While I’ve been able to confirm that Windows does indeed register the FSK COM port in use, I have never been able to track down the offending software or driver.  And, while I’ve been annoyed, I haven’t been annoyed enough to wipe the hard drive and rebuild the machine from scratch.

The workaround up until today has been to use MixW, which is happy to use the COM port in spite of it registering as “in use”, for chasing DX, ragchewing, and contesting, and to occasionally use MMTTY (or, more usually, N1MM+MMTTY) in AFSK mode when I didn’t want to fire up MixW.

This has been OK, but the arrangement annoys me for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m trying to wean myself off Ham Radio Deluxe (which I like, but maybe not enough to upgrade when the new owners take it commercial) onto the DXLab suite (which relies on MMTTY for RTTY).  And second, while MixW does OK for RTTY contests when the contest exchange is a state or a number, it’s not really laid out efficiently for other exchanges which it can’t auto-grab, like the name exchange in the upcoming NAQP RTTY test.

So, I’ve been searching for a solution…and I think I might have one.  I found a utility called Virtual Serial Ports Emulator, which (among other things) has the ability to create a virtual serial port and map it to a physical port.

MMTTY » EXTFSK » Virtual COM port » (VSPE) » FSK COM port seems to work in my limited testing so far.   I need to go find a couple of big pileups and give it a real workout, however, to see if it might be an acceptable workaround to my woes.

VSPE is freeware for 32-bit users, but has a $30 license fee for 64-bit use.   And, as a non-disclaimer, I have nothing to do with the company.   Heck, I’m not even positive that it’s a good fix yet – I still need to stress-test the arrangement before I’m fully comfortable.

However, as Google has turned up no information about others having this particular problem with N1MM/MMTTY/MMVARI/WinWarbler, I thought I’d put this possible fix out on the interwebs for others to consider.

There are three installments – CW, Phone, and RTTY.  CW and Phone will be in a few weeks.  All three have a certain attraction to me because there is a “Rookie” overlay category, and I’m not above taking pleasure in getting good results when there isn’t much competition.

This was, as indicated by the title of the post, the RTTY chapter of this year’s WPX contests.  If you’ve read my prior posts, you’re quite aware that I love RTTY contests.  The sound of the diddles is just cool, and my rig has good filtering for FSK RTTY, so it’s less of a chore trying to copy a signal (my issue with phone) or in decoding the signal (as CW doesn’t come naturally to me).  And, while I don’t have a real contest setup here, I can at least sit back and enjoy the beauty of watching propagation change.

I started in thinking that if I could keep my butt in the chair through 200-300 contacts, I’d consider it a success.  However, as always seems to be the case, I might have gotten carried away:

        Band     QSOs    Pts  WPX
         3.5      91     236   50
           7     126     460   66
          14     206     451  103
          21     173     378   88
          28      67     146   35
       Total     663    1671  342

            Score : 571,482

…and that was even with several breaks to spend time with the wife, to wrangle on antenna work, and to sleep.   I wonder how I would have done if I had spent the full 30 hours on the air.

Last year, the high US SOAB LP rookie score was 154,031, and the high US SOAB HP score was 251,489, so I feel pretty good with those results.  Looks like this score would have gotten me 4th place among rookies worldwide.   It remains to be seen how many rookie submissions there are this year, or how my score stands after log-checking.

There were quite a few folks who struggled with decoding my call.  I’m probably in more than a few logs as “AB1O”, “AB1OB”, and the like.   I tried correcting those errors when I witnessed them.  It makes me wonder how many calls or exchanges I might have muffed.  The scoring report should make for interesting reading.

Aside from a bit of an addictive/compulsive streak in me, perhaps part of the reason I went so gung-ho in this contest was that I joined the Yankee Clipper Contest Club this past week.   I had been meaning to check things out with that organization for a while now, but to join one must attend a meeting, and the YCCC has an unfortunate habit of scheduling meetings at times that I have other commitments.   But the YCCC held a Contest University at ARRL headquarters in Newington Thursday evening.  I attended, picked up a few tips, and turned in an application.

