AB4UG Radioblog – Page 68 – Imabug's journey into electronics and amateur radio as AB4UG and VA6BUG

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.

Assembling the shack

Spent a bit of time decorating the shack today in between contacts for the ARRL DX contest. The two big maps at the top are CQ and ITU DX zone maps. On the right for easy reference is the ARRL band plan/WAS map, country prefix list and US grid square maps.

Still need to tidy up the cable clutter around the radio a bit but I’m liking the way things are set up so far. Have the radio sending audio into some surplus computer speakers, and headphones handy for playing on the radio without disturbing the rest of the house.

Still need to finish setting up the logging station. In the meantime, it’s paper logging.

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).

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.

Scanning manuals

Now that I’ve finally got my scanner to work under Fedora, I thought I’d use the opportunity to scan the manuals I got with the Heathkit IG-102 signal generator I picked up a while ago. I was also lucky enough to find an assembly manual on eBay for the HD-10 keyer I picked up at Hamcation so I scanned that as well and converted them both to PDF files.

There’s another manual for the IG-102 that’s quite a bit larger (168 pages) that will take me a while to scan and convert, but I’ll get that done eventually.

Softrock Lite II enclosure

No empty Altoids tins around, but I did have an empty tin that used to hold some tea bags. It was the perfect size to hold the Softrock Lite II and a 9V battery.

Punched a couple of holes into the tin so I could secure the board and instant enclosure!

On the right side I think I’ll see if I can make a hole to attach a BNC connector for the antenna. On the left side I’ll make a small hole to run the cable out to the sound card.