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After a few months of radio inactivity I picked up a little idea I read a while ago on the N1MM wiki. Of course I could buy a Winkeyer, but since I’m just a CW-novice with not many miles on the paddle, I want a cheap and simple solution first. I could always buy a Winkeyer in the future. Besides, I really dislike all kind of separate little boxes in my shack. I’m more of a Zen-fan.

When I read the N1MM wiki, the described serial interface for CW was simple enough to put into a DB9-connector. Just solder two parts and off you go. I bought the parts (and the DB9-connector) on a local ham marked for a few euro’s and put things together. Result? It works like a charm! Now N1MM is able to send CW directly from my PC to the rig. Next step is getting my CW-skills up to speed to run my first CW-contest.

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This weekend I wanted to score some contacts in the Ukrainian RTTY contest. Saturday night at 21:00 local time I set down, opened a new log in N1MM with the appropriate contest and went off. But after 4 or 5 contacts I noticed N1MM keeps sending number 001. In the logging windows it shows the correct number but MMTTY keeps repeating 001 with each new contact. Aaargh, searching N1MM manual of several thousand pages didn’t come up with a solution. Double checked contest layout, all seems correct. Restart N1MM a few times. After an hour of searching I gave up. I didn’t had the time or the energy to search any more. I did want to participate in the contest for only a few hours anyway, now I blew the whole thing off.
Next time do some test sending exchanges first long before the contest starts!

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PCI Express serial portsSince one of the best contest logging free software N1MM is running on Windows only, I had to install Windows on my Mac Pro. Running via Bootcamp it works fine. I want to run CW skimmer together with N1MM so I can read the very fast stations in the contest. But N1MM needs 2 COM-ports (cat interface and keying port) and CW Skimmer won’t run properly without a cat interface too. My TS-590 has two possibilities for cat interfacing: via USB and via serial port. So I need 1 com port for cat interface with N1MM, 1 com port for cat interface with CW Skimmer and 1 com port for N1MM keying. At the moment I have only 1 serial – USB converter. So I looked around on the webs and found a PCI express card with two serial ports! Right away I ordered the card. Let’s hope my plan will work. I don’t think the card is supported by MacOSX but that not a big deal since I’ll use it with Windows anyway.