My quest to learn CW (33)

 

Finally after 930 attempts I managed to get a 88% accuracy training english proverbs with a speed of 28/22 wpm. I promised myself to go up in training speed. I will delete all my attempts and start over on 28/24 wpm.

I will also increase my speed in the "lessons" or in other words the random 5 letters/numbers signs which are given for 1 minute. My training speed was 28/20 wpm and will now be 28/22 wpm.

The blue line above is at approx. 70%. You see that it is an up and down process. Some days are good, others are bad. Overall it went better I think. Still random signs are difficult. 

Am I on the right path? Some will say yes, some will say no. I've got fun and like the training and that's important. However after 33 months of practice I still have difficulties to decode morsecode. On the computer with perfect code is not as difficult as on real air. People make mistakes, you need to figure out words and abbreviations that are not really familiar.  I make a lot of mistakes and most of the times I really don't know what to key. When I key it goes wrong half of the time. But never have had a problem with any station at all. It seems every CW operator on air is happy there is a new CW operator active, and it doesn't matter whatever you try to key, they understand.

I'm now at a point that I want to make as many CW QSOs as possible. I look out for easy to work POTA stations and DX. Most of the time it is a 5NN TU report. But sometimes I will throw out a CQ and hope the best of it. Today IK0PIC Luciano came back to my CQ on 12m. I hope he understood what I tried to key since it was not without errors. At least he got my QTH which I managed to key well, which he repeated. Then I saw 10m could be open to Africa. I didn't hear anything on the band so I made a few CQs to wake things up. Surprisingly I heard a very weak HA coming back. It was barely audible. I suspected it was HA7RJA Rob and I was right. I suddenly heard him a bit stronger and was able to get my report and he got my report before the signal disappeared into the noise. A few minutes later I worked 3B9FR from Roderiques Isl. That was a very nice experience today and a lot more fun as making world wide contacts with FT8.

NTCQP August

 

NTCQP setup

   Love this one hour CW QSO party. It's all about fun and you can operate different ways. This month the challenge was QRP. 5 points for every QSO made with QRP power.  So I took the (tr)uSDX for this task. And this time I wanted to do the mechanic section for a change. So I connected my Jesse H. Bunnell steel lever straightkey.

One hour of searching, calling and sweating. It was difficult at times. Calling CQ did not get any response on both 40m and 80m. Most stations I heard were called by many others so most of the time I did move to see if I could work someone else which was difficult. At least I worked 6 stations, 5 on 40m and 1 on 80m.

First QSO was with PA3GPX Rene, I was glad he recognized me imidiatly. Last QSO was with PA3HEN Theo which I met personally on the Beetsterzwaag radio market in spring. I think he recognized me as he did QRS (slower code) for me which I appreciate very much.

QSO:    7033 CW 2026-08-20 1905   PA3GPX       599  RENE       260      

QSO:    7034 CW 2026-08-20 1910   OK2BVX      599  DALI       209      

QSO:    7022 CW 2026-08-20 1919   OK2KKI       599  PAVEL     NM       

QSO:    3556 CW 2026-08-20 1939   DF7DJ          599  BERT       235      

QSO:    7034 CW 2026-08-20 1957   PA4N            599  FRANK   295      

QSO:    7035 CW 2026-08-20 1959   PA3HEN      599  THEO       3   

 I think I discovered something else. The J.H.Bunnell key is not my thing. It is way too light and for people with sensitive soft hands. In the heat of the CW game I have a very heavy fist like they call it. I felt so sorry for the nice key which behaved like a frog when I was keying the code :-). It really looks nice and it is screaming for a gentle operator which I am not. I think I have to choose another key from the keys I still have to restore. Probably a militairy bulletproof key is better for me hihi. Till the next QSO party . .

Updated my Meshcore devices

 Updates

 The plan was to finally update my repeater and repeater antenna. This went well. But did it really make a difference? I don't really know. I will have to measure some day.

Some photos from the repeater hardware setup here. See the difference between antennas. The old black antenna is visible left of the new one.

12V is coming out of the solarpanel and 5Ah battery setup originally ment for outdoor cameras. I convert the 12V to 5V with a very cheap car battery charger. A powerbank will not work here because the Seeed studio Xiao nRF52 lora device is using very little power and it would switch off.

