ND2E's Blog

Well, I managed to finally complete my Digital Worked All States award. With the help of a couple of hams in Rhode Island I was able to use JT-65 to complete my quest for Digital WAS. Next, I see that I am a couple of states short for the 20Meter PSK31 WAS so that is where I will aim.

Thanks to WB4SON and KE1AF for their help with RI JT and PSK.

For months now I have been stymied in completing my Digital Modes Worked All States award. There are five states missing and I just am not hearing many PSK stations from the missing states. I have been studying CW and completed the KE1L WKUSB keyer so I can do conventional CW rather than using DM780′s MCW mode. The addition of CW allows yet another digital mode for me to search for the missing five states. Unfortunately DM780 requires a really clean signal to decode the Morse code and I am not proficient at Morse (yet.)

I read that JT65 was an extremely useful weak signal mode. I installed JT5-HF software and set it up to work with Ham Radio Delux. Although it was a simple install there was a lot of interesting reading material before I felt comfortable going on the air.

Once I had JT65-HF set to what I thought was the correct settings I needed to test the PTT interface and the TX level. Luckily the Elecraft K3 has a test mode that allows you to check PTT and transmit levels without actually radiating. I could have done the same thing by reducing the power level and running the transmitter output to a dummy load. Either way will work but it was quick to just go to test mode.

I did a quick Google search for operation information and found an Italian site that had some really good information. The info was very helpful as was the setup instructions included with JT65-HF.

The good news is that on 5 watts you can message the world. The bad is it is slower than watching grass grow. I tried working on 10 meters (28.076 MHz). There were literally dozens of signals during the day and early evening. Japan was present but I had no luck in making a QSO. I did several but it is slow roughly five minutes per QSO. This is definitely not a mode you want to use during primetime on Field day … but I bet it might be worthwhile overnight when there are few new stations to log.

Hopefully I will be able to pick up the missing states using this mode…I did see several stations on PSKReporter running JT65-HF in several of the missing states.

JT65-HF can send signal reports to both PSKReporter and to the Reverse Beaconwebsite.