Another week of amateur radio has expired. Expired Ham, get it? 🙂
Welcome to another issue of Expired Ham, a weekly newsletter where I discuss the ways I participated in the amateur radio hobby this week.
How about those HF band conditions this past week? Am I right? Terrible. Complete trash.
It seems like every day since I got my new Yaesu FT-710 has been terrible for operating on HF. I made one or two contacts on FT8 early in the week. Midweek gave us a minor geomagnetic storm which made receiving extra difficult for me at my QTH. What gives, Sun? Give me a break.
I ordered a new antenna to add to my collection. Since I really can only operate portable, even when at home, I need options for antennas that give me good coverage across all bands. I can’t say I’ve ever read a bad review about the Wolf River Coils coil so I’ve had my eye on one of the Silver Bullets. Pulled the trigger on Tuesday evening after doing a bit more research. I like the premade kits so I went with their “Take It Along” Silver Bullet Platinum with the large tripod. I want that Worked All Continents award and I think being able to push a bit more power through the antenna will help me get a signal further from the eastern US coast. We’ll see. If nothing else, it gives me flexibility.
In other news, I have finally joined an amateur radio club. After attending a couple monthly meetings of the Vienna Wireless Society, I decided I like what they offer and how they operate enough to join their club. I hope to participate in club happenings when able.
In other other news, I spent much of this weekend pulling my hair out trying to get fldigi set up and working correctly on my MacBook Pro. I’ve only located one decent source of information about setting up fldigi with macOS online (thanks K0PIR), however, his information is now a couple of years old and the app isn’t exactly like the version he was using and he was using an ICOM 7610 with two cables between the radio and his computer. Not exactly a 1:1 setup for me and my Yaesu radios. What’s irritating about these ham apps, for me, is that no two configurations are identical it seems. It would be nice if there was a single standard setup that worked with everything. Anyway, while I was able to get fldigi to work directly with MacLoggerDX for automatically logging QSOs in fldigi, I wasn’t actually able to figure out how to get fldigi to allow me to make any contacts. I think I’ll continue to work on that and will probably post an article about how I got to work if I’m successful. That way there will be some up-to-date information for fldigi and macOS online. The Virginia QSO Party was this weekend also, but I didn’t manage to participate. I will have make better plans for portable operating for these events and contests from now on. My home operating conditions just are not favorable for playing radio.
Have a good week ahead everyone. 73.
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