Friday, February 14, 2020

Digital Modes Are Alive

I recently got my HF radio off eBay and ending going with a Yaesu FT-991 (not the "a").  Cost was a factor and very good portability for a full 100W 6-160m rig.  So the first thing I did was string up a 10m dipole in my bonus room.  This was great and I could RX in 20/40/80m but little to no activity on 10m so therefore no TX :-(.

So I decided to double the length of the dipole to support 20m and go digital.  This made sense as I wanted to keep with 5-10W as the antenna was in the same room as I was.  Now here is where the decision to with the FT-991 came in real handy as it supported digital modes via its USB connection natively to your PC.

So got the dipole extended and installed WSJT-X on my Ubuntu laptop and tuned up to <1.1:1 SWR.  BTW the dipole has a 1:1 BALUN that I built from a kit on Amazon.  I started experimenting with FT8 initially and after watching some QSOs take place on 20m I decided to dive in and send out my first CQ @5W.  Whoa, I immediately got and response and watched as the software handled the rest with the designed automation to exchange SNR and GRID info.  And like that I had my first QSO and logged it to CQRLOG.  I later setup WSJT-X to log automatically to CQRLOG.

In a 3 day period I was able to perform 78 QSOs all to unique callsigns including some DXs to Canada, France, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Spain, Dominica, Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela.  The farthest QSO was Brazil @4160 mi or 6696 Km which sounds better!

My last highlight before signing off on the second day was I made a QSO and POTA spot for a ham in Washington state that was 2398 mi away.  This was a really great QSO that I also spotted on pota.us and confirmed with the same person on the facebook digital POTA group!  Nice!

Image may contain: text

No comments:

Post a Comment