pa0r

Today I have made the brand new Elecraft K3 ready for our next venture, the CQWW-CW contest 2008.

This year we have chosen Madeira (CT3) as our battle filed. Last time I was there was in 2004. The crew is the same as last year's succesfull M/2 operation with some additions (more on that later), one of them being Andy, DJ7IK whom I accompanied to Lybia and Tunesia.

The K3 is the ideal contest rig. It is fittet with a 400 Hz roofing filter and keying and rigcontrol can be done via 1 RS232 cable. That cable was a story in itself. According to my new philosophy, 'you don't have to make what you can buy', I had tried to buy a serial extension cable to do the job. Nowhere in town could I buy one. The girl in the largest computer shop of the Netherlands looked at me with compassion. "Well daddy, you are 5 years ouit of time for this... serial cables have been OUT for several years, they don't exist anymore".

O.K.,  there are times that you have to admit  that you are a bit detached from reality. So I found an internet shop wheich still had a few of those old fashioned cables in stock, and ordered 2 (you never know)... Delivery time 2 working days, so just in time for the trip.

The cables were delivered nicely in time (of course we were away shopping in Belgium when they came, but most delivery crew know that they must put the stuff into the wooden shoe at the back door when we are not at home). The cable connects to the laptop o.k., but I had a problem with the female connector for the K3. The K3 male connector has 2 protruding nuts, the same type of nut the female connector has, so they just don't fit together...

So we had to go back to the old workshop, with screwdrivers, stanley knives and metal saws. When we had cut off the plastic from the connector we saw that that the nut was bolted to the connector. Moreover this was also the connection that held the metal shield of the connector.

The only way out was a visit to the junk box... find an old female connector and fit it to the new cable.

Now I have rigctl working, and also CW. Strangely enough, PTT does not work. I does not return to inactive after the first time it is switched on. This does work ok with the USB cable. Strange.... Fortunately the VOX circuit of the K3 takes this lightly. It has to be ON anyway for the internal keyer to work.

Do I need to mention I also packed the old parallel interface? You never know....

I arrived home safely after a 14 hour trip. Most of that time was spent waiting. 1 hour 30 minutes in a road block in Las Palmas on the way to the airport in the morning, 1 more hour on Las Palmas airport, almost 3 hours on the plane to Madrid, 6 hours on Barajas airport, two hours 50 minutes flight to Amsterdam. Not to forget the 1 1/2 hour drive home.

Looking back at the operation we can be quite satisfied with the results. Working in the multi/multi class we made almost 10k qsos and almost 20 Million points. The location in the city of Las Palmas turned out to be sub-optimal for multiband contesting. Especially 160 meters , where I spent almost 8 hours was bad, if not impossible to operate. We ended up listening on the 20 meters quad radiator, and even then only the big guns could be heard. Many thanks to those who took the time to contact us using the 'callsign guessing procedure'.

20 and 15 were good, 40 reasonable and 80 mediocre. 10 meters was hardly open from our location at EA8URL.

 600 meters higher than our location EF8A was working multi/2, and some test contacts before the contest showed that they were at least 10 dB stronger than us on all bands, resulting in a score of over 30 Million...

 After the contest we were able to visit them, and we could see why. This mountain top station is a professional job, and they will certainly be a force to reckon with in the years to come!

 Anyway, we had loads of fun, and the team proved to be excellent.  I am looking forward to next year's CQWW-CW...

 Rein PA0R

Well, the platform arrived yesterday afternoon, and it was too high to enter the drive way. But after 2 steel constructed pergolas were dismantled the 2o meters quad and the 10 meters beam coiuld be repaired. The 160 meters inverted L works fine on the roof, although I think we will build an extra rx antenna for listening, as the noise is S7 (preamp off).

I could work some EU stations quite early on 160 yesterday, while it was still light here.

Here is a pic of the antenna situation here...

Spirit is high, and we are now qrv on 3 bands testing the antennas using home calls....

