Monthly Archives: November 2011 - Page 3

More recordings

These recording were done by OQ5M (ON5ZO). He has got a very nice website as well, so visit that blog if you have not seen it. http://www.on5zo.be.

The recordings are quite a bit distorted, so I would suggest turning down the volume if trying to listen to them since the sound level is very high. Thank you Franki!

The plugin usually used didn’t seem to work properly with wav, so just click the links.

CQWW SSB 2011 OQ5M and SJ2W on 10m (SM3JLA op)

CQWW SSB 2011 OQ5M and SJ2W on 15m (SM2WMV op)

CQWW SSB 2011 OQ5M and SJ2W on 20m (SM3JLA op)

CQWW SSB 2011 OQ5M and SJ2W on 40m (SM2WMV op)

PA3GEG recording

PA3GEG sent me a recording from the CQWW DX SSB 2011 contest. It is SM2LIY who is the operator and you can hear that first he is transmitting with the 6/6/6el stack at USA and also the 4el fixed at Europe while working PA3GEG. But when some US stations call he switches over to just the stack which you can hear very clearly since his signal drops by a large amount.

Here is a also a recording I found on youtube. This time its me (SM2WMV) as operator next to RL3A who you hear in the beginning of the clip.

Do you know of more recording with SJ2W in them? Please send me the information, mike_at_sm3wmv.com

The 18m tower ready to be lifted

This weekend I didn’t manage to get a lot done at the station. The horrible autumn weather made my mood bad and all I managed to get done was to lift the pieces of tower in place and assemble them. I also attached the two level of guy lines, attached the control cable for the rotor, so now its ready to be hoisted. I have scrapped the original plan of using a tree to winch it up, because the angle didn’t get 100% and also the tree feels a bit too weak. So I need to figure out how to get it up because I don’t feel like using a ginpole either. That is very time demanding and the top section weighs a bit too much for me to feel safe about it. So either we’ll use the small village crane or get an excavator to pull it up, I’ll make some calls.

Some remote control stuff

I worked some tonight on a card which will be essential for the remote control of the station. This boards will talk to the server via USB and has got an openASC bus so it can talk with devices on the bus. It will also control the relays that turn on/off gear in the shack. That way I don’t always need to have everything running, just the server and this small board. So when I want to work remotely there is a software on the local PC that will be used to turn on/off the gear and you’re ready to go. This has also got a timeout, so if it hasn’t received a ping within a certain amount of time, all the equipment are shut off. That way there is no chance for the radio to be stuck in TX if we lose internet or similar.

There is also a picture of the 80m 4-SQ box which I burned up just prior to the contest. When I walked out to the 4-SQ, about 40m from it I could smell the burned electronics and the board was too damaged to be fixed. Luckily I hadn’t given back the 4-SQ box we previously used, which was borrowed from SM2NOG, so I installed that and we were ready for CQWW DX SSB which turned out great. There was some water lying on the board so I suspect that is why it flashed over, and when things start to go bad it burns quite quickly. Next version I will put a better box and also a 15w resistor inside it to keep out moisture.

Hopefully this weekend we can get the 18m tower up and during the evenings I will try to work on the remote control stuff. Would like to be able to listen around a bit during the weekends, even if I can’t rotate antennas yet I can change bands and control direction of the 4-SQs etc. through openASC. Next thing after this will be to start installing the rotator boards into the rotator control boxes.