Virtual ham radio...sounds interesting!

For the past few weeks I have been up and down the bands in the evening hours looking for some CW activity and with the current conditions signals have been few and fare between. This has forced me to get a firm handle on the digi modes and to be more specific JT-65 and JT-9. As the saying goes "if you don't use it you loose it" and this is my concern due to the lack of CW activity I have been involved in lately, I have worked to dare hard getting my CW speed up to just see it drop off due to lack of activity. Last evening this got me thinking.....what about the internet there must be some interactive over broad band CW happening out there?? In my travels I came across two programs neither are free but they offer CW (and SSB) operating over the internet. Not really ham radio as such but it helps my CW skill stay sharp until the band slump is over. The first program I came across was QsoNet based out of Canada the cost is a modest 40.00 per year and you are given a free 30 day trial which is great. I looked the website over and found the their discussion forum, the last posting was from 2012 and the latest update was back in 2011. This made me wonder if I was just going to be listening to empty broadband due to the fact no one was around. I also wondered if there was active support for the site as well. I then moved on to another site called Hamsphere base out of Europe. This program was 30 EU per year along with a free trial but I was not able to locate for how long. This site seemed to be very up to date and a new version 4 had come out that looked very professional. Their forum was very up to date with postings from 2016 so it seemed like things were alive and well. Hamsphere seemed to be a very in-depth program with such things as a virtual Ionosphere, DX alert system, awards, contesting, multiple antennas to choose from, you can use your own keyer and DX cluster.....and the list goes on! I checked out some online YouTube videos of the program and WOW it sure is a professional program. I was watching one video when the commentator said "these are the antenna selections I have PURCHASED" I thought.....wait a minute what did I just hear and sure enough that's what was said "PURCHASED". I investigated this and found Hamsphere shop and this was the show stopper for me. It seems the 30 EU per year is not the only cost, at this site you can purchase antennas were the price goes as high as 90 EU!! Check out the link and it seems that there is lots of items for the radio that need to be purchased. I was not able to find anywhere on the home page information about extra purchases. It did say you could build your own rig and that there were a 100 antennas to choose from but again nothing about added cost. Another odd thing was you were never asked for your radio license. At QsoNet you had to fax in a photo copy of your license, it seemed not so with Hamsphere. Has anyone out there used either of these programs?? Do you know of any other interactive CW over the internet programs out there??

Multi tasking at the rig.

Reading blogs and operating JT65-HF

I flipped the switch on the radio this afternoon to 20m CW and it was dead! There were some very faint stations basically at the noise level and to hear them I had to engage the Audio Peak Filter. Thinking it was DX calling CQ I was very surprised to hear both calls were from the States! That kinda gave me an idea of the band conditions for CW and I then moved onto JT65 HF on 20m and it was nice to hear many op's. Most of the calls on the waterfall were from the U.S and that's just fine considering the propagation, I did see one station from Spain being decoded. I did make contact with KB0PPQ in Kansas City and while waiting to make another contact I was reading PE4BAS Bas's blog.  Have radio and multi tasking!

An afternoon with JT-65HF

The morning today was full of chores that had to be done so it was up early and go go go. That plan worked out just fine and it allow me to have some time at the radio. I listened for a bit on the CW portion of 20m and it was very slow. I then decided to stay on 20m but move onto JT-65HF and see what was happening there. Right off the bat I decoded ZS6C from South Africa I was not able to connect up with him after several tries he seem to fade off the waterfall. That sure would had been a nice contact but on the positive side I have seen him on the waterfall many times in the past so there will be more opportunities.  I did have lots of  U.S stations calling CQ as well but I was not able to make contact with any of them either day......just not my day on the waterfall. I then changed it up and moved to calling CQ...oh and this post was being written while I was operating JT-65HF you just have to keep an eye on the waterfall and the decoded message. It is going to take a while for me to get the hang of the timing down. When you call someone on the waterfall there is not much time during decode to see if they are coming back to you, coming back to someone else or calling CQ. I did have KA4HOT come back to me but we were not able to complete the QSO most likely because I'm still getting the hang of the QSO rhythm.

UTC time on the desktop

My new UTC clock on the PC desktop

I have Friday off today and got my running around out of the way this morning, so I decided to flip the radio switch and see what was happening. I was going from band to band around 1600 UTC and there was just stations here and there most U.S stations. Then at 1700 UTC I was listening on 20m and on the Elecraft P3 the lower end of 20m came alive! From only hearing U.S stations to hearing LOTS of  European stations and at first I could not tell if it was a contest or not but it had to be.  I went to WA7BNM contest site and looked things over to see what contest it was while at the same time listening to the contest to see what the exchange was. To be honest I did not have to much luck with either, I really could not make out the exchanges and the web site was not really clear what contest this could had been. As I was attempting to ferret out the contest an old issue came back to me....UTC time! I have an app on my Iphone that gives local and UTC time but more often than not the Iphone is not close by when I need to reference UTC time. The same issue comes up when logging a contact on paper temporally until logging it on the PC. I was going to purchase the MFJ 108B dual LED clock but it was good I held off. It occurred to me to get online and search for something that was a free download on the internet!! I found a neat little program that sits on your desktop. You can resize it, move it around, when you restart your PC it comes alive in the last place it was left when you turned your PC off and best of all it's free!  Have a look at it and see what you think and by all means if you are using another program let me know what it is and I will check it out.

