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Interference caused my AOC monitor

Nothing from the LG monitor.

This has been the longest stretch I have gone without posting something up on the blog. Have really not been on the radio all that much as the conditions have not been all that great....BUT... there have been some happenings around the shack. Back in February I posted on the blog the problem I was having with my new monitor. It was affecting my Elecraft P3 with all kinds of interference. I tried all kinds of fixes but it just brought about frustration. Last week I went out and purchased a new monitor and this time I did not go for the cheapest! This time I did some reading online of monitors other hams have and worked well for them. One of the monitors mentioned was the LG line of monitors, so I purchased a 24 inch one and gave it a go. It's working just find and does not affect the P3 at all.
At one time but sold the LP Pan and the Creative Labs E MU 0202 USB external sound card. This combo worked great and gave me a super pan-adapter. I was able to with the click of a mouse (using PowerSDR software) control my K3 and also click on signals on the bands scope and the rig would go there. Well I
purchased a used LP Pan and E MU 0202 device. I have not as of yet hooked it up I have gotten as far as
to download the software I am going to use with it which is NaP3 software. At this point when I tried to install the software (or any other SDR software) I get an error message entitled 2908. This error message and what I have tried to cure it is a whole blog post on it's own. This is still a work in progress and I hope I don't have to resort to reformatting my hard drive!
 The final happenings here have been....working on my Elecraft K2 kit and the accompanying blog where the progress is being shown.

The operating chair

The Skeeter hunt   is a great QRP contest that has really caught on with the QRPer's. It's only a 4 hour contest and offers extra points if you want to take on a challenge. Last year it was to brew up a home made key and use it in the contest. If you did this (supporting photo's needed) then you picked up huge bonus points! Well last year I was not able to come up with a homemade key so the bonus points were out the window for me. This year the challenge was to operate beside a body of water......no problem for me as there are 3 rivers within 5 minutes or less for me.

Storm clouds

I scooped up my bonus points (passed along the pic's to back it up) but I was not able to make the same amount of contacts that I did last year. There were some factors to this, conditions had changed from last year, I worked an all nighter on Saturday so I was operating on more that 24 hours without any sleep and thus I did not spend as much time in the test........well a 1/2 hour less. I used my Elecraft KX3 operating on the internal batteries. The antenna was a mono band 20m whip from my car. I was going to use the Alexloop so I could take advantage of more bands...but...the weather conditions were looking very stormy. I did not want to take a chance and have the Alexloop damaged from rain.
The weather turned out to be great it did not rain but the storm clouds over head kept it cool and the sun off me. I operated from Riverside park which is a great park about 5 minutes from my QTH. Funny thing I never had anyone come up to me wondering what I was doing! In the past this has happened and it gave me a chance to explain ham radio. Something new in the contest this year is operating SSB, I did not take advantage of this and stayed CW and just single band.

A look towards the river

Some of the highlights were contacting TF/LX1NO (who was in the WAE contest) for whom you get bonus points for! Also I brought along an extra external battery just in case the AA internal rechargeable batteries died on me. To my surprise they lasted for 3 hours with me constantly calling CQ BZZ.

Another shot of the river.

So I was able to make 18 contacts with a total score of 1396. Funny thing my last years score was 1392.....So technically I did better than last year by 4 points!!!

The dreaded toroid...

Getting ready for solder blob

A. Use a lighter to burn off the coating
B. Use sand paper.
C. The solder blob method.
D. Use a razor knife to scape the coating off.
E. I have heard some dipping the wire in var-sol....would not recommend it.  

I use the solder blob method and I have tried the sandpaper (find it just to rough for the delicate work that is needed) I have tried the lighter method but found on the smaller toroids I am not able to control the heat and end up burning off to much insulation. The razor blade scraping I have not tried and really don't want a razor knife that close to my fingers. SO....it's the solder blob for me!! I find if I put the toroid in an alligator clip to hold it I can in a very controlled fashion remove the right amount of enamel from the toroid.
I change the tip on my Weller soldering iron to a larger tip and use a .030 diameter solder. Most of my board work is done with a .020 diameter solder.

DO NOT SKIP STEP 7.....
7. Once the toroid wire has been stripped I use my DMM to check to make sure the coating has been removed and there is good continuity. Oh and for toroids that have more that one winding I check to make sure there is not shorts between the windings as well.

8. It's now time to solder the toroid in place and I find once the toroid is soldered in place before the leads are trimmed you can heat each solder blob up again and give each lead a LIGHT pull with a pair of pliers. This will allow the toroid to sit firmly on the board.

Some tips
1. Practice practice practice......it's like CW it's an art and over time you will get the idea and look forward to it.
2. Some toroids have nice rounded edges but be aware of those with sharp 90 degrees edges. These toroids can if your not careful remove the insulating coating from your wire and potentiality cause a short.

Using a paper and pencil to count

3. When  you have a toroid with 20 turns or more you can go buggy trying to check the turn count. What I do is lay the toroid on a sheet of paper and pencil make on the paper each turn. I then count the pencil marks and sometimes ticking them off as being counted.

4. Use two sizes of soldering tip's one (I use the Weller ETC 1/8 tip) for the solder blob used to melt the insulation off the wire. Then a thinner tip (I use the Weller ETR 1/16 tip) for soldering the toroid to the board.

