AmateurRadio.com

On Tuesday of this week Julie and had plans to go out for a nice dinner. When I got home from work it was time to the make lunches for the next day, have a shower and feed the cat. To have all this done before Julie got home meant we could just head out for dinner once she got in.  It was a nice dinner and we took our time relaxing and talking. It was shaping up to be a great evening until we came home and our neighbour called out to us..."I think I hear smoke alarms going off in your place" As we got to the front door I could hear them and then it HIT ME...one of the steps to making our lunches was to boil some eggs!!! I forgot 6 eggs that were on the stove cooking on hi. The house was full of smoke, no fire, cat was hiding under the bed and all six eggs exploded and were EVERYWHERE!!!
I will say Julie was very understanding but I was very very upset with myself!! So no radio at all for the next week or so as I have to do some major cleaning! Our insurance has a deductible of 1,000 and I figure I can get things back to normal for 1/8 that cost. Lesson learned I am now looking for an automatic egg steamer that cooks the eggs and then turns off on it's one if I happen to have another senior moment.

About a month ago a new kit arrived and is still sitting waiting to be built. With some thought and over time I ended up selling my Logikit CMOS4 keyer that I built. I sold it not because it's a poor keyer but  being a stand alone keyer made it for me a hassle to program.  I missed just starting up the PC opening a program typing in what I wanted the keyer do and simply saving that sequence.  I do a lot of CW contests and have to keep changing the exchanges. With the CMOS4 keyer I was always taking out the manual and refreshing my poor memory with the proper sequence of buttons to push on the keyer to enter and save morse code in the CMOS 4 memory.
So I sold the Logikit keyer CMOS4 and Julie had purchased me the K1EL WKUSB keyer kit. I am familiar with the WKUSB keyer as some years ago I did purchase a built unit and it worked great. At the time it did seem to have some issues with my contest program N1MM. I ended up selling the unit and as they say hind sight is 20/20 and if I knew then what I do now I would still have it. This keyer has been around for some time now and improvements have been made. To hook it up to the PC is a simple USB cable along with some software and you are off to the races. To change the CW messages you open a program on your PC enter your new message then save to the key and that's it. You are able to enter four separate messages (just great for contests or DXepedtion contacts) The keyer can be connected to two rigs, my K3 and K2 can use the same unit without cable swapping. So back to the software for just one more moment.....not only can you program messages BUT there is a slew of custom settings you can enter such as spacing, weight and tone just to mention a very few extras. I hope this weekend to heat up the soldering iron and point it in the direction of this kit!!

Signals on 10m this afternoon

Sunday afternoon has seemed to pass just a little faster with setting our clocks ahead last evening an hour. I did find some time to get on the radio (finally after about 5 days off). I tried 10m and according to the P3 screen things were fairly calm for that band. As I was starting up my PC along with the DXlab software I did notice some small and large spikes on the P3. Most of the time when the band is this dead and it was about 2 in the afternoon as well these spikes are just QRM.

EA2LU antennas

Upon investigation to my surprise the first spike was a signal from PV8ADI in Brazil. For some reason I have had troubles with South American station. Not sure if it's the position of the dipole in the attic or just one of those always hard to get spots for me. I gave the station a go with 500mW's but as I expected....nothing. He was having lots of stations (ones I could not hear) come back to him. The flavor of the contact was signal report and move on. I brought the K3 up to 5 watts and gave him a another call. He came back to me and we exchanged reports and moved on.

I was now noticing some stronger signals, the first I tuned in was EA2LU from Spain. I tried Jorge with 500mW's and made the contact without any troubles. He was running a  Yagi at 100 watts. This was a nice contact as we were able to exchange rig info, antenna info and

EA2LU setup

 chat about how well he found my attic dipole preforming along with only 500mW's. I then moved on to another strong signal that had just shown up while my QSO what Jorge was ending. This station was EA1ND calling CQ and again I was able to make the contact with only 500mW's as well. Nacho had told me this was his first contact into Canada and he was very thankful that I came back to him. For sure I will upload to LoTW and Eqsl.  We spoke for a short time about the weather both here and there along with  RST, power and name. These Spanish contacts at 500mW's netted me 7600 miles per watt. Just made contact with FG5FR from Guadeloupe with 500mW's on 15m.  I have been keeping one ear on the rig (headphones) and writing the blog post.....multi tasking who would had thunk.

