As I have previously mentioned, the South Plainfield Amateur Radio Club will be at the Westergard Library in Piscataway, NJ on Saturday, April 20th from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM presenting Amateur Radio to the public at large. If you're in the area, please stop by! We're going to have an FT8 station, a SSB station and of course a CW station. Hopefully we can get all three up and running in order to give the people who visit us a good idea of what this hobby is all about.
Yours truly will be manning the CW station. I hope to get an antenna set up in the small grassy area that I am told is just adjacent to where we will be. Supposedly, there's a window that will allow us to run coax to the outdoors. QRPTTF is that day, so maybe I can operate and show people that Morse Code isn't a relic of the past. The bug-a-boo in my mind is the critical importance of an outside antenna. Last October, when we held a Morse Code demonstration at the JFK Library (also in Piscataway) I tried setting up the AlexLoop only to find the interior fluorescent lighting was generating so much RFI as to make the loop a mere decoration.
My primary goal is to do some "real live operating", or at the very least, some "real live receiving" I have that little golf ball sized speaker that I can hook up to the KX3, so people can hear what's being received, as the KX3's internal speaker leaves a lot to be desired (Sorry, Eric and Wayne!). I also played around with the KX3's built-in CW decoder last night. I had to open up the manual and look up how to activate it because I think the dinosaurs were still alive the last time I tried to use it. It's finicky in that for it to work half way decently, you have to be listening to a signal that's pretty strong - at least S7 or higher. The outside antenna will be crucial for that. If the signal is weaker than about S7, all you see on the KX3's display is a lot of *'s, e's and t's. Which once again proves that the best on-the-air CW decoder is the gray one that situates itself between one's ears.
Which brings me to today's topic. If worse comes to worse and I can't get on the air, I can resort to Ham Radio Solutions and their VBand CW bot. The little USB adapter arrived in the mail yesterday. Don't let the picture fool you. This thing is about the size of your thumbnail.
This little gadget allows me to hook up a set of paddles, or a straight key, or even a cootie or bug to my laptop via one of the USB ports. The adapter comes with the required USB cable, which I'm pretty sure is a USB-A to USB-C cable. On the Ham Radio Solutions VBand page, I can send CW and see it displayed on the laptop screen. Or I can have a simulated QSO with their robot. Or, if I get super desperate, there are other channels where you can have a real time live QSO with another Ham via the internet. I'm hoping to use it primarily as a device where people can employ one of my straight keys to send Morse and then see on the screen how they've done.
I hooked it all up last night and breathed a sigh of relief when it worked the first time. My concern wasn't with the adapter, but with my Lenovo T430 laptop which is kind of getting long in the tooth. My laptop doesn't like newer things, like 5G wifi, for instance - it doesn't even detect it. To my relief, the USB port detected the adapter right away and there was no frustration in trying to figure out how to configure com ports. (I hate that!) It took a bit of time to get a good feel for using this set up. I had to turn the auto-spacing feature off as it was screwing up my rhythm in sending. The default setting is Iambic B and I had to change it to Iambic A as that's what my KX3 is set for and it felt more comfortable. You know, 45 years as a Ham, and I'm still not 100% certain what the difference is between Iambic A & B !! Anyhow, before long I had everything set up so that I could send and the laptop display was actually legible and not just gibberish.
After "Amateur Radio Day At The Library" is in the books, I'll still use this as a way to practice and perfect my bug fist, which is currently somewhere between the "disaster" and "atrocious" stages. And I'll always have it should we give more Amateur Radio demonstrations. Heck, it might be even good to set it up at the Information Table that we set up for Field Day. I'll have to bring that up when we're at the library or at the next club meeting. I can see where putting this right next to the Guest Book might draw some attention.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!
