IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
I was just about to scream this out on the radio until I realised that I'd just spent an hour idly surfing the net just reading "stuff" - most of it amateur radio. So having done that I could hardly accuse anyone else of not using the radio!
BUT, it would be rather nice if someone somewhere could post on a blog here or on the main club forum something that might be of interest to other members or hams anywhere. Does anyone keep their own blog - we'd love to see it!
I read with interest NASA's statement that Solar Cycle 24 had 'officially' begun, so it seems that I'll see at least one in my lifetime. Mind you - you know how synical I am - I suspect the band will be swamped by all those USA and Eastern European stations running huge amounts of power and antenna systems that make our club contest station look miniscule. No doubt QRP will become the order of the day and it will be frowned on to use more than a few watts. Anybody prepared to enlighten me on their experiences during the last cycle?
In my surfing, I had a good browse through Tim (G4VXE's) blog at Google (www.g4vxe.com) - most entertaining and thanks Tim, always something interesting to catch up on at your site. Good photos too, which is something I think our site lacks (well, not that they are bad, just lacking in number). Must polish up my camera lens. No musn't do that - come on chaps - this is a CLUB site, not just DLP's blog...
It's the 80m SSB AFS this Saturday (19th Jan) and I hope some of you will have a go this year. Its absolutely frenetic, but a great intro to contesting, and not necessarily the way it should be done - you'll hear both good and bad rubbing shoulders (and sometimes head butting) but the spirit of the thing is great and I find the AFS 80m contests just great fun just doing search and pounce. Start at the top or bottom of the band and work your way up or down to see how many you can work - I find the most enjoyment trying to work the little stations sandwiched between the big ones, and I have learned a lot about the filtering/dsp controls on my rig trying to filter them out of the adjacent qrm. I have the Inrad narrow SSB filter on my main RX (MkV Field) and that has proved to be worth its weight in gold together with the Inrad roofing filter. I've put another on my wish list for the sub-receiver (VFO B) and that will be brilliant for S&P when 'running'. I'm always thankful to people running narrow TX filters in that sort of contest too - as I suspect the people either side of their frequency are too, although they'll never get any BBC type audio reports using them!
I'd like to marry the MkV up with some of the excellent software written for SDR - the filtering possibilities are brilliant. I wonder if anyone's come across any articles on doing this with the MkV? I've certainly played with just filtering the audio output to great effect with CW using 2 soundcards, but the greatest benefit comes from finding the I&Q outputs inside the rig and sending those to each side of the stereo input to the SDR software. You may ask why when the receive side of the MkV is so good anyway? Let me say I'm no stick in the mud when it comes to adopting new technology that has a positive benefit (and particularly doesn't make a fortune for some faceless corporation), and I can see that software IS the future of radio. I think the person or company that marries the black box and software together properly will sweep the floor with the competition, and importantly, IN competitions. What I want is a marriage between the two, not something that is completely built as an SDR - I love the controls on my MkV and I would only want software to supplement those, not to replace them. There's something about the tactile quality of a 'real' rig!
Hey ho, I've written this and still not worked anyone on the radio today <g>