iFTx ⁽²⁾

Finally I had a chance to set up the QO100 dish on the side of the house. It was originally behind the harage at ground level which was not ideal as it was both a head-hitting hazard and an RF hazard, especially as I eventually want to be able to send not only SSB but also DATV which requires a higher power output than the 4W I had originally. I also wanted to copy the special GB2RS broadcast on QO100 which was scheduled for the 28th September, 2025. So, out with the scaffolding and up with the dish. That was the easy part. The disk elevation was already set so all I needed to do was point it in the right direction azimuth-wise. I nearly got that right using a theodolite app on the phone so with the aid of all relevant hardware I tuned it to max, for now anyway. It was rather amusing to have to set up a laptop and power supplies on the scaffolding as the last time I did that was at ground level. Cables came next - three runs of RG59, each around 12 metres back to the shack. These were very fiddly but…

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…