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Well, as a licensed Ham for some years, I recently decided to get active again and thought my musings may be of interest to others.

Most recently I've got myself an FT-950 which I plan to use primarily for data modes.

Today I have been musing over the data mode on the FT-950 and most specifically menu items 54 & 55. It seems for the default settings of these menu items to work, you need the radio in PKT-USB mode; by default the data mode was in PKT-LSB. I was failing to decode signals I could hear in standard USB mode with that setting.

Seems that the radio will work well in the dedicated data mode, just some understanding of the carrier offsets involved are needed to figure out which mode the radio actually needs to be in.

I left the radio running WSPR for a few hours today, my signals (only 10W out) were heard far and wide including Japan, and I was receiving from all over as well.

I came home with a Comet CAT-300 ATU today, but it seems to be the most useless ATU I've ever come across. It wont tune anything and actually provides a higher best SWR when in-line than without the tuner at all. I conclude that it's faulty and will be taking it back tomorrow.

I'm going to take a picture or two of the shack and post them now.

Mark. G0MGX