First PSK31 Contact in 2013

Posted on Monday, July 1st, 2013 at 8:37 am in

Digital Test

Digital Test

Wow what an exciting weekend! Greatly inspired by Noel Hammond (ZR6DX) during his talk at the West Rand Amateur Radio Club, I put together a few items that have been gathering dust in my junkbox. Being late in the day I didn’t expect anybody to be around, so I sneaked a quick CQ on what I thought was an empty piece on the 20m band just to see if everything was working and if there is something going out on the wires.

Well, you can imagine my excitement when ZR6AOC (David Cloete from just up the road in Weltevreden Park) replied. My hands were shaking, I didn’t have any macros loaded to assist me, and I didn’t even know how many watts or splattering I was emitting! But I couldn’t resist and I replied.

To my horror David came back! He wasn’t joking! Its working! We had a nice if short QSO, he even gave me a good 599 report. I think I forgot to breathe. The result is that I am hooked on digital. As you can see from the photo the electronics wasn’t built into a case yet, but shortly afterwards they were all neatly tucked into a box and by the end of the weekend I made 10 contacts and 6 countries. Awesome stuff!

BTW I’m setting up the Yaesu FT-840 permanently as a digital station so I don’t have to swop cables, and it is going out on a Broadgun Travelling Wave antenna (from Webb Industries, a multiband inverted Vee wire). All my contacts so far have been around 50 watts.

Don’t hesitate to give me a call sometime, I would love to make contact with you!

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