Author: dick

Goodies

I received a nice box via FedEX yesterday. Earlier this month, I won a weekly  random drawing in the Icom HamNation Weekly Swag contest. The box contained an Icom ball cap, Icom T-shirt, bumper sticker, map, chapstick with the Icom logo, an Icom neck lanyard, a nice Icom Luggage/Equipment tag, a pen, a couple of fake tattoos, lots of equipment brochures, and probably some other things that have slipped out of my feeble mind. Nothing of great value or consequence, but really appreciated and enjoyed! Thank you, Icom! The swag all goes well with and compliments my IC-7300!

The procedure is simple … watch HamNation (on YouTube), and then fill out your info and answer a few survey questions (see the link in the first paragraph). You have a chance to win a weekly prize or a Grand Prize monthly. Nothing ventured … nothing gained, right?

I worked a bunch of stations on 17, 60, and 80 meters yesterday evening. I was hearing good signals on all the hf bands except 10 meters. Truthfully, you can make FT8 contacts just about anytime on SOME band.

73 de Dick N4BC

 

Good Vibrations …

Good vibrations … to quote the Beach Boys … RF vibrations, that is. Last night, I heard stations on just about all HF bands, some quite strong. I worked over a dozen FT8 stations on 40 and 60 meters. The higher frequencies, not so much luck. Although they were solid reception, I just couldn’t connect. Even 80 meters was reasonably devoid of QRN.

I got my RTTY setup working. I was using the wrong mode on the IC-7300. I was set to RTTY and should have been in USB-D since I was using AFSK. At least, it seems to work now. I couldn’t find any RTTY stations on the air yesterday evening to do a final test. But … listening on another receiver, I can hear the diddle and mark/space tones when doing a test transmission.

73 de Dick N4BC

 

A Couple of New Ones!

I worked two new countries this evening, both on FT8 … Oman on 40 meters and the Falkland Islands on 30 meters. Yes, Virginia, there is life left in the ham bands.

I also went ahead and updated the firmware on my IC-7300 with no problems noted. I don’t know why so many people have difficulties with this … if you follow the manual step-by-step, it’s hard to mess it up. DO remember, however, to save your configuration before upgrading, unless you want to go menu diving and setting up your whole operating environment again.

I downloaded MMTTY and integrated it with N1MM+ in preparation for the RTTY contest tomorrow. I haven’t tested it live on the air yet, but it should work fine. Tomorrow will tell!

Wow … three posts today! Maybe I should have saved up and dribbled it out more slowly. Oh well, I hadn’t posted for a while so I guess this makes up for it.

73 de Dick N4BC