The situation at this moment is:

At home: Repeater: PE4BAS Roodeschool - Roomserver: PE4BAS BBS/Room (Antenna height 10m)

At the job: Repeater HB Uithuizen - Roomserver: HB BBS/Room (Antenna height 5m)

The distance between the two repeaters is 6 km. 

According to the Meshcore app I have a huge range. But in reality I'm not so sure about that. I think the app does not take buildings around the antenna in account. I've also updated the repeater on my job and since I suddenly could not access the roomserver there. I updated that as well. Then I came home today and my roomserver at home was not working as well, so I updated it to the newest firmware. 

So far I am not able to directly connect to the roomserver at my job and from my job I am unable to connect the roomserver at home. I hoped the new antenna would be adding extra dB to reach it but it doesn't. The plan is to replace the antenna at the repeater at my job. I might have to look for a better place for the repeater there. My opinion is that this link between my home and job repeater should be reliable. At this moment it is only possible to connect under special circumstances. This happened only 2 times.

Roomserver bug?

I don't use the Meshcore system all days since the whole thing is not really reliable. Once and a while I update all my devices to see if there is any progress. But features stay almost the same and I don't see any use in the new features build in. For a long time I have an issue with the roomservers. The problem is that messages left on the server from my phone with the heltec V3 connected are perfectly readable by the same system. But if I connect to the same roomserver with my standalone TDeck I can't read the those messages. I can only write and read messages that are left from the TDeck. Like the roomserver has two rooms with a wall in between. This issue appears on both roomservers and probably it is a bug. However I cannot find anything about it on the internet yet? Am I the only one with this issue?

I think the roomserver is the most important station in this mesh network. I wrote about that a while ago. If you're in an emergency your first need is water, shelter and food. When you are busy looking for that you can't be on the phone all the time to read messages. Your phone and companion device might run out of power and you're disconnected from the network. In that case the roomserver on solarpower shines. It stores the messages from others till you're able to retrieve them.

However, I feel the roomserver firmware has issues. And I think the roomserver needs some more development. What and how? I don't know. I am no expert. But at least the "separate rooms" issue should be solved first.

Future plans

Not really. I will leave everything running. I hope to play it once and a while. You never know if you'll need this system. The only thing I will change is to power the roomserver at home with solarpower. Hopefully there will be some more repeaters in the neighbourhood. Experimenting with these LoRa devices is not that expensive and everyone with a little tech interest can do this. 

International Lighthouse and lightship weekend.

 This weekend there was the lighthouse and lightship activation. Have been hunting for it before. This time I was looking for OZ1NBG since one of the participants Kees PA3KL was one of the activators there. And of course I love Denmark.

Pilsummer lighthouse By kaʁstn Disk/Cat - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11868935

Tried many times to hear OZ1NBG on several bands, But only heard them briefly at 40m SSB. I managed to break the pile-up and made the contact. Would like to work them on CW as well but have not heard them since, A list of lighthouses and lightships I worked below.

Groote Kaap lighthouse

V55LH Diaz Point NA-0004

DA0DH Dahneshoeved DE-0003

PI4WAL Westkappele high NL-0017

OJ0YL Market Reef FI-0011

OR5R Westhinder 1 lightship BE-0004

TM22LH Bodic FR-0027

DL0EM Campen DE-0048

DA1HW Plau am see DE-0119

PD0FSB/P Den Oever NL-0041

PA0XAW Groote kaap NL-0037

Nordborg fyr (lighthouse)

OZ1NBG Nordborg OZ-0006

PA/DA1MT/LT Zoutelande NL-0046

DK0MAR Fehmarbelt lightship DE-0018

DK0OC Pilsum DE-0066

DL6WWM Heidkate DE-0038

GB2LG Mull of Galloway UK-0086

Fun contact was with the station at Pilsummer lighthouse. It is almost visible from here and signals were very strong. Some laughter when I told my location.

Small experiment during eclipse

Photo made by my daughter

   We had an eclipse yesterday. The moon covered the sun for about 88% for a second. I've been watching but didn't find it spectacular at all. During the eclips I had my radio on 80m WSPR for a small experiment. It was interesting to see that during the eclipse the amount and distance of spots increased.

