I bought a used Yaesu Ft-817 with a W4RT LZ-11+OTT tuner, Maha battery, MFJ power supply, Maldol 20m whip, and a few other accessories. At home, I put up a full-size G5RV inverted vee on my TV mast and a couple of trees, and got LinPSK 0.7.1 up on my RedHat 9 Linux laptop and made some modifications to it, and was able to receive Medellin, Colombia and Argentina in addition to stateside Illinois, Idaho, and Washington. Rich KD4WYK and I put together Buxcom interfaces (the cables don't match the instructions, nor did ours even match each other). We had to put in another pot I bought at Halted because the laptop doesn't have line-in. Friday afternoon ar 12:00 we saw the first RF output. The Thanksgiving weekend started 20 minutes later. Today visiting my sister in San Luis Obispo, CA, I put up a random wire antenna out the 2nd floor window to a tree and ground to a water pipe, and was able to answer a CQ from Antonio XE2SIV in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico, about 150 miles east of Tijuana. He said my signal was 60% copu, not bad for a conservative audio level setting and a random wire antenna. My effective power was probably about 1 watt, or less. I have to unplug the laptop power supply and run on battery because of the hash noise it generates. Next project: a PSKMeter to get my levels set. I think I will write a perl script to operate it.
- posted by Leigh @ 06:31 z