Who’s a silly boy then?
This weekend is the IARU HF championship - a contest for both SSB and CW for the 24 hours commencing 12:00 UTC on Saturday the 11th of July. Bodo in Nigeria (see previous post) would be active as 5N0HQ and I was hoping I might get a contact at some point over the period of the contest.
I set about working a few stations, initially on SSB but then moved to 15m CW where I’d seen 5N0HQ spotted. Although I wasn’t putting out a huge signal I was concerned when no one, not a single station, responded to my calls on CW. I should mention at this point that having made some SSB, RTTY and PSK31 contacts since getting the FT-950 setup, I still hadn’t logged a single CW contact. I began to wonder if all was well with my interface configuration.
I’m using the CwType software by Sergei (UA9OV) for sending contest exchanges. This communicates with the radio via a MyDel SB-2000 radio interface unit which also handle rig control and RTTY FSK keying, as well as audio in and out. Although it seemed to be keying the rig and I was hearing the CW tone in my headset, on closer inspection the radio was just sending a steady tone and wasn’t being keyed to send the CW characters. It turns out I had the wrong setting in the CwType software - the PTT port pin was set to RTS when it should be set to ‘NONE’. Keying is then via the DTR pin to send the CW characters. Having made that change I got a response from the next station called…and several more after that.
So having made the change and realised the error of my ways, I’ll be back on the hunt for Bodo in his 5N0HQ guise. I fear I may have missed my best chance of a 20m contact but I’ll see what I can do if he pops up on 40m this evening. At least now I’m sure the setup is working as expected so any failure to log him now will be down to the propagation gods!