As I pulled into the driveway after work today, I noticed one of the neighbours had placed a couple of satellite dishes by the curb for disposal. First thing to cross my mind was “Hmm, I wonder if I could do something with those…”. Mentioned it to Connie and she said “Grab them” so I did.
Satellite dishes
They also came with a mess of coax (probably 75 Ω stuff) that’s probably been sitting outside for who knows how long, so could be of questionable quality by now. It will give me something to start off working with though.
RG-6 coax
Not entirely sure what I’ll do with them yet. I’ve read in various places on the web about people using them for various simple science experiments/demonstrations, like recording solar radio emissions. It will probably take me a while to even do anything with them. I’ll have to spend some time researching different options and finding out what other people have done with them.
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.
Results for the 2013 Tennessee QSO Party were waiting for me in my mailbox today, along with a very nice award for the top score (760 points) from South Carolina in the Low power Phone category. My first contest award!
TN QSO Party 2013 award
Ok, never mind that I was the only submission from SC. It will make a nice decoration for the shack. The certificate also notes that I was a first time entrant to the QSO party.
Spent a couple hours at the radio playing in the ARRL 10m contest today. Didn’t get to play as much as I wanted to, but managed to score 28 contacts for 1176 points. I’d have played longer, but the cold I managed to catch from somewhere put a damper on things. Managed to snag SD and ND though, both of which seem to be hard to get states. The ND contact is confirmed in LoTW, so hopefully the SD contact will confirm there at the end of the contest. I should be at least a couple states closer to WAS Basic after the weekend.
