As an experiment, I left fldigi running listening for PSK signals on 10m (28.120 MHz) for most of the day to see what could be heard. Fldigi can scan the passband and send the callsigns it finds to pskreporter.info, where it gets displayed on a map. Between about 07:30 and 20:30 (EST) today, this is what fldigi spotted through the antenna and radio
10m PSK31 spots from FM02as
A total of 25 stations sending out PSK signals were spotted by fldigi. The European stations were picked up mostly during the day, with South American stations coming in later on in the afternoon and the smattering of stations out west late afternoon/early evening.
Not as much 10m PSK as I thought I’d see. I know there was more PSK activity throughout the day, but either the radio wasn’t hearing them or fldigi wasn’t spotting them. I think I’ll try this a few more days and see how things go.
With the help of the M3 frequency counter Jason/NT7S sent me, I was able to set the transmit frequency for my two OpenBeacons. The 40m OpenBeacon I built is tuned to 7.0403 MHz while the 30m OpenBeacon from W2MDW is set for 10.139 MHz. Both of them transmit “AB4UG/B FM02AS” using QRSS with a 6 second dit.
I’ve had the 40m OpenBeacon on the air all night, but I’m not sure if anybody saw it. Most of the QRSS grabbers seem to be listening on 30m. There’s one grabber listed that’s on 40m, but it’s listening around 7.0008 MHz. I’d have to replace the crystal in the OpenBeacon to get down that low. I should put some pin headers in the crystal spot so I can change frequencies by replacing the crystal.
I think I’ll try the 30m OpenBeacon running today and see if it gets grabbed anywhere.
(Looks like I’ll have to tweak the frequency of the 30m beacon…most of the grabbers seem to be listening on a fairly narrow 100-500 Hz band around 10.140).
Update: Tweaked the 30m OpenBeacon to transmit at 10.1399 MHz. If you happen to see it, let me know.
After a bit of poking around in ARRL’s Logbook of the World (LotW), I discovered that I’m a lot closer to getting Worked All States (Basic) than I thought. I only need to make contacts in three more states: Mississippi, Rhode Island and West Virginia. Then I’ll have made contacts with at least one person in every state.
More wallpaper for the shack!
Update 2014-02-10: KB8BIP (WV) confirmed in LotW! Two more to go!
Spent a few hours on the radio this weekend playing in the ARRL RTTY Roundup. It’s my first digimode contest and it was an interesting experience.
I’ve found that with digital modes, I like to have the sound on so that I can hear (in addition to see) the activity in the passband. I started off on 20m and right off encountered a bunch of loud and overdriven signals. Some of the transmissions were so bad that they washed out the entire passband during the transmission. Here’s a brief sample of what some of the better transmissions looked like.
20m RTTY passband during the 2014 ARRL RTTY Roundup
I also found that fldigi’s decoding the RTTY signals seemed to be spottier than PSK decoding. I’m not sure if that was just because of the quality of the transmissions it was having to decode or just the nature of RTTY. I’ll have to try to find some non-contest RTTY to test with.
For most of the contest, I was running 30-35W which seemed to be pretty sufficient to get me heard reasonably far. I finished up with around 110 QSOs and decided to call it a day a few hours before the end of the contest because I was getting tired of sitting.
Highlight of the contest was a 20m contact with VK3TDX all the way in Austrailia. That sets the record for my longest QSO at over 16 000 km. Here’s the excerpt from the fldigi log
There’s some garbled decoding, but it looks like he got everything. Using 35W, I was very surprised he was even able to pick up my signal. I suppose it’s possible he was listening remotely using a station closer to me (with SDR and Internet connected radios, you can listen and potentially operate from anywhere in the world from the comfort of your computer desk). I’ll hang on to the thought that I just had some astoundingly good propagation.
AB4UG-VK3TDX QSO
(Sweet, just checked on LoTW and it’s confirmed there. Woohoo!)
At a couple points toward the end, my sound card interface started acting up and would rapidly switch PTT on and off. Not sure what was causing it, but both times it happened there were some really strong signals coming through the radio. Don’t know if it’s related or not, and this is the only time the interface has acted up like that.
After today, I haven’t quite decided if digimode contests are quite my thing. I think I’ll have to try a few more contests out.
As I mentioned in the October progress report, antenna building has taken a back seat to building up the workbench.
I have an OpenBeacon built for 40m now that I need to finish calibrating. I’ve acquired enough gear for the workbench now that I think I can do that.
The SoftRock Ensemble RXTX kit is still sitting in the parts bin waiting for me to get around to building it.
I’ve made some progress on the Morse code part, but not a whole lot. I need to make a routine where I sit down for 30 – 45 minutes or so at a time and really devote some effort to it.
