I snuck away from work for a few minutes today and made my first RTTY QSO. Got a nice report from a
station in Chicago.
Very happy to report that I made the level shift cable and it worked right the first time! For the
first time, I dared to try to build the circuits right into the cable shell, which ended up being
way easier than I thought it would be.
I'm sure this is an old trick, but what I figured out to do was take a piece of circuit board and
wedge it between the two rows of solder cups on the back of the DB9 connector. This gave me a
platform to work on and made it very easy to build one circuit to pin 3 (TxD), and then flip it over
to build the other circuit on pin 7 (RTS). Then I just removed the board and tied both circuits to
the ground rail on pin 5. A folded piece of black tape between keeps the two circuits apart, and a
wrap of tape to stabilize them before putting on the shell.
The monitor tone and the RTTY decoder on the K3 made it easy to verify that it was all working
before I even made a transmission!
The Dual Tone Filter is very cool! A marginal print signal will snap to almost full print when you
turn it on. In a contest situation it will help you pull out the weak ones I think, but it also
seems to demand more precise tuning. I think for the most part I will leave it off except when needed...
Oh, and the 100W amp didn't break a sweat during the whole QSO.
73 - jeff wk6i
--
Jeff Stai
[hidden email]
Twisted Oak Winery
http://www.twistedoak.com/Winery Blog
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