Month: December 2018

A New Baby!

Look, guys … it’s a new baby straight key!

Black Micro Morse Key with Red Knob

It’s a 3-D printed straight key mounted on a solid aluminum base … really stable (also available without the base). The base is 3.75 x 1.5 inches (10 x 3.8 cm). It’s produced by a father/son team in Texas and the price is reasonable. The service is super fast, too!  The company is CW Morse and there are all sorts of color combinations and styles available. A more limited selection is available at MFJ, under MFJ’s own part number. Check out CW Morse’s site for more details and prices. I’m really looking forward to getting out in the field with this one. Actually, I think it’ll be put to use in the shack on the ARRL Straight Key Night, January 1st, from 0000 to 2359 UTC. See you there!

73 de Dick N4BC

2.0 … Workin’ Fine

I got on the air with WSJT-X when I got home from work this afternoon, and everything worked the way it’s supposed to. I made 25 contacts on 80 through 17 meters, using version 2.0 … except for 60 meters … Everybody on 60 was still using ver. 1.9.1.

This is a good sign. Looks like lots of people upgraded. There is a decided increase in the number of stations running the latest version. I even worked a new one on 17 meters … ZD7JC, St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic. This is where the British imprisoned Napoleon after his defeat.

73 de Dick N4BC

Hey! Where’d they all go?

Checked out FT8 last night … started by using WSJT-X 2.0 rc5 … crickets! Where’d everybody go after the contest? Lots of activity on the spectrum display. So I reverted to ver 1.9.1 and voila! … tons of stations!

I think it’s going to be an uphill battle to move everybody to the newer version. Still, when the non-beta version 2.0 is released on December 10th, I may be surprised. I hope so … this newer iteration of WSJT-X really has some good features and Joe and his crew seem to have fine-tuned the decoding algorithm for optimum performance.

73 de Dick N4BC