The tips seemed like common sense, and were understandably geared more towards big phone and CW contests.  But it did help to have an external influence reminding me that if I want to have fun generating a big score, I shouldn’t dilly-dally in struggling to work cool DX pileups I might encounter.

RTTY contests are, currently, the only contests I feel comfortable attempting to run a frequency.  Although I need to train myself to do this more consistently, I usually did plop myself down whenever I found a clear frequency and called CQ.  However, I only got a couple of good runs in.  Most of my time was spent S&P-ing, since I seem to have a fairly decent rate doing so.

40 meters continues to be challenging for me, partly because of a high noise level and inconveniently placed nulls on my antenna, but also because Friday and Saturday evenings the band was a zoo – wall to wall, frequently overlapping RTTY signals.  Still, given the WPX scoring (more points on the low bands), I slugged it out there.

20 meters seemed less zoo-like, and with the drop in sunspot activity, it was generally the most profitable band.   15 meters was good for DX, productive but not crowded, when open.

10 meters was disappointing.  I didn’t encounter much activity there Saturday (but I did take most of the afternoon off, so I might not be a good judge).  For a couple of hours Sunday, however, signals from Europe were quite strong even given in spite of my antenna not being too good on that band.   I spent more time than I probably should have on 10m because of that…but not enough other competitors got the memo that 10 was open.

Still, it was a lot of fun.  I just hope that I can recover in time for the DX contest this coming weekend.

First, another branch that was broken and dangling high in a tree from the October storm came down in a windstorm this past week, pinning my inverted L.   Now whenever the wind blows, the wire is getting disconnected from the balun.   If I am going to keep that antenna as a long-term part of the farm, I’m going to have to put up a new wire, as I simply cannot free the existing one.  

However, I’m postponing putting up that new wire, as there are still a few more broken branches waiting to come down, and because I’ve been working on building what I’m calling a “drunken doublet” – a 160 meter dipole that weaves/bends among several trees at the back of the property.   Models suggest that it will be no worse (and probably better) than the L for top-band work.   I want to get it up before the 160m phone contest in a couple of weeks.

I had thought I was getting close to my goal Saturday when I did something stupid.   I had a 133-foot length of wire just about where I wanted it, when I pulled on the rope at the “far end” of the wire a little too hard.  The mason’s line I had tied to the balun-end of the wire slipped off, and that end of the wire was now dangling in the air, 20 feet out of reach.  Rather than climbing a tree to bring it back to earth, I finished pulling the wire all the way through the trees…and now I have to re-weave that side of the antenna.   Drat!  And that wire was just where I wanted it.   Annoyingly, it was too breezy to get a guide-line re-woven before it started getting dark.

I was doing this while taking a break from the CQ WPX RTTY contest.  It was a nice day outside, and it seemed like a FB idea to sacrifice some points to enjoy the day, especially if it meant I might be able to try the new antenna “under fire” that evening.   Sadly, that didn’t happen.

More on the contest in another post.

Yes, I did get a little bit of contesting in. I made a few contacts in both the CQ 160 CW contest, and in the BARTG RTTY Sprint. However, I was a little disappointed with the RTTY contest — admittedly, I had other obligations during the best time to work Europe at this time of the year, but the little bit I was on saw stations in the north half of Europe and some R9 stations difficult-to-impossible to work due to auroral flutter.

The 160m contest was a little more interesting, but humbling. I’ve written previously about my challenges in getting onto top band, and I took this opportunity to confirm some suspicions of mine — my inverted L is heard better on 160 than my Carolina Windom, but the Windom hears better on top band than the L. Despite having the opportunity to do such testing…well, propagation seemed decent at times, and it was frustrating actually hearing plenty of DX, but not getting heard by those stations. Next free weekend with decent weather, I’m going to be cooking up another antenna for 160. Hopefully that will occur before the CQ 160 phone test, as that seems the last chance this season to really stress test any new creation.

