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Back in late April, I posted the inspection of two heat sinks my Icom 7610. I always get a bit anxious when I remove all the cable from the radio and all that is plugged into it. In the past, I have learned that it saves lots of time and headaches if I use my trusty iPhone and take pictures of the cabling. I really don't have all that many cables at the back of the radio BUT I still take pictures. Once the heat sinks checked out to be without issue it was time to re-connect the radio again along with my trusty pictures.
All was connected and it was time to fire up the radio and see what happened. Everything was good and now it was time to make sure all software was "talking" to the radio. There were no issues so far until I went into transmit. The antenna I am using is an EndFed multiband and I do need a tuner to allow a decent SWR. The odd thing was it seemed my tuner lost its memories of the presets for each band. That was no issue I just started back at square one and returned each band so it was in memory. The issue was after tuning the band I would attempt to transmit and the tuner would start tuning again as the SWR seemed to go back up over 3.0. The first thing I checked was that the antenna was still up and it was as you never know stuff happens. I double-checked the rear of the radio with my pictures and all was good there.
To me, it seemed something was up with either a coax patch cable or the coax out to the antenna. The first thing I wanted to check was the PL259 connectors on the back of the radio. I have in the past had these connectors show issues once they were moved around with being unconnected and re-connected. I try to keep coax angles very slight as I have found over time this can add stress to the connection. I was not looking forward to the whole process but it was the next step that had to be done.
I am not sure why but out of the corner of my eye I noticed my LDG DTS-4 antenna switch which I use as a radio switch (between my Icom 7610 and Elecraft KX3) and not antenna switch as I only have one antenna at the moment. The light on the DST-4 position 1 for my 7610 was out and the light for the KX3 position 4 was on! Problem solved the DTS-4 was grounding out my 7610 as it was not selected and with the simple push of a button my problem was solved.  

Up until this weekend, I was deep into the QSO party challenge which means getting on the radio each weekend and logging contacts in each of the QSO parties here in  Canada and the U.S. This weekend was all prepared for and it was going to be a barn burner with 5 QSO parties going on! Here was the dilemma.....the weather on Saturday and Sunday was forecast to be great. That is not good when I have to jack up our large deck and redo the foundations to bring it level. This is due to the fact that the previous owner had no idea or hired someone who had no idea what they were doing.........or as what I say "if you hire someone and pay peanuts you get monkeys". Then speaking of foundations our large shed foundation was put in by the same person. The shed is old and to jack, it up would just bring on more issues as the shed is at its end of life. The new shed was ordered and came in on Saturday sooooo I had to begin the demo of the old shed as well. A very not so much ham radio weekend but these things had to be done and it takes precedent over the hobby.

Bottom cover removed

In the Icom 7610, there are two ADC (analog-digital converters) that in some rigs an issue with the heat sinks have either become loose or all together falls off. There was an issue during production with certain radios where this was an issue. My serial number did not fall into the run that had this particular problem. BUT I did want to double-check to make sure I had no issue with the ADC heat sinks. I have had very good luck with my 7610. As most have heard the Icom 7610 has a notorious issue with their screens. My rig now is over a year old and I have had no screen issues and I hope I am safe to say that I am out of the woods......but if something does come up with my screen Icom has said that all screen issues are covered no matter the date of your rig.

No issues with heat sinks.

Back to the ADC issue, today I decided to inspect the ADC heat sink to make sure there was no issue. I removed the bottom cover and was thrilled to see both ADC heat sinks were without issue. I know my radio was not one of the production runs that had this issue but it does not hurt to check.

