Some Casual Contesting

Well,

This weekend is the IARU HF World Championship and I have been having a dabble in CW.

I have three monitors connected to the "radio" PC, the primary screen has my main Logger32 window:

Going clockwise you can see:

1. Great circle map plus beam heading - any DX station entered into the log entry window is also placed on this map;
2. The pink/purple bar lists the station I am workings callsign and country;
3. Below the pink box you can see a list of previous QSOs with the callsign being worked plus the incoming DX spots;
4. The next window is "worked/confirmed" this lists the country/prefix being worked and shows the status of each slot i.e. not worked, worked, confirmed;
5. The top right window is the telnet connection to my DX Cluster of choice;
6. Below the map on the far left is my logbook window, the colour of the entry tells me if it is yet to be uploaded to LOTW and if the QSO is confirmed;
7. To the right of the logbook is the QSO entry window including frequency and mode read from the radio directly. There's also a lookup to QRZ.com to auto populate name grid et cetea.
8. Then we have 10 bandmaps which list the recent DX spots by band and frequency - clicking on a spot tunes the radio.

The left hand screen is watching out for any opening on 4M using dxmaps:

The third monitor has a number of other applications, firstly, we have CW skimmer to help me with CW RX at high speed - here we have YT0HQ at 37 wpm:

Then I have my CW Machine - this is part of the Logger32 application and is a CW keyboard with macros - simgle click on the maco or any text typed in is sent as CW:

And finally we have the remote software for the SPE Amplifier we discussed back here:

The amp is performing flawlessly since its return from the manufacturer. It has a lot of ATU frequency memories and as you tune between parts of the same band there is no need to worry at all about the antenna match - its just a case of setting it up once with your antennas and then forgetting.

The Antenna selection is also automatic as you switch bands on the radio - there are CAT interfaces from both my Kenwood TS-990 and Icom IC-7610. So the preference from 4 antenna sockets is auto selected by band.

With auto band, antenna and ATU settings its foolproof and is performing perfectly - I'm delighted.

Here's our Elmo looking like he has the worlds problems to worry about:

Good, isn't it?

It's cheating - I know!

Well,

This weekend is the IARU HF World Championship:

http://www.arrl.org/iaru-hf-championship

and propagation hasn't been that bad; there have even been some openings on 10M.

Now, my CW is simply rubbish. I passed the Morse exam when I was 19, then I spent a few years going things like getting a degree and a job - I didn't use the Morse for many years - not that the test even began to prepare you for on-air CW...

Anyway, here's a screen shot of me working LY0HQ in CW:

I am using Logger 32 (http://www.logger32.net/) - this is my preferred day-to-day logging program. It includes a CW machine for sending CW using a simple interface between a COM port on the PC and the KEY jack on the radio, my interface is made like this:

Then also on the screen you can see I also run CW Skimmer at the same time:

http://www.dxatlas.com/cwskimmer/

This monitors the audio from the radio that's being fed into the PC soundcard. It's a really neat CW decoding application - you can use it with narrow radio filters to focus on a single signal or it can decode multiple signals over a wide bandwidth - very neat.

I also have a monitor of "antenna cam" on the screen too - primarily just because I can!

Anyhow, that's how I go about cheating and working CW. Cat's not impressed:

Good though egh?