dick | N4BC

Playtime!

I received the SDRPlay RSP1A yesterday evening, and spent the evening getting familiar with the SDRuno software. It’s pretty complex, but allows you to interact with nearly any parameter in the receiver. So powerful!

My first hurdle to overcome was finding a USB 2.0 A-B cable. I was sure I had one in my magic tub of tangled cables, but I couldn’t find it there. I ended up “borrowing” the cable from my CW keyer. I checked Best Buy and they wanted anywhere from thirty-five to two hundred dollars for one! Must have been solid gold (including the insulation)! Amazon had one with ferrite beads for around eight dollars and it was one day delivery! Guess which one I bought?

Anyhow, using the “borrowed” cable and referring to websites and to YouTube, I got everything up and running just fine. I was listening to everything from AM broadcast to 70 centimeters. Lots of neat stuff.

It was a timely arrival, too. I had gotten on the air after work and tried to work some POTA stations and some FT4/FT8, but no luck with either. The parks stations were all down in the mud and few and far between. I think the nasty weather kept a lot of them at home. The FT stations … not sure what was going on there. I could copy them well, but they just weren’t answering. The time offset was good … I was within about 0.1 second on most of them. Just one of those things, I guess. It gave me more time to play with my new toy!

73 de Dick N4BC

New Toy!

The weather yesterday was terrible! Monday the temperature was near 80 deg Fahrenheit, and Tuesday it dropped into the 30s and hit us with sleet and snow (no accumulation, thankfully!). Last night it was in the 20s and the doors on my truck froze shut and needed some serious muscle power this morning at 0530 am. So I was depressed and when I get depressed, I want to buy something 😀 !

Anyway, HRO had a Social Media Special on the RSP1A Software Defined Radio … $89.95 + free shipping for the first 100 orders ($30 off regular price). Looked neat and I had always wanted to dabble, so I sprang for one. Should be here before the weekend, so I’ll have something to play with. Maybe I’ll integrate it with my IC-7300 as a higher resolution panadapter? Who knows?

73 de Dick N4BC

Problems

I had an issue last night. I fired up everything to work some FT8/FT4, and the rig was intermittently shutting down. I would get error messages about loss of communication with the port from Win4Icom, and oddly enough, a message from Windows Defender about how it had saved me from myself! Certainly some mixed messages!

The prime problem was the radio turning off, though. At first, I thought maybe the software was shutting it down remotely, but eliminated that. My next suspicion was that RF was getting into the laptop. That wasn’t it either!

Next, I wiggled the positive wire from the power supply to the rig … no change. Then I wiggled the black ground wire … the rig powered off! Further tugging and wiggling pulled the wire out of the terminal on the rear of the Samlex power supply. Aha!!

Evidently, the setscrew holding the wire in the terminal had loosened over time and finally, there was enough resistance to cause the voltage to drop below the minimum required to run the radio.

The moral of the story is that a simple problem can mimic a host of other problems. If your radio is shutting down, check the voltage first!

73 de Dick N4BC

Finally! Two Hundred Parks!

It took a while. I finally got 200 unique parks confirmed and have the paper to prove it 😀 .

Actually, I had a bonus one as well … 201 confirmed. I started chasing parks on the 18th of February 2019. I don’t do it seriously, and only intermittently, but they add up. This is a pretty popular program with lots of participants.

The most prolific activator is KB3WAV, Kerri. She has activated 402 parks, 240 of them unique, and made 16,086 contacts as of this date.

On the hunters side, W8ZST, Mike, is the leader. He has worked 2,615 unique parks and has 5,849 contacts so far.

Lots of commitment there, folks. You can see that some people really get into POTA (https://parksontheair.com/). It’s fun … it’s challenging … try it!

73 de Dick N4BC