During other radio-playtimes, I did a bit more DX-chasing, trying to fill in a few more band/mode combinations on HK0NA, VP6T, and TN2T. Also, some discussion after the local VE session got me curious to see how I was doing on Diamond DXCC, the a special award commemorating the 75th anniversary of DXCC, where the object is to work 100 1937-era entities within the year. It seems that although I’ve worked 85 modern DXCC entities so far this year, I’ve only worked 61 1937 entities.

And last, but not least, I had some time this weekend to experiment with jPskMail, a utility that links with fldigi to use various soundcard modes to bridge over RF to an internet connection. It’s an alternative to using PACTOR/Winmor for Winlink 2000 HF messaging. It seems intriguing, but the current edition of fldigi has a nasty habit of locking up on my machine…and it seems to want a POP-enabled email account on the internet side, which I no longer have. (I have one “throwaway” account that is currently pop-enabled, but it requires SSL connections. I’m guessing that’s why I’ve failed to connect….)

All-in-all, it wasn’t a terribly exciting weekend radio-wise, but I still enjoyed myself.

Entities 179 and 180 are Malpelo Island and Pitcairn Island, respectively, thanks to the HK0NA and VP6T. Both stations have been loud here during the appropriate band openings, and the biggest challenge has been getting through the pileups. I wouldn’t mind getting both stations on a few more bands or other modes…but I’m just happy to have them in the log at all.

Probably the coolest thing about DXpeditions like these is that many of them are posting logs to the net when resource permits. Heck, it looks like VP6T is uploading to Logbook of the World as they go; I already have a LoTW confirmation back from them.

So, I had the opportunity to put in nearly full-time effort into both tests, helped by the fact that the NAQP tests only run 12 hours, and single-operators can be active for only 10 of the 12, leaving plenty of time during the rest of the weekend to do chores, tackle honey-do lists, tend to disabled spouses, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a certificate for having the high score from Connecticut in the July 2011 NAQP-CW, with 253 Q’s and 123 multipliers, which seems respectable given my inexperience, even if you ignore that I “won” Connecticut by virtue of being the only person to submit a log from the state. Combine that with a bit more experience and confidence, I was interested in seeing how I could do.

I think I might have done OK this time:

          CW         SSB
Band   Q's Mult   Q's Mult
160m    35  21     20  16
 80m   126  37    100  34
 40m    64  30     45  24
 20m    76  33     52  28
 15m    54  20     75  32
 10m    11   6     28  15
TOTAL  366 147    320 149
SCORE   53,802     47,680

On the CW test, I got started late and missed much of the time 10m would have been productive, and as noted in my prior post, I operated off the “wrong” antenna until I went to 80m. I operated strictly in search-and-pounce mode, since even though my CW is improving, it’s nowhere near good enough for me to feel comfortable calling “CQ TEST”. 80 and 160 both had very low noise levels, making it a pleasure to hunt on those bands.

I hadn’t expected to compete on my own for the SSB test. At the local ARES EOC, there had been talk of giving the station a workout by playing in this test…but due to weather, conflicting schedules, etc. I was free to participate in my own. Several times during this test I thought about putting up my headset, since I’m not really a big fan of working phone, especially in crowded conditions, with just wire antennas, and just the most basic filters available to me. It’s just too…messy.

Aggravating matters was the fact that a CME hit that afternoon, and the bands were extremely noisy for much of the test. Phone on 40 meters is always a challenge for me due to a high local noise floor on the band, but during the contest it was positively ugly. The only saving grace was that I discovered along the way that an RFI issue I’ve had seems to have been accidentally resolved: in the past I have had to avoid transmitting between 7200 and 7300MHz on the Carolina Windom because I would get noise on the house alarm system. Perhaps this is a fringe benefit of adding a manual tuner, with its own grounding strip, to the station.

I had planned to operate strictly search-and-pounce during the contest. It may not be optimal strategy, but the fun of turning the VFO to see who I find next more than makes up for that. However, late on Saturday evening, after the noise level dropped a little, I came across a quiet frequency on 80m. I asked “is this frequency in use?”, actually had someone respond back “no”…and thus started a decent run. Considering how much fun that was, I really ought to try calling CQ more often.

I’m looking forward to the RTTY installment in a couple of weeks. As I’ve noted in a few prior tests, I think RTTY contests are my favorite.

