Sunday, December 26, 2010

GQRP Club Winter Sports

The GQRP Club Winter Sports activity is starting at Boxing Day. I will try to be QRV at least for some hours during the upcoming week but my hopes are not high as I only run SSB. The following is copied from the GQRP website:
The G4DQP Trophy (Winter Sports).
The highlight of the year for many operators is the clubs WINTER SPORTS. This is NOT a contest, but more a gathering of like minded souls on the bands on, or around the QRP frequencies.
This all takes place twixt the Christmas pud and the New Years hangover. To be more precise it runs from Boxing Day until New Years Day inclusive. As mentioned this is not a contest as such, none of the "UR 599, name Fred QSL? QRZ" Have a chat, enjoy the bands.
The G4DQP Trophy is awarded annually to the best log submitted of QRP contacts during the clubs Winter Sports. All logs and claims must be sent to Peter G3XJS QTHR by 7th February each year.

Please also note the GQRP club's General Award Rules

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

My first WSPR

When finally being able to sync the time on my laptop it was time to try some WSPR. I first read about this mode a long time ago but haven't tried it myself until now. The WSPR software is capable of decoding signals not even heard by the human ear and that makes it ideal for QRP communications. As you can see from the map my best DX on 40m was 4X with my 1 watt tx power.

Time sync follow-up

After a busy weekend I finally found some time to look into the time sync issue again last night. As suspected I had to open a port in the firewall in the DSL router provided by my ISP. I'm now ready to WSPR!

Thanks again for all your help and suggestions!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Syncing computer clock

The last weeks I have tried some digi mode QSOs and wanted to try out WSPR. Although I managed to set up the WSPR software I was not able to sync computer time. I tried both Dimension 4 and Internet Time installed with Win 7 but all I receive is a timeout failure. I have played around with firewall and anti virus settings but the problem still persists. Any suggestions?