I bought a project J-Pole made of 450-ohm ladder line at the Hamfest for a couple dollars. I rebuilt the connections, firmed up broken parts with some wood splints and tape, and tuned it with the NanoVNA.

It seems to be working pretty nicely for 2m and 70cm. I’m pulling in stronger signals, and still able to transmit.

I bought a few things:

• a handful of connectors for audio and antennas
• a project j-pole made of 450 ladder line

I participated in the RTTY Round-Up.

Trouble with fldigi/R1CBU

I screwed around lots trying to get fldigi talking to the radio. R1CBU software works great with wsjt-x, but fldigi and flrig completely failed to connect. It wouldn’t key the radio. Switching back to stock software on the radio worked fine with flrig, but where’s the fun in that.

For flrig, I could tell it that it was an older version of the radio (X5105?), and it would key and set frequency, but flrig wouldn’t read back the frequency when updated at the radio.

I ultimately got fldigi talking to R1CBU by using flcat with an xml file for G106.

Then I could “tune” power output following instructions in fldigi manual.

Working!

I started making some contacts on 10M and 15M. It’s much more like voice contacts: yelling back and forth on the same channel. I’m using macros and sticking to those for the contest. They’re on the 3rd page of macros in fldigi.

I’ve made at least a few contacts, so I’ll submit them to the contest

I’ve loaded the R1CBU UI on the X6100. Reading the manual exposes all sorts of great features and conveniences:

Highlights

• Large waterfall
• Lots of options on MFK and VOL knobs, and it’s customizable
• SWR scan is very fast
• CW decoder is robust
• ALC starts at 0.0
• Serial console access: minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0, root, 123

Bugs

• Setting time down to the second is weird. I used serial console and CLI instead.

I found the QRZ awards tab on the logbook, and applied for awards for which I’ve qualified. They now show on my profile.

I installed a new firmware, egzumer, on my Quansheng UV-K5. The firmware has some handy features:

• It displays name and frequency at once
• It leaves the backlight on all the time at a lower level

Here’s a good demo of what ALC is doing. It’s clipping off the top of the signal, so turn the power up to just before ALC reacts, whether it’s 0->100 like the radio in the video or 100->0 like Xiegu radios.

I checked into the Welfare Net at 7:45pm ET. KC3MBB, Brett, just up the street at Donnerville and Stony Battery Rd contacted me afterward to welcome me.

Tuned to 8416khz, I received a Navtex weather report. I tuned the X6100, CW, FIL2 set to be really narrow, and I let fldigi decode the transmission as Navtex.

I have a dipole that’s 20m long (10m each side) strung through the house right to the banana plug adapter to the radio and no coax. I’ve coiled the wires together at the feed point to shorten and tune. I can run 40m with tuner turned off. I’m hitting Europe, Central America, Canada, and the midwest US.

I figure, since the wires are insulated and kept parallel to each other, the coil is serving as feed line and not part of the antenna.