Radio, railways, stuff...

Having two radios, two SignaLinks and multiple computers I figured why not spread a little... so here's 4m FT8 from the FT450D and transverter plus 2m FT8 from the FT817. Well, it would be rude not to use both together... Mind you, the poor old i7 MacBook Pro does seem to have a whinge if I dare do something else at the same time - it seems to temporarily forget the USB and gives a rig control error. On the other hand it is quite convenient to have the Mac set up as now because it is always on and I can very quickly get onto 2m FT8 (or indeed 70cm FT8 but my best QSO so far has been all of 7km!)

My first FT8 on 70cm. Only 25km, but still a first for me. No reply sadly, so no QSO this time. At the time I sent a few CQs while watching pskreporter and seeing nothing. I checked this morning just out of interest and there was this one reception report. This was via the FT817 and 2.5W into a 70cm big wheel, which isn't at all big at that frequency! I had only just installed it which itself was a bit of a comedy of errors. I had some M&P cable ready for it but just never got round to making it up, so soldering iron out, BNC at the shack end, cable pushed through the hole in the ceiling, N male at the antenna end. The centre pin fell out! So, picture me managing to pull the loft end of the cable back down the ladder and across there landing floor to the shack (hard enough feeding the cable through the hole so I really didn't want to have to pull it put again!), supporting it with my knee, soldering iron at maximum reach and more heat... the NanoVNA showed the SWR to be just right where it needed to be so all was well. And clearly too much cable to be able to do that maneuver! But it reminds me I really do need to sort my coax feeds out, and sort out the ceiling hole by fitting some trunking. Edit: I did manage one QSO later on, at just 7km. But hey, it's my first on 70cm FT8.

I had heard of VARA HF but not done anything about it because the Windows machine is not connected to the HF rig. That was cured yesterday by something I should have got ages ago - a USB switch. This switch has two USB connections aimed at connection to two PCs, and then four USB sockets for devices. So the SignalLink and the USB adapter for CAT control are now plugged into this switch which shares these between the Linux and Windows PCs. It all seems to work fine with USB devices connecting and disconnecting and, fortunately for Windows anyway appearing in the same place. It took me a whole to figure out that the CAT control, ends up as COM6 on the Windows box but so far it has not decided to change when reconnected. Now the Windows box can see the FT450D I tried WSJT-X - no issues there, and it provided a good end to end test. I downloaded VarAC and the VARA HF modem. Installation went fine and almost straight away it decoded a beacon on 14.105. Since then it has been decoding numerous other beacons and a few CQ calls but I have yet to answer one. No time right now and I don’t want to use this for short FT8-like overs. I did send a few beacons and pskreporter showed that I am being received. Nice. I have yet to get CAT working though. I don’t know what the issue is there as everything is set the way it should be so I am tuning the rig by hand until then. PTT is via the SignaLink which will do vox so tx works anyway. (Update: CAT now works fine - I had not set RTS and DTR to High in the CAT Configuration section despite it being that way in the pics in the documentation...) And there is an issue I missed at first - VarAC plays sounds on events so the right would occasionally transmit for a bit of a second - Settings -> Appearance and Sounds and unchecking ‘Play application sounds (…)’ sorted that out. I did notice one thing though. When I turn the Linux machine on it is generating noise on 20m. The Linux and Windows machines are essentially identical so something is causing pickup. I’ll need to unwind all the cables and add ferrites - a useful indication hopefully easily fixed. There are now far too many cables and all in a mess!