Happy to be back from the vet's

First off  I took a vacation day from work as I  had to take Oliver (our cat) to the vet for a followup after dental surgery and by the way looking back on my career decisions I should had been a veterinary dental surgeon! They do say hind sight is 20/20. Oh and for those wondering Oliver had a great checkup, he was ecstatic  to get out of the veterinary clinic and home. Some of the other time today was spent on the radio TRYING to make contact with TX5K. On all the bands I had absolutely no problem hearing the pileup trying their luck at making contact but I could not even hear TX5K!! On Saturday my wife has a hair appointment and a trip to the dentist.....no surgery just a checkup....BUT  in ham radio lingo what does XYL at the salon and dentist spell........RADIO TIME!!! So I am going to give TX5K another go before the DXexpedition is over. So why did I entitle this post "Anonymous is getting very smart!" In the past I had
maybe 2 or 3 "anonymous" postings a week. Now let me clarify what I mean my anonymous......these are advertisers trying to post a comment on my blog but the main idea is to plug their biz with a link! Blogger has been excellent with the ability to discern between the real deal anonymous comment and the...let me take advantage of your blog and plug my biz anonymous comment.  Over the last month I have noticed a large increase of anonymous comments (the take advantage type) trying to use my blog. Not sure why this is.....my blog can't be all that popular? I really don't care if they "try" to post their fake comments but what I have noticed is they must be getting smarter in how they word the comment. Blogger is  not recognizing it as spam but seeing it as a legit comment. These past couple of weeks I have had to go through my comment section of blogger and delete comment posts that are just plain spam! Has anyone else had this issue? Or do you have suggestions on how to deal with this?

RFI Friday night

My last post dealt with my PC monitors causing me some grief in the form of RFI to my K3. On Saturday I spent most of the day spinning my wheels trying to find a way to lesson or better yet cure the RFI problem. Below is what I had tried to in order to fix the problem.
1. I changed out the video cables and wrapped them with chokes as well.....did nothing.
2 Moved the monitors to other locations on the operating desk...that was loads of fun and it too did nothing.
3. Tried running the K3 just off battery power and.... nothing.
4. Ran the monitors from the 12 volt Astron power supply and again nothing.
5 Put snap on chokes on ALL cables coming out of PC and the ALL cables from each monitor.....NOTHING!
6. Even tried tin foil on the back of the monitor and grounding it...only made monitor look sci-fi.
7. Put 1:1 balun on the coax coming out of the K3 and still had problem.
8. Tried my Elecraft K2 (maybe just a K3 problem) found same issue with K2.

Sunday...not to bad

9. Plugged monitors into separate AC outlets on different circuits and did not fix issue.
10. Ran a ground up to each monitor and video card on the PC (PC is already grounded) and nothing.
11.Repositioned screen to see if that made any difference I thought it did but turned out not to.
 So that was how my Saturday was spent and from doing all the above I was able to find out a few things that I hope may ring a bell on how to solved the RFI isssue
1. As I move my hand closer to the monitor the RFI increases.
2. When the rig is on the dummy load the RFI is gone.....but so is everything else regarding signals.
Now it's Sunday and I have come to the understanding that I am going to just have to live with the problem. I know where it is coming from that sometimes that is half the battle! I am going to do some reading and thinking about the issue. I came into the shack to just roll the desk back up against the wall and tidy up the room. I then turned on the K3 along with the PC and for some reason the RFI is still there but not as much at all!!! Seems doing nothing is doing something!!

RFI from new monitor

This evening I was on the radio and had the Elecraft P3 up and running as always. I just happend to be looking at the P3 external monitor when my PC's monitors went into sleep mode. I noticed that some signals (now seen as RFI) dropped off the screen. I had noticed these signals before and knew it was RFI but had

Both monitors off

 no idea it was coming from the monitors! My new AOC e2351F LED monitor seems to be the major culprit but the Acer Z233h does add just a little on it's own. If I turn the monitors off (via the monitor button) the RFI is gone or if the monitor goes into sleep mode. You can see from the picture to the right where the RFI was from the tails. So the question now is how does one go about narrowing this down? I have power supplies to each monitor...but would they be the problem if the RFI is gone when the monitors are turned off but supplies are still plugged in? Can you ground a flat screen monitor to my station ground? Could the RFI be traveling down the monitor cables? Well this is just another project to keep me busy. I am lucky that the RFI is not the same on all bands these shots are from 18mhz and it seems to be the worst of them all. Any ideas blog world??

Back in December when my second Elecraft K2 kit arrived I tossed around the idea of starting an additional blog about my K2 build. I planned to not only document my kit build but to keep the site updated with links and sites that will help out fellow builders. I have up to this point produced 3 pages and some updating posts on the blog itself. Check out the blog and give me  your feedback as well as any info you would like to see on the site as well.