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Yesterday late afternoon I had a chance to sit down and put my feet up on the patio. I was checking out the new QST on my Ipad with the sun coming in and out from the clouds. From my position, I have a clear view of my Endfed wire. As I was gazing at my Endfed and the nice clear sky something on my Endfed antenna caught my eye there was movement on the antenna!
As I got closer my antenna was very busy with black ants going back and forth on the antenna. I was shocked by the amount of activity the tree that supports my antenna does have lots of ants. I was curious where they were going and what all the excitement was about. The opposite end of the antenna is terminated at my shed. I saw them coming down the support pole, along the roof of my shed then onto a maple tree branch that was just touching the peak of my shed roof. Not sure what they were after but whatever it was it seemed it was worth the trip.

Meet and greet

I did notice when ants met who were travelling in opposite directions they seemed to greet each other. After some reading (ants are fascinating) it was not so much of a greeting but more a checking each other out to see if they were from the same colony.......if not it would be a fight to the death! Sometimes there is more than just RF and SWR floating around on your antenna.

Today I was planning ( you may get the idea by the first 4 words things did not go as planned) to sit down at the radio (Icom 7610) do some reading regarding the radio. I have the Icom advanced manual as well as The radio today guide to the Icom IC 7610 by Andrew Barron ZL3DW. I started up the 7610 without issue found my two above mentioned books. As a sideline, I have been following a conversation on the 7610 I.O. user groups site regarding external monitor issues. The last post it was advised to check the inline fuses? I never heard of inline fuses on a monitor and was just checking online to see if I could see any information. My first thought was someone is confusing the power line fuses in this case. I put the info into my browser hit enter and some sites came up and I clicked on the first site and low and behold my monitor went red in color and I was greeted with the picture above! There was also a phone number (not included in the pic) of "Microsoft" and they could guide me on how to solve the issue. Well, it was obvious to me that this is a scam but my huge issue was my security program did not pick it up and stop the loading. My security program is Bitdefender but more about that in a moment. What happened was my mouse became extremely slow to move around the screen. I was not able to access task manager to close my browser, I was not able to shut my PC down or restart it via menu options. At the time the only option seem to restart the PC by holding in the reset button beside my power on/off button. The PC started without issue and first off I wanted to make sure Bitdefender was running and it was, I then checked to make sure there were no features turned off and all were on. I then opened Malwarebytes (premium trial version) and did a scan and it picked up right away there was an issue. After the scan was done the issue files were deleted. It was time to find out what was up with Bitdefender and why it did not pick up on the issue? I went to their site directly to online chat. In a nutshell, the tech rep only wanted the Malwarebytes log files to be sent and examined. I was disappointed the tech rep did not want to go over my Bitdefender settings to make sure all was on that should be. There really was nothing he did other than having me email the logs. My yearly subscription with Bitdefender is up in 34 days and the handling of this issue my make my mind up either way if I am going to renew or not. Last week I had another question for them and the tech support told me the "back office" would email me a response very soon. Well, guess what I have never heard a thing from them so let's see what comes of the log file submission.  

Another CQWPX CW contest has come and gone and this year for me it was a parttime effort as the weather was great here and many outdoor "Stuffs" had to be done. I was shocked to see 10m open and I was able to bag 7 contacts there. During my first leg of the contest on Saturday, I found it very hard to contact any Europian stations. I did make one into Ireland and that was it. The second leg of the contest was Sunday and it seemed that Europe had opened up just fine and I was making DX contacts. The only issue during the short time I was taking part in the contest was the XIT issue which I posted about a few days ago. The other issue was right at the get-go of the contest, I was not able to get the N1MM CW macros to key up the Icom 7610. I have been working QSO parties Win4Icom rig control software looks after N1MM+ as 3rd party software. I do this because I can control the 7610 via my mouse using Win4Icom software. So things like band changes, fine filter adjustments, APF on and off and so on. I did not want to play with the issue for too long as I was not really going to be in the contest for all that long. I ended up going back to old school operating.....well almost old school no paper and pencil yet. I shut down Win4Icom and configured the N1MM+ com port to talk directly to the 7610. In minutes I was up and running again.
without issue and not an issue! Most of the time I get on the radio the day before a contest and test out the rig, software and keyer to make sure all is well.....guess what I failed to do the day before this time? My setup is as follows, I use
Below is the contest breakdown:
20m          73 contacts
15m          20 contacts
10m            7 contacts
Total      100
Score 18,778
WPX        83

I am operating in the CW CQWPX contest today and just can't contact anyone. Yesterday all was good but today NOTHING at all. Have a look at the above picture and see if you can see what's wrong. It took me some time as I kept overlooking the obvious.

Last evening I wandered down the hall to the radio room someplace I have not been for about 2 weeks or so. I have been taking advantage of the great weather here to get some outdoor projects done.  There was a shed to level and rebuild and also a deck to level and refinish. Doing those projects during the day left me with no real energy to get on the radio in the evenings. For some reason last evening I just had a nice kick in my step and it was off to the radio room for some FT8 adventures. I found myself on 30m and it was hopping with activity at 0200 UTC. One of my contacts was to the Dodecanese and I had never heard of this location. I looked it up and it is a group of 15 large islands and 150 smaller ones. SV5DKL was from Rhodes which is the capital of the Dodecanese islands. These set islands are a part of Greece but it was very cool to contact this off the beaten path location. Overall I was very pleased with the conditions on 30m and I was on making contacts until 0300 UTC and then my internal clock told me it was time to hit the sack.

RFI issue spread across the band

Over the last let's say a month or so I have been seeing some RFI on the waterfall of my Icom 7610 that is new. For about 7 months I have been RFI free at my new QTH and was very happy regarding this fact. At my old QTH in downtown Toronto RFI was the norm. 20m seems to be the worst for the issue and it's not all the time and as for what are the times I am not exactly sure. I have been very lazy with trying to narrow down a time frame for the RFI events. Way back about 10 years I did have a plasma TV that gave me a huge headache but I was able to solve that issue with the MFJ 1026 noise cancelling unit. In my wisdom, I ended up selling the MFJ unit for whatever reason. To try to narrow down the issue I have done the following:
- Switched to my active antenna and I still had the issue.
- I change to battery power only and I still had the issue.
- I turned off the main AC circuit breaker to the house and I still had the issue while using battery power obviously. Oh and an added note.....my dear wife was not happy about that.

Sometimes the RFI stops but then soon starts

-Switched to my dummy load and the issue was gone but so were all signals.
So from the above, it seems it is being picked up by the antenna and not something within my home. At this point, I have not tried to pinpoint times as to when or if the RFI is present. I will be within the next few weeks paying very close attention to times when I am on and if the RFI is present or not. Until then I wanted to see if I was able to solve the issue with the Icom 7610's filtering. The choices I have are the noise reduction option or the noise blanker option. As a side note, my previous rig was the Elecraft K3 and it had amazing filtering for RFI issues. It was time to put the Icom 7610 to the test and see how it performed. I tried both the NR and NB and found it was the NB (noise blanker) that did the trick. I was able to totally remove the RFI and still hear the CW signal that was getting buried in the noise. Within the noise blanker settings, you can adjust the level, depth and width. I did find certain settings worked better than others at removing the offending RFI. I did change over to my Elecraft KX3 just to see how it dealt with the RFI and I was shocked how it really was not able to remove the RFI and the Icom 7610 won hands down!

This is 20m FT8 on Saturday it sure is very hard to belly up to the bar and find a spot for your signal cursor! I would chance to say that FT8 is seeming to have caught on. I did manage to contact many U.S stations are well as Russia, France and the Netherlands.