Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁰⁾

The Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles (URE) ran an event to commemorate the 95th anniversary of the IARU with was founded on 18th April 1925 - 18th April is also World Amateur Radio Day each year. It ran from the 15th to 30th April. I had to have a go! There were 10 callsigns of the form AMxWARD and 9 bands in use, from 160m thru 6m. And as you might imagine there are quite a few pileups. I only used FT8 with the occasional FT4 but the stations were active on SSB, CW and digi-modes (I spotted them on RTTY, PSK31, FT4 and FT8). After I made sufficient contacts for the Silver award I was going to stop, but after a short breather decided to go for Gold, finally making that on the penultimate day. I made myself a personal target of at least one contact on all the bands I can operate on, so 40m thru 6m, but I never managed 12m due to pileups. I also never managed to get the 10th station - pskreporter showed that they were receiving  me but again, the pileups. While I came nowhere really on the ‘score board’ (apparently 251st in the…

This was awkward. I found some info on the Web where someone had used a USB to Ethernet adapter and a Y-splitter cable to connect their Pluto to their LAN. So I got the exact same bits off eBay. Nope, no go. I resorted to asking on the very helpful Facebook group and tried all the advice, for example powering it via the separate USB power socket, but still no go. So, a process of elimination - the USB adapter worked fine on the Mac so no issues there, nor with the CAT5 cabling in use. But I did not have a separate mini-USB to USB socket cable, only the splitter cable. Back to eBay... A cable arrived today and the Pluto appears on the LAN just fine. So it's the Y-splitter cable that is at fault. Not tested it yet but it's only a couple of quid so no biggie. Serves me right for not keeping things simple and using a splitter. Anyway, one step closer to my QO100 project! All I need now is a decent way to get Ethernet out to the workshop. I do need a LAN out there anyway, not just the house wifi, so…

So the Ethernet interface on the shack PC decided not to work at all today. It's managed by the network-manager stuff so no ideas why it had decided to go funny. Actually, it has been off colour for a few weeks now as at boot it does not see the Internet i.e. it fails to find a route but does see locally. Anyway, I've never liked network-manger, I would far rather get control of it all myself. I realise it's there for a reason but I favour a more handraulic approach. After battling it into submission and removing it from the startup scripts editing /etc/networks/interfaces has cured its tantrum. For now anyway! But I am wondering what is up with the PC now as USB failures yesterday and then a collapse of networking today... everything important is backed up so no worries there. However, I am not of the camp that these things fail slowly as I have had PCs running for years and years before. I may well use this as an excuse to get a midi-tower system I can dual boot (Windows and Linux) and get a couple of PCI cards into.

This morning the rig would not go into transmit via wsjt-x. It worked fine last night up to when everything was shut down and there were no changes to anything, hardware or software. Rebooting the PC made no difference. CAT control was working both ways and it was receiving FT8 fine. I noticed that transmitting would sometimes change the rig settings e.g. from data to non-data. I tried the flrig / fldigi combination but transmitting via this messed the FT450D’s settings up in that it was rapidly triggering tx and the rig decided to engage its internal tuner. Plugging the two USB connectors into the front USB sockets on the PC made it work but the transmit levels are mad - ALC is triggering and the rig does not generate any decent power with this turned down. ALC is on a knife-edge where it goes from very little power / no ALC via the SignaLink TX control to 50% ALC and proper power output with nothing in between. Fiddling with the audio settings on the PC and in wsjt-x makes little difference. But changing the Mode to Data/Pkt in Settings -> Radio does improve the ALC business. This was set…

Been having fun with the Pluto today. It has been working fine, though not used very often with SDR Console on my acquire Windows 10 laptop but today I needed an SSB source to find a fault on the TR-9130 which had gone deaf on SSB. The Pluto made an ideal source and helped me to find out I’d got the gain and RIT controls mixed up and so had turned the gain right down! D’oh. So, after putting the TR back on the shelf it gave me the opportunity to finally fiddle with the Pluto. First off, when transmitting on SDR Console the transmission breaks at a regular short interval. Googling (well, actually these days DuckDuckGo’ing - does that work?) found some info which I tried but to no avail. Someone mentioned that it worked fine in SDR Angel so I downloaded this and after watching YouTube I managed to get a decent output. Not sure what I’ve done wrong with SDR Console but that will wait for now. But I really wanted to use the Pluto on the Linux box. Some time ago I had a go at installing the Gnu Radio software along with the modules that…