More exciting than Bouvet? K4SWL QRP POTA!

Posted on March 6, 2026 by robert

By now it should be obvious that I’m somewhat obsessed with POTA. When the weather or health doesn’t allow me to get outside, I hunt, or listen to podcasts and read posts from activators.

I first ran across Thomas K4SWL back in February of 2022 and have worked him about a dozen times since.  Each new contact is always a treat to me because I know he is a QRP guy.  This year I discovered he runs a website QPRer.com, and is a frequent co-host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast.  I find his reviews of QRP radios and equipment to be very insightful.

Thomas adds posts of his activations to his website, and this one can be found here.  He frequently posts YouTube videos of his activations as well, and the link to this one can be found here.  It’s always a treat to hear yourself at the other end of a QSO, and mine comes up at about the 24 minute mark.

I really appreciate Thomas for his activations and sharing his joy of QRP with the world.

Proudly in the log of K4SWL on his Feb 17 QRP activation of US-2755

Posted in Activation, KH1, Portable, POTA, QRP, QRPer | Leave a comment

Bouvet Island – 3Y0K

Posted on March 6, 2026 by robert

I guess I consider myself slightly above a casual DXer.  I’ve already got some nice wallpaper like 9BDXCC, but I’m nowhere near DXCC Honor Roll, having just 284 confirmed countries.  In the past four years I have only added 8 new ones.

I knew Bouvet Island was coming up this year, and used KP5/NP3VI to dust off my rusty skills.  Man, that lulled me into a false sense of security because they had been on the air for about 40 days by the time I worked them.  So the pileups were small.

So I went hunting for Bouvet with false hopes.  On the first two days, the signals were weak and the pileups were massive.  I honestly don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it in 15 years of DXing.  I spent about 5 hours one day trying to work them on 40m CW – a fools errand on their first or second day.  Then I discovered that 40m FT8 was producing good signals between 11 PM and 3 AM local time.  I spend another 6 hours or so without luck, watching many stations that I had heard in the nights before work them over and over again.

Finally at 1:16AM local time this morning, I was lucky enough to complete a contact with them.  Signal levels were decent (about -15 for both of us), proving yet again that 100 watts and a wire can work the world.

My thanks to the DXpedition crew for 3Y0K.  I can’t believe any group of people are willing to spend $1.7 million making a tiny frozen island near Antarctica radio active!

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POTA Progress

Posted on March 1, 2026 by robert

I’ve made quite a bit of progress toward 2,000 unique parks in the month of February, despite losing time to the Blizzard of ’26.  On Jan 1 I was sitting at 1,820 parks.  Two months later I’m up to 1,937.  67 of those have happened in the last two weeks.

Most of my POTA hunting had been on CW and on the weekends.  I discovered that SSB was much more productive, especially on week days.  I suspect this time of year requires dedication and likely means activators are going to somewhat more unusual places (who wants to sit on an ice-covered bench looking at bare trees in the winter).

I’m hopeful that I will be over 2,000 parks before the end of March.

Posted in Hunter, POTA | Leave a comment

Desecheo Island KP5/NP3VI

Posted on February 26, 2026 by robert

For whatever reason, I sort of stopped chasing DX a couple of years ago.  There are only so many hours in a day, and it can sometimes takes hours of patiently trying to contact a rare DX station.  I knew that Desecheo Island had been on the air for weeks and would be an All Time New One (ATNO) for me, but I ignored it.

Until last night, that is, after some discussion of DX on our local 75-meter net.  Right after the net, I contacted KP5/NP3VI on 30-meter CW.  Later today, I worked them on 10/12/17-meter CW and 20-meter SSB as well.

Imagine my surprise when I found all contacts had already been uploaded into LotW!

Check out the official website here:  https://desecheo2026.com/kp5/ 

There are excellent tools showing real-time QSOs as well as the status of the remote island station.

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Blizzard of ’26

Posted on February 26, 2026 by robert

Ever since I moved to RI in December of 1979, all I ever heard about was the Blizzard of ’78.  It was a horrible storm that immobilized much of New England for many days.

Emergency Management wasn’t really much of a thing back in 1978.  FEMA didn’t even exist until April of the following year (and the Blizzard of ’78 was part of the justification).  Various governors and mayors were late in closing down cities and roads, and by the time people were trying to leave work for home, it was too late.  That lack of planning and procedures, coupled with a New Englander’s tendency to ignore dire weather forecasts, meant that even though the storm ‘only’ dropped 27.6″ of snow, people died in their cars stuck on interstates, and school busses were stranded with children inside.

