End of this contest…

In the last 2 weeks I have been working hard to get my band decoder up and running and to prepare for next contest: the ARRL RTTY Roundup (in which I placed first in M/S LP non W/VE in 2013).

Yesterday I made some QSOs and everything worked all right.

This morning I click on a dxspot on 12m and have my logging program turn the rotator… a few seconds later: no more signal on the receiver.

Something has gone wrong on the Big Boy Rotator and, of course, before I noticed it had overturned and broken the coax cables for my WARC rotary dipole.

The 10-15-20 beam is working OK and the rotator seems to turn but with no correct indication of the direction. I guess this contest has already ended for me this time.

Next big RTTY contest on my list is WPX in a months time…

So, todo:
– find someone to climb the 15m tower twice
– fix the rotator or find a new one
– fix the broken coax

Anyone some money to spare to help me buy a SteppIR DB-18E so I can replace the good old FB-33 while we’re climbing the tower anyhow?

SO2V RTTY FSK

Ever tried to work SO2V using this trick? You’ll no doubt have run into the problem that windows doesn’t want you to share a serial port between 2 programs.

So, when working SO2V with N1MM and 2 instances of MMTTY it is not possible to connect the 2 MMTTYs to the same FSK interface through software.

The solution: this interface as shown on the K8UT website.

All you need is 2 com ports (one for each MMTTY instance) and 4 diodes.

Don’t forget to work me in next RTTY contest!

FSK RTTY with Signalink USB? Yes you can!

According to this page on the Tigertronics website you can’t do FSK with the Signalink.

Of course you can, you just have to be a little creative…

Use the Signalink for RX and make this interface from Don AA5AU’s site for keying your transceiver.

It takes only a few euros and a few minutes of work for the hardware.

Configure MMTTY for transmitting FSK through your serial port et voilà!