Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Cq Dx Contest from TI5N........

I have been invited and decided to accept joining a team of great OPS at Costa Rica's TI5N during the upcoming ARRL DX Phone contest the weekend of March 3 & 4.
It's been awhile since I have been on the other side of the pile-ups and this should be a blast!
http://kg5vk.com/

Steven Lott

http://www.wa4pgm.us/TI5/2012/Operating_Plans.htm

Thursday, January 19, 2012

ARRL Diamond DXCC award tracking

I ran across this announcement for a software tool to assist us in tracking our progress for the ARRL DDXCC award......

-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://dwestbrook.net/projects/ham/checker/

I have added support** for the DXCC Diamond -- figured this was as good a reason as any to finally get this checker project off the back burner :) Example DXCC Diamond report:

http://dwestbrook.net/projects/ham/checker/reports/KJ4IZW/DXCC-Diamond.html


Note this is beta ... I got 95% done with it about a year ago and then couldn't get back to it -- But it's a general framework for parsing a ADIF file and checking pretty much any kind of awards. (It started out as a checker for the 070 Club endorsements)

This checker works very well with output from DXKeeper (which produces good adif!!).

Any comments or requests for other award series, please let me know ...
dwestbrook@gmail.com

73!
--david
KJ4IZW
------------------------------------------------------------
My thanks to David KJ4IZW for his work on this project !
Steve
KG5VK

Friday, January 06, 2012

Simple Antennas work

Not everyone of us (least not I) can afford big aluminum on all HF bands
wires and ladder line work really well for the low freq stuff
For me it has always been pretty simple 1005/f for a loop of wire
But many can't get even a small loop on the low freq's within their property
Here is a smart guy that shares other methods.........
http://www.w5dxp.com/notuner.htm

cheers!
steve

Monday, December 26, 2011

Ham Radio and Friends

It's synonymous for me, Ham Radio and My friends are so en-twined
and here is a link to one of the famous Ham friends that was in my circle of friends during high school.

Back then it was WN0FOI or friendly old Indian, WA0DYV Bill Orgroski, Gary Novak . Bill Ames WA0WBJ, who we were all jealous of because he had Drake Twins and a Quad and Jay Portnoy

There is also Al Rosenthal (Al and I got our License together, he was wn0foj) and a few others that I have lost touch with many years ago.

Yes, indeed Ward Silver N0AX and I ran in the same circles, yes that is a bit scary if you know Ward well :)
If you don't then you are missing out on a person that is a whole lot of fun to be around !

Of course my circle has grown since those days with many new friends
like Tom KR5D, Bob K8KI and Les Diefenbach which we met during our Air Force career

Today there are many others and I consider it a privilege and honor to know each and everyone
as that is the greatest gift of all friendship.

Randy,Marsh,Floyd,Ray,Mike,Tim,Marcel,Scott,Bobby,Mark,Glenn,Hugo,Matt, Joe, John and Ted

There are a few other Hams that I need to work on rekindling our friendship
as life has just drawn us apart, such as my old buddy Brian Lewis
which a bike ride brought us to come to know that we are both amateur radio ops.

Many of you I talk to almost daily either on the radio or the phone or by email
I look forward to spending more time in 2012 with each of you, either contesting alongside you or just chatting on the radio

73 and Happy New Year everyone !

Steve
KG5VK

Friday, December 23, 2011

wow more Clublog.org features discovered

if your a user of clublog.org (if your not, then why !)

then you can use a script (html) like below (after u are logged into your clublog.org account)

http://www.clublog.org/dxccchart3.php?call=kg5vk


(substitute ur friends call on the end in place of mine, unless u just like tracking my progress)

cheers!
steve
KG5VK


see the last Ten Q's I uploaded to ClubLog

click here
This will show you the last Ten QSO's I uploaded to Club Log.org

Here are a couple of other Widgets.....

DXCC

Log

Cheers!
Steve
KG5VK

Thursday, December 22, 2011

listen to ur audio from GW7X

This shared with me by George K5GH....

If you worked GW7X in the recent 10m contest (or several of the other contests since 2005) you can listen to how your QSO sounded at the GW end at the website below:

http://gw4ble.dxlist.co.uk/index.php

cheers!

Steve
KG5VK

Uploading your log to ARRL LOTW

click here for a short movie on uploading your ADIF file to the ARRL LOTW server
This movie does exactly what the title says (Logbook of the World)
I plan on building more movies on LOTW features
dependent on the feedback from this one

cheers!
Steve
KG5VK

Monday, December 19, 2011

Tools that help us work what we need

ClubLog.org

Offers several great tools
Besides the obvious of being a log tool it
has a feature set that may often be over looked

DX Spots for Needed DXCCs

Using this tool, you can search the DX Cluster for spots related to DXCCs that you have not yet worked. There are 10,551,747 spots in the database up to 19th December, 2011, so the search is limited to the last 30 days or 300 results.