Beginning this past Sunday February 22, and continuing through Monday evening, the “Blizzard of ’26” struck New England.  Ultimately 37.9″ of snow fell in RI.  That combined with much higher sustained winds and gusts, and wetter snow fall, made it the strongest Blizzard to ever hit the state.  In fact, more snow fell on that day that is usual for the entire year!

While days later, people are still digging out, in reality, despite the impact of the storm, the state has recovered MUCH more quickly.  The governors instituted travel bans and states of emergency.  People stayed home.  As a result, folks didn’t die in their cars, and kids were making snow angles in their yards rather than being stranded in busses.

Although not a formal radio topic, I bring this up because of its impact on infrastructure.  We lost power at about 10:30AM Monday.  Thanks to hard working Rhode Island Energy crews, we had power back by 6:30PM Tuesday.  The total number of power outages and the duration was far lower this time than in ’78.  I was blessed to have a generator and fuel, and all my radio antennas remained in the air.  Our Generator ran from 4:00PM Monday through 7:00PM Tuesday: 27 hours on 3 gallons of gas, supplying power for our heat, refrigeration, lights, internet, and a radon removal fan.

The movie below shows neighbors working together Tuesday afternoon to clear 3 feet of snow from our local roads.

 

 

Posted in EU2000i, Weather | Leave a comment

Progress toward 2000 unique POTA Parks

Posted on February 13, 2026 by robert

I’m thinking something pithy, like as slow as maple sap in the winter – that’s how fast my march toward 2,000  unique  POTA parks is going.  It’s been 44 days, and I’ve worked 50 new parks, bringing the total to 1,870.  In my defense, I was sick as a dog for 21 of those days.  But, realistically, I’ve been hunting about 16 parks to get one new one confirmed.

We will get there someday.  And then the even slower march to 3,000 unique parks will begin!

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Remote CW on a Flex6600 and iPad/iPhone

Posted on February 4, 2026 by robert

I’ve owned a Flex6600M for many years, and use it daily.  One of the things that it absolutely excels at is accessing the radio remotely.  Initially I did that by having a Flex Maestro (essentially a remote head for the radio) in my 3rd floor bedroom.  I beat the heck out of scrambling down stairs to get to the actual radio on the ground floor.  It works just fine for voice or CW, and two of my weekly CWTs are done that way.

Marcus DL8MRE has been providing an excellent version of SmartSDR for the Mac/iPhone/iPad, and I’ve been using that extensively with my iPad/iPhone at home and on the road.  The built-in FT8 mode and logbook makes that mode easy.  You can do voice using the built-in microphone on the device, but CW seemed to be a long-shot (where do you plug in your paddle on a iPad?).

Enter another company, Lynovation, and the CTR2-MIDI .  This is a small “knob” device that attaches to your iPhone/iPad via a USB charging cable, and provides a jack for your paddle.  There is a knob (defaults to a frequency knob) and a handful of buttons that allow you to control important parts of your Flex remotely.

You can see the CTR2-MIDI knob in the upper right corner of the photo.  A paddle with a magnetic base is attached to a magnetic stainless steel clipboard below that.  And you can see the iPad version of  the SmartSDR software running.

While I won’t go into details, the “MIDI” part of the knob is the key to this product working with Apple devices, and also providing a great CW experience even over wonky remote internet connections.  The sidetone is generated locally with no delays or stuttering.  I use it all the time at 30 WPM.

Posted in FlexRadio | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Winter Field Day 2026

Posted on January 26, 2026 by robert

I’m usually with my club doing Field Day, summer and winter, but this year my family was rocked with Norovirus the week before WFD.  We knew when and where we caught it and it was obvious that I would be infectious during the contest.  So with great regret, I had to let my club know I wouldn’t be available.

In a round-about way that may have been the best timed disease ever as the entire country was hit with a horrible winter storm.  Real temps were in the low single digits and wind chills were -20.  Plus a foot of snow fell on Sunday before the contest ended.  My friends were suffering outdoors, but I was comfortable at home (my unheated shack was about 60 degrees).

I didn’t work many stations because I had my eye set on getting as many multiplier points as possible.  I copied the bulletin, sent and received messages via WinLink, made both a FM and Linear Satellite contact, operated three different modes, and made contacts on six different bands.  When it was all said and done, I worked 34 stations and had a multiplier of 17, over the 4 hours  that I was on the air on Saturday.  Honestly I should have stayed on the air another two hours and could have easily worked 100 more CW stations on 20/15/10.

