Happy February!

Is it just me - or did January fly by like the proverbial bat out of Hell? It feels like Christmas was just a couple of weeks ago!

Before I bore you, a bit of Ham humor first (found on Facebook)

Secondly (the boring part) - I finished customizing Ham Clock thanks to watching K2CJB's awesome video on YouTube.

The upper left hand corner has my call sign and the local time. Next to that, the tile alternates between the sunspot number (above) and a picture of the sun (below).

To the right of that are the active POTA spots and then comes the latest DX Cluster spots. Getting the DX Cluster to work was a bit of a trial. No matter what DX Cluster I entered, it seemed I always got an error. Finally, I figured out that Ham Clock was looking for an "ON" command. As soon as I entered "SHOWDX" next to that prompt where I was getting a flashing "err", everything started humming. 

An interesting thing about the POTA tile/box - I'm not sure where the info comes for the content, but it listed a POTA activation that was NOT listed on the POTA app that I had running on the screen above the laptop. Maybe someone spotted it to the Cluster and not to the POTA app?

The final small tile in the upper right hand corner shows the current solar weather parameters. You can customize all the tiles by putting the mouse cursor in the upper left hand corner of the box and left clicking. A list of options becomes visible and if you select more than one option, the tile will sequentially display your choices. For me that's that first box where I alternate between the sunspot number and the solar image. The rest of the tiles, I chose only one option.

While I was monkeying around with this, I saw on the screen that Kuwait was on 30 Meters - 9K2NO. I figured "Why not?" and gave a call. It was a bit before I found the "UP" sweet spot, but I did get him in the log. Clicking on his call on the world map gave me his local date and time, his local temperature, and his latitude and longitude info in that bottom left hand corner "DX" box/tile/ Seeing that he had a nice 64F while I was at 34F was a bit depressing, but was neat at the same time.

It's not often you can get a Ham Radio accessory that you can describe as "fun" in and of itself. Ham Clock is an exception. It fulfills that yen for a Geochron at a fraction of the price and it's a neat and useful "toy".

And here's the best part. If I can get this up and running - ANYONE can get it up and running.

72 de Larry W2LLJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!

Got the full screen now

The remote came yesterday and with only two or three button pushes, I now have Ham Clock filling up the screen without bleeding over the edges.. And now, when I exit full screen mode, all the buttons are visible that I need to click on to make changes, if I so desire. I'd like to customize a few of those tiles and I'll look into that more. I have a feeling that YouTube will end up being my best friend. (Yes! YouTube WAS my best friend and the process is way simpler than I imagined it to be!)

Please excuse the crappy camera angle. I must have been holding it in such a way that it looks like everything on the right side is going uphill. That's not the case in real life.

I forced myself to stay up to participate in the 40 Meter Fox Hunt last night. The lower Fox was Wayne N4FP, in Florida, and he was found after some dial twiddling. At the beginning of the Hunt, he was barely audible, but with time, his signal came up nicely and I was able to give him a 579 report at 0239 UTC.

The upper Fox was Tom KV2X who is located in New York. The band was long and I never heard a peep from him. I am assuming that he was probably somewhere around 7.045 MHz, which is the middle of the 40 Meter Upper woods. Let me check RBN .......... - OK, he WAS at 7.0445 MHz last night, so my guess wasn't off by much. 

In any event, he was inaudible and there was some kind of station situated there who was 20 over 9 and was handing out RSTs from Colorado. I didn't catch his call and I'm wondering if perhaps it was a POTA station. Or maybe it was some other event - was the NAQCC Monthly Sprint last night? That could have been it.

In any event, I noticed that in the log that Tom posted to the qfox e-mail reflector, that he did not work much of anyone on the East Coast, with the exception of one station in GA, VA and FL. The NorthEast was a vast wasteland, Feeling like that must be the case,  I packed it in early around 0300 UTC and went to bed. The added fact that it was only 59F down in the basement helped make that decision an easy one.

Holy Moly! I just noticed we're at the last day of January! 2024 is already speeding by, or so it feels like it!

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!

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!