10 meter started opening today. With 5 watts, I got to Hawaii and Greenland.

Xiegu released another updated firmware for the X6100: APP 1.1.9 & BASE 1.1.8, dated 2024-09-23.

1. I downloaded it from Radioddity, and wrote it to an SD card:

$ sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress

2. I booted the new card for the app upgrade to 1.1.9,
3. I applied baseband 1.1.8 from the menu in the UI.
4. I tried the CW key in the stock firmware, and it transmitted (unlike last time).
5. I booted back to R1CBU, and it looked good there as well.

I did a little FT8, decoded some CW, and listened to some SSB on 40m. I found I could to turn the RF Gain closer to 100 instead of below 63. It may be reading slightly lower power on the display before ALC kicks in: up to but not over the 5W, where it used to often push a little past.

It’ll stay.

Week in Radio

• Last weekend was POTA weekend: 4 setups and 5 activations in 2 days around Michaux State Forest area
• Morsle to practice copying CW
• My first 2 CW contacts hunting POTA
  • 40m
  • X6100
  • 71-foot EFRW
  • 3D-printed Iambic paddles
  • Fell apart pretty quickly, but got into their logs.
• Testing the footprint of the KA3TKW VHF/UHF repeaters to high on a hill. near Wrightsville with my trusty Quansheng at the SPARC picnic
• New house
  • Extending my meshtastic network with a minimal external antenna
  • Strong enough into 21 at 5 watts
  • Flagpole mast with a tape measure yagi to try to get back east to Parkesburg.
• I was up way too late redesigning an antenna winder for the smaller balun I like.
  • I need to get the 3d printer and software going again since the move
• Xiegu x6100 has another dangerous firmware update that I’ll try in the near future.
  • The last firmware stopped all TX, so we’ll see what happens this time.

Other News

• A RTTY contest coming up this weekend
• AO-91: Monday, 10:15pm EDT
• SO-50: 437.795FM
• The 6m 53.21 repeater is up.

I got in W1JMA’s log when they were activating US-7545. on 7047.5kHz. They looked me up in QRZ, so knew my name and location. I sent 599 and received 599. It was a super-minimal exchange, because I fumbled a lot.

I had to read a bit about how to correct errors, and I soon stumbled into AF3Z on 7036kHz, and I saw a funny series of attempted corrections: “a littr eee a littr eee a bit”

Later, I Got a second contact, KV4UD.

My Week in Radio

• Tried some new firmware for X6100, but no good
• Moved Houses
  • installed some antennas
    • 71ft random wire
    • 1/4 wave ground plane
• POTA weekend
  • Michaux State Forest
  • Caledonia State Park
  • King’s Gap Environmental Education Center
  • Pine Grove Furnace
  • Used an EFHW for everything
  • Ran out of battery on Pine Grove Furnace on the second day, so did the whole thing with 1W FT8.
  • Tried calling CQ on CW to see if RBN would pick me up.

Questions

• Charles, KC3SWC: What books about operating do you recommand?
  • Ron, WA3VEE
    • ARRL Operating Guide
    • ARRL: Basic Electronics for Radio
    • Electronics for Hobbyists
  • John, KC3WWC
    • Spend lots of time listening to others
    • Youtube
  • Chuck, NA3CW
    • Lots of people are listening
    • Keep it civil
    • Keep it technical
    • Don’t bore people with aches and pains
    • ARRL Operating Manualy
    • ARRL Handbook
    • ARRL Antenna Book
    • Be helpful
    • Be interesting
• Wayne, KC3SQI: How do you tone squelch for receiving and filtering away QRM from another repeater on the same frequency?
  • Ron, WA3VEE: tone squelch or “split tone”
  • CR, W8CRW: T-SQL = tone squelch
  • Chuck, NA3CW: would be useful when the band opened and a distant DMR is overtaking 985.
• Ron, WA3VEE: Yaesu HTs can only do one of the other, not both.

I used the EFHW for everything. I activated 4 park entities:

• Caledonia State Park after riding the Michaux GRVL ride.
• Michaux State Forest from the ATV trail parking on the ridge.
• Kings Gap Environmental Education Center late in the day, so I raced a little.
  • antenna up in about 8 minutes
  • 10 contacts within 26 minutes
  • on the road again 14 minutes later
• Pine Grove Furnace the next morning, where I ran out of battery, so I did the whole thing with 1W FT8. I practiced a bit and started putting out my call on CW to see if RBN would pick me up, but kept it to a shy 1W. It didn’t pick me up.

Radioddity had the new firmware for the X6100. I downloaded it, wrote it, installed it, and rebooted it to see the stock APP 1.1.8 and BASE 1.1.7. That mostly-useless audio spectrum is gone. The strange jump at 63 in RF GAIN is fixed.

BUT transmitting gave NO POWER. R1CBU also exhibited the problem. When I downgraded to BASE 1.1.6, it transmitted again. Others had seen this problem as well, while others had it work. It must have depended upon variations in the hardware.

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.

CY9C St Paul Island Expedition

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.