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Getting comfortable

December 27th, 2025 |

As much as it is hard for me to believe, this past year I officially became a senior citizen in Canada—that’s 65 years old. Do I feel older? Not really at all, but one thing I have noticed is that my long periods of contesting have required me to make some adjustments. It may not have anything to do with me getting older, but deep down, I know it’s a factor. Being a fan of radio sport, I sit for long periods of time in front of the PC and the radio. Below are some of the adjustments this senior citizen has made to make radio sport easier.

To begin with, all who are involved in radio sport sit for long periods of time. For that reason, I have an office chair with above-average support: adjustable lumbar support, head and neck support, height adjustment, rollers for easy movement, and, finally, height-adjustable armrests—more on that later.

All my monitors are on adjustable arms, and I have them all adjusted to eye level. There is no looking up or down. In the past, I have found that continued looking up or down can get aggravating on my neck and shoulders. I have also moved the monitors in close so they are easy to see, reducing eye strain from small print. I have the programs I need for radio sport spread out over two screens. This way, information is not cramped, and nothing is hidden in the taskbar. Finally, I have a monitor connected to my Icom 7610. This stops me from looking down at the radio display. All the information is at eye level,and large and easy to see. Having said all the above there is one monitor connected to my Raspberry Pi4B that I use for Hamclock. The monitor for this sits on the top shelf of my desk. I have no room for another eye level monitor. I only check this monitor from time to time to view VOACAP propagation.

During contesting, there are times I use the VFO for tuning while searching and pouncing (S&P). For this reason, I have moved the radio closer to me on the desk. It allows me easy reach to the radio with no leaning forward and overstretching.

One piece of hardware I use all the time is the keyboard. In my case, I use a full-size keyboard, the Lenovo Professional. In the past, I have tried the small keyboards, but I just find them to be a cramped workspace. I have a wrist support that is the full length of the keyboard. I found it was too low, and my wrists were still at an angle, so I added just the right amount of 3x5 cards under the support to get the right height. The keyboard itself is on an adjustable tray for both height and closeness to me. Once the keyboard is at the right level and closeness, I have adjusted the armrests on my chair so my arms are level with the keyboard.

Now, a computer would not be complete without a mouse. My mouse is off to the right and also has a wrist support. Right beside the mouse is my Icom VFO B RC-28, sharing the same wrist support. On the left side of the keyboard, I have another smaller keyboard tray that extends from the side of the large keyboard tray. I have a mouse connected to my Icom 7610. This mouse allows me to click on band spots that are shown on the waterfall display on the large monitor at eye level. This allows me to slide my left hand off the keyboard, click on a spot, and return to the keyboard without even looking down.

Alongside N1MM+ logging software, I also use the Win4icom suite. This allows me to change bands, and each band macro is set up to adjust filter, noise reduction on or off, noise blanker on or off, RF gain per band setting, and filter settings if needed. I can have all this done with one mouse click on the Win4icom software.

I am able to use my hearing aids along with my headphones. My hearing aids have fine adjustments I can make to allow me to hear weaker signals and adjust tone and sound for maximum benefit and less fatigue. All this can be saved to my iPhone and called up when I need it. My setting name is “Contesting.” All I do is swipe the iPhone hearing aid app to Contesting, and it sets everything up automatically.

The final thing is a portable heater set up at my keyboard level and set to low heat. In the winter, even if my radio room is warm, I find that over time my fingers get very cold. When this happens, the heater is turned on, and warm air blows across the keyboard. In no time, my fingers are nice and warm.

In the station setup picture the mouse on the right is my main PC mouse along with the RC-28 external vfo. On the left side the mouse on the blue mouse pad controls the Pi4b Hamclock screen. Its a bit hard to see but under the tray that holds the Pi4b mouse and Begali key is the tray that holds the mouse for the Icom 7610 in which I can click on waterfall signals.

These setup ideas I use may not only be for us seniors but for anyone. I just find that as I get a bit older that these help greatly. If you have any suggestions of your own, do drop them in the comments.

RAC Winter contest was a bust!!

