Hf

We headed to Caledonia State Park for the Arts & Craft Fair for a couple hours. I threw the 12.5m EFRW into a nearby tree. 40m was dead. 20m and 15m were very busy with SSB contesters for the IARU HF World Championship. Via FT8 and SSB, I could hear lots of EU on 15m, 17m, and 20m, but not much in local signals. Not many people were hearing me, so I only made 4 contacts in the hour or so that I tried.

There’s a special event contacting stations the 13 Colonies for the week over Independence Day in the US.

I contacted the following stations by SSB and FT8 over my couple days at home and out in the parks:

• K2A
• K2B
• K2C
• K2D
• K2E
• K2F
• K2G
• K2H
• K2I
• K2J
• K2K
• K2L
• K2M
• KU2US
• GB13COL
• WM3PEN
• TM13COL

I was traveling to DC the weekend of ARRL Field Day, so I found some time e-bike from the hotel to activate US-0655, the National Mall from a park bench at the mall. I clamped the GRA-1900T right to the bench. Field Day was happening, so traditional bands were very busy. I jumped to 17m for a quieter, POTA-only experience. The LiFePO4 battery hadn’t been charged in a while, so it went dead by the end of my activation. It was a bit of a race against the dwindling battery. With the battery completely exhausted, and running on the internal battery of the x6100, I got to 12 contacts.

I had played with the radio the night before. I tried my gra-1900T and the 12.5m EFRW in the hotel room. We were on the 9th floor of 10 floors in Downtown DC. I barely got out for a moment on 40m with the wire, then nothing. The whip did absolutely nothing.

I had heard a bit of pulsing noise on all the FT8 bands the other night.

On the Morning Grind Net, Rick, WB3CSY, mentioned this as well and that he suspects it came from a solar flare that was hitting us.

I cleaned up the backyard a bit, and ran a new 12.5m (41ft) random wire up the hill behind the house.

My first tests the next day on 30m at 1W got me some contacts. By 4:40pm EDT, the bands were all in “poor” condition, so it got tough to test.

The next morning, I watched the 40m band close. It was ablaze at 8am, but getting pretty quiet by 10:30am EDT.

I compared the old antenna out the front with the new antenna out the back using FT8 and PSKReporter.

The back antenna saw fewer decodes on 15m on average. It mostly lacked any stations from Europe. Looking at the antenna’s physical attributes, it starts on first floor (lower than the old antenna) in backyard, but it slopes up more vertically. The middle of the antenna, on average, is blocked by the hill to the East.

The old antenna out the front saw more decodes overall, including Europe. It starts at second floor window and only slightly angles up. The whole antenna is higher and clears the hill, even though Europe may still be mostly all the end of the antenna. It performs better.

I had fun physically launching the new antenna, but I’ll need to do some more work to get more of it higher in the air to be useful.

I spun the dial below the 30m ham band at the end of the night, and I caught all kinds of interesting broadcast (31m) and HF air traffic.

The 40m band was hot at 5:30am EDT. I got:

• Trinidad and Tobago
• Dominican Republic
• mostly eastern US otherwise

Switched up to 15m to get Finland, and I grabbed 1 local contact on 6m. I’ve accumulated 1800 contacts on QRZ, 1489 are confirmed, across 79 countries.

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.

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