Recently, I saw a newcomer's post on Twitter regarding his first WSJT-X session. I noticed right away that he only decoded a handful of stations, but those with supposedly extremely good reports. This is what happens when you set your receive bandwidth extremely low. This means that you only receive signals that lie within this range. If we remember again our education, we find out that a normal report refers to a bandwidth of 2.5kHz. In this articel I explain the fundamentals about that.

Some time ago I already built some "loose" interfaces for my FT-817. I used these later on my FT-891. The CAT, respectively the FTDI USB to serial converter I needed at the FT-8x7, I don't need at the FT-891 anymore, because it already has CAT via USB integrated. The FT-891 simply uses a Silicon Labs CP2105-F01 USB/Serial UART converter internally. As with many other TRXs, this is not galvanically isolated, but the engineers thought of something. Apparently it works well anyway. I have had no problems at least in the last 2 years. In this article I show you my solution for this problem.

Some quick shots from this week while we did some SOTA in the in the northern Black Forest region. We started on Hohloh DM/BW-054 984m. The next day we went to Hornisgrinde DM/BW-019 1163m. After those 2 I had 994 SOTA Points, only 6 points short of the so hard wanted iceblock trophy.  We then drove one hour further south to the Brandenkopf 945m DM/BW-067. I was not prepared for this (battery-wise) and we hoped that somehow 4 QSOs would come into the log. It became then nevertheless even 10 QSO, until the device switched off from the low voltage. Now I am SOTA “Mountain Goat”. After 177 SOTA activations in 7 countries in 5.5 years. I already ordered the award and I applied for the trophy.

Last year in December I wanted to activate 2 mountains in the Vosges. These two are not too far from my home town. Both could be done from the same parking lot. That day it was below 0 degrees °C and we had freezing rain on the Petit Donon. But in return we got 3 points winter bonus each in addition to the 2 times 10 points. 26 points with only one parking stop is not too bad. I was already on the big Donon at the end of 2017, actually you have to go there more often. Simply very nice there. 13 QSO vom VO-023 on 40m and 20m SSB. Exactly 2 hours after the last QSO we logged the first one from VO-090. 16 QSO here on 40m and 20m SSB with best DX AE7KI in TN. Always great to work DX with 5W.

After EI/IS-050 Torc Mountain the day before we took EI/IS-127 Carhoo Hill 02/Jan/2019 with great condx. Worked a lot US and VE. Thank you GM6ZAK, EA2CKX, EA2DT, G0VWP, G4AFI, M7AFI, DL5AWI, G3OCA, IK2LEY, DG1NPM, F4HZR, S54KD, DL3KZA, AB4PP, N4EX, AA1VX, SV2RUJ/P, VE1WT, SP9ETA, KB9ILT, (18 MHz!). I can highly recommend Ireland. What a great landscape!