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Computers have the ability to raise my blood pressure to dangerous levels, but nothing causes quite so much stress as printers. Like most home users I suspect we are not heavy printer users. But we always seem to end up throwing away a little-used printer (usually with a full cartridge of ink) because of some alleged problem with the print cartridges.

We have an HP Photosmart 2575 All-in-one printer. We have had it for several years. In that time I would estimate that it has used no more than 4 sets of print cartridges. The cartridges installed are full and genuine HP products, not cheap refills. But whenever we try to print a message comes up: “Ink Cartridge Problem. Remove and check color cartridge.”

We have removed, checked and cleaned the colour cartridge. We have  removed, checked and cleaned the black ink cartridge. We have cleaned the contacts. We have done this over and over again and still we get the same damned message.

The stupid thing about this is that the printer will still make a perfect colour copy. So I know that it is perfectly capable of printing. But I can’t print from the computer no matter what I do. Grrrr!

Working JT65A can sometimes be very frustrating. Today 10m was open and quite a bit of DX was coming in but the sum total of my afternoon’s endeavours was precisely two QSOs.

This mode does eat up time. I called several stations to no avail: either they didn’t hear me or replied to someone else. A couple of stations I called faded out in mid-QSO so I never received any rogers. I tried calling CQ and had a couple of replies, but they never came back after I sent their report.

It takes two minutes each time to find out if the other guy can even hear you. So you can spend a lot of time on abortive contacts.

On well, there’s always tomorrow!

I think I narrowly avoided a battery fire or explosion in the shack this morning. For the last 18 months or so I have been using my old HTC Touch 2 smartphone as my 2m APRS iGate (I hated it as a phone.) All that time it has been sitting in the desktop cradle talking to my Kenwood TM-D710 TNC via a Bluetooth connection and providing a 24/7 gateway that is silent (unlike my PC) and uses less power.

This morning Colin M0XSD sent me an APRS message and I took the phone out of the cradle so I could use its keyboard to reply. I noticed that it felt quite hot. After about 5 minutes conversation the battery died. Having been on permanent charge that should not have happened.

My dead Touch 2 battery – can you see the bulge?

I took the still warm Li-Ion battery out of the phone and noticed there was a distinct bulge on both sides of the casing. So I suppose that it was on the way to exploding or catching fire. Unfortunately the phone won’t work with the battery removed and powered only from the desktop cradle. So my G4ILO-2 iGate is off the air. I will think again about the wisdom using a permanently-charged smartphone as an iGate in the future!

JT65-HF-Comfort, the fork of JT65-HF that I mentioned a few weeks ago, has now been made into a public beta. There is now a project page at http://abcsolutions.de/jt65hf/. There is also a forum at http://jt65hfcomfort.iphpbb3.com/. If you use JT65-HF then you should really join the forum in order to have an input to the changes being discussed.

I had an all-day session on the JT modes today. Actually, almost all of today’s contacts were on JT65A. I did listen for JT9-1 signals a few times but most of the time I only saw stations I had already worked before.

I put out a CQ call on 15m JT9-1 and Joe Taylor K1JT came back to me. I’ve decoded Joe’s WSPR signals numerous times and I’ve exchanged several emails with him but I had never had a radio contact with him until now, so that was a nice surprise.

Then it was back to JT65A. The contrast in activity was extreme. There were so many stations active I couldn’t find a space to call CQ, so I had to wait and pounce on new stations that called.

I must say that when using JT9 I miss the infrastructure that has been built up around the JT65A mode – the reverse beacons, the auto-spotting to PSK Reporter so you can see how far your signals have got, the JT-Alerts when you decode someone you’ve worked before. I especially need the B4 alerts. My memory is so bad I can’t remember the calls of stations I’ve worked before so I have often called people who I have worked only a couple of days earlier. I guess that due to the lack of new stations they probably don’t mind too much!

No not that ISS! This is station II5ISS which I worked on 20m PSK31 whilst testing some tweaks to KComm.

If you’re interested, you can win an award by working II5ISS on three or more bands before the end of 2013.

I always like reading about what can be achieved using a stealth antenna system, so I always enjoy reading the blog of John, N8ZYA.

From a town house in Charleston, West Virginia using 3 watts of CW to an indoor random wire, John has made 1,830 contacts including 361 DX stations in 73 different countries. Simply amazing!

I hope you don’t mind me pinching your picture, John!