Thanks everyone for your help!!

My contact on 20m

New and improved waterfall

Yesterday I spent some frustrating time trying to get WSJT-65 HF software up and running. I was having sound card issues and software issues, it sure was making my Saturday radio time very upsetting. I sat down and posted on my blog the issues I was having and I received lots of advice via the blog and emails. From the advice here is what I did…..with regards to the WSJT-65 HF program I made these adjustments. Bin/Pixel I set to 3 from it's setting of 7, I removed the check mark from flatten, NAvg was set to 1 from 5 and HZ was set to 0 which it was already. These settings made a world of difference to the waterfall display. Since I have the Signalink USB which has it's own sound card I was advised to just use the RX control on the Signalink for the waterfall setup. Yesterday I tried to do this and any adjustments to the RX really only had sporadic effects at best. Once the software settings were changed to what I mentioned above the RX adjustments seem to work very well. With all that was done to the program today I was able to make 2 contacts. AK4BB on 20 meters and K4OP on 30 meters. Again I just want to thank everyone who me great advice and because of that I am up and running on WSJT-X program.

Needing some help with JT65-HF

Ok all you JT-65 op's out there I have some questions about my setup here at VE3WDM using the new release of WSJT-X ver 1.6.0. Here is what I am using in my setup- Elecraft k3 in DATA A mode, Signalink USB, Windows 7 and finally as I said WSJT-65 ver 1.6.0. Tigertronics has a great web page for setting up the sound card for Windows 7. I followed all the step and all seemed to go well until I noticed one setting keeps reverting back to a default setting. Once I go to the step "Setting the windows software playback levels" you are instructed to set WSTJ's sound level to 50% which I did. I kept this window open but notice once the WSJT program came out of transmit the WSJT volume reset to 100% and stays there? To get the setting back to 50% you have to manually reset the volume but once again it resets to 100% after

Reset sound setting?

transmitting. The other issue is my waterfall and really at this point Im really not sure if it's a issue or lack of knowledge of this mode. I have seen on many Youtube videos of a nice blue waterfall with yellow and red JT-65 signals. My waterfall has two very large "signals" on the left and right of the waterfall. The first picture (PIC-1) is with the signalink RX at zero so there is no decodes (that makes sense) but what are the "things to the left and right on the waterfall?

PIC-1

As I turned the volume setting on the Signalink to 9 o'clock I was able to see decodes but the mystery signals were still present on the left and right to the waterfall. This can be seen in PIC-2 but then just an hour later with all settings the same what waterfall looks like PIC-3!

PIC-3

PIC-2

So I'm not really sure what is going on with the receive RX and why the sound setting is getting reset from 50% to 100% after each transmission. Any input would be a great help to getting this mode up and running.

Using WSPR for some band analysis

My wet noodle on 40m WSPR on Dec 30 2200 UTC

30m results at 2100 UTC Dec 30th

 

 

Over the holidays I was able to get some time to activate WSPR (at 5 watts) using WSJT-X version 1.6 the latest version which now includes WSPR. I wanted to investigate band activity with relation to UTC time from my QTH using my MFJ 1788 loop from the balcony. I started WSPRing on Dec 30th on bands I thought to be the "good" bands such as 15, 17 and 20m. From the UTC times of 1600 to 2200 I netted zero results on these bands!!  It could had been due to poor propagation on these bands as I had very poor results. 30m was my best band of all the test bands for that day. I did confirm that my MFJ loop is just a wet noodle on 40m as I was only spotted by two very local stations on a band that seemed very busy.

17m from  1500-1550 UTC Dec 31

I was on again on Dec 31 testing to see how the propagation gods were treating me that day. It turned out that my faith in 17m and 20m was uplifted a bit with some decent results. and once again 30m seemed to be consistent. It would seem from my limited testing that 30m is the band for me to go to on evenings when I get in from work. Also 20m but it may be more hit and miss. During the day on weekends 17 and 20m seem to be a charm. But then again there is always propagation that plays into the numbers and then just good old luck. I try not to just play these numbers games all the time. In the past (as I am sure most reading this post also have had it happen) there has been times when a band should be shut down and I make an amazing contact against all the odds.

20m from 1600-1700 UTC Dec 31