This was a much lighter year for blog posts, things have become traditional, went to the Florida Contest Group Contest dinner in Orlando for Hamcation, I won a HT Heil headset. I got 1st place in WCF for the RTTY Roundup somehow, I’ve done much better other years and not gotten first. I did complete a goal from last year of adding a second antenna, the Loop on Ground antenna, it’s not great and don’t use it much. I skipped Dayton this year as one of my friends gave me a ticket to a Spartan Race at Tampa Stadium that weekend, which started me on a new hobby, CrossFit. In October I…
2021 Ham Radio year in review
Overall a pretty slow year for ham radio for me. There weren’t many DXpeditions, I enjoy chasing them. I did complete my DXCC for CW so now I have all 3. I also completed the Worked All States Triple Play. I made 10 or more contacts in 132 Wednesday CWT mini contests, which will earn me a Gold participation medal, which was 1672 contacts, I have to work most of the time on Wednesday’s so I usually just get around 10 or so can get back to work. Here’s my Logbook of the World totals: 9,324 Confirmed QSOs 176 DXCC mixed 103 DXCC CW (+6) 113 DXCC Phone (+1) 147…
DMR on the cheap
I never had much interest in DMR but my friend sent me an Amazon link for a DMR radio for $20 so I couldn’t resist. It’s $40 now though, not sure it’s worth that much. The brand is “Cotre”, it’s chinese, there’s no manual and it doesn’t have a display. jhart99 has done a good job of documenting programming the radio on his website https://jhart99.com/co01d-programming/ You can program it with a Baofeng cable, as long as it doesn’t use the Prolific USB-to-Serial chipset(I had one cable with this chipset but luckily found another that worked with the CH340 chip) I couldn’t hit the local DMR repeater from my house so…
New rig, Flex Radio 6600
When I get into hobbies I tend to go all in right away. With ham radio I found that strategy to be a little financially irresponsible. The Icom IC-7300 had just come out when I started and spending over grand on just one piece for the new hobby didn’t sit well with me so I found a deal on the Icom IC-7410 used (from a military officer, so I felt comfortable buying it over the internet). I’ve mastered the 7410 and wanted more. I’ve been radio shopping for a few months and finally pulled the trigger on the Flex Radio 6600. This radio is basically a server, you connect the…
Images from ISS
The ISS is sending out an SSTV signal again and I just picked up a brand new unopened Arrow Antenna off QRZ for $100 so I tried it out. There were two passes today but both around 20 degrees so I didn’t get a great signal but I was still able to sort of make out the images. They’re doing more later in the week so I’ll try again or maybe go to the beach or a parking lot to get better ones.
5,000th Contact!
During the IARU HF Championship I made my 5,000th contact, it was a CW contact with IB9A in Silicy. I’m going to send him a card.
My First Radiogram from@SWRadiogram
I’ve been following @SWRadiogram on twitter and was around to listen into on 7.780MHz this afternoon. Here’s what I decoded: Before RSID: <<2019-02-08T20:31Z MFSK-32 @ 2870000+1500>> Q= oex¬/sib eÏinzeÜo ee in9ti¾hm et Welcome to program 86 of Shortwave Radiogram. I’m Kim Andrew Elliott in Arlington, Virginia USA. Here is the lineup for today’s program, in modes as noted: 1:40 MFSK32: Program preview (now) 2:48 Manual vs. automatic transmissions in Switzerland 7:04 Olivia 64-2000: SWL Fest and ISS SSTV 9:39 MFSK64: Mars cubesats have gone silent* 13:53 Images of the week* 28:24 MFSK32: Closing announcements Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net And visit http://swradiogram.net Twitter: @SWRadiogram t”nd n Z…
HF Weather Fax
I saw a post on reddit about WEFAX so I looked into it. National Weather Service broadcasts weather related WEFAX images and text in various different HF frequencies from different stations around the world, pretty much constantly. Using fldigi, I was able to decode the signal from Boston and New Orleans and get a few different images. You need to tune about 1.5kHz below the list frequency using USB. Fldigi has some adjustments on the bottom for adjusting the angle and position of the image. It’s mostly related to maritime weather. Over a year in the hobby and I keep discovering cool new things to do in radio. Most of…
13 Colonies Special Event
There’s a 13 Colonies radio special event celebrating the 4th of July. I’ve enjoyed it so far, there’s 13 stations, one in each state with short K2x calls and a couple special event stations. They’re on all different modes and they all have pileups going, some really deep(Rhode Island). I’ve got 9 so far. http://13colonies.net/
New callsign, AA0O!
I’ve been applying for shorter, easier to say call-signs. I feel like I’m talking forever saying “Kilo X-Ray 4 Hotel Lima” and I received AA0O, Alpha Alpha Zero Ocean rolls off the tongue better. I’ll be updating the domain name at some point but for now its staying at kx4hl.com