The RSGB runs a series of short weekday evening contests. The VHF+ ones are on Tuesdays, multi mode, but the bands change, whilst the HF ones flip day and contest mode, but are always on 80m. Last week’s HF contest was 80m cw, and presented a good opportunity to test the ts-480 in remote mode, As usual, I didn't have much time to play and was only available for the last 10 minutes of the contest making about 15 QSOs. Nonetheless I learnt a few valuable lessons.

As suspected, a real front panel makes all the difference to S&P operation so the move to the ts-480 was the right one. I  used the naked bare bones 480 in contest conditions with the inbuilt dsp. Whilst the AF dsp works just fine, much better than my FT-847’s , there is clearly no substitute for real IF filtering so I have just ordered a 500Hz filter ready for the WPX contest this weekend.  

We are entering the main sporadic E season and until yesterday I was not able to get on one of my favourite bands, 50MHz, as I didn’t have an antenna in the air. The dual band 6/4m yagi plans are still ongoing so I decided that a dipole stapled to the inside of the loft rafters as an inverted V would at least give me some presence on the band. 10 minutes with the soldering iron and I had a dipole ready to go, a further 5 minutes after that it was up and ready for tuning.

I was really surprised at the effect the rafters had on the dipole. My miniVNA made light work of tuning, which was a good job as my original dipole (standard length plus 6 inches to be safe) was resonant on 38MHz! A few snips and careful rearrangement of the legs next to the roof gives an SWR of 1.3:1 on 50.150MHz, so that will do me nicely. Tuning around the band last night gave me QSOs on cw with S53A and T77C. I also heard a few Italians on SSB, but have audio problems which stops me from transmitting at the moment.

No posts for a while, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been getting on with things.

First job has to be to build remote rig RRC cables for my ts-480. As usual things didn’t go smoothly. First of all, I couldn’t get the PC to radio link to work, but some posts to the RRC forum and private email correspondence with SM2O suggested that it was best to use RRC Com port 2 for this as port one (which I was using) doesn’t work so well. I can’t explain why, but a switch to Com 2 sorted that problem out – thanks for your help Mike! The next issue was simple user error – no audio being passed from the microham DVK to the radio. I moved one connection along a pin on the microham DB37 and all was well with that.

The final problem is more serious and remains unsolved  - terrible SSB audio when running more than about 10W between top band an 20m. This is clearly an RRC related problem as removing the boxes from the circuit made the radio work just fine. Looking on the RRC forum shows that others have been having similar problems and one correspondent posted a settings fix last night which I have yet to try.

Last weekend I finally got to spend a little time on the air during the IARU Region 1 432 and up contest. It would be fair to say that conditions were terrible, and I only managed to work 21 stations over about 3 hours on 70cm - pretty poor indeed. That said, there was some (KST assisted) DX in there but the path was supported by the DX end who were running big stacks of yagis, like DR9A at 689Km and DJ6BS at 632Km.
  
It doesn’t look like there is any chance of winning anything, but here are the squares worked for the record.