Tuesday 15th January 2019 - Shining Tor G/SP-004
I walked to the summit from the Cat & Fiddle, then a little further along and slightly down the ridge. I wanted to find a spot where the wall backed into the direction of the wind, and a little lower so that the load on the mast would not be as severe.
As it was, I ended up snapping the mast in two during setting up anyway - although it was on a section that had been weakening for some time (that I had kept forgetting to do something about!). So the apex of the BH4 linked dipole was 1.5m lower than intended, but all was fine with that.
Not fine was the way the various software were interacting on my tablet. As well as WSJT-X 2.0, I’ve now also got Log4OM, Log4OM Communicator and JTAlert installed and running. The idea of this is to allow proper logging, with an aspiration for it to become automated as part of a future macro which will also cycle the QSO process to return to calling CQ after that.
At present, I’m getting the logging dialog box up automatically at the end of a QSO, but I still have to manually then click to confirm I want to log the contact. I’d rather that bit was automatic. A few seonds later, I get an error message with the word “Failure” as the headline, telling me that it wasn’t possible to log the QSO to Log4OM, but that the data has still gone into the log file (text file I think).
As well as these issues, I noticed several instances of someone replying to my CQ call and WSJT-X not automatically launching into the QSO process as it normally would. I had to manually click on the station calling to trigger it. Sometimes it worked, but many times I had to do it manually. I wondered if the other processes running (JTAlert, Log4OM, Log4OM Commuicator) were interfering in some way, so I closed them down. However the intermittent problem persisted.
22 QSOs made on the activation:
2m FM: 7 - including S2S with Neil M0WBG/P on Gun G/SP-013
30m FT8: 11
80m FT8: 4
There was a short shower during the activation, but I kept dry inside my bothy bag at that point. Otherwise it remained dry, but very cloudy, cold and breezy. I walked off the hill at dusk, headtorch in pocket, but not required.