I’ve started installing antennas at the new house. I have a 71-foot EFRW out the backyard. Noise was a bit low, S2 or so. We’ll see how it looks when computers get here. That wire seems good for 80m.
I strung a 2m/70cm dipole into a tree in the front yard. I’m on the wrong side of a hill, so I’m missing W3GMS, but K3IR, KA3TKW, AA3RG, W3UU are coming in strong.
I loaded F4HWN 3.3 onto my UV-K5 to have a look. It only has 3 scan lists, and it’s awkward to cycle through them. I found starting the spectrum analyzer to be cumbersome as well, since i couldn’t attach it to a long-press of a button. The single VFO view is pretty nice; it puts lots of nice info on the screen, and it’s big. Ultimately, I went right back to AubsUK for the scan features.
Someone spotted
CY9C’s Saint Paul Island Expedition
on the 21 mailinglist:
18095kHz, SuperFox FT8 mode.
I tuned my WSJTX to the frequency,
enabled SuperHound,
and it crashed upon trying to decode.
Running: /usr/bin/jt9 -s WSJT-X -w 1 -m 3 -e /usr/bin -a /home/john/.local/share/WSJT-X -t /tmp/WSJT-X
sh: 1: /usr/bin/sfrx: not found
Fortran runtime error: EXECUTE_COMMAND_LINE: Invalid command line
Error termination. Backtrace:
#0 0x7f02d8e21b9a in ???
#1 0x7f02d8e22699 in ???
#2 0x7f02d8e22afc in ???
#3 0x7f02d90b8eeb in ???
#4 0x7f02d90b9099 in ???
#5 0x559f9788ca06 in ???
#6 0x559f97885f15 in ???
#7 0x559f97885467 in ???
#8 0x559f978838a2 in ???
#9 0x7f02d883edb9 in __libc_start_call_main
at ../sysdeps/nptl/libc_start_call_main.h:58
#10 0x7f02d883ee74 in __libc_start_main_impl
at ../csu/libc-start.c:360
#11 0x559f97883900 in ???
#12 0xffffffffffffffff in ???
I filed a
bug for the missing binary.
In the meantime,
I downloaded and installed the wsjtx deb file
from sourceforge to make the DX QSO.
I saw them again on 14.094MHz, but they don’t hear me.
I checked in on the bug, and the maintainer explained that those binaries are not open source, so not included with the Debian package. To fix it longer-term, I kept the new binaries, and went back to the package that Debian provided.
I ran some errands and wandered off to Susquehannock State Park, US-1425 to play. I started with SSB phone, and immediately heard Hawaii. The bands were busy with QSO Parties for Hawaii, Kansas, and Ohio, so I kept hunting people and easily got my 13 contacts. I never switched to the computer for digital modes!
In addition to the QSO parties, I caught a contact from Italy and K8MRD of Ham Radio Tube in a park in Texas. I bothered one last operator with a little CW, but I failed pretty badly. The radio was decoding for me, but my keying wasn’t up to the job.
I setup camp at Marietta Riverfront Park with the EFHW stretched from the pavilion to the nearby tree. I was expecting to get rained out, but it never came.
I got 23 FT8 contacts on 20m and 3 SSB contacts on 40m and 20m at 10W. I also spoke to a nuclear ship in Baltimore, and I heard some light house special event stations. It was so quiet there at the park compared to my desk full of computers that I thought the NR was stuck on.
W3FIS, Dr. Paul Ross, stopped by to activate, so we chatted a while after nearly 25 years since I last saw him when I was in college.
fldigi left running but disconnected from radio
ran CPU at 95C doing nothing.