Ham Radio is Fun! Enjoying it since 1997!
From Gerry, W1VE. More information will follow:
“10/31/2018 – Paul Bittner, W0AIH fell 60 feet from the Strum tower (40m). (It was) a beautiful day and he wanted to get ready for SS SSB. No services information yet obviously and the shock has still hit me. Please pass the word. Thanks.”
I last saw Paul at Dayton 2017 with my daughter Jordan KF5GDJ. K8CX took a great photo of us. He was a kind man, always pleasant to be around.
–Scott, W5WZ
A late Sunday afternoon QSO with W7IFG on 2018-10-08 via 20M USB yielded an unexpected surprise! I had just completed a previous QSO with intentions to QRT for supper. W7IFG asked for a quick QSO, and I obliged.
Scott told me (his name is also Scott) that he had a QSL card from W1AW/5 that listed me as an operator during the ARRL Centennial QSO Party, and he also knew that the two QSOs on the card were made with me, because he had asked for my home call sign. We briefly discussed how much fun the Centennial QSO Party was for all the participants, then signed off.
The following Friday, Oct 12, I received an envelope in the mail from W7IFG. I was quite surprised to find not only a QSL card for the recent QSO, as well as the original W1AW/5 card!
QSL from W7IFG for QSO with W5WZ on 2018-10-08 20M USB, and QSL from W1AW/5 for QSO with W7IFG on 2014-11-xx on 17m USB, with W5WZ as the W1AW/5 operator.
Thank you very much W7IFG!
73, Scott W5WZ
Recently, one of my FT-1000MP exhibit an odd thing on the display tuning bars. Notice the leftmost letters don’t display. The bars stay like this in all modes, both receive and transmit.
The Yaesu guy, WA4GEG suggested replacing the entire Display Unit.
About 7 years ago, I bought an ‘MP for parts. Luckily, it still had a working display unit.
Earlier this evening, I made the swap. It took about an hour start to finish. Once again, I have two working ‘MPs.
The postman delivered a benign white box yesterday. I opened it to reveal this beautiful plaque sponsored by Icom. Thank you!
North American QSO Party, SSB – August
W5WZ running stations in NAQP
North American QSO Party, SSB – August
Call: W5WZ
Operator(s): W5WZ WM5H
Station: W5WZ
Class: M/2 LP
QTH: LA
Operating Time (hrs): 12
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
——————-
160: 0 0
80: 113 31
40: 537 52
20: 616 57
15: 27 12
10: 0 0
——————-
Total: 1293 152 Total Score = 196,536
Club: Louisiana Contest Club
Comments:
Bands were terrible; lots of noise. And that was before the thunderstorms! Never was able to run on more than one band.
Watching Contest Online Score Board made the progress interesting – N5ZO was chasing us down, narrowing our QSO lead to only 16 at one point, and in the last 20 minutes came up with some multipliers to move ahead in total score.
Whew! That was a long 12 hours. 500 QSOs less than our January effort.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
My elmer, Jim W5LA will be teaching a General Class Ham Cram on July 27,28. If you or anyone you know is interested in being in the class, go to w5la.net/general/ for more information and to register for the class.
Registration is required so I can know how many are coming.
I realize the time is short so I need you to register and pay as soon as possible so I can order the General Class study guides.
Thanks and 73,
Jim W5LA
Several years ago I acquired an unidentified tilt-over crank-up tower. Manual winches, it appeared to be about 60 feet tall. The deal was take it down and it is yours. So it has sat behind my shop for about 10 years.
Recently, I saw a picture on the internet of an identical tower, and it was identified as an EZ Way, not that it mattered much to me at the time. However, the motorized trailered tilt-over crank-up tower that our club has used for Field Day for many years isn’t available this year. Ah-hah! Now I have a reason to be interested in the EZ Way. Of course, it was designed to be ground mounted. But I have a heavy trailer, and began considering the possibility of mounting the tower, temporarily and safely, on the trailer.
Short story is I reinforced the under frame at the four anchor bolt points for the tower base, and also fabricated a support for the long end of the tower to rest on when in transit.
All attachments to the trailer are bolted, so the installation is easily reversible to return the trailer to normal utility use. The project turned out quite nice!
For FD, I don’t expect to need to crank up to more than 45 feet. Exercising the KISS principle, I’ll install a flat top plate with a 3 ft pipe stubbed up. Then, I can slide the larger diameter mast over it, and rotate it by a pull rope attached to one end of the boom. The antenna will be a KT-34.
Many thanks to Jim W5LA, Mark K5MSB and Shawn WA5VQP for the helping hands on the labor to make this all possible.
In 2020, I removed this tower from the trailer and installed it on a homemade Wonder Post.
Networking N1MM+ on a local area network is both easy to do and functionally desirable for a multi-operator station.
Did you know that it is also possible and relatively straight-forward to do the same thing over a Distributed Wide Area Network? Why, you may ask? I can think of several reasons: 1) some contests allow distributed operating, such as IARU HQ stations 2) Special events – here in Louisiana we recently hosted the W5L Louisiana Purchase Special Event, and just a few years back the W1AW/5 ARRL Centennial Event. 3) For a contest where one or more participants is operating the rig remotely
N1MM Logger+ networking is automatic within a single subnet, which is usually the case in local area networks. However, if you want to network across a Wide Area Network, or in rare instances where your network involves more than one subnet, auto-configuration will not work. In that case you will need to fill in computer addresses in the “Edit Computer Addresses” table exactly as assigned by the network(s). For WAN networking you must enter the external IP addresses of each LAN and also port numbers for all the computers you wish to connect to, in the format XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:port number}. The port number is needed to permit operators to set up forwarding through their router firewalls to the right computer. If going subnet-to-subnet, you do not need to enter port numbers and the IP addresses would be the internal IP address.
The details are found on the official N1MM+ documentation site near the bottom of the page. The diagram by N9KT is very helpful. I suggest using it as a pattern to create your own cheat sheet, specific to your network.
Your router must be capable of configuring the proper port forwarding, and your “world-facing” IP address really should be a static IP address. As long as every station’s internet router is capable of port forwarding AND can specify the translation between internal and external ports per host, it is pretty easy to set up. Every computer that will be included must have the same version of N1MM+, and must be set up for the same contest with the same configuration for the contest.
73, W5WZ
Rotating Macros la3za.blogspot.com/2013/12/clever-k3-macro-trick.html Adding text labels to ANT1 and ANT2 www.elecraft.com/K3/k3_operating_tips.htm#Adding%20text%20labels%20to%20ANT1%20and%20ANT2
A special event commemorating the Louisiana Purchase will take place from April 21 to April 28, 2018. Sponsored by the NorthEast Louisiana Amateur Radio Club, the event will use the call sign W5L.
A commemorative full-color QSL card has been created for the event.
Operators will be from locations across Louisiana, activating the HF bands in CW, Phone and RTTY modes.
A schedule of the on-air times and more details are available at https://W5WZ.com/W5L