ETR and ETC tips

Coming soon how to wind the bi-filar toroid and transformer toroid.

This past weekend was a long weekend up this way with Monday being the holiday. My plans were to get involved in the North American QSO party contest on Saturday. This is a short 10 hour CW contest  and when conditions are not that great a North American contest can be very attractive. To make a long story short I started and ended the contest on 15m. It was rough going and I found the bands  really not be all that busy. The other contest problem was it was a gorgeous day outside!!! For some reason this year I just was not getting into the contest mode.

One observation I made before surrendering  to the great weather outside was in Ontario our section is no longer ON. This changed a short time ago when the province was divided into 4 sections Ontario North (ONN), Ontario East (ONE), Ontario south (ONS) and finally greater Toronto area (GTA) In the contest I would attempt to send ONS but most of the time I could only get to ON....my "S" was interrupted with TU.

This is really was not the fault of the contester as I found N1MM  auto filled my section as ON and not ONS. Not sure if my N1MM is up to date and that change has been made but it was tough getting the ONS across during the contest. My contest effort stopped about an hour into the it. I made 17 contacts but the weather was calling my name. I figured the good weather days are going to become limited and soon the snow and cold weather will be here.....then lots of time to spend on the radio.

This coming weekend is the Skeeter hunt contest. This is the second running of the contest. I found it was a nice way to spend 4 hours of your Sunday afternoon. You are encouraged to get out into the out of doors for this contest. This year if you can operate beside a body of water you get bonus points!! I have scouted out two locations close to home were water (river) is....have to make my mind up as to where I will be heading. I had a look at the long range forecast today and Sunday is looking great!

Most of the time I participate in a contest just for the fun of it without any expectation of placing anywhere close to the top. Last week I was reading some of the blogs that I follow and Scot KA3DDR blogged about CQ WW DX  contest certificates you can get online. It's very simple you plug in your call and low and behold you are told if you have a certificate waiting for you. If you do it's easy you just download it and print it!

The attic dipole is working it's magic agian!

It's Sunday afternoon and thought I would flip the K3 to the on position. The RSGB IOTA contest is in full swing but I was only able to hear  few stations. As I spun across the band I came across G0PZA/EU11 in London area. I gave him a call at 500 mW's but it was just not going to happen. As I slowly raised my power I was able to make the contact with 1 watt for a 3594 miles per watt contact. I then moved around the band but was not able to hear all that much. I was pleased with this contact as the bands over the last couple of days have not been really all that great. Last night I heard a station calling CQ from Nova Scotia and even with full power at 5 watts I was not able to raise this station. I consider this evening to be an accomplishment with a 1 watt DX contact as compared to almost a local call and being shut out with 5 watts. It's 5 o'clock in the evening and I am very tired (considering I pulled an all nigher at work on Saturday) so it's soon time to hit the hay and looking forward to another week at work....NOT!!!
Have a good week everyone
 

Three weeks ago I ordered from Elecraft there XG3, it's an RF signal source device with a range from 1.5 to 200 mhz,  two programmable sweep functions, 12 programmable bands  (2m to 160m) and 4 calibrated output levels as well as a few more bells and whistles. This unit can be updated via your PC which is great when Elecraft comes up with bug fixes and new options for the unit. You can either power the device by a 9 volt battery or your DC power supply (11 to 14 volts DC). One of the reasons for me purchasing this unit was it can via software preform an Rx Sideband Null Field Calibration. This is an experimental Field Calibration program and the instructions and program were sent to me via Elecraft support. The reason I wanted to do this calibration was to stop the "woodpecker" effect I was getting on my KX3 during CW contests with stations that were very close by. The program needs run for around 20 minutes to complete and I thought this would be a great Saturday afternoon project.....not thinking that 20 minutes would turn into 2 hours with the calibration not even starting!! 

So far so good but Murphy shows up!

To do the test you first have to make sure the XG3 has the latest firmware loaded so I plugged in the supplied USB cord to update the XG3. I had the "new hardware found" info box come up and I then began the search for the USB port......well for some reason I was not able to find it. I then just plugged in my KX3 USB cable I use to update the KX3 rig with and it's com port 13. I used that cord and plugged it into the XG3 and had it look at com 13 and all was well. It seemed the firmware was up to date. For the calibration test I needed to have both the KX3 and XG3 running on USB ports of their own. So I swapped some USB cables around and I was able to see my XG3 on com 19. That was great (so I thought). I started up the RX

Not able to use available com ports

sideband null field calibration program and the first thing I was asked was to enter the com port of the KX3 and XG3. I entered the KX3 (com13) and  the program said all is well and was able to see the rig. I then went to enter com19 for the XG3 and the drop down menu in the Elecraft program only went to com port 16!!!! WHATS UP WITH THAT!!! So the calibration test came to a fast end. All this farting around took 2 hours of my time and got nothing done......I went into my device manager to see what was going on and I tried to change the XG3 to a lower com port number but I was informed that all com ports from 1 to 18 are in use, funny thing is I don't have 18 USB items to take up that many ports.....but I do have LP Bridge and VSP manager that create virtual ports and also an 8 port Edge port device that takes up virtual ports as well. My question is why does the XG3 program only go up to com port 16.....N1MM does the same thing and it's a pain!!! So I will be emailing Elecraft support to see if there is a solution to this or maybe I will go the Mac way and set this up on my wife's mac computer.