I’m listening to the April Tower Drill of Lancaster ARES. They seem to be roving around the county and contacting each of the repeaters to log a signal report at higher and lower power levels, especially down to HTs.

From the ARES page, I discovered a new repeater to add to my scan list: W3AD at 145.39 PL 118.8.

We had some time in West Chester to visit Ben and see the new Mini Countryman, so I stopped by Ridley Creek State Park to activate. I had lots of tangles trying to toss my 21.56m EFRW into a tree – it took 30 minutes just to get started, but I had the wire at least 25 feet into the air. I operated FT8 and FT4 on 10m from a pavilion. [Read More]

On the good old 12.5m EFRW, I’m trying 10m FT8 this morning. It’s going nowhere. 15m is much better.

Chasing Hawaii

I have ham-alert for anyone in PA, NJ, or MD spotting the Hawaii DXCC. I’ve been chasing Hawaii around over to 17m and other bands as they pop up, but I didn’t seem them much. It’s the last state I need of the 50.

10m is busy here in mid-afternoon, and I’m reaching south america on 5w. I got Suriname and Cayman Islands on 5w. then 10m maybe died again.

Pitcairn Island DXpedition

I just got the VP6G DXpedetion on 5w on FT8 on 28.0785MHz. That’s my first “OC”! I don’t know why they were shifted, but I saw it on the waterfall on my X6100, so checked it out.

Matt and I ran to Erie, PA to watch the eclipse, and activated US-1402, Presque Isle State Park before eclipse. 10m was a bit slow, but I got there on FT8. I ran my 71-foot (21.65m) EFRW sloped up into a nearby tree from our station on a picnic table.

I got some audible screaming on the speaker in addition to the normal clicking when I hit the tuner. I usually have a choke near the radio, and that was missing.

It was cloudy and even some rain in the morning, but it cleared and we saw some blue sky before the eclipse started around 2pm.

Totality was at 3:16pm EDT. I have a video in 360 degrees.

My Week in Amateur Radio

• Overload on UV-K5 with better antennas
  • UV-K5 & UV-K6 for comparison - not broken
  • Balance antenna location good enough but not too good
  • FM bandstop filter helps a whole lot
• Modifying params database on Xiegu X6100
  • Now shows me accurate bands and privileges, so I won’t accidentally wander beyond my privileges.
• Picked up an Evolve 3 laptop that runs on 12v
  • Linux is being challenging: wifi and sound.
• Packing camera and radio gear or eclipse trip tomorrow

I checked into simplex net west again.

I posted to Facebook and got lots of discussion about the FM bandstop filter. When I started adding better external antennas, I could reach further (tx and rx**, but I also found that some VHF frequencies got much worse. It turned out I was overloading the receiver with the strong FM broadcasts in my area and increased sensitivity of the better antenna. I found a bandstop filter helped bring back those signals I was losing. [Read More]

I’ve installed the NUNU fork of the egzumer firmware on the uv-k6. It has a cool channel spectrum analyzer for super-fast scanning that can see all the active channels at once in the graph. There’s no good way to proceed to the next channel, but that’s not a huge problem.

The firmware also includes some unneeded “NUNU” mesh messaging protocol.

I checked into the Morning Grind on K3IR today. The questions was: plans for solar eclipse? I transmitted successfully through the FM bandstop filter from rtl-sdr.com. The filter has helped immensely to hold 2m signals with sensitive external antenna.

I took the Amtrak from Lancaster to Pittsburgh to visit Marie. In down times, I scanned with the spectrum analyzer on my UV-K5.

Rail

On the train, I scanned the rail frequencies, 159MHz-162MHz. I could hear some chatter about the Norfolk Southern freight trains in our way, and I heard the automated messages reporting clear track conditions.

CMU Buggy Net

Scanning the entire 2m band on Saturday morning, I heard the radio club kids running their regular net that supports buggy practices.