Weekend adventures ..

Yeah .. yeah.. not into the wilderness but into my hams world. TPT will talk nothing but his hams world nowadays :) Anyway, worked on 10m with Pak Arif again, YC9MDX from Timor Island.. though I've heard few other stations, the pile up from other 9W2s.. so, forget it.. those hams were trying to get to Europe and we were seem to be disturbing them.. I wonder, when they specifically calling a region (e.g CQ Europe), should we interrupt them?

Anyhow, did my adventure into APRS world too. As per my previous posting, I have my Dell ready and I was using Rigblaster P&P from my FT897D as temporary APRS fill-in digipeater+igate. So, since I got from Mr Posto my FT60R's battery eliminator on Saturday, I spent my weekend trying to build the radio<->pc interface. I started on Friday evening and stayed up till wee hours in the Saturday morning and given up.. I could not get the PC to trigger the PTT line.. so, on Saturday evening, I started to look into it again.. replaced the optoisolator, wouldn't budge .. removed the diode, same thing, removed the LED .. same thing .. the voltage won't go to +5V as expected .. so .. took the connector off .. just the USB<->RS232 thingy.. guess what, AGPWE wouldn't trigger the CTS line high.. for whatever reason. Rummaged through my boxes of junks .. and found an RS232 cable .. good.. good.. and connect it to COM1 .. and guess what.. there.. the red LED on the FT60R lights up.. damn.. I spent hours to troubleshoot .. and it was the USB<->RS232 thingy that caused the problem. Reconstructed everything, clean up the mess I did on my table and underneath it .. and clean up the experimental box that contains the circuit that I did on a veroboard (sorry, I didn't shoot any photo before it went inside the box.. and too lazy to open up the box again..).. and photos here are the result of my hard work .. hi.hi.hi

!

The box.. will show the inside if I ever need to open it up.. yes, I use silicon glue to glue up the DB9 port there :) Left side goes to the radio and the two cables on the right go to PC.

The radio .. using battery eliminator .. and look closely, you see that I cut off the connector to the remote mic and replaced it with a pair of stereo plugs. I did it because it is a hassle to find a 4-pin plug which fits into the FT60R speaker/mic plug. So, there .. I could use both remote mic and the interface by unplugging one and replugging another to the female stereo plug. Surely, bad thing is to mix the power supply with my other rigs which somehow putting QRM on the receiving audio.. I tried putting that ferrite bead, helps a little.. need to get a separate power supply I guess.

Anyway, you could check the result here:

http://www.db0anf.de/app/aprs/stations/basic?call=9W2TPT-3