CT-17 – Spinning and Grinning

… From The Shack

2006 CQ WW DX Contest: It has been a learning experience so far. Much more intense than Field Day. It seems as if the bands are jam packed – nothing but “CQ Contest” from 80M to 10M. I started last night a had contacts mostly on 80M, but also a few on 40M – mainly South America and the Caribbean. Today contacts are about even between 15M and 20M… more Caribbean island stations, Africa, and Europe. Not much heard from the Pacific. I did hear a KH6 station on 15M buried in noise.

When I wasn’t on the radio I was finishing the QSL cards from the W4M special event station. I now consider my QSLing activities for W4M complete.

I’ve also been cleaning up my log. As of right now, I’ve logged 1069 QSOs since I upgraded to General in Nov 2005. Of those, 102 are CW QSOs (the first was back in DEC 2005). I need to go back and look up FISTS information and see if I’m close to their basic award. I’ve contacted a total of 86 DXCC entities – maybe I’ll be able to get 14 more during the remainder of the contest. The total towards the Worked All States award is 47. I’m missing Hawaii, Alaska, and Wyoming. I’m also probably close to the basic award for Worked All US Counties. The basic award is for 500 counties, I think.

Best news this weekend – I got the ICOM CT-17 working!. It’s quite slick, I can now click on a DX cluster spot in my logging program and my IC-706MKIIG automatically flips to that frequency. Or, if I’m hunting and pouncing, the log will automatically grab the freq and mode from the radio and place it in the log. I wish I had done this earlier.

I also had a short 30M QSO with Bill, WD8RTW over in WV. The QSO was going well, but then he disappeared. He came back briefly but we ended the QSO.

…. but it wasn’t there!

Had a nice 80M CW QSO last night with Tony, KN4VL. There was some QSB and QRM, but we hung in there for about an hour ragchew. Tony is a retired Marine and has children and grandchildren in the armed services. I think I’m slowly making progress on the CW front.

Yesterday after work I wanted to swap out the feedline on the Carolina Windom from RG-58 to RG-8X. My plan was to lower the matching unit which has an eyelet on top that I used to raise the matching unit up to ~50ft with some heavy duty line.

I loosened the line and attempted to lower the matching unit, but the line was getting hung up in the tree branches above. I let the end of the line go and began to gently pull on the RG-58 feedline to slowly bring the matching unit down to a point where I could reach the line isolator (hanging 22′ below the matching unit) so I could swap feedlines. I got the line isolator down to my level and successfully swapped the feedlines. I then went to grab the end of the line to pull the matching unit back into the treetops, but it wasn’t there! Then I looked up. The line had been shorter than I thought – when I had pulled the matching unit down using the feedline, I had not realized that the line was so short and now the end was dangling a good 15′ above my head! I got out my ladder to try and reach the line but it wasn’t tall enough. I then tried standing on the latter with a rake, in an attempt to snag the line and pull it down. No luck. I had an idea. I grabbed one of the 10′ PVC pipes that I use for my G5RV during a portable setup to support the ends. The top of the pipe has a hole drilled through. I then grabbed about 20′ of small gauge wire, threaded a loop through the hole at the top of the pipe and then took the pole back out to the dangling line up in the air. I was able to get the end of the line through the loop, then pulled the ends of the small gauge wire tight, grabbing the line. I pulled the pipe down and the line came with it. I felt pretty stupid, but I was able to get the Carolina Windom pulled back up (now with the new feedline) and my station is up and operational.

While I think the new feedline has helped improve my signal a bit, I’m still having problems on 17M, 15M, and 12M. 17M I’ve always had issues with and from what I read, it might be an issue with the radio itself. I’m usually able to work PSK31 and Phone on 17M without the tuner, but when I dip down in the CW portion the SWR is much too high. Both 15M and 12M will not tune. Also the SWR is too high to use without the tuner. On my inverted vee, both 15M and 12M are usable. So – I know I will need to play around a bit to get everything working.

This weekend is the 2006 CQ WW DX Contest (Phone). I want to use the contest as an opportunity to complete my initial DXCC requirements. The Carolina Windom is good to go for 80M, 40M, and 20M – so I should have plenty of opportunity to work those DX stations.

At lunch today I was tuning around 20M, 17M, and 15M – lots of activity…. lots of stations testing equipment in preparation for the contest.

I need to do two things before the contest kicks off:
(1) fix the power cable to the radio. When I did some shack clean up, I moved all the equipment onto a new Alinco DM-330MVT power supply using the RigRunner. But I was having some problems with the adapter that goes on the back of the IC-706. I need to pull the power cable off, recheck the PowerPole connectors, and the four pins that connect to the IC-706.
(2) setup the ICOM CT-17 so I can save little time by having my frequency automatically saved when I log QSOs on the computer.

…. the question is – can I get both of those done before the 2000 (local) kickoff of the contest?

N3FJP’s amateur radio logging software

I have been using the N3FJP’s amateur radio logging software since I upgraded to General a year ago. I’m slowly starting to realize what a robust program it is. About a month ago, I started using the DX packet cluster feature about a month ago – very slick. Last night I played around with the software’s ability to print out mailing labels, which (with a little tweaking) will be a much more effective way for me to do my QSL cards. Now I want to explore interfacing the computer directly to the radio with my ICOM CT-17 CI-V level converter. I’ve had the CT-17 since I purchased the radio well over year ago, but have never used it. Setting it up looks pretty straight forward. I should have an available RS-232C cable and then I just need to solder a set of PowerPoles onto the power cable and I’ll be in business. The biggest benefit this will give me is the ability to have the QSO freq directly logged. I may also be nice using this direct computer-to-radio interface with the DX cluster capability… simply click on the DX spot that you want to go to and the radio switches over to it. So… we’ll see how it goes.