A little reading entertainment for you...
Sometimes You Just Need to Keep at It - No Matter What
While getting ready to submit my VHF Contest logs, I ran into a dilemma I
had not considered before. Was my category 'Single Operator' or 'Multi
Operator'? All along I had prep'd and planned to be 'Single Operator'. But
about an hour into the contest an acquaintance I had not operated with for
many years showed up. I did not invite him and was not thrilled at all
when he appeared. My hope was that his stay would be brief, and his
interruptions would be minor. However, that was not to be. Apparently,
Murphy was going to spend the entire contest plaguing my participation.
The first issue Murphy entertained me with was about an hour after the
contest started. I was intermittently losing receive signals through my
mast mounted 2m preamp, which then progressed to both loss reception of all
2m signals and high SWR on transmit. After determining the problem was
definitely up on the tower, I went out and lowered the crank-up tower down
and moved my man-lift (yes, I have a man-lift) into place and went to take a
look. I pretty quickly determined a perfectly good DPDT coaxial relay was
stuck in the half-way changed position, leaving both TX and RX open from the
antennas and preamp. The mechanical "contact "pusher" that the magnetic
coil pulls in was rubbing against the mount and had gotten stuck there.
Without success I tried to adjust it by loosening the screws and wiggling it
around. When that didn't work, I went to my spare parts pile ang took a
coil and "pusher" off of a spare relay and swapped it out. That solved the
problem. By the time I was done and had the tower back up and was again
operating, I had lost about an hour and 30 minutes.
After that I was able to get in a good 3 hours or so of operating until
Murphy messed with the settings I was using for Digirite. Digirite is not
really a good program, it's kludgy and very hard to configure, and I don't
like it much, but it's the only thing that interfaces directly with
Writelog, my contesting software. Digirite's only advantage is the ability
to dupe check digital QSOs before they are worked. Murphy had done a good
job of screwing it up and I was not able to get it going again, so I
switched over to running multi-instances of WSJT-X and accepted the fact
that I would have dupes in my log. I lost another hour or so of operating
time with this minor interruption.
Things settled down, everything was working perfectly, and I was plugging
along making contacts and filling the log, . . . . . . for 3-1/2 hours.
Then without any warning, WSJT-X stopped working, all instances of it, on
all 3 radios at once. Murphy had gotten into my computer and had somehow
deleted all, I mean all, of my sound card device settings. I had no audio
to or from any of the radios to WSJT-X. By this time almost all of the
contest was taking place using digital modes and without WSJT-X I was out of
the game. Fortunately, I know how to quickly set up WSJT-X sound and
thought this was going to be a quick fix. I couldn't have been more
wrong. I could not get Windows 11 to recognize any of the external sound
card interfaces (IC-9700 built-in & 2 separate Signallink units). The
computer indicated that they "just were not there". I was lost. I
rebooted the computer more times than I could count. I tried to reinstall
drivers, that didn't work either. I unplugged and plugged the USB
connections, with no success. I even reinstalled WSJT-X, which did nothing.
Finally, I shut everything down and unplugged the computer and went for a
cup of coffee. When I returned and turned everything back on, all of the
sound card devices were there! Apparently, power off clears faults and
detects devices when a computer restart or reboot does not. I had to reset
all of the device mapping and parameters and was finally back on the air
after another 3-1/2 hours of lost operating time.
As 2AM local time approached I was eagerly anticipating switching over to
EME to grab some needed multipliers. Lots of other contesters had the same
idea. The chat boards were full of people arranging and scheduling contacts
on all 3 bands I was planning on as well. This was going to be great.
That was until Murphy, remember Murphy? He woke up from his nap and
tweaked my WSJT-X settings. Well, that's what I think, but have still not
resolved the issue he created. Before the contest I was doing ok making
EME contacts on 2m and 432, and with some difficulty I was succeeding on 222
as well. But since the earlier rebuilding of the entire WSJT-X suite,
including sound input & output configurations, I have not copied a single
signal off of the moon. I even went out to the yard in the dark to see if
the moon was there and if my antennas were pointed at it. Both the moon
was where it was supposed to be, and the antenna array was pointed directly
at it. I receive chat board messages reporting reception of my transmitted
signals, but I cannot see or copy anything from anyone. This makes no
sense at all. Terrestrial with FT8 works fine using the exact same hardware
and software. So, after 2-1/2 hours of zero contacts I gave up the EME
effort and lowered the elevation back to ground level.
