W4FT on Amateur Radio

Contest season continues with the CQ Worldwide DX SSB contest.  For this one, I thought I had everything ready in advance.  A few weeks back, I put a 3 element Mosley TA-33-jr 20/15/10 beam on the chimney and have been getting pretty good results with it.  About the same time, I replaced the shack computer. In the days before the contest, I applied all the OS updates, I updated the data files for the logging software and set up all the sound files, hot keys, and other settings. It didn’t take long to figure out that there was a small problem.

While the beam was working well, I was having a little trouble aiming it in the right direction.  Beam headings were all off. While I definitely had good signals transmitting and receiving, I soon found that adjusting for maximum signal instead of predicted heading, I did a bit better.  And, it was repeatable.  This was a no-brainer.  I found my old-fashioned compass, set the beam to north, and went out side.  Hey, it was only off by 35 degrees! Lesson learned: the compass function in a cellphone can be dramatically off.  If it’s critical, use a real compass. Easy fix, just add 35 to every beam heading.

Everything was going well, or at least so it seemed. The sun was still up and I was easily making contacts on the upper bands. Search and pounce was serving me well. So well, in fact, that I decided that I should start using the voice keyer function in the N1MM logging software. All of a sudden, nobody was hearing me. Hmmm, was the radio cooked?

Everything appeared to be working fine.  I could hear the audio files playing on the speakers attached to the RigBlaster Advantage. Power output was set to maximum. The SWR level was nearly perfect. So what was the problem?  I kept poking around and checking everything I could think of.  Finally, I flipped the meter on the radio over to ALC and keyed a test file through the voice keyer.  Sounded great on the speaker, but the ALC meter barely registered anything.  Just to keep it legal, I threw my call out using the desk mic attached to the Rigblaster.  Full scale readings on the ALC. AHA!

The good news was that I had essentially isolated the problem.  The bad news? I had no idea what was causing it.  After trying to cure it for a couple hours (I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to blow up my radio), I was making no progress.  Well, I was missing the contest and wanted to get back to having some fun. So, I abandoned the voice keyer functions and went back to doing it the old fashioned way. Time to have some fun.

OK, so now all the technical problems had workarounds.  The contest was still going strong, but somehow I wasn’t quite as excited, so  I plodded on into the night. When the traffic fell off, I decided to get some sleep.  The next day was better and I was able to steadily make search and pounce contacts.  The few times I attempted runs though, I didn’t have much success.  Go figure.

In short, as much as I love contests, this had gone somewhere that just wasn’t as fun as usual. The results tell the story.  I was on for a little over 19 hours, made 353 contacts with 83 distinct countries and 28 sections out of 40, for 279 multipliers on 6 bands. The result was a little over 266,000 points.   Not bad for the effort.

As for the hardware issues, I have fixed them both. The antenna rotor issue was easy. Ten minutes on the roof with a wrench is all it took to re-aim the beam. The voice keyer was another story. I called West Mountain Radio and talked with tech support for over an hour.  They were very cooperative and helpful, and just as interested in resolving the problem.To make a long story short, they gave me enough info that I was able to work through the problem and resolve it.  It turned out that when I updated system drivers, the USB driver for the sound card in the Rigblaster Advantage had been corrupted. Simply reloading it wasn’t fixing the problem.  I had to delete it, and then scrub the registry to get rid of all references to it before reinstalling.  That cured the proiblem.  Now, it’s ready for the next contest – ARRL North America Sweepstakes!

73,
W4FT