There is No Such Thing as an Off Radiosport Weekend

This last weekend had little to offer radiosport-wise.  I listened around the bands and was ready
for the eclectic TISZA_CDX Cw contest.  Unfortunately, (typical with contests of this type) nothing
was heard.  There was also the Kentucky QSO Party.  Also typical for such events, very few KY stations participated in their own QSO party. Nevertheless, I submitted a 4-QSO Log and posted
an entry on the 3830 Scores Website.  My last KYQP GiG was in 2019 and I made even
LESS QSOs than this year.

Having only 12 hours for an East coast-based party all but precludes contacts on 80 & 160 meters from the Waste Coast.  I wish they would either LENGTHEN the event hours on Saturday or give us
a 2nd opportunity on Sunday; as many state QSO parties do.  I managed a WHOPPING 4-QSOs;
3 on 20-m Cw and Ssb and one on 40-Cw.  While there was a run of the SEANET GiG, just like
2019, there was hardly anyone heard to make it worth setting up a log in N1MM.

The Boats on the Air (BOTA) GiG offered us the promise of working a sailboat tooling around Angel Island (in the S.F. north bay)  from 1 to 4 pm Saturday afternoon.  They published the frequencies (7.115 Cw, 14.325 Ssb and 18.100 FT8) but not what callsign(s) would be on the air.  Having rewired the antenna sharing switch for the CH-250 vertical, we gave a listen with Dennis's (W7AYT) Yaesu FT-450 and my Yaesu FT-1000mp.  Nothing was heard on 40-Cw, a faint whisper was heard on 14.325 and some (undecodable @W7AYT) FT8 signals were heard on 18.100.  On 20-meters,
if they WERE on 14.325, their signals were probably skipping over the Concord location.

This was also Museum Ships Weekend as well.  WQ6X managed communications w/the USS Midway (stationed in San Diego) and the USS Iowa (anchored in San Pedro - near L.A.).

Throughout the weekend there were experiments that didn't make it.  The JPS NIR-12 external DSP runs extremely HOT - there are no ventilation holes to keep the pair of TMS320C26 DSP chips cool, leaving them HoT to the touch and the filter cover extremely warm.

In the past I tried running a pair of fans (from a defunct laptop cooler).  They worked well enough
and unfortunately put a motorboat (or airplane engine) sound in the right channel audio line (where the NIR-12 is inserted).  Thinking it was a fault of the fan-pair, I tried a junk box fan with the same results.

It is possible the problem is created by using the NIR-12's power line (tapping it from lugs on the power switch).  I guess the next test should be to power the fans directly from the 30 amp SAMLEX 1235M power supply - the NIR-12 is powered by its own Wall wart.

On the software side of things a new Version (4.82) of the WQ6X Beacon Tracker went into Alpha
test on Monday to evaluate the new Active Beacon Frequency screen, offering a look at not only the selected beacon frequency; also included are an indication of what bands the other 4 active beacons are transmitting on.

Even though a given weekend shows little to no contest activity, there are ALWAYS things to be done to improve your operating experience for the next weekend there IS radiosport activity.  I wrote about this exactly a year ago (June 8th, 2020).  Click [HERE] to read all about that.

What do YOU spend your time with during slow-radiosport weekends?