I can’t believe it’s been so long since I put anything up here at Grouchy Farmer. Things have been busy and I fear this blog has been a low priority item.
I probably shouldn’t have called this blog Grouchy Farmer because I fear there isn’t going to be much farm related stuff going up here. Mostly this is going to be about amateur radio from now on. People change, priorities change… The farm’s been sold. It was a purely economic decision. We got the proverbial ‘offer we couldn’t refuse’, and decided to get out while the price was high, and we’ve had no regrets.
Amateur radio, on the other hand, has been going hot and heavy over here. I got a new antenna up, and another is going to be set up as soon as the weather gets warmer. A 35 foot free standing tower is going to be going up this spring. For better or worse, I’m getting more and more involved in ARES and SkyWarn, and I’ve become the primary net control operator for both ARES and SkyWarn operations. More or less by default because no one else wants to do the job. Everyone else would rather be out in the field. Can’t really blame them, of course. Who wants to be stuck in a stuffy emergency communications center in the courthouse basement or in our communications trailer when you could be out in the field actually doing stuff?
I’ve also become the primary HF operator, also by default. Turns out there are only two people in the entire county organization who have a general class license or higher, me and Tom, and Tom got out of HF years ago, sold all of his HF gear and concentrates entirely on VHF and UHF. I’m the only one in the group who has HF gear any more.
But onwards! First, Ham Radio Deluxe…
Well, here we go again. I’m giving HRD another chance. I was so frustrated with the last version I had that I deleted it from the computer, didn’t bother to renew my license and just forgot about it entirely, switching to the always reliable Fldigi.
I must be a glutton for punishment, because I’m trying again. I’m currently testing the latest release, 6.2.72. I also have a brand new laptop with way more horsepower, more memory, more everything, and Win 8.1, and I’m hoping that the new version, along with all new hardware, will finally make what should have been an amazing program, actually work.
Early results have been mixed, to say the least. It does seem more stable than the last version I was using. It hasn’t done anything to my 990, at least. The last version did — well, things. At least three times HRD screwed up my TS-990 so badly I ended up having to do a factory reset of the transceiver to get it working right. At least that hasn’t happened.
The program does a lot of really fun stuff. But it still has a major problem; it crashes. Usually at least once a session Rig Control just shuts down. Windows pops up with a ‘this program has stopped working’ message. That’s all. No errors, no warning, nothing. It just stops. Digital Master does the same, but not as frequently. It was especially irritating when I was trying to work a South Africa station this morning with PSK31 and DM just went away. No warning, no error message, nothing.
I really don’t know what to think any more. I love the access to the spotting networks, love the rig control system, like Digital Master… But it doesn’t do me a heck of a lot of good if it just — stops. I’ll do some more investigation. Maybe I’ll try hooking everything up to the TS-2000 and see if the same problems crop up with that transceiver.
Amplifier Issues — I’ve got a new off center fed dipole up in the backyard that can handle the output of my amps, so I’m finally able to play with those down on HF. I’ve got two, both Ameritrons. One is the big, massive tube type monster that puts out enough heat to keep the shack warm even in a blizzard, and the other is a sleek, svelte, 1,200 watt solid state unit. As soon as I got the solid state amp the boat anchor, with much grunting (the bloody thing weighs around 100 lbs), it got shoved under the desk and the 1200 took it’s place. All was working well, until I noticed my signal strength on receive was going down and down and down… threw the amp into bypass mode, turned the transceiver power down to 5 watts and briefly keyed the mic and to make a long story short all my meters were telling me I didn’t have an antenna connected to the rig. Oops…
A half hour later I’d narrowed it down. I’m about 95% sure it’s the antenna connector on the amp, and I think I know what happened. I’m using 3 or 4 foot long LMR-400 jumpers to connect the amp and tuner and transceiver together. Certainly major overkill. But I got a 500 foot spool of the stuff sitting in the corner and I was darned if I was going to spend perfectly good money on buying cable when I already got that and all I have to do is whack a hunk off, put some connectors on it, and go.
The problem is LMR-400 is really, really stiff. It’s about as flexible as soft copper water pipe. Not a big deal if you’re really careful and pre-bend it before you connect it. Well I wanted to move the amp. What I should have done was disconnect the LMR, move the amp, bend the LMR into the right position and then reconnect it. I didn’t. I just moved the amp, putting a great deal of strain on the connector, and something popped, probably a solder joint inside the connector. So first chance I get I’m going to have to take out the five zillion (approx) screws holding the cover on the thing and see what’s going on.
I haven’t been in any great hurry to fix it because I rarely use the amplifiers. On HF I mostly run PSK31 and other digital modes, and almost never operate at more than 75 watts. About the only thing I want the amps for is getting on the ARES state wide nets down on 75 meters. And I’m hoping that with the new dipole replacing the old Comet vertical, I should be able to cover those even when running just 200 watts.
Enough… First I don’t write anything for months, then I try to cram too much into a single post… Pacing… Need to learn pacing…
Later…
grouchyfarmer 