Tag: Rigs

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SignaLinkUSBLast weekend I offered a friend of mine, Fred PA3YH, some help with his shack setup. He owns a Icom IC-756PRO-3 radio. Since a few months he bought a Signalink USB and works all different digital modes with it. Actually this combination works really well! He is doing great in QSO’s! The only thing missing was a good logbook. He did connect the rig via the Signalink to his laptop, but didn’t yet use rig control (Cat-V).

So these two things I want to help him with. First, rig control. Fred did already bought a cable for rig control. It is a USB – ACC-connector cable. After installing the driver for the cable, the laptop did see an extra com-port. Now download and fire up the latest copy of Ham Radio Deluxe. No problems so far. Imported his logbook from LogPA (his current log program). Also no problems. What surprised me was the super duper integration of HRD with the radio. I myself do not yet have a Signalink, but men what cool features do you have then! You are able to record sound of the rig, almost all options are controllable from the program.
Also figure out for him how to let Windows use the internal sound card and let the HAM-programs use the Signalink. I wasn’t able to fully test his new setup because he pushed me out of the way, that enthusiastic he was! 😉
The cool thing about this new setup for Fred is that he makes enough time to investigate all the options and tricks. Hopefully I can benefit too from his investigation 😉

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Some time ago I’ve bought the TCXO-SO-2 option (Temperature Compensated X-tal Oscillator) from Joerg, DL6IB. Although I was very pleased to have the option, I postponed the installing because I wanted to figure out a way to measure the stability improvement before and after installing. Since I don’t own (yet) a frequency counter, I didn’t know a way to check.
A few days ago Joerg again send me a message asking me if I already installed the option in my Kenwood TS-850. I was a little ashamed to reply I didn’t. Promised him and myself to do this as quickly as possible. At this new years day I’m a little tired anyway, didn’t feel like anymore work around the house. So I sat down and opened my TS-850. Before I started with installing, I googled around to find a story of installing this option. Didn’t find anything. Okay, it is a pretty simple install but it gives me confidences to read about it. Seems I have to post the first story about installing this option… Continue reading →

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HomeSweetHomeHi all! We’re back in town from two weeks of holiday! It was very nice. We did a lot of hiking, site seeing, enjoying meals etc. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to set up my portable radio kit in Italy at all. The chalets where so tight packet together, it was impossible to throw a wire over something. And if I was able to do that, I would have interfered with at least 10 satellite receivers. So I kept the goodies in the trunk for the first week of the holiday.
In France of course I had more possibilities to setup a nice configuration. I did bring a 1:6 balun with me to experiment with. Two wires of 13,8m and 27,7m where attached to it and hung up between two tree’s. It worked kind of nice but of course only on the lower bands (40 and 80). And there was not much of interesting activity on those bands that week. Then I’ve tried to work my open dipole for 20m and my long wire (16m) that are already installed at the house. But not much luck either. Lots of static (at least I think, or even there are appearing noise generators) and very little signals. All in all I’ve made 4 QSO’s. Not enough to even bring the stuff with me. I consider to buy a dedicated (old) radio for that location to leave. Then I don’t have to bring the heavy stuff with me all the time and I’m able to use a good radio with all filters and stuff even on holidays.

So when someone has good suggestions for a good (second hand) transceiver with (kind of) modern filter methods but isn’t too expensive (I’ll only use it for maybe one week a year), leave me a comment or a message!