from the inhabited world there is zero QRM. Very nice when you sometimes have to pick up weak signals.
The idea now is to setup my Kenwood TS-850SAT at this location. The TS-850 has a build in voice keyer, but this keyer is not able to repeat the message with an adjustable delay. So I’ll use my own homebrew voice keyer. I already tested with success my headset. It works fine, so now I only have to find a decent foot pedal to switch between receiving and transmitting. Of course I can buy a foot pedal in an instrument shop or something like that. But that is expensive and less fun. So I searching for a solution for that.
Then I’ve hands free for logging. I think I bring my MSI netbook with me for logging. Only thing is I have to find a good contestlogging program. My main rig controller is Ham Radio Deluxe, but that is not quite feasible for contest logging. N1MM makes Windows crashing when it interacts thru the Keyspan USA-19H USB-RS232-adapter to my rig. So that doesn’t seem a solution. I already take a look at many logging programs, but they are all so old and ugly and don’t do rig control (which I want for logging the complete QSO). So I didn’t figure out that one yet.
If you have any good suggestions, please send me a message!

Last weekend I offered a friend of mine, Fred PA3YH, some help with his shack setup. He owns a Icom IC-756PRO-3 radio. Since a few months he bought a Signalink USB and works all different digital modes with it. Actually this combination works really well! He is doing great in QSO’s! The only thing missing was a good logbook. He did connect the rig via the Signalink to his laptop, but didn’t yet use rig control (Cat-V).

So these two things I want to help him with. First, rig control. Fred did already bought a cable for rig control. It is a USB – ACC-connector cable. After installing the driver for the cable, the laptop did see an extra com-port. Now download and fire up the latest copy of Ham Radio Deluxe. No problems so far. Imported his logbook from LogPA (his current log program). Also no problems. What surprised me was the super duper integration of HRD with the radio. I myself do not yet have a Signalink, but men what cool features do you have then! You are able to record sound of the rig, almost all options are controllable from the program.
Also figure out for him how to let Windows use the internal sound card and let the HAM-programs use the Signalink. I wasn’t able to fully test his new setup because he pushed me out of the way, that enthusiastic he was!
The cool thing about this new setup for Fred is that he makes enough time to investigate all the options and tricks. Hopefully I can benefit too from his investigation

Some time ago I’ve bought the TCXO-SO-2 option (Temperature Compensated X-tal Oscillator) from Joerg, DL6IB. Although I was very pleased to have the option, I postponed the installing because I wanted to figure out a way to measure the stability improvement before and after installing. Since I don’t own (yet) a frequency counter, I didn’t know a way to check.
A few days ago Joerg again send me a message asking me if I already installed the option in my Kenwood TS-850. I was a little ashamed to reply I didn’t. Promised him and myself to do this as quickly as possible. At this new years day I’m a little tired anyway, didn’t feel like anymore work around the house. So I sat down and opened my TS-850. Before I started with installing, I googled around to find a story of installing this option. Didn’t find anything. Okay, it is a pretty simple install but it gives me confidences to read about it. Seems I have to post the first story about installing this option… Read the rest of this entry »

To all readers of this website: all the best for 2010 for you and your family. I hope I’ll be able to keep you interested with new articles on this blog in the next year and years to come. Of course I hope to hear you on the airwaves someday

A few weeks ago I decided to join DARES (Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Services). I always liked the idea of doing something very useful with our hobby. Last 14th of november was my first meeting with the crew. After driving around for a while to find the address I met the guys from DARES.

I must say, I’m impressed how well they are organized! All the new member did get a pager so the board can reach us anytime. Also we’ve got two portables (2m and 70cm) which we can use for peer communication when we are practicing or in case of a real emergency.

This meeting was about getting to know each other and getting the right mindset. I’m looking forward to the next exercise!

