Today (12/29/2015), several SPARC members met at the SPARC Clubhouse to work on several 
projects to help with contesting and other activities at the W4GAC station. Bob N2ESP, John KI4UIP, Dave KR4U, Ron KP2N and Tom NY4I worked on various projects that needed to be done for this weekend’s ARRL RTTY contest. While John, Dave and Bob wrestled the Cushcraft R7 antenna into position outside and ran coax, the rest of us worked on tweaking the Elecraft K3 to work on RTTY FSK mode. For a reason that would become apparent, we could not properly decode signals that we knew were there. As it turns out, we had two issues: one on receive (RX) and one on transmit (TX). The RX issue was that the RTTY frequency was set different on the rig than on the MMTTY program. Once we figured this out, all went well with the receive part. But, then other stations were not decoding us properly. This was a simple issue of switching the FSK polarity to invert our mark and space. Now, it works! There is nothing like reading the manual :). The K3 station will use the Log periodic on 20 and the dipole on 80 along with the Alpha 9500 for 1000 watts. The R7 will be run on other bands as a multiplier station.
Tom NY4I hung around (rather than sit in traffic to Palm Harbor) to work on the K3 remote station. There are a few items that required finishing for the remote station. You may recall, our plan is to allow members to operate the K3 remotely thereby using the radio and antennas at W4GAC from home (great for those of us with limited antennas). After a few configuration issues and hooking up a speaker cable to the back of the K3, Tom was able to connect to the K3 with his K3/0 setup. At least it worked across the room! Not wanting to make any more changed with the contest upcoming, there is a small punch list of items to do to complete this project. This list included routing a few LAN cables, adding an external speaker to the K3 (through the Behringer mixer) and finalizing the inbound WAN ports for access. Please note the technical details were added intentionally to see if anyone has an interest in learning the nitty-gitty details of how remote stations work. If you like mixing hardware and software, it is quite a bit of fun to configure. be sure to ask Tom to help out on this project. There are always things to do and things to learn.
If you want to know how you can use the remote (even with using just your PC or Android device), please talk to Tom. Once the station is fully operational, we will do a training session for those interested.
