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.

I finished the new computers and was facing the confusion of having 2 mice, 2 keyboards and 2 displays. The conventional solution to this kind of problem is to add a KVM switch and use one keyboard. KVMs are relatively inexpensive if you only need 2 computer ports. But if you are going to go beyond 2 ports you need the expensive variety of KVMs.

Either way it is still an expense and I had just built 2 new computers and purchased a new 24 inch display for one of the computers. I needed a cheap inexpensive means of switching the keyboard and mouse between computers.

I found a piece of software, Synergy+, that allows the sharing without the need for hardware.

I installed it last night and find it is a convenient. Even-though it is still beta, I haven’t noticed any bugs. It must be installed and set up on each of the machines. It is not difficult to set up but the instructions are a bit obscure.

I also use Logmein Free to run the K3 when I don’t want to be in the basement. It is very useful on digital modes where you don’t need to hear the audio. I can also use it with HRD decoding CW since I don’t copy CW very well and I really don’t need to hear the audio (but I should be listening so my proficiency increases.)

I finished assembling the K3 late last Saturday and sarted the calibration and set up on Sunday and Monday. I Made two QSOs Monday afternoon to check things out but have not had any reports on how the digital signal looks.

So far the rig is living up to expectations and is an upgrade from both of my two previous HF rigs. I really appreciate the ability to move the passband around a bit as well as using the DSP to limit the bandwidth. One of my previous rigs had the ability but it was not as easy as it is with the K3.

I am using a Silicon Beach 24-bit external soundcard with the rig and see that the noise floor is a bit lower than I had experienced with the other rigs using the same soundcard or using a SignalinkUSB. The ability to switch to a narrow (400 or 250Hz) and use HRD to automatically put the signal in the middle of the filter passband with just a couple mouse clicks makes life easy when things get congested or when there are really big signals swamping the radio AGC.

One of the things I really like is the K3_EZ program that allows me to measure and print the SWR of my antennas with just a push of a button. The KAT3 ATU is great, I have a 40M Hamstick dipole that I use for digital work and occasionally need for voice. My other radios could not match the high SWR at the top end of the 40M band. The KAT3 does a great job. Of course I probably see a 10-15 dB loss but at least I can radiate some sort of a signal.

The USB Serial device that has given me a problem is the IOGEAR USB to 2-Port Serial RS-232 Converter, Model GUC2322. I reinstalled it and reinstalled the driver on their web page.  Again I noted the major increase in the System Process CPU usage. I removed it and placed an old USB 1.1 Prolific adapter in and the CPU usage for the System task went to 7% on the peaks and stayed down at zero most of the time.

I will eventually contact IOGEAR and Moschip to find out why.  But for the moment the Dual Port device is not usable in my system.