A few other activities of note:

Connecticut ARES has had a couple of mini-tests on HF in the past few weeks. Two weekends ago, the experiment was to try to reach a station in North Carolina at prescribed times on 40-160m. 40m was difficult due to the proximity to a broadcast station. 60m was challenging in that interested parties found whether or not they had any 80m capabilities. 80m wasn’t too bad. 160m was challenging on both ends, with a couple of interested stations discovering that they couldn’t tune their antennas on the designated frequencies, stations like mine getting confirmation that running barefoot on topband can be difficult, and the station on the other end perhaps not having the best 160m antenna in the world either.

This past weekend, someone in New Haven County had an interest in conducting a couple of propagation tests on 60m. Participating stations heard each other very well at midday, but after sunset…well, the band had gone long and communications weren’t possible. The results weren’t surprising, but it’s nice to see a bit of local ARES interest in 60m in particular, and HF in general.

The ARRL January VHF test was also this past weekend. I don’t have good antennas for anything above 25MHz, but I still tuned around the bands, made a few contacts, and picked up a couple of new grids. My participation was marred, however, by my power supply deciding to seemingly randomly shut down when transmitting. This, of course, happened after I ran into a couple of folks who wanted to QSY for a short QSO. To them, I just disappeared from the band. I suspect RF was getting in somewhere, so I disconnected and reconnected every power and coax cable I could find. I’m crossing my fingers that my theory is correct and that I tightened whatever was loose; I haven’t had the issue crop up since.

Coming up next weekend is the CQ 160m test. Unless my wife has other chores for me, that should make for an interesting opportunity to see how the L and the Carolina Windom (using a manual tuner on both) compare to one another on top band. I’ve only loaded up the Carolina Windom a couple of times on 160m, while my L was inoperative, and my suspicion is that the L is the better antenna on that band…but I’m looking forward to the chance to put that to the test. Here’s hoping for a low noise floor!

I was bummed by that discovery, made as the CW installment of the North American QSO Party was getting underway. I worked out the necessary settings to tune up the L at various points on 160m, grumpy because I feared the L was still “broken”, and then I switched back to the auto-tuner to start playing in the contest.

What I didn’t realize, however, was that I didn’t switch back to my Carolina Windom. I spent the first part of the contest working off my Inverted L, which had previously been disappointing in comparison to the Windom on other bands, without realizing the difference. Only when I went to 80 meters did I realize what I did: I bypassed the tuner (since my Windom is resonant in the bottom part of 80m), and had high SWR issues.

I wish I knew just how I impacted the L in my repairs, because it now appears to be a better all-around antenna than it used to be (even if I now have to use a manual tuner for top band).

It’s good that I have an excuse to play a bit more with the L, because my plans to put up a different antenna for 160 have been put on hold thanks to Mother Nature deciding to end this winter’s snow drought.

Even though the L is working, there are still a couple of broken branches high up in trees that threaten to take it out…plus the tractor-meets-coax accident and some unpleasant experiences dealing with cleaning up fallen leaves in the side-yard that is now home to a bunch of radials has me reconsidering the wisdom of an L in that particular location. I’ve also been a little disappointed with my limited ability to DX on topband.

To that end, I encountered plans online for a “double L” antenna, which I’m interested in adapting to my property. I just hope the next good antenna-raising day comes before seasonal noise returns to 160.

I think that of the “major” modes of amateur radio, RTTY is probably my favorite.  I like phone because it’s nice to have the human touch of a voice on the other end of the radio.  CW is great because of its efficiency and the mental challenge of translating code.   But I think what really gets me about RTTY is that is sounds cool, and in a contest I can let the computer do most of the work, leaving me with the fun of finding signals, the adrenaline of pushing on when there are plenty to choose from, and the likelihood that I’ll come across someone chatty when the contest is slow.

Band conditions were not that great as compared to this past fall, but the lack of propagation was offset by having plenty of stations to work – enough to stay busy, but not so many that everyone was transmitting on top of each other – and there not being too many big, zoo-like pileups.

