K0SWE Blog

I had my ham license during last year's ARRL Field Day, but wasn't really aware at the time what an important "holiday" it is to US hams and didn't participate. This year, I fixed that mistake. I had an invitation to join RMHAM at their annual mountain excursion, but family duties kept me close to home. Instead, I planned to head out to a local park and operate on battery for a few hours. I don't really have a great portable kit yet, so I hauled out most of my QTH station. I replaced my usual mains power supply with a 360 Wh battery, and opted to keep my QTH antenna in place and instead use a Chameleon portable. This year's gear list: Icom IC-718 (from Alan's SK collection ) LDG IT-100 tuner MFJ 822 power/SWR meter Signalink USB sound card interface Panasonic CF-19 laptop Chameleon MPAS 2.0 with SS-17 vertical Bioenno 30Ah LiFePO4 battery in a Powerwerx MEGAbox Powerwerx FSP-110W solar panels Powerwerx MPPT-150-14.6 charge controller...

I haven't been on the air a ton over the past month. I've been a little fed up with my logging software and overall logging strategy. I run mainly Linux on my computers and do a lot of FT8 with WSJT-X. CQRLog has worked pretty well since it will accept log entries directly from WSJT-X thanks to UDP integration. However, I'm a programmer and very picky, and there are things in CQRLog that I just can't stand. For instance, CQRLog will let you backfill a QSO's name, city (QTH), state, etc. from the QRZ.com database for several records at once, but it basically assumes you want to backfill your entire log; I only want to fill in the last 5 QSOs that are missing that information and then stop. CQRLog also doesn't have good merging. It will deduplicate, but it just deletes duplicates instead of trying to keep relevant information from matching records. That shortfall makes it painful to run CQRLog on multiple computers, for example a home desktop and a field laptop. T...