John Woodstock wrote:
It's been a long time since I've been on HF.. Been a ham since the
late 70's..
(welcome back!)
As I look at all the gear out there, it seems tough to get this all
put together.. I think I'll be mixing phone and CW. I think I'll be
doing a bit of rag chewing and I'd like to try out contesting..
Here is what I know.. For Antennas, I'll be using dipoles. Can't sell
the XYL on a tower.
I've got an off-center-fed dipole. 44' on one side, 88' on the other,
fed with coax through a 4:1 balun. If it's mechanically beneficial, you
can use any desired amount of 300-ohm TV twinlead between the feedpoint
and the balun. (I was told you *had* to use the twinlead, but that it
didn't matter how much you used. So I figured *zero* was a valid
answer, and it proved right!)
Works GREAT on 80/40/20/10 and with the autotuners in most modern
radios, it works OK on 15 as well.
Mike - I'd like to have one mike for what will end up being a few
radios (1 or 2 VHF/UHF and 1 or 2 HF rigs). Some sort of Mike Switch
seems in order. With or without a processor? Which brands are the
best?
Modern radios have built-in speech processors. I wouldn't want a
processor in your mike switch.
For contesting, a headset mike is VERY convenient. (actually, it makes
rag-chewing a lot more enjoyable too - after building one, I *had* to
have a headset for my telephone too!) You can buy them. You can also
buy, for a lot less $$, a computer multimedia headset. 10K resistor
from mike hot to +8V (which is probably on a pin on the mike jack),
0.2uF capacitor from mike hot to audio input on the rig. Works great, I
get good reports too. Mine's a Labtec LVA-8322, two for $10 at Dayton..
Logging - The PC in the shack is not fast, but has XP on it.. I also
have a laptop with Linux if that is better.. It seems the loggers are
either general in nature or specific to contesting.. Would also love
to have the rigs feed the logging program, it appears to be available.
Some also appear to be a keyboard CW keyer. Any thoughts on which
programs are the best?
(I'm no expert on general QSO logging programs - never found one I
liked, so I wrote my own, running as a collection of Perl CGI scripts
(and straight Perl programs))
For contesting, the three big names are TRLog, CT, and NA. You'll find
links on
http://www.contesting.com . TR supports more contests and is
more flexible; however, CT supports most of the big ones and is free.
All three are extremely flexible CW keyers, HOWEVER the CW keying
functions won't work under Windows XP. (because of timing issues, and
because they use the parallel port for things other than printing -
directly accessing the hardware in ways that XP won't allow)
A TRLog clone for Linux exists.
http://home.iae.nl/users/reinc/TLF-0.2.html . I've had some grief
getting it to key properly but haven't really spent much time on it.
There is some evidence that TRLog itself will run on Linux under DOS
emulation.
Voice & CW keyers - If the logging program doesn't key, which are the
best voice and CW keyers are out there.. Would like to use them for
the standard things we repeat a million times. Who makes the best
units out there?
Modern rigs generally include built-in simple CW keyers for general
non-contest work. (some of them have built-in voice keyers as well)
http://fermi.la.asu.edu/w9cf/sbdvp/dvp.html is a popular program for
using your sound card as a voice keyer with TRLog. It may or may not
work with CT/NA, and may or may not work on Windows XP.
I don't know offhand of anything that'll work on Linux. However, I saw
something out there that will read the state of a pin on a parallel port
and act on it. You could hook a footswitch to that pin, and have the
program trigger the "play" program to play back a .wav file with the
desired recording.
--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com