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!
Dean Amateur Radio 5N0HQ, CW, CWType, FT-950, IARU, RTTY, SB-2000, SSB, technology, UA9OV
…is, that he is using a form of Hellschreiber, a fax like data transmission mode. Hellschreiber (also known as Feldhellschreiber, Feld-Hell or simply Hell ) was invented br Dr Rudolf Hell in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s and was developed to provide intelligible communication even over very poor quality radio or cable links.
You can read more about Hellschreiber in the wikipedia article here.
Dean Amateur Radio Hellschreiber, PSK31, technology
I was checking out 20m last night to see what South American stations might be working PSK31 when I noticed an unusual trace from an Italian station, IT9AQR, Vincenzo in Sicily.
PSK31 ’symbols’ for CQ and 73 from IT9AQR - how does he do that?
He also has a similar symbol for ‘QRZ’ which I didn’t get a screenshot of. I think it’s quite neat.
I’m not going to get into the rights or wrongs of it (because I haven’t yet seen any other comments on this kind of PSK extension) but I’d love to know how he does it. I’ll ask around and report my findings.
Dean Amateur Radio, Pictures PSK31, technology
…with the FT-950 are in the log but it wasn’t all plain sailing! Despite leaving it all in a working state when I powered off last night, turning it on this evening intent on meeting Richard (M0SNR) on 6m for a quick RTTY sked resulted very much in a ‘back to square one’ type scenario - nothing would work!
To cut a long story short the problem appears to have been 6m. Whenever the radio was set to transmit on 6m it would stay in transmit even if the PC software sent a PTT off command. HRD wouldn’t unkey the transmit, neither would MMTTY. Only unplugging the USB cable to the interfce box (the SB-2000) would force the radio back to receive mode.
I’m going to see what others on the HRD forums and the FT-950 Yahoo user group think about this but I suspect RFI on 6m getting the interface software or low level COM port driver into a bad state.
The good news was I made a few contacts tonight once I had figured out what the problem was. At 20:02 UTC I had a short PSK31 QSO using the Digipan software with HA1FB (Feri) and at 20:32 UTC I had a RTTY QSO with OH1LWZ (Hannu) using the MMTTY software. I do eventually hope to use DM780 for PSK31 but I will continue to use MMTTY for RTTY even though this does mean you have to close the HRD software because they both use the same COM port. Not ideal but I am prepared to put up with it for the sake of using MMTTY and FSK keying.
I have more work to do but the first thing I’ll check tomorrow is that tonights settings are still ok when I power it all back up again after shutting it down tonight!
Dean Amateur Radio computers, DM780, FT-950, HRD, PSK31, RTTY, SB-2000, technology, Yaesu
Persevere, never give up, try, try and try again! The soundcard I refer to in my previous post is now working as required with both line and speaker audio out. Music is restored to my world - all is well 
Dean Life..., Music technology
One step forward and two steps backwards! Why aren’t things ever quite as simple as they should be?
I have this afternoon installed a new (well, used really, from eBay) soundcard in my PC. The card works fine and does what I bought it for (decoding amateur radio PSK31 and RTTY data transmissions), however, I now have no means of listening to music on the PC or watching films because there’s no headphone socket and the original onboard soundcard is somehow disabled. Damn!
Dean Amateur Radio, Life... computers, PSK31, RTTY, technology