CU in the pile-ups

 73,

Rein EA8/PA0R

I am writing this in one of the shacks of EA8URL in Las Palmas. We (DK3QZ, DLiEMH, DK3QQ, DL3KAH, DL5XX and myself) are planning to operate the CQWW-CW from this QTH. At this moment 3 of the 4 stations are ready (including the computers) and all antennas work except that the 20 meter quad has a broken reflector, the 10 meters 4-el monobander is tuned to 27.4 MHz and we still need to build a dipole for 160m.
But we still have 3 days to go and the weather is nothing like at home. Day temperature is a solid 24 degrees, which goes down to 22 degrees during the night. It is really nice to make a morning stroll down the beach before breakfast, and eat out on the beach in your t-shirt while your xyl is putting another log onto the fire at home.

Had a nice run on 17m yesterday afternoon for one and a half hours, the first eQSL has already arrived. I am curious what the long band antennas do. Maybe we need to put up some receive anatennas. Until now it looks like the qrm at this down town hilltop qth is reasonable.

We are now assembling a second 10 meter yagi. We don't know the distance between the elements, so better go look in the library (the URL is well equipped with books). Today the highworker which has been promised to come 'manana' for the last 3 days will come to enable the repairs.

Must hurry....

Rein EA8/PA0R

Saturday, 9:30 local.

We are at the Chaos Computer Camp, some 50 km north of Berlin, Germany.
And we are surrounded by hackers, some 3000 of them. That also means some 5000 computers and 10.000 network cables, also in the wireless::village where I live.

The atmosphere in the camp is completely different from what we are seeing at the Ham Radio camp in Friedrichshafen. The average age of a hacker seems to be around 22, and you know you are talking to a ham when the person is over 50. 50% of the hackers wear their long hair in a tail, and the standard dress is baggy shorts and T-shirts with interesting messages on them. And from most of the big tents you can hear the onk-onk-onk of 2kW audio woofers, all asynchronously outputing the same type of 'music' until 4:00 local. The days of Howling Wolf, John Mayall and Eric clapton seem long gone.... By the way, the equipment is so good you cannot hear the pskmail beacons on it.
The food you can buy is esoteric at best. No solid hamburgers but indian curry, tomato noodles, crepes and ah... bratwurst (saves the day). All people here feel they are part of an army, and the enemy is the government, the industry, Microsoft(TM), the police, politicians, C++, and the establishment at large. The world is ok here, divided in 85% Linux, 15% windows. And most speakers openly pity the people who have to work for M$ to earn their money. And most campers here have taped off part of the licence plate so if the anti-terror administration comes to video everything they won't be recognized. All in all this gives a warm feeling of togetherness.

We are well prepared. All laptops have a tight firewall, and we have been warned to back up all computers before connecting to the network, and remove all personal information from any hard disk present. After being here for 5 days now pskmail still has not been hacked, so it must be reasonably secure.

10:00 and I am looking at the fldigi screen. No beacons on 30. Since the start of the conference on wednesday the S-meter of the FT897D is at a steady S8-9. Which means that I can send APRS beacons, but I cannot hear the QSL's. I can check on findu that the beacons get through o.k.
PA3DSC is also here. We use pskmail APRS messaging to chat. For that I have hacked the code so that the messages are also displayed when no server can be reached... This works well over a distance of 200 meters as his signal is S9++.
10:10 the first hackers are leaving their tents to have the first sanitary and buy the first coffee. They don't look healthy, must be due to the evening before. But that will change until 11:00 when the first lecture is scheduled ('Hacking WEP in 60 minutes'). Then they will be in one of the big hangars of this former military airport, with their laptop charged so they can read the latest news during the speech.

This is our last day here and I have to hurry. Still have to do the dishes and must be in time for the lecture.
So far the stay here has been quite succesfull. 5 demos, 2 newspaper interviews, 1 radio interview, got more people interested... Somebody interested to start a server in Italy. More than I hoped for.

Looking forward to seeing the S-meter drop to zero when this is all over. But it is good to know pskmail would actually work as soon as the network went down...