Radio, railways, stuff...

(this is a re-write of my original post to tidy it up) I signed up to EchoLink today and installed EchoMac, a Mac version of the software. I have yet to play with this other than making calls to the *ECHOTEST* conference - a self-test facility like you get in Skype. Getting the software to communicate was a bit of a fiddle, through no fault of the software or EchoLink. First off, the home router needs to be able to pass UDP ports 5198 and 5199 in both directions to the Mac, and port 5200 TCP outgoing. The information is here http://www.echolink.org/firewall_solutions.htm. By default everything incoming is off other than a few rules that I have for the web servers. So I had to enable this. The Sky router I have can be a pain here because more often than not, pressing Apply to save firewall rules gives a 'not found' error and it seems to want several goes before it works. No idea why that should be, surely the script is either there or not, not there sometimes! Anyway, I got the rules in. Note on the Sky router you need to first define a Service for those UDP ports, then select that service for the firewall rule. But it still did not connect. Over to the Mac firewall which was already switched on. Not sure I did this, maybe the latest software update sets it by default. Anyway, here I needed to select EchoMac and allow it to accept incoming connections. It seems I also needed to reload EchoMac to make this work, so I guess the firewall only permits an application when it loads, not if it is already loaded, which makes sense. There are still connection issues though. I can connect more reliably if I chose the Sky router as the wifi hub. Every test so far when connected to my main hub results in no connection for EchoHam, but switching to the Sky router wifi and it usually works. I say usually, because if I connect to the Sky box and load EchoHam it works, but then if I unload EchoHam, switch to the other wifi hub and reload EchoHam it still works. But not always! I'm sure this is a fault of my own security because I can get it to connect, just not always first time.

I think my shack was sulking tonight as I'd not played for two days. First the tuner played up and then the PC would not see the SignaLink. Running lsusb showed it to be missing. I could not reach round to replug the USB cable so rebooted the PC instead. Now it showed it but wsjtx-x could not. Checking the config wsjt-x had reverted to the internal sound card. I'm guessing that running it with the USB missing did that. Or they really were sulking! Oh yes and then 20m is completely dead. Trying 40...

Ok, so I acquired a YT-1200 automatic tuner some time ago but left it gathering dust as I had always planned to add more bits of wet string to my loft fan dipole for other bands. The tuner was going to go on the long wire that I never got round to making via a 9:1 un-un which is wound but not soldered up and looking sorry for itself in a corner of the workshop. Plus there has been a lot of FT8 activity on 20m anyway and the internal tuner in the FT450D is happy there. Well, I set this thing up last night and it happily tunes from 80m to 6m (not tried 160m yet). The fan dipole has two elements, one cut for 20m and one for 6m, but I've now made FT8 contacts on 40m, 30m, 17m and 15m, not bad for a bit of wire stapled to the rafters and 10W or however much actually makes it out of the tuner. Yes it's not a mega-station with a beam or even any kind of external antenna (yet!) but it works for me, aided of course by FT8 being a weak signal mode - my signal must be pretty weak! Edit: I've now managed one FT8 QSO on 12m and today (5/Nov) one on 10m. 80m is probably a lost cause right now as although the tuner seems to tune it ok the rig is not happy. But there is a serious lack of wire up in the loft so not a big surprise.