Best DX for me was getting to Siberia on 15 meters, and into the Ukraine on 80 meters.  I heard Namibia and Queensland, Australia, but when heard they were playing S&P while I was also S&P-ing, and I just couldn’t find an open frequency ahead of them to try to attract their attention.

As I was able to have some pretty good contact-rates Sunday, both while running a frequency and while searching-and-pouncing, I started to get optimistic that I might be able to break my record for most number of contacts in a contest.  However, I didn’t quite get there.

        Band    QSOs  Sec  DXC
         3.5      53   16    3
           7     107   12    9
          14     140    8   13
          21     139   17   18
          28       8    0    1
       Total     447   53   44

States/provinces missed:  DC, HI, NJ, VT, WY; NB, NS, LB, YT, NT, NU

High and not-so-high points of the past few weeks:

Contests – yes, I did play in a few contests in December.   The focus of December activities seems to have been on opposite ends of the spectrum, with the running of the ARRL’s 160m and the Stew Perry contest occurring on topband, and the ARRL’s 10m and a new 10m RTTY contest occurring up on 10 meters.   Sadly, neither 160 nor 10 are particularly strong bands for me: the Carolina Windom just doesn’t seem terribly efficient on 10, and while my L is OK for NVIS…it ain’t a contest antenna.

I also played in the RAC Winter contest, which seemed significantly more active than the Canada Day contest, but I kept my participation limited so that I would have some energy and spousal-tolerance in the bank to participate in the Stew Perry and the CW installment of the Rookie Roundup.

The CW Rookie Roundup was a little disappointing, actually, not to mention quite a bit humbling.  It’s probably not terribly surprising that there aren’t many rookies (folks first licensed in the current or two prior calendar years) interested in working CW, and I really didn’t expect too many responses to my calling CQ after the hours I spent calling CQ in the RTTY installment to no avail…but I had hoped that maybe a few more experienced operators might be willing to throw a Q or two my way.   And, I did make a few contacts…but I also listened to quite a bit of dead air that afternoon.

But the Rookie Roundup was also not without its lesson learned – that I still have a long way to go in getting comfortable with operating CW.   I’m reasonably comfortable answering contesters calling CQ and making contest exchanges, especially if I can listen to their callsign and information a couple of times to get it right.   But when calling CQ, it’s a little more difficult to “listen a few times”, and you don’t have the luxury of choosing to make contact only with folks sending clear code.   So, I suffered.

Also, I realized that the unorthodox way I’ve been learning code has a few downsides.  I understand that it’s common for new hams to learn CW at slow speeds and build up speed as they gain experience.  However, when starting out, I found I had a horrible time getting the pattern of different characters to stick in my head at very slow speeds.   Code sent at 25wpm feels “right” to me.  Much above 30, and I struggle make out individual characters.  At 15 and below, I hear individual dits and dahs and have a horrible time grouping them together intelligibly.

I had the automatic keyer set at 18wpm for most of the Rookie Roundup, which felt painfully slow to me…but it seemed like I was Speedy Gonzales in comparison to some of the other “CQ RR” / “CQ R” calls I encountered.

But even though my contesting wasn’t as adrenaline-inducing as prior weekends’ events, it was still by and large a lot of fun.

Anniversary – December also marked the first anniversary of my getting my ticket.  I was licensed just before Christmas in 2010, and ventured onto HF in April.  Since then:

• I’ve worked all states (“mixed”, “CW” and “phone”…but still missing Maine for digital, and still missing a few states for single-band WAS)
• I’ve worked 176 DXCC entities (148 confirmed).
• I’ve worked 611 band-entities (451 confirmed) of the 1000 needed for DXCC Challenge
• I’ve learned a lot.
• I’ve met some interesting people.
• I’ve had a lot of fun.

Station (de)Construction – However, not everything was rosy as the year turned.  This weekend finally brought around some damage to my L – a branch that broke in the October storm finally came down, bringing my L down with it.  I also discovered a little early critter damage on the coax leading to the L…and after patching that up, I apparently didn’t get the coax re-trenched quite right, for when I ran the tractor a little while later to clean up/mulch some late-season leaves, I severed the coax.  D’oh!!

