S55W as Multi/Multi in EA PSK63 2013 Contest

I had a lot of fun last weekend in EA PSK63 Contest. Members of S55W contest team have a lot of RTTY experience but contesting with low power PSK63 is another story. We were very pleasantly surprised how 50W are just enough for a great race. And we were not so impressed with some distorted signals on the band.

EA PSK63 Contest

Call: S55W
Operator(s): VASJA, S53NW, S55O, S56G, S57LR, S59JL, S50YL, S50XX
Station: S50XX

Class: Multi-Op HP
QTH: Vogrsko
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
80: 164 44
40: 276 71
20: 332 79
15: 218 69
10: 18 15
-------------------
Total: 1008 278 Total Score = 600,758

Club: Slovenia Contest Club

17 new radioamateurs ;)

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Ε½ane, S57CT, Kristjan, S50XX and me (as official ZRS examiners) were very pleased to promote 17 new radioamateurs on 20th of February at Radioklub AjdovΕ‘?ina S59AAN . They all passed N class exam. Congrats! Soon they will take part in another course and we’ll greet fresh bunch of full licenced hams on all bands!

Raspberry Pi as rtl_tcp server (“remote radio sampler” for SDR)

Radioamateur high speed data links in my area are underutilized πŸ™‚ We have several webcams (capable of streaming H.264) , some servers, APRS gateways, a very busy Skimmer connected to dx cluster network … but all this rarely generate more than couple of Mbit/s. This evening I combined Raspberry Pi with USB DVB-T dongle into high performance network traffic generator. The initial idea was different πŸ™‚ I wanted to experiment with SDR stuff on R_Pi. I compiled rtl-sdr from osmocomSDR (http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr) . My USB DVB-T fob is a Sencor SDB522RT , a simple gadget that works well under various operating systems. After plugging-in the USB dongle I started rtl_tcp (with parameter -a and IP address of R_Pi … otherwise rtl_tcp defaults to localhost IP) and fired up SDR# on Windows7 machine. Selecting “RTL-SDR/TCP” as a source and configuring IP address of R_Pi before pressing Play was enough to connect SDR software to remote “converter”. Sample rate of 2048000 samples per second (about 2 MHz “window”) generates about 33 Mbit/s or 4.1 MB/s of network traffic … and this could be used in performance network testing πŸ™‚

Raspberry PI with rtl_tcp feeding data to SDR#

Raspberry PI with rtl_tcp feeding data to SDR#

Upper right window is a SSH (terminal) session with R_Pi .

Fighting inverter noise

Last EUHFC contest from my summer location JN65UX was not eco-friendly. I don’t have grid power here (yes, I’m posting this from nice cool porch πŸ˜‰ ). The cabin is solar powered at for least two decades now but this is still an ongoing project. I pulled out old 1,5 kW chinese generator because my new inverter make all radioamateur band useless. Normaly I work QRP directly on 12V house wiring, but EUHFC doesn’t have this category. So for 12 (plus…) hours I polluted the peaceful wood with monotone brbrbrbrbrbrbrrrr.

It’s time to find a solution to RFI inverter problems and first results from today are very good.

Before the noise covered all bellow S 9 +40 dB on 80m band
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With filter … wow … I can follow the S5 net on 3,605 MHz πŸ™‚ … 160m is still useless, 80m could go for local traffic and big contests, 40m also …. but 20m and up are completly clean!
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Not for producion use πŸ™‚ 220 V contacts are exposed during the tests!
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Raspberry Pi as javAPRSsrvr on S56G/P location

RaspPi is now “entering production” at s56g/p site. First tests were successful πŸ™‚ and tiny computer runs javaprssrvr (no RF stuff at the moment). WX station is also planned soon. The most amazing thing is very low power consumption.

RPi

Raspberry Pi in "production"

Stay tuned πŸ˜‰

my Raspberry Pi arrived yesterday

I ordered Raspberry Pi (Farnell) on 1st of March, 2012 … and little creature arrived yesterday (29th of May, 2012). I have rather busy schedule this week but few minutes were strapped here and there to first switch on the toy πŸ™‚ There is no remote access configured on debian image and I connected RPi to the only HDMI display in the household. Looks amazingly well  on 45″ monitor πŸ˜‰ With ssh daemon started and powered with HTC smartphone charger now runs as a “headless” server on home network.

Beeing a student again … Contest University Italy 2012

I was offered to join small group of “students” visiting this year’s Montichiari Contest University Italy and there was no second thought πŸ˜‰ Gregor, IV3WJP, decided to be a driver to 3 youngsters : Paolo, IV3BCA, Mauro, IV3AZV and me. I had a great time, MNI TNX guys!

Check the gallery “Contest University Italy 2012”