Tag Archives: lotw

Apr 12

ARRL Trip – 2011

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On Monday a number of us from DLARC (Delaware-Lehigh Amateur Radio Club) took a field trip to the ARRL Headquarters in Newington, CT and also work the W1AW station.

During the 4 hour trip, I worked a number of DX stations on 17 and 20m including Russia and Belgium. Having HF in the car definitely makes the time go quick, but logging becomes the difficult and hazardous part.

Once on-site, our tour guide took us around league headquarters where we visited the Logbook of the world (LoTW) and certificate department as well as Product Test Lab, Marketing & Advertising, and VEC departments. While there Laurie (KB3SIK) was able to find out the status to her recent upgrade, which happened to arrive in the mail that day. In the outgoing QSL card bureau, we found cards destined for NE3F, the local contest station in Reading, PA, which I found rather funny.

We also had a tour of the ARRL employee station, W1HQ which had a decent amount of gear including a SteppIR beam and 6 meter King Conversion amplifier. I’ll be adding W1HQ to my rare DX list.

It was nice to be put faces and names to the ARRL and see what they do from their perspective. They do alot with what they have and make use of every piece of equipment they have; Something quite apparent in the Lab and Art departments.
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After lunch at a local pizza place, we put in some operating time at W1AW, their visitor operator station. W1AW is also the station that provides the on-air ARRL bulletins as well as qualifying Morse code runs. I ended up running their Yaesu FTDX-9000D on 15m for a bit. The station has alot of different gear and operates a number of modes.
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The remainder of the photos and video can be found here.

Jul 03

ISO: Logging Software

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With Field Day 2009 having ended almost 2 weeks ago, and the IARU contest next weekend, I’m finding myself in search of a new logging software.

Since my start in HF back in March, I’ve been using the first logger I started with, EasyLog 5. It’s a good clean program with alot if features, although having used WB3W’s Field Day logger, I’ve gotten a little used to the large text and simplified operation.

When it comes to contesting, it’s all about speed. So I was on the search for a logging software that had a clean interface that was stable and pretty to look at. Kind of what you find in a relationship.. :) I also wanted something that did a lookup on the operator details when their callsign was entered. My eventual selection would also have to pull frequency from the radio as well.

I’m happy to say, I’ve found the logger that best suites my needs; N3FJP’s Amateur Contact Log v3.0. ACL (for short) is light, clean and fully customizable. Within minutes I had it polling frequency from my radio, resolving callsigns from the QRZ internet service and fully customized colors, input fields and the log view. It also has DX cluster with alerting built in as well. By browsing around a bit in the software, their appears to be a voice keyer as well as CW keyer with winkey support as well as an interface for Logbook Of The World (LoTW). For the $19 USD he’s asking for registering, I believe the software is well worth it.

In addition to the ACL, N3FJP also has an IARU logger which I will use next weekend.