Did you see those key words.........

Spots related to DXCCs that you have not yet worked

Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a powerful tool
if your working towards a specific award, say DXCC on 80m
then once up upload your current log in ADIF form to club log
it will give you focus with this tool on needed countries for that band !!!

Try it out I think it will help you work more new ones within a shorter amount of time
Of course we need t verify what we hear is what someone posted on cluster
and when I copy a call diff than what someone else did and spotted I always try and repost with the correct call - also not that the spots are from all over the world, so a spot posted from an op in India may of course not be workable from our country.

Cheers !

Steve
KG5VK

Sunday, October 30, 2011

My results from 6 hours in the chair during CQWW Phone DX 2011

CallSign Used : KG5VK
Operator(s) : KG5VK

Operator Category : SINGLE-OP-ASSISTED
Band : ALL
Power : HIGH
Mode : SSB
Overlay Category :
Default Exchange : 4


Name : Steven Lott Smith

ARRL Section : LA
Club/Team : Louisiana Contest Club
Software : N1MM Logger V11.10.0

Band QSOs Pts DXC Zn
7 13 38 4 12
14 73 206 19 60
21 79 230 21 67
28 1 3 1 1
28 135 395 27 94

Total 301 872 72 234


Score : 266,832

Monday, October 24, 2011

ARRL FD 2011 SARA K5SAR operated at KG5VK's shack

2011 Field Day

Displaying entries for Section=LA

Entries 1 to 22 of 22 listed


#CallScoreCategoryQSOsPower MultGOTA CallSectionParticipantsClub
1W5ZR10,9862A2,6922W5RZYLA30Louisiana Cane Field CC
2W5EA9,7042A3,2842N5LCCLA55Twin City Ham Club
3N5RD6,5602A2,2652
LA15Minden ARA
4K5DF5,6363A1,5362W5YWLA35Daton Rouge ARC
5K5SAR5,1284E1,6652
LA15
6K1DW3,4701E1,0632
LA2
7W5DDL2,0281A4492
LA47Acadiana ARA
8N5II1,9522A5892
LA7Springhill ARC, Inc.
9W5BII1,8282A4892WA5LQZLA33Southwest LA AR Club
10AC5PW1,5682A2392
LA17North Rapides RC

Friday, September 23, 2011

Ham Radio Deluxe HRD SOLD

while I have not confirmed this.....


Simon Brown, HB9DRV, has sold the rights to his popular Ham Radio Deluxe software package to a group consisting of Mike Carper, WA9PIE, Randy Gawtry,K0CBH and Rick Ruhl, W4PC. All three principals have more than 25 years of experience with radio data communications. Rick Ruhl is the president of W4PC Software, Inc whose products include the PakRatt , PKTerm and Radio Operations Center software suites. Randy Gawtry is the president of Timewave Technology Inc whose products include the PK and DSP families of data controllers and other commercial data products. Mike Carper is an experienced Fortune 500 technology executive, educator and f eatured speaker
in the areas of wireless technologies and IT Service Management.

cheers!
steve

Monday, September 05, 2011

New RBN Aggregator Available (version 0.92b)

New RBN Aggregator Available (version 0.92b)

This from Pete Smith.......

Many CW Skimmer or Skimmer Server users are probably aware of the Reverse Beacon Network. The RBN uses a small piece of software called the Aggregator to collect spots from CW Skimmers and Skimmer Servers all over the world and forward them to the RBN's database server.

Since the inception of the RBN, we have been using an effective bare-bones version of the Aggregator written by Felipe, PY1NB, founder of the RBN. Now, thanks to the programming skills of Dick, W3OA, we have a new, Windows Aggregator in a near-final beta form, available for download and use. In addition to being much easier to configure and use, the new Aggregator has some important new features.

* It adds the option of a master.dta check to Skimmer Server (like the Paranoid validation mode in CW Skimmer).

* It also allows users to send spots to the Aggregator without first filtering them to remove the non-CQ spots. The Aggregator then forwards only those spots the RBN requests. For now, that will be CQ spots for HF and all spots for 50 MHz and up. In the near future this will allow us to experiment with spotting the NCDXA HF beacons, and probably other tricks that have not been possible up till now.

* And finally, the new Aggregator permits RBN contributors to connect locally to it with their logging programs, either taking advantage of the new filtering capability or not, as they wish.

For the full story and a download link, see the Reverse Beacon Network blog at http://reversebeacon.blogspot.com/.

--
73, Pete N4ZR

Thursday, August 18, 2011

websdr.org

Have you ever wanted to listen to what your signal sounds like on the other side of the pond ?
Now you can !
Not only that, you can listen to what propagation is in lots of places
and all you need is a computer and internet access !
Check it out at......
websdr.org

Cheers!
Steve
KG5VK