Some pictures made with the excellent WSPR watch app on my iphone.

Spot amount

Spot distance

You can easily see that around 18 UTC when the eclipse occured there is a peak. Then it goes down till after the sunset.

Denmark vacation

 

   It has been a while ago I posted something. And yes, I'm still alive. Though I was on vacation in Denmark for two weeks and these days it is not safe to post something about that on the internet that can be read by everyone. Particular because there have been a few thefts in the neighbourhood the last few weeks. Anyway, this is a post about how I was active from Denmark as OZ/PE4BAS. Yes I was portable but not moving so I left the /P out of the call. We hired a small house close the bridge over the Sallingsund straight to the Island of Mors. Close to the city of Glyngøre, were famous cyclist Jonas Vingegaard lives. I tried to be on air everyday. But in reality this wasn't always possible. I brought my (tr)uSDX QRP radio, my PE1BVQ made endfed, the K6ARK lightweight endfed and the Superantenna MP-1. The radio power supply was a 12Ah Li-ion battery which I also used last year in Sweden. 

I also brought my laptop to do digital modes but when I arrived in Denmark I had two challenges. First the laptop battery died and second the laptop didn't see the local accesspoint. It didn't bother me as I wanted to do most QSO's with CW. But I got questions why I was not on FT8, since that would be so much easier. I found a solution by leading the coax through a window and got it to the laptop which worked with the power supply. As accesspoint I used my iPhone hotspot which was detected  by the laptop. I made some FT8 contacts in the end and was even heard in the USA and Australia. Most of the fun though was with CW and a occasional SSB contact.

First day I tried the lightweight endfed but although it worked well, I didn't like that it pulled on the radio, since there is no coax attached, the endfed is connected directly to the radio. I made one contact with OK2BVX on 40m CW and decided to hang the other endfed with 5m H155 coax like I used in Sweden. It worked well and SWR was reasonable. Output of the (tr)uSDX showed about 3,5W, real QRP. It's incredible that I made so many QSOs at all.

See below screenshots from the excellent HAM2K Polo logger I used on my iPhone.

To be honest some of the QSO were arranged via skeds. Like the QSO with PA1PRD on SSB and PA4O also on SSB. I later made a sked with PE2V which didn't work out well in the morning, but it went well in the evening. Most of the QSOs were in the evening since that was the time with the propagation on its best for short distances. At some days dutch radio amateurs sound as strong as local stations in Denmark (although I worked only one station in Denmark which was OZ9MM, and he was not local). HA7RJA Rob from Hungary was worked 4 times both on 40m and 20m. He has me in HamAlert and was soon listening as soon as I was calling CQ. It was great to do some CW training with Rob and he also did provide me some useful tips. I did try the CWops Tests on wednesday evenings but most of the stations were way too fast for me and few were receiving me, it might be fun for the more experienced CW operator but it wasn't really for me. 

I also had some skeds on FT8 with some friends at home. That went very well as expected from FT8. We arranged the contacts on another frequency as the standard one which is very convenient. Signals were strong, most time in the + dBs. Of course I did some other FT8 QSOs as well to see what I could reach. Below a picture of the efforts. Best DX was TF4M from Iceland. But as mentioned before I was heard in the USA and Australia as well.

FT8 is a lot of fun and it's so much easier to make worldwide contacts with QRP and a small antenna. But it isn't really a challenge. CW is a challenge for me and a lot more interesting. 

Last evening of our vacation I decided to test the K6ARK light weight endfed again. I wanted to see if a block of wood, which I used to fix the antenna on the table, would affect the SWR and how the antenna works. It didn't affect the SWR at all and receive seems to be ok. I just tried it on 40m and made some excellent contacts to SO5CW, OZ9MM and PA3GPX with CW. Of course the block of wood was a little unconventional. I think a piece of wire can be used as well to fix the antenna. Building this endfed was fun and using it from Denmark was interesting.

Can you spot the antenna?

We had a great vacation and have been driving and sightseeing all around the northern part of Denmark. It really is one of the most beautiful parts of the country in my opinion.