After most of the country went on lockdown, I noticed an increase in activity on the CW bands. I had high hopes that this level of activity would not only persist through the pandemic, but also keep increasing.
Unfortunately, that early burst of activity seems to have waned. We’re not back to pre-lockdown activity, but it seems to have peaked. Please prove me wrong. I want to hear more of you on the air.
NEQP 2020
Last weekend, I participated in the New England QSO Party. I like this one because there are lots of stations on the air, and there are lots of multipliers. Also, I seem to get into New England pretty well from here.
I was only able to get on for about an hour on Saturday. I was a little disappointed with that, but then found out that there was also a session on Sunday. I got to operate a little more on Sunday, and made a decent number of contacts on Sunday. I even made some phone contacts.
New speakers for the Flex
I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things that disappoints me about my Flex 6400 is that I cannot use my Motorola communications speaker with it. You must use an amplified speaker.
I tried a couple of cheap PC speakers that I had in the shack, but both of them suffered from a severe case of RFI, making them unusable. So, I needed to find a set of speakers that would work properly in the RF environment that is my shack. On the FlexRadio community website, I found just the information that I was looking for.
Most of the guys who replied to the item seem to be using $99 Bose speakers. That seemed a bit expensive to me, so I chose the second most popular choice, the Creative T20 Series II speakers. I bought mine from Amazon, and I was going to include a link, but it looks like Amazon isn’t selling them any more.
They seem to be a good choice. They sound pretty good, and I don’t hear a peep out of them when I’m transmitting. The sound is different, and it took a little getting used to, but now I’m pretty happy with them.
Dave New, N8SBE says
Bose have always struck me as being over-priced, but I do have a Bose Roommate system from the days when I schlepped around a portable CD player so I could listen to classical music while doing a contracting programming gig. I still have the speakers, but haven’t done anything with them for literally decades. I didn’t even occur to me to haul them out when I set up my K3 (now K3S). I had instead purchased a set of “RF-shielded” speakers from West Mountain Radio, which I still use. I’ve never heard a peep of RF issues from them, and they have a volume and tone control on them. The original design, which was pretty rectangular, with flat sides and sharp corners, seems to have been discontinued, but they are still selling something called the COMspkr here:
http://www.westmountainradio.com/product_info.php?products_id=com_spkr
for $40. YMMV.
JB, N8XRE says
There’s cheap audio amp kits all over the place. That plus some ferrites might get that Moto speaker back in action.