The timing was good for going back terrestrial. 432 and even 1296 was
open. I was hearing a New England station (~500 miles) on 1296 CW at 599!
But for some reason my CW key was not keying the transmitter. As the signal
faded into the noise over the next 6 or 7 minutes, I realized that WSJT-X
had put my IC-9700 into 'split' mode and even after changing the mode to CW,
the TX VFO was still in 'Data' mode. I'll blame this lost 3-point contact
and new multiplier loss on operator error. Murphy had nothing to do with
it.
Things had settled, the sun was rising and even though I was still bum'd
about the EME failure, I was slowly racking up points on all bands when both
2m and 432 SSPA's shut down. The panel lights were out, this could only
mean Murphy had screwed with a power supply. Not to worry. I had a spare.
I quickly swapped in the spare, but neither came back on! Ok, now what?
Maybe Murphy had screwed with my 3D printed 50V distribution block. So, I
unplugged both amps from it and hooked them to a Y connection I had. This
didn't change anything. Neither amp still worked. I was baffled, Murphy
had gotten trickier. My next move was to connect only one amp at a time.
The 2m amp did not come on, so I tried the 432 amp, and it came on. This
was progress. Not a good sign, but at least progress. I need the 2-meter
amp to work. Next, I pulled the power cord from the back of the 2m amp and
saw that there was black soot and some melted plastic on it. This did not
give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. The amp had been performing well so I
assumed (hoped) it was ok. I took the power cord to the work bench and
opened up the connector. The internal + and - pins had shorted together
where the plastic had melted. I did not have another of these weird Russian
DC connectors that the amp uses, so I cleaned up the soot and cut strips of
thin Teflon sheeting and put it in where the plastic had melted to keep the
+ and - pins from shorting. This fixed the issue. Murphy had been
defeated again and I was back in business with only about 40 minutes of lost
time.
By now it was getting into late Sunday morning, and I had been up since 5AM
on Saturday. That's a long time without sleep when you are 71 years old.
But that didn't matter. I was making contacts, slowly, but I was making
them. I even snagged a few new grids on 6 and 2-meter MSK. Sometime
later, after my second or third unscheduled 10 minute nap in front of the
radios wearing my head set, I decided I need to go lay down and sleep for an
hour or so.
Five hours later I woke up and was back at the radio to find not only
6-meters hopping, but a 2-meter sporadic E opening to the southwest. I
don't know how much of it I had missed, but this was great. Lots of
contacts and new multipliers, and no sign of Murphy. After the 2 -meter Es
died down I was jumping from band to band and rotating antennas all
directions picking up points and multipliers. By this time in the contest
there was almost no SSB activity, and most of my contacts were FT8 with the
occasional 432 or 1296 CW contact thrown in.
With only about 2 hours of the contest remaining I was feeling pretty good.
Then he struck again! Except for most digital, I operate wearing a Heil
Proset Plus that I got for my birthday about 15 years ago. Because I haven't
done a lot of CW for years my code copying pretty much sucks, and I always
copy wearing headphones. Well to challenge me, for his last act Murphy
decided break an internal conductor in the headset cord to turn the audio in
my left year on and off at random. This was quite annoying but at this
point I was not going to stop and fix it.
To wrap up this rambling saga, I go back to my initial dilemma. Was my
operating category 'Single Operator' or 'Multi Operator'? Since Murphy
didn't work or log any contacts and only provided challenging entertainment
for most of the entire contest, I think I'll go with my planned 'Single
Operator' category.
Now to find out why I'm not seeing or decoding EME modes from WSJT-X.
de K3SK FM07
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