A while ago (somewere end 2008) I started practicing morsecode. Every day I practiced for about half an hour and ones a week I joined my fellow HAM’s on the air and practice with a teacher. For many weeks that kind of worked. But then the teacher had a major lightning strike in his antenna and many of his stuff was blown to pieces. From then on I told myself I would practice every night except the weekends.
Of course that wasn’t the case. In the meantime I picked up a very nice morse training program pointed out by G4ILO.
Some nights I was able to put myself behind the computer for a minute or 10/15 and train a little. But it was not enough to catch the drift. Last weekend I’ve got a new idea for a good training moment!
Every day I have to travel 1,5 hours to work and back. Because I have to travel in rush hours and in the busiest area in the Netherlands, I travel by train. That gives me 3 hours per day to kill some time. Mostly I spend it reading, listening podcastst or just sleeping. But it would be the perfect moment to practice morse code!
So I called a friend who owns a unused netbook and asked him if I could use it for a few months. No problem, he answered. I picked it up last night and this morning I’ve practice morse code for about 45 minutes! Maybe this evening when I travel home, more training minutes will be added. I hope this will lead to a much faster progress.

After reading about WSPR 2.0 getting out, it did grab my attention. I still like the whole WSPR idea so I looked around in the shack to give it a try. The idea was to set-up my blown-final FT-817 and connect it to my Antron 99 vertical for 10m. It wouldn’t be possible to tx with the Yaesu, but at least the WSPRnet would have another listen station on 10m. I already picked up a nice signal from Asia one time, but on average it is really quiet on 10m.

I think I leave the setup running for a few weeks. See what happen when the propagation will be better on 10.

My mind is spinning off, wouldn’t it be nice to have more ‘beacon’-like WSPR kit? Something very small, no interface required, just a little box with an antenna and UTP connection. Dedicated to WSPR 24/7 and just sitting in the corner of the shack. Hmmm, interesting idea. Let me know if someones already come up with this idea!

Two weeks ago I switched on the transceiver on saturday and listen around on the bands. I couldn’t believe my ears! There where incredible conditions. 40, 20 15 and 10 where completely open! It wasn’t hard to hear there was a big contest going on. I wasn’t into the contesting lately so I had to pull out the contest calender to check which one was on. It turn out to be the CQ WW SSB contest. After I read the contest rules I started to make some contacts. I was even able to make a qso with South Africa on 10 meters! Finally I’ve got a change to test out my Antron 99 which I installed for 10 meters. It worked very nicely!
At the end of the weekend I’ve made 77 contacts in the contest. Not extremely much, but okay for me. Especially if you bare in mind that I was totally unprepared.
If these conditions are a sign of what is possible in a high sunspot cyclus, I’m gonna have a very nice 6 years to come!

I seem to be unable to convert my HRD-ADIF-log into the needed Cabrillo-format for the contestmanager. I send him the file anyway. A few days later I received an email that my log was processed! Now that’s what I call service… Thanks Bob, K3EST.

As I am a Mac user for many years now, The Unofficial Apple Website is one of my favorite blogs to read almost every day. The other day I read in this blog about 5 Mac applications for ham radio fans. Cool! Two hobbies in one article…

Hi all! We’re back in town from two weeks of holiday! It was very nice. We did a lot of hiking, site seeing, enjoying meals etc. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to set up my portable radio kit in Italy at all. The chalets where so tight packet together, it was impossible to throw a wire over something. And if I was able to do that, I would have interfered with at least 10 satellite receivers. So I kept the goodies in the trunk for the first week of the holiday.
In France of course I had more possibilities to setup a nice configuration. I did bring a 1:6 balun with me to experiment with. Two wires of 13,8m and 27,7m where attached to it and hung up between two tree’s. It worked kind of nice but of course only on the lower bands (40 and 80). And there was not much of interesting activity on those bands that week. Then I’ve tried to work my open dipole for 20m and my long wire (16m) that are already installed at the house. But not much luck either. Lots of static (at least I think, or even there are appearing noise generators) and very little signals. All in all I’ve made 4 QSO’s. Not enough to even bring the stuff with me. I consider to buy a dedicated (old) radio for that location to leave. Then I don’t have to bring the heavy stuff with me all the time and I’m able to use a good radio with all filters and stuff even on holidays.

So when someone has good suggestions for a good (second hand) transceiver with (kind of) modern filter methods but isn’t too expensive (I’ll only use it for maybe one week a year), leave me a comment or a message!