Nothing is as easy as they would have you believe

Things must be getting a bit better as I actually had enough energy to start to configure Ham Clock yesterday afternoon.

And is say "start to configure" because this is turning out to be a work in progress. None of the fault lies with Inovato however. The bundle went together quite easily and the entire process is as painless as they would have you believe.

The problem is with my choice of display hardware. I'm using an old Emerson TV that we used to have in our bedroom. It has an HDMI input, where as the smaller monitor to the right only has VGA and DVI. The little Inovato Quadro has an HDMI output, explaining the use of the gigundo TV.

The problem is the display is too big for the TV screen. There are important boxes and portions which fall over the edges. I need to adjust the display parameters of the TV, but you can only do that via the remote control and guess what we lost/misplaced a couple of years ago?

Yep, you've got it!

As it is right now, some of the boxes that I need to click on, such as the WIFI configuration utility for example, are invisible.. By the sheer dumb luck of hovering the mouse slowly over the upper right hand corner of the display, I stumbled upon the box and got that much completed. But I need to go back to do the rest of the setup.

So an executive decision had to be made. Do I buy a smaller, say 20" widescreen monitor with an HDMI input, or ..............? Looking at the price of monitors on eBay, they're going for more than I want to spend right now. Even used ones are ridiculous as the shipping costs alone in most cases hang out in the $30 dollar neighborhood and that's on tp of the monitor selling price.

I went with .............or. I looked up the model number of the TV on the back, plugged that into eBay with the added word "remote" and came upon a new remote controller for about $8 and free shipping. Once I get that, which should arrive either tomorrow or Wednesday, I can adjust the screen so that the entire Ham Clock display will fill the screen without bleeding over on the edges.

I have to remove that ampersand (&) after my call sign and get the DX Cluster window configured among other things. I think I'm going to like having this in the shack. It presses all my correct "cool" buttons.

A question for those of you who may have this in your shack. Do you leave the computer, (whether that be a Raspberry Pi or a microcomputer like the Quadra) run all the time, even when you're not in the shack, or do you shut down and re-boot each time you're going to play radio? I'm not sure what I want to do there.

When I finished getting everything in the shack straightened out and reconfigured, I checked into the St. Max Net on 75 Meters at 0000 UTC and when that was over, I added all the Fox Hunt QSOs from Thursday night into AG Log.

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!