AmateurRadio.com

There’s been a bit of radio silence over the last 2 weeks. mainly because I’ve not been at home. We spent Christmas and new year up in Scotland and then I started a new job last week away was away from home for 3 days. Hence the quiet conditions. I prefer not to broadcast that I’m away until after the event, just in case.

I did have a couple of hours listening in for the Christmas cumulative but only worked a couple of stations that were very close. Apart from that Santa dig bring me a new antenna for 6m, which was interesting on the way home (My journey down was spent hoping that the cardboard tube would stay in tact, despite torrential rain). This has prompted me to have a rethink about my shack and what kit is going where, what I need and what I can sell on. Plenty to think about.

I hope Santa was good to you and here’s wishing everyone an active new year.

Happy Three Kings or Epiphany – and to our Orthodox brothers and sisters, Merry Christmas!

Now that the Christmas season is approaching its end (next weekend for Roman Catholics), it’s not too early to start to think about the inaugural outdoor QRP event for 2013 ……..

Freeze Your Buns (or Butt, if you prefer) Off – which should be held the first Saturday of February – the 2nd, which is also Groundhog Day.  So you can freeze your body parts off operating in the Arizona ScQRPions QRP sprint, while simultaneously keeping an eye peeled for groundhogs!

There hasn’t been any official notice of any rule changes for 2013; so if you’d like a refresher on the rules that were used last year, click here.

Last year I made 11 contacts using my PFR3A and the Buddistick on top of the car, and the temperature when I started was 45F (7C).  Accuweather is predicting colder than normal temperatures for the second half of January and all of February.  That would be good for a better multipler; but not so great, comfort wise.

Let’s hope that it’s not like THIS, that day! Or worse yet …. like it was the day before!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

Yesterday I thought I would set up my Cross Country Wireless SDR-4+ receiver to use for IBP beacon monitoring using Faros. The purpose of this was mainly to reduce the wear and tear on my Elecraft K3 which otherise would have to be on 24 hours a day.

I established that Simon Brown’s SDR-Radio software supported external program control by emulating a Kenwood transceiver. I therefore needed to see if SDR-Radio could be controlled using Omni-Rig, the control mechanism used by Faros.

SDR-Radio supports CAT control using a virtual serial port.

I created a linked pair of virtual serial ports, COM8 and COM9, using VSPE, a virtual serial port emulator. Using the serial ports option of SDR-Radio, I assigned the control port to COM8. Then I used a serial port emulator connected to COM9 (I use RealTerm) to verify that SDR-Radio ‘spoke’ Kenwood. It did. In fact it emulated the Kenwood protocol well enough to fool KComm into thinking it was talking to an Elecraft K2. So far so good.

Now to see if Omni-Rig could control SDR-Radio. Omni-Rig uses “rig files” to define the command set of different radios and it includes one for generic Kenwood. Unfortunately it did not work with SDR-Radio: the receiver indicator of Faros turned red to indicate a fault.

I downloaded the rig file documentation and debug tools from Omni-Rig’s site and tried hacking the Kenwood rig file to get it to work with Omni-Rig by trial and error. But no luck. Whatever I did, the program reported an error with the inscrutable message: “RIG1 Status commands already in queue”.

Error messages reported by Omni-Rig

So it looks as if I’ve hit a brick wall. Clearly there is something in SDR-Radio’s emulation of the Kenwood protocol that Omni-Rig doesn’t like. If anyone else would like to have a go solving this problem, be my guest.