Good start to the weekend. While testing my transmitter and antenna
on Saturday afternoon the loading coil caught fire. One of the
windings on the coil had slipped and an arc over occured which caused
the plastic insulation to start to burn.
This coil has been in place at the base of the antenna for some 18
months now and is dual band 73/136khz so it has done good service.
The coil has now been repaired and the antenna current up to 3 amps again.
Put out a couple of CQs on SCW on Sunday morning. I did not see any
reply and assumed that perhaps my transmitter frequency was too low.
Went down to the transmitter shed to retune the transmitter. When I
came back I saw a very strong IK1ODO calling me. I dashed back to the
transmitter and put it back on the original frequency, came back and
gave him an O report. It keeps one fit, this slow CW operating.
Got a nice .BMP QSL card from Marco over the e-mail.
Was called by DJ5BV (transmitting in a nice clear spot between on
.701 nicely between the Loran lines) and we exchanged OO reports.
This station passed quite a lot of info during this QSO. I received
a cryptic R UFB1STG, which I assumed was a locator that I had not
read properly and GERD, which I assume is his name. I just had time
to send a R to all this before I had to go QRT. Later I decoded this
to ' Received you fine business and you are my 1st G'!
I had received a report from a DL on my slow CW transmissions saying
that readability was not too good because that the gaps between the
morse characters were too short. Andy Talbot G4JNT has kindly
modified the program so that the gaps can be increased. I now have
the program set up but have yet to try it out on the air.
From Andy
As requested by Peter G3LDO, I have now added a facility to CWSLOW (was
SLOWCW) to increase the inter character gap lengths slightly to improve
readability when using Gram software etc.
For anyone who wants to press an ancient 8086 macine into service - and I
know of at least two using an Amstrad 640 etc - the CWSLOW code is compiled
to the simplest (8 bit ??) form suitable for these machines.
--
Regards, Peter, G3LDO
<[email protected]>
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