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Don’t forget Xmit Attenuator in FLDIGI

Posted on January 23, 2026 by robert

I was configuring my radio to be able to copy the Winter Field Day bulletin tomorrow (1 PM and 7 PM EST), and wanted to use PSK31 as a backup for CW copy (I seem to recall last year that copy was not optimal on any of the stations sending the bulletin)

Anyway that meant firing up FLDIGI, which I had not used in several years.  Not only did I need a quick refresher in how to use it, but my versions of FLDIGI and FLRIG were out of date.  I’m a firm believer in don’t fix it if it isn’t broken, so I will update things AFTER WFD.

Anyway, I wanted to make at least one PSK31 contact, which I did (thank you Jacob KR0ES for suffering through my poor skills).  But I was stymied as to why I was only producing a few watts of power.  I had forgotten that there is a transmit level attenuator within FLDIGI.  In my case it was set to -12dB, and I had to reduce the attenuation to 0.

See the photo below for the location of the control (bottom right side, highlighted in red)

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POTA and DMR – A New DJ-MD5 Talkgroup

Posted on January 3, 2026 by robert

I really went deep into a rabbit hole yesterday.  I had been reading and listing to many things POTA related and stumbled upon the fact that there was now a DMR Talkgroup, 3181, for POTA users to coordinate their activations.  Probably been there for years, but it was new for me.

That turned into a day-consuming rat hole for me as it meant that I had to reprogram my Alinco DJ-MD5 HTs with the new talk group.  Anyone who has ever used DMR will immediately recognize that is not a “push a few buttons” task.  In my case it was made worse by the fact that I hadn’t changed the codeplug in my HTs in 7 years.  In other words, I had to relearn everything about my radios and their configuration software before I could reprogram them.

My  “Drink Me” moment began when I discovered that my DJ-MD5 had been obsoleted about six years ago.  Thus my journey started with trying to locate the programming software.  Oddly enough, the radio never appeared on the Alinco site, so that was no good.  I did order them from DXengineering, but they really didn’t  have a link to the firmware and programming software.  HOWEVER, buried in their archive was this link:

https://www.remtronix.com/digital-radio/discontinued/dj-md5tgp/

Sure enough that had several versions of the programming software as well as firmware versions – which was good because my original radio had version 1.02 firmware and the most recent one had version 1.13C.

I downloaded the CPS 1.12 programming software, which was distributed with the version 1.13C firmware.  In installed flawlessly.  But when I plugged the radio into my PC, Device Manger didn’t find it.  Then I had a vague memory that the micro USB connector on the side of the radio was amazingly hard to plug in.  Sure enough, after an obscenely hard push, the connector snicked into place, and Device Manager discovered it as a new COM port.

Using the CPS software I was able to suck the contents out of both of my radios (FW 1.13C and FW 1.02).  Now the second part of the journey was to rediscover how to set things up in a DMR radio.  Fortunately I had several other talkgroups defined, so I was able to copy/paste one and change it to the POTA Talkgroup  3181.

The above sounds easy, but as any DMR user knows, that’s the view from 40,000 feet.  In reality I had to add the new talk group in (under the Digital/Talk Groups) tab first.

Next I had to edit the Public/Channel tab to add in a new channel for POTA:

Finally the Public/Zone tab had to be activated to add the new channels into Zone 1 (I only use one Zone in my radio, but there are many cases where multiple zones would be  helpful in organizing things).  See the photo below:

Those three steps are the magic that was needed to get the POTA talk group into my radios.  But I still had two remaining issues:  Firmware out of date in one of the radios, and adding the Digital Contact List to both radios (last updated in 2019).

I figured I could take the 1.13C firmware I had downloaded and use the Tool/Firmware Update to upload it to my radio.  Simple, Right?  Wrong!  First you need the magic decoder ring to get your radio into the firmware update mode.  That’s in the PDF I have here:

Then pay careful attention to the bottom of the third page which explains that you need to run the CPS software IN ADMINISTATOR MODE, otherwise you will get a “Run Time Error 5”.  Funny that is the FIRST thing you need to know before you start the software, rather than the last thing you read in the instruction!

It is almost time for the “Eat Me” return to real life.  The remaining item was to update the Digital Contact List (the DMR User ID information).  That required a trip to the Radio ID database, and obtaining the latest USERS.CSV file from there:

https://radioid.net/database/dumps

The trouble is that file is HUGE – it has all the DMR IDs.  I used Excel to delete everything but the US and Canadian IDs.  Even that was pretty large, 153,387 users as of yesterday.  But it was small enough to fit inside the DJ-MD5, which has room for 200,000 users.

So after that journey to Wonderland, and several rabbit (or rat) hole detours I was rewarded with a POTA Talkgroup on my DJ-MD5.

 

Posted in DJ-MD5, DMR, POTA | Leave a comment