Last weekend another edition of the Dutch PACC contest was active on the bands. Every year it is an exciting time around the second weekend of february. This year for me it extra exciting because as new contestmanager of clubstation PI4RCG. A few months ago I had the idea to build a simple multi-multi-station at our NERA club facility. Just 5 seats with a few wire antenna’s. It turn out to be much more work then I aspected. Continue reading
Tag: NERA
PACC 2010 coming up
With the PACC 2010 coming up, I’m getting all jumpy to get my “ultimate contest setup” complete. My plans are to participate in the PACC this year from our club location NERA. Last year I’ve take a look and made a few QSO’s from that location and it is fantastic to operate from there. Far from the inhabited world there is zero QRM. Very nice when you sometimes have to pick up weak signals.
The idea now is to setup my Kenwood TS-850SAT at this location. The TS-850 has a build in voice keyer, but this keyer is not able to repeat the message with an adjustable delay. So I’ll use my own homebrew voice keyer. I already tested with success my headset. It works fine, so now I only have to find a decent foot pedal to switch between receiving and transmitting. Of course I can buy a foot pedal in an instrument shop or something like that. But that is expensive and less fun. So I searching for a solution for that.
Then I’ve hands free for logging. I think I bring my MSI netbook with me for logging. Only thing is I have to find a good contestlogging program. My main rig controller is Ham Radio Deluxe, but that is not quite feasible for contest logging. N1MM makes Windows crashing when it interacts thru the Keyspan USA-19H USB-RS232-adapter to my rig. So that doesn’t seem a solution. I already take a look at many logging programs, but they are all so old and ugly and don’t do rig control (which I want for logging the complete QSO). So I didn’t figure out that one yet.
If you have any good suggestions, please send me a message!
New club housing
I’m a member of the national radio club Veron. Every region in the Netherlands has its own department which are coordinated centrally from Veron Headquarters. Based on your address you’re member of that region (I guess this is the way it works in every country). Because I’m living in Hilversum I’m member of Veron department ‘t Gooi.
A few years ago the old clubhouse burned down and since then ‘t Gooi was located in a temporary location above a local primary school. Needless to say the location was not ideal of course.
But the last two months there were very cool things going on. We’ve got an offer to move in a new location: the old NERA-building. The NERA-building is a pretty old building that was used for radio communications with Indonesia back in the days Indonesia was still a colony of the Netherlands. The location was chosen for it’s perfect soil conditions for radio.
Of course this would be the perfect place for a radio club to have their clubhouse!
So we’re in the new locations for a few weeks now. Enjoying all the space! Last evening (every tuesday is our get-together-evening) we had a meeting about what antenna’s there should build, how the clubhouse must be decorated, should or shouldn’t we have a bar, etc. It’s nice to be member of a club were all the members are active, enthusiastic and there are some financial means to do something! I will post some pictures of the new location asap!