As many of you know, this was Hamvention weekend, and because the event was cancelled, it was a sad weekend for many of us. To help us get over our disappointment the World Wide Radio Operator’s Foundation (WWROF) sponsored the first Hamvention QSO Party yesterday.
It was a fun event. I made 150 contacts in 3-1/4 hours and scored 168 points. (You got 10 points for contacting W8BI, the Dayton ARA station, and I was fortunate enough to get them twice.) Here’s the breakdown:
| Band | CW Q s | Phone Qs | |
| 80 | 17 | ||
| 40 | 97 | 26 | |
| 20 | 10 | ||
| Total Qs | 126 | 24 | 150 |
| Total Score | 168 |
The exchange was a signal report (599 or 59) and the year that you first attended the Dayton Hamvention. Other than W8BI (1952, the first year for the Hamvention), the station that gave me the earliest year was K4AVX, who gave me a “59.”
Life’s too short for QRP?
Speaking of the Hamvention QSO Party, there’s been some chatter on the Flying Pigs QRP mailing list. Mostly, it was complaining about the poor conditions. My feeling is that if conditions aren’t good for QRP, crank it up to at least 100 W. Why miss out on the fun being had because you’re not running enough power.
FRLogger
And now for something completely different….
While perusing the FlexRadio Community message board, I came across a link to FRLogger, a logging program designed to work with the FlexRadio. It sounded like a great program, and you can’t beat the price (FREE!), so I downloaded it.
At first, I had problems importing the ADIF from ACLog. This was completely my fault. First of all, ACLog didn’t have a QTH field, so when I set that up, I defined a “City” field. I thought I could simply change the ADIF field name to QTH, and then import it. I was flummoxed when that didn’t work. I enquired about this on the FRLogger mailing list and was assured that it would work, so I gave it another go.
What I discovered is that Notepad didn’t like such a big file (>10 Mbytes). When I told it to search and replace, the little blue wheel whirred, but not replacements were made. I took the file up to my Mac, edited the file with BBEdit, and it imported without any problems.
With FRLogger, I can do things with the FlexRadio that I don’t think that the SmartSDR software can do. For example, you can smooth S-meter readings by averaging a number of readings. Another example that I really like is that you can digitally record the audio. I don’t have to muck around with my little hand-held recorder.
It’s not perfect, but the author, WS7M, is working on it, and I’ve offered to help him with the documentation. I think I’m really going to enjoy using it.