A funny thing happened on the way down the hall to work today......I'm retired so I guess it was not my way to work but my wife Julie. She is a tech support person and is now working from home. She takes both phone calls and internet chat to solve issues. Earlier this week we set her up to work from home and her office is in the same room as my radio setup and her sewing hobby. So it's now a radio room/home office/ sewing room space.
What was going through my mind was how was the radio and Julies' new company PC and internet phone going to react to my Icom 7610? All was good and the only issue was her two monitors would wake up from sleep when I transmitted on certain bands (40m and 60m) I had this same issue with my PC and I added snap on toroids and it did the trick. So I did the same to Julies monitors and the problem was solved. We were operating both PC's from a wifi connection and Julie felt her PC was running a bit slow. It was no big deal for me to run a LAN cable from the modem to a gigabit ethernet network switch in our office. Julie was thrilled as was I too as both our connections were much faster. Now here is the catch.....I was on my PC today looking up some info regarding the upcoming weekend QSO parties. Julie was on a call and all of a sudden her call dropped and a type of busy signal was going off in her ear. I was not on my radio and only my PC. The day before I was on my PC while Julie was working away and without issue. When I shut my PC down her phone reset and all was good again. My way to deal with this is to think about what was different from yesterday and today when the issue happened. The only difference I could think of is we are off the wifi and on LAN connection. What this has to do with this new issue is beyond me but I left Julies PC on the LAN connection and I moved my PC back over to the wifi connection. After I did this and many tests all was ok.......I have no idea why both PC's being on LAN would cause this issue as with both being on wifi or one on wifi and one on LAN there was no issue. All that concerns me is that Juile's PC is working without issue and can get on my PC and my rig. My question is does anyone out there have any idea why I had the issue?

Not what you want to see after a program restart!

This weekend contained some QSO parties to partake in. Almost every weekend there has been a QSO party I wanted to take part as I have a personal goal to see if I can make some contacts in all the QSO parties. I am not officially enrolled in the QSO party challenge as I have no hope of placing anywhere other than close to the bottom of the pile. It is just a thing for me to do during the COVID 19 stay at home order. I have managed to make at least one successful contact in each of the QSO parties up to this point in time (I have a feeling that may end once the Hawaii QSO party happens) But this weekend I thought the streek was going to come to an end. I was having huge issues with hearing anyone in the Nebraska QSO party! BUT I then remembered reading they also accept FT8 QSO"s and not many QSO parties do. So it was off to FT8 to see what I could find. The contest software I use is N!MM+ and it does integrate with both WSJT-X or JTDX software. The issue here was I had not as of yet made the integration. I found online a very nice video of a step by step process and as Picard would say "make it so". Before I ever venture into making program and radio changes I always back up both my PC (system restore) and my radio settings.
I following the setting changes that needed to be made in N1MM+ and JTDX software I then did the smoke test and restarted the programs. I was greeted with an error message and the program stopped working altogether. To save the day I restored the JTDX settings and rig settings back to their previous settings. I then was able to make 2 Nebraska contacts on FT8 using the "old" settings in JTDX.  My next step was to figure out how to convert the ADIF file that JTDX gave me into a Cab file which the Nebraska QSO party needed for submission. I went online and found SP7DQR's program called ADIF2CABR program and it did the trick.
The next day it was time to tackle the JTDX integration with N1MM+ so I went back to the video and figuring the issue was I was rushing the day before. Since everything was backed up from the day before I got right down to it. Once done I tried a restart and low and behold all worked fine. I reviewed what I did and it came down to the file location of JTDX I had to enter into N1MM+ I don't believe I enter the exe file last time.

A much better message.

There was one very odd thing that happened it had nothing to do with N1MM+ or JTDX it was my setting for my windows microphone. What clued me into this was the receive level in the JTDX program was off the scale. I open Windows microphone settings and it went from a set level of 4 to 100. It's just the magic of Windows and for whatever reason, it decides to do whatever
it wants!

I went into the radio room last evening around 2130 UTC to have a listen as to what was going on. I found myself on 30m and noticed there was a few CW signal but really not all that much action. I spun the VFO down to the first signal at 10.110.0. It was EA6Y from Balearic Island located in the Mediterain Sea and on his QRZ page there are some amazing pictures of his surroundings. It was a very fast CW QSO with RST and TU (thank you) I then spotted him on DX Summit . He seemed to be calling CQ for some time before any takers. His CW signal was clean and crisp into Atlantic Canada and my 100 watts made it without issue.
I then moved onto the next CW signal on the waterfall of my Icom 7610 and 4O4T from Montenegro Lou's signal was very crip as well and once again my 100 watts had no issue making the trip to Montenegro. At 2200 UTC the band seemed to drop it's DX adventures and it was time to move on to things such as reading my many amateur radio periodicals a rewarding evening on the radio none the less.