December 20th, 2025 |

Author: Mike VE9KK

I was very disappointed, but I wanted to err on the side of caution. This weekend was the running of the RAC Winter contest, which is very well attended. I get a lot of practice running in this contest, and it is a great help in my contesting journey. Unfortunately, the weather forecast put a damper on the weekend contest. For our area, high winds were forecast up to 100 km/h along with rain that could turn into freezing rain. My antenna, the Hustler 4BTV, according to DX Engineering, is rated for winds up to 88 km/h. At the best of times, I don’t like to venture even close to that number with my antenna. This weekend it “could” reach 100 km/h, and then add to that the possibility of freezing rain. This weather event was to start on Friday and run until Saturday evening.

I have the ability to tilt the antenna down and secure it, which is what I did. Being retired now and on a fixed income, to replace the antenna would be about $600.00 with tax and shipping. I am not in a position to drop that kind of money because I decided to leave the antenna up and see what happens. Eventually, I would like to get the Butternut HF6V, as it can withstand winds up to 130 km/h. For the most part, other than a hurricane, I could leave it up without worry. At this point in time, that antenna is way out of our budget for a hobby.

The antenna will go back vertical on Sunday, and it lives for another day on the air, pushing out CW. It did give me more time on the weekend to spend working on my python coding projects for ham radio.

As a side note my participation in the contest would not had been as heavy as like in days gone by. We found out 2 weeks ago that my wife Julie has cancer. Things worked out great in that all with in a 2 week period she was able to see a specialist and then see a cancer surgeon and then have surgery as well. She had her operation on Wednesday and is now at home. We shall now see what the next steps are, but for now we are just enjoying Christmas.

RAC Winter contest was a bust!!

December 20th, 2025 |

Author: Mike VE9KK

ARRL 10m contest 2025

December 15th, 2025 |

Author: Mike VE9KK

Final score

Another ARRL 10m contest is in the books, and once again, I was surprised by how well 10m performed. The solar numbers were good—not great, but good. This meant there was fading in and out of signals. At one point, when I was calling CQ contest and a station came back to me, you had one chance to complete the contact, or they were gone for good.

Saturday was a great day with many long runs and high hourly contact rates. I just figured that Sunday would be a lot of the same… NOT. I found Sunday to be slower, with the average hourly run between 50 to 70 contacts. Toward Sunday late afternoon, it seemed I was calling CQ contest to empty space, and it was at this time I found my rate was better just searching and pouncing my way along the band.

It was nice again to contact fellow blogger Bas. He was just at the noise floor, but was readable and in the log. Oh, and thanks, Bas, for spotting me on the cluster—once I completed our contact, things started to get very busy for me. When this happens, I find narrowing my filter to 200Hz and turning up my CW speed from 32 to 36wpm has a way of thinning things out. Not as much in this contest, though, as my exchange is my Canadian Province, and it, in most cases, self-populates for most contacts. Once things slow down a bit, the filter goes back to 300Hz and the speed to 32wpm again.

From my location, I found 10m open at 8am to Europe, and I could hear them answering U.S. and Canadian calls, but I heard none of those stations until noon. At noon, it then turned into a mix of North America and Europe until early afternoon, when most of Europe faded away. Late afternoon it was still North America but now with some Central America and South America mixed in. Around 4pm local time, most, if not all, stations were gone, or the fading was so bad it was very frustrating to make a contact.

I know I’ve hit my limit, and it’s time for a break when I start to make silly mistakes. Case in point: I had a call from a fellow CWop, K4RUM, he is from NY, so my logging program prefilled that—BUT he sent FL. Not a problem; he’s enjoying some warm sunshine. Very simple to hit a few keys and change the state—I do it all the time. Well, not if you’re getting tired like me. I sent K4RUMNY as his call. Then I sent K4RUMFL as his call. I am now pounding foolish keyboard keys such as

“?” my province “NB” and well finally I sent K4RUM FL TU. He gave me two “dits” from his key with what I would imagine was a smile on his face.

I am now gearing up for the next big contest out this way: the RAC Winter contest on December 20. See you all there.

CQ world wide DX CW contest 2025

December 1st, 2025 |

Author: Mike VE9KK

Nice to see this type of action on 10m.

Once again, the CQ WW CW contest has come to an end. Although the conditions were not as favorable as last year, it was still a fantastic event. Some highlights included contacting fellow blogger Bas, who was using his new contest call PA6G on 20m, as well as reaching ZD7VJ on St. Helena Island and VP8NO on the Falkland Islands.

I was pleasantly surprised to connect with many South American stations on 10m on Sunday afternoon. I’m pleased to report there were no station issues at all—everything ran very smoothly.

