Category: Ham radio

QST magazines available

Last summer at one of the radio club meetings, one of the older hams brought in a small stack of QST magazines that he didn’t want any more and asked if I’d be interested in them. Being newly licensed, I said sure!

I’ve gone through them a few times now, and with Connie’s collection of QST, these are duplicates now so I thought I’d pass them along to someone else to enjoy.

There aren’t a whole lot of them. I have Oct 2011-Feb 2012 and April-May 2012. Would prefer to hand them off to someone local, but I’d also consider shipping them.

Softrock Lite II ready to put on the air

At long last I’ve finally gotten around to putting the coax and interface cord on the Softrock Lite II receiver. The cord to plug into the sound card came from some old discarded speakers, and the coax is a short length of RG58 with an SMA connector that I picked up a while ago. I was originally going to use it for an antenna project for the VX8-DR, but figured I could always get another one later.

Softrock Lite II ready for the air
Softrock Lite II ready for the air

Now I just need to find some time to get it on the air. If I want to use the antenna, I’ll have to find an SMA (female) to SO-239 adapter, or make some jumper wires to connect the ends.

DXing

Spent some time playing on the radio during the ARRL DX contest over the weekend and added about 40 more contacts to the log. Spent most of my time working on 10m where there seemed to be a lot of good propagation today. Lots of DX stations, not a lot of noise like I usually hear. 10m is an interesting band where I heard the DX stations pretty clearly, but didn’t hear any of the stations they were working, aside from maybe a few out on the west coast.

Early in the day when I started, most of the stations I was hearing were across the Atlantic. I think the farthest stations I worked were US5D in the Ukraine and LZ9W in Bulgaria. Later on in the afternoon and evening there were a lot of Carribean and South American contacts although some of the louder (1kW) European stations could still be heard. I even managed to work a Venezuelan station who said he was operating 5W QRP (YW2LV). Pretty impressive.

Had fun with the DX contest. Maybe next time I’ll try to get some more contacts logged.

Connecting the straight key

After going through the manual for the HD-10, I learned that the terminals on the rear of the HD-10 could be used to attach a key. So off to the garage I went to put some terminal connectors on some wires to use to hook up the J-38 key to the HD-10.

It took a couple of tries before I figured out where the wires were supposed to go on the J-38. There are lots of pictures of J-38 keys on the internet, but not too many that show how the wires are supposed to be attached (the terminals are the two on the inside).

J-38 straight key and HD-10 keyer
J-38 straight key and HD-10 keyer

With everything connected, tapping the key made the keyer make noises and I managed to make some Morse Code sounding noises with the key. Now they can sit on the desk next to me so that I can practice tapping out Morse Code whenever I feel like.

I still need to take the key off the base and clean it up a bit, and then make up a cable that I can use to plug the J-38 into the radio with. Also thinking about seeing if I can find a nice block of wood to attach the J-38 key to for a more solid base and to elevate the key a bit.