Care to guess what my next antenna project will be?  (At least the weather forecast for this weekend is decent, knock wood.)

Well, I suppose that it’s appropriate that the “2 steps forward, 1 step back” nature of my luck appears to be a constant that transcends the turning of the year.

I’ve been reading some of the synopses of the contest on the 3830 reflector, and the phrases “great conditions” and “record-breaking” seem to be quite common.  I hope the same will be true next year when the contest and my anniversary don’t overlap.

I was able to get on the air a little, and make a few Q’s, but my results pale in comparison to many others’:

   Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty    ZN
    1.8       8      15    4    5
    3.5      20      55    8    5
     14      43     126   31   11
     21      37     110   22    6
     28      52     156   29    6
  Total     160     462   94   33

            Score : 58,674

…which was basically one pass through 80 and 160 before going to bed Friday night, and quick passes through 10/15/20 after getting up Saturday and Sunday mornings.  No new countries worked, but I did pick up a few new band-entities.

The bigger development in the shack over the past week or so is that I’ve become the owner of a new Kenwood TM-D710, a 2m/440 dual band rig with built-in APRS capabilities and a built-in TNC.

The 710 is geared towards those who want to work APRS mobile, but mine is for now destined to be a base/portable rig as I’m not entirely comfortable operating mobile.  There have been several occasions in the past few months where I’ve felt constrained wanting to play on HF while monitoring VHF repeaters, and for various reasons the 7000+HT combination just wasn’t cutting it.  From my QTH, 5 watts is fine for getting into a couple of the local big repeaters, but it quickly gets iffy from there.

The 710 caught my eye primarily for two reasons:  First, it’s dead-simple to modify for MARS use (no de-soldering of any diodes required).  Second,  I liked the prospect of having the built-in TNC.

So far, my experience with the 710 has been fairly positive.  I’m pleased that it seems to perform a little better on 2m than the 7000 – at least I seem to have a cleaner signal into and back from a few repeaters on the fringes.  And I’m not surprised that it fares much better on 440 than the 7000 since the 710 puts out 50 watts UHF, versus the 7000’s 25w.

I did suffer from a few quirks of the 710.  The biggest quirk that caught me (since I didn’t read the instructions closely enough) is that the rig has two COM ports; you use the COM port on the body of the radio when programing or updating the main radio firmware,  but you use the port on the control head of the radio when using the TNC or updating the TNC firmware.

The other quirk that…well, “disappointed” I guess is the best word… is general memory management.  The D710 has an insane number of memory positions – 1000 – and advertises 10 banks of memories, but what it boils down to is that it’s 10 fixed banks of 100 memories.  If you want to include one frequency in multiple banks, you have to program it in multiple times.

Also, when using Kenwood’s programming software, I was able to talk Excel into generating a comma-delimited file that could be imported into Kenwood’s software, but using that tactic to import frequencies wipes out many other settings you may have set elsewhere in the software (or read from the rig).  I don’t think I’ll want to do massive reprogramming of the memories very often, unless I find a less obstinate tool.

The APRS function seems cool, although I did quickly pare back the notification display.  I can see where someone would find it a nifty addition to their mobile operations.  I don’t seem to decode quite as many packets as I do when using the IC7000 plus a soundcard/virtual TNC, and there are one or two digipeaters/iGates that don’t seem to hear me as well with the 710 as with my prior setup.

But using the 710’s TNC for non-APRS packet feels amazing as compared to the 7000+soundcard setup.   The prior setup seemed to crawl along, and I wasn’t able to even get into a major area BBS.  But with Outpost driving the 710’s internal TNC, the connection into my usual BBS was very fast (at least comparatively), and I was able to get into the aforementioned major BBS without a hitch (easily enough that I wonder if something changed with the RX setup at that BBS).

So, I’m reasonably pleased. 

Next station tweaks – finding out if Outpost can support multiple instances (one for amateur work, one for MARS), and seeing if either RMS Express behaves better for packet links with the 710 than it did with the soundcard, or seeing how klunky it is to get Airmail to do Winmor.