Radio and rails...

A couple of new arrivals, a (new) Yaesu FTM510D and an (old) Yaesu FRG9600. On the FTM510D it is unheard of for me to actually get something so new. New, yes, but usually at least a year after launch. But this is new new. I was actually about to order a FTM500D when, fortunately the advert for this poped up. And it is way ahead of my FTM100D that this is replacing. First off, I like the display. it's big but not too big, colourful and gives all the right information. Not shown here is the information you see from a memory chanel which includes the callsign (or whatever you program in), frequence, mode and tone. It seems to find the GPS a lot faster than the FTM100D or my FT5D. There are, of course a lot of variables, for example cold start times, or the fact that somehow the shack finds GPS hard despite the perfect sky view from SE to SW. (Mobile phones never seem to have an issue). But the FTM100D would sometimes not find a GPS signal in hours. The FT2D was even worse. I like the controls too, with volume top left and press for…

Given there is a new DV gateway on 70cm near my QTH I wanted to add it to the MD380. The first issue is I had completely forgotten how! Remarkably, the radio has plenty of battery so it was duly plugged into the Windows PC via the TYT USB lead. The TYT software failed to find the radio and on checking Device Manager it showed no driver. Off to the web to find one. Nope. I found a link to nowhere, found a driver that didn't work, and another which would not even install. By now I was beginning to remember things about code plugs... Off to the Linux box then. I found Editcp with with that I found my memory! I had used this before but DMR isn't really my thing these days so it sort of fell off the disk when I upgraded PCs a couple of years ago. Anyway, Editcp found the radio without fuss and downloaded it. After remmebering all the places one needs to add stuff to add a single chanel I had oen set up for the new local gateway. But I can't get in... perhaps it is just too far. I tried via…

Now the competition is over here is the best image I received during the Fram2 mission: I received several images in total including slides 1 through to 8, of which about half were full or nearly full images. The setup here was SatPC32 driving the TS2000X connected to a 70cm QFH antenna in the loft. This really needs to be outside but that will have to wait.

I grabbed one of these little guys off Amazon after spottong a review on Youtube. The SW28HF covers 1.8 to 50MHz at up to 120W. It is a tiny little thing wth an internal battery that would lend itself to portable operations, but mine sits atop the tuner. My only niggle is the charging port is on the front - personally I'd rather it was hidden at the rear but that's just me. It appears to work nicely, giving a readout which looks to agree with the bars on the FT450D and broadly with the LEDs on the tuner. It has a high SWR alarm that I have not fiddled with yet, and the single sheet instructions are clear and go into some detail of what SWR is and how high SWR can damage a transmitter which is a nice touch.

I made my first QSO on the QMX+ on 30m today. It is a nice little QRP radio, the one I have has all bands from 160m to 6m. Getting it on the air is a bit of a fiddle, not caused by the radio itself. I have a very shorrt random wire antenna tuned by a Z-11Pro II tuner that works very well with the big radios but the QMX+ needs to be treated carefully. Tuning at full power is a bad idea because the tuner is going to hit some very high SWR figures and damage to the finals is a real risk. But there is more to this tale... First off, I wanted to run it from my old MacBook but no matter what I did it would never see any data from the radio - the QMX+ has CAT and audio along a single USB. CAT was working fine in wsjt-x but no audio of any description. So I loaded wsjt-x on the Mac Mini but it crashed every time I tried to set the radio up. Anyway, I wanted to use the rather neat iFTx app on the phone which does FT8 and FT4 and…