CQ world wide DX CW contest 2025

December 1st, 2025 |

Author: Mike VE9KK

Nice to see this type of action on 10m.

I was pleasantly surprised to connect with many South American stations on 10m on Sunday afternoon. I’m pleased to report there were no station issues at all—everything ran very smoothly.

Python and what I have been up too.

November 24th, 2025 |

Author: Mike VE9KK

A snippet of the shutdown python script as actions are taken.

Python and what I’ve been up to… well, let me tell you!
I’ve honestly surprised myself with the automation I’ve built for starting up and shutting down my contesting setup. Before Python, the startup routine was a long chain of manual steps: launching VSPE and waiting, then clicking on Win4Icom Suite and waiting again, then starting N1MM+ and waiting some more, then opening Firefox, navigating to the Reverse Beacon Network, entering my call, checking that I was spotted, and refreshing it every 10 minutes.

Now? Thanks to Python, all of that happens with a single mouse click. I LOVE IT!

With one mouse click my Kasa plug turns on, powers on my Astron power supply and Pi4B and it begins its startup. Then VSPE starts, then Win4icom starts, N1MM+ starts and finally Firefox opens to Reverse beacon network were it logs in and then enters my call sign to show who is hearing my CQ contest calling and will refresh every 10 minutes.

Now If you’re curious about the hiccups and challenges I ran into along the way, keep reading. Or, if you’d rather skip ahead, feel free to jump to the end where I share some of my upcoming Python-and-amateur-radio project—you might be surprised!

Let’s start with the Wi-Fi plug that kicks off the entire startup process. I needed a Python library to communicate with my Kasa plug—easy enough. Then I needed to find the plug’s IP address—again, no problem. But one day, my Python terminal that handles the whole start-and-stop sequence suddenly threw an error related to the Wi-Fi plug. After some investigating, I realized our router had restarted and reassigned the plug a new IP address. That completely broke my script.

More research led me to a great solution: I could assign a name to the plug and have Python search for the device by name, then automatically discover whatever IP address the router had given it. Problem solved—elegantly.

With the Wi-Fi plug sorted out, I moved on to scripting the rest of the startup sequence. I added every program I needed, in the exact order they had to launch, and it worked beautifully… until I noticed that some programs loaded slower than others. That meant certain tasks weren’t finished before the next program in the chain started, and everything just froze. The fix turned out to be simple: insert time delays between launches to give each program the breathing room it needs.

Next came Win4Icom. Tom, VE2FSQ, does an incredible job keeping his software updated—there’s a new version roughly every month with improvements and bug fixes. But once a new version came out, my Python script kept opening the old one. To fix that, I wrote code that automatically checks for the latest installed version every time and launches that one instead.

Then I ran into another issue: occasionally Python wasn’t shutting down my Icom 7610 correctly through the Win4Icom software. That meant the radio was being abruptly disconnected when the Wi-Fi plug powered off my power supply. NOT GOOD. So instead of relying on Win4Icom for shutdown, I added the Icom CI-V shutdown command directly into my Python script. That ensured the 7610 powered down properly every single time.

My Pi4B is also tied into the Wi-Fi plug, but that part is simple—when the plug turns on, the Pi boots normally, no Python needed. Shutting the Pi down, however, is a different adventure involving Windows and Python… and I’ll save that story for the next post.

As promised, here’s a preview of what I’m working on next. When a contest is over, I normally have to:

Go to the 3830 scoring site and manually enter my score.
Generate a CAB file and submit it to the contest sponsor.
Generate an ADIF file within N1MM+.
Submit that ADIF to my logging program Amateur Radio Contest Log then do the same for LOTW, Club Log, CWops, and QRZ.com.

I’m developing a Python program that will do all of that automatically:
• Login to 3830, fill in the band breakdowns, multipliers, total contacts and multipliers and final score.
• Generate a CAB file from within N1MM+.
• Generate an ADIF file from N1MM+ and load it into Amateur Radio Contest Log.
• From within Amateur Contest Log program, automatically open Club Log and LOTW and submit the logs.
• Then log into QRZ.com and CWops and submit the score there as well.

All with one mouse click—while I sit back and watch it happen.

My next post will be dealing with the contest shutdown process. At this point I am just starting the new project I mentioned above.