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After the ‘screaming’ incident with the AT-5555 rig a couple of weeks ago, the rig has seemed quite happy. With the lighter evenings, the band seems to have been open a little longer. By the time I get to the car in the evening, around 1820z there seems to have been just a little propagation left on 28MHz, usually to South America.

For the last couple of evenings, there have been Brazilians to listen to, whilst driving home. Signals have been weak, but I’m hopeful of a contact soon.

Driving around at the weekend, during daylight hours there have been plenty of contacts around Europe and Russia which is good fun for mobile operation.

Soon the Es season will be starting which should be fun on 28MHz.

I was really pleased to work Nigel, ZD7XF at the weekend for a new country.

You might be interested to see a few pictures of Nigel’s previous operation from St Helena here

Nigel is, of course, G3TXF at home and is a very well-known and respected contester and dxpeditioner. He’s also a fine man. Some years ago, I had the absolute pleasure of working with him and Roger, G3SXW on a project building a website and database reporting on the financial performance of Telecom companies. In fact, on Nigel’s amateur radio website, there’s still a bit of code that I wrote which shows all of Nigel’s DXpeditions that a particular callsign has worked, band by band!

So, whenever I work Nigel from a faraway place, it’s always a particular pleasure.

There are some days when things don’t go quite right. In fact, nothing goes quite right.

Yesterday morning, I thought I’d have a look on 28MHz JT65. I plugged the interface lead into the sound card on the computer but there was no receive noise. Fiddled and faffed and discovered that there was a problem on the socket with the computer.

Managed to get around that by using an external USB sound card which came with the ZLP interface. That worked great with WSJT, but with the W6CQZ JT65-HF program which I use on HF there wasn’t enough gain using the basic interface that I have from the FT1000MP. In the shower, I realised the simple way around that was to run all the digimodes from the FT847 which had previously just been used on VHF/UHF. Got that going and in fact, the receive on 28MHz seemed to be better than from the old setup. I had some contacts to test it and all seemed ok.

Later in the day I was playing around on FSK441 on 144MHz and I noticed the output was down! I had a sinking feeling that I had done something horrible to the PA whilst on HF JT65A. Fortunately, it proved to be the patch lead between the FT847 and the amplifier. I removed the patch lead and everything seemed ok. Need to grab some more connectors from Maplin tomorrow and make another up.

Then I got panicky about a noise that the FT847 made when going back to receive on JT65. That proved to be something to do with the JT65-HF program – WSJT was fine. I think it was just a slightly different click of the relays on HF. But I’m not quite convinced!

Playing around on JT65 on LF I realised that the filters in the FT847 weren’t anything like as good as the FT1000MP. I decided to connect the MP back up. On LF, the lack of gain really wasn’t an issue compared to my findings on 28MHz earlier. So that’s good, I can still use the MP for JT65 on 7 and 3.5MHz.

About then, I saw a tweet from Paul, M3JFM to say he’d just worked ZD7XF on 10m. Now, I’m pretty sure that I haven’t worked St Helena from the UK, so I thought I’d better do something about that.

I found Nigel, ZD7XF on 7MHz easily, but what a pileup! I decided to admit defeat somewhat grudgingly and went to bed.

The cats asked to get up at 0530z so I had a quick check on the bands after testing them out. ZD7XF was audible on 3505. I tried a couple of quick calls, but it was clear I wasn’t getting anywhere. Back to bed!

By 0800z ZD7XF was on 21MHz. The Butternut isn’t great on the band, but it works – just. After just a few calls, Nigel was in the log! Already, today seemed more positive. After breakfast, I thought I had a few minutes before I needed to start my jobs! I checked 28MHz and he was there – not strong, but workable. It took a few goes, but I made it. Thank you, Nigel!

It all worked out in the end. Need to get that patch lead sorted and take a look at the socket on the laptop…..

And a quick ‘get well soon’ to Paul, M3JFM who inspired the ZD7XF chase!

This evening as I was driving home, I noticed a loud station on 28.475 running a pileup of mostly Spanish stations. Although my Spanish is sadly very poor, it is good enough for me to realise it was PP5BS. I haven’t worked Brazil yet from the mobile, so I wanted to have a go.

I pressed to transmit and there was a loud whistle. Initially I thought it was feedback or that I was in PA mode, but no. Pressed again and it was fine. Intrigued now, I moved off frequency and kept going over to transmit to see if it would do it again. Once every few it would, but I couldn’t fathom out why.

When I got close to home, I stopped to try and find out more. Associated with the ‘scream’ I could now see that the display said something that looked like ‘5 H 1’.

Great! Back home now, let’s see if I can find a list of Anytone AT-5555 status codes on the web. Um, not really. Back to the manual. Then I found that in the menus there is SWR protection. If turned on, it threatens to give a voice alert and switch off the transmitter. Of course, I had switched off voice alerts, so it was giving me a warning tone. And the display? Really, it was showing S HI which probably translates to SWR HI!

Now it makes some sense. When I mounted the transceiver, the PL259 for the antenna lead seemed a bit close to the floor, but I didn’t worry. I think the car was bumping on bits of road and a poor connection occurring.

I’ve now sorted that out, so I’m hopeful my rig will stop screaming at me!

I’ve just applied for the Notice of Variation to allow me to change my callsign during the period of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee where it will become GQ4VXE and then during the Olympics when it will become GO4VXE

Should be fun!

The process is simple. As long as you have your OFCOM Lifetime Licence Number! I didn’t and had to scrabble around on the OFCOM site to get that. Once I had it, I had the online forms filled in and the NOVs in the form of PDF documents emailled back to me immediately.

You can apply here

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll know that I have been keen to get going on the VHF datamodes, particularly the WSJT modes. I’d been thwarted up until now by the lack of an interface and I’d been reluctant to part with money until I could verify that things ought to work ok! I’d had some bad experiences with the FT-847 and interfaces in the past.

The random trigger for getting this sorted out was seeing a tweet from Colin G6AVK on Twitter that he had ordered a ZLP interface for his laptop. I hastily Googled ZLP Electronics and discovered a range of interfaces very competively priced. I e-mailed Neil, G4ZLP to ask his advice about interfacing with the FT-847 and he recommended the Pro Plus interface. On the basis of his advice I placed an order.

Two days later it arrived, well packaged. Getting the FT-847 setup proved very simple indeed – although I’d had a bit of fun and games getting the levels right from the Pro Plus interface to my FT1000MP. However, it was the VHF/UHF rig that I really wanted to interface with.

Armed with the interface and the WSJT software, I popped onto the ON4KST chat server to see if anyone was around to try a JT6M test with. Although I only have the vertical up, I thought it would probably yield some results. And so it proved, as I was quickly able to exchange signals with Pat, EI8IQ on 50MHz although the reflections ran out before we could complete a ‘proper’ QSO.

Yesterday evening, I set the receiver running on 144.370 with the FSK441 decoder going and I was pleased to decode a meteor burst from Martin OK1UGA. I shall be keen to try and work him sometime soon.

Will 50W from the FT-847 be enough? I have a 4CX350A amplifier here, but I’m sort of trying to avoid using it! And I wonder if I can make some JT6M QSOs with the vertical, or will I have to try and erect a dipole or a low beam? It’ll be fun finding out!