I attended the SPARC member meeting tonight and heard about lots of interesting plans. They have some fun events coming up, like a fox hunt, some antenna building to prepare for the fox hunt, and even some POTA outings. They’ll also start planning for field day.
The main presentation was about the recent Dry Tortugas DXpedition.
I went home and sent my member application right away.
I failed to check-in do to RF issues, but my summary is still good.
I think I was having antenna trouble, so I couldn’t check in. I only listened.
I updated the bands on my X6100 running R1CBU to follow the US band plan/privileges:
sql/bands_ham.csv to break bands by plan and privileges for USsql/params.sql to not import band_params.csv,
but to instead build it
from the bands tablesqlite3 params.db < params.sqlparams.db to the DATA partition of the SD cardRebuilding the database loses all your settings on the radio, so you have to put those back, but I can now see where the general privileges start and end on each band.
[Read More]I updated my X6100 to
R1CBU 0.20.1.
Oleg provided a tgz
with only the updated files,
so I dropped the file into /DATA partition,
started up the radio,
and it unpacked the update.
The tgz contained the x6100_ui binary and params.db.
This can be an interesting way to make my own updates without needing
to know how to rebuild the entire image.
I see the changes applied to his
x6100_gui github repo,
so I know that’s a good base
for making future changes.
Learning to do make updates is interesting, because the original maintainer, Oleg, is likely done updating this firmware in favor of building his own radio in the image of the X6100. He’s frustrated trying to get help and documentation from Xiegu. I run the R1CBU firmware full-time.
During 985 net on Monday night, which is VHF on my UV-K5 running egzumer 0.22.0, I’d get periodic static in reception. It got bad enough to completely cut-out. I was using my simple wire dipole hanging in the tree outside.
K3IR had been frustratingly quiet as well, so I checked the antenna with the NanoVNA as it hung outside. There were no fluctuations in SWR, so it’s not connections or proximity.
I tried the Explorer QRZ-1 HT, and it sounded great on the same antenna on the same net. Is my UV-K5 broken?
To test a bit further, I ordered a new UV-K6 to compare. I also downgraded to egzumer 0.21.0 for further testing.
The next day, Tuesday morning, K3IR was sounding better, but I was getting the same periodic noises. The outside antenna doesn’t completely cut out, but shows terrible doubling/overload as if from FM station.
Inside, the magmount antenna on the 3d printer is better. Is the dipole outside too sensitive and bringing in more signal than the frontend of the UV-K5 can handle?
During the DX contest, people were tuned all over, not just on full khz. A woman with a higher voice confounded me for a moment as I tried to get her to sound right. I was tuning by 100hz, so some were boomy low, a bit high-pitched, and some were just right. Tuning people a little higher made them easier to read, but that probably makes me lower for them. I tried to keep them as low as I could understand. RIT/XIT might have been useful for longer conversations.
What’s the best practice tuning SSB to hear clearly and tx as clearly as possible?