M1KTA visits AE5X
M1KTA at AE5X
As I worked (and recorded) Dom KH8/M1KTA in American Samoa, it would never have occurred to me that three days later he would be here in my shack.
Dom’s trip back to the UK included a lengthy stop-over here in Houston and, with me being 20 minutes from the airport, it was a great opportunity to meet Dom and hear about his one-man DXpedition.
I picked Dom up at 8:05 this morning – 40 minutes later, coffee and apple turnovers are sharing shack space with Dom’s KX3, laptop and other accoutrements of his DXpedition as he shows me his CW technique with software that encodes, decodes, records and logs his QSOs.
This was my first time to lay eyes on a KX3 and, as much as I was looking forward to test driving one, I was more impressed with Dom’s stories of how he operated at KH8. To hear him describe band conditions and long path DX contacts – all while doing all-nighters on a remote beach in the middle of the night…amazing stuff.
Who first said that enthusiasm is contagious? What an understatement!
Unfortunately, band conditions weren’t that great this morning but we did put the KX3 through its paces just a bit in the QRP contest and in other QSO’s on several bands. I don’t think more than 5 or 6 seconds ever elapsed in silence while Dom was here – we both were talking non-stop about QRP, DXpeditions and travel the whole five hours of our visit.
Before going back to the airport for his final leg of the journey, we had lunch at Pappacito’s where I introduced Dom to those Texas delicacies known as enchiladas, fajitas, frijoles charros, tres leches, etc.
Dom, I thoroughly enjoyed our visit. Thanks again for sharing your stories – and for KH8 on 15m! You’re welcome back anytime.
.
.
Radio
| 
DX, personalities, QRP
Themocracy
Hi John,
Sounds like a very interesting visit.
You said “software that encodes, decodes, records and logs his QSOs”
Could you please elaborate a bit. The image is a bit small. The CW decoder looks a bit like DX skimmer. Can you please confirm.
73, Pierre ZS6A
It was interesting. I forgot to mention that just prior to KH8, Dom had been to Senegal and Gambia with the KX3, so lots to talk about.
The software is Win-Test:
http://www.win-test.com/
Primarily for contests, Dom uses it for DX QSO’s, constantly switching in and out of macros to have dynamic QSO’s. More than my keyboard QWERTY fluency (or lack of!) would allow.
Pierre,
I am sure John will not object if I answer:
Main window on left is win-test I run it selecting HF-DX contests (list contests, scroll all the way to bottom of the list and then one up). I use a K1EL usb winkeyer and USB cat control the KX3 so everything is automated as far as logging, frequency etc.
I have the rig with an audio monitor setup so both cw sidetone and ssb sample so I can hear a copy of what I am sending/saying into the laptop line in, and I record the contest in win-test (as an MP4). This gives you an ability to record and mark up each contact with a backup audio so that you can replay a qso at will.
I back it all up with cwget that I primarily use to record the audio in as a wav file, so I get two different recordings of the same qso, CWGET will decode cw as well but it doesn’t do this realtime but I find it useful to help with tuning as it will display the audio bandwidth when a pile up occurs. I have never managed to get the KX3 SDR RX to work properly yet as a sort of panadapter. I am an SSB op really and whilst I can operate cw I needed a bit of a leg up for DXpedition pile ups and this combination made it workable.
Win-test is contest software and it has the ability to operate either as a RUN or S&P station. For DX operation you operate as a run station and almost everything is in 24 macros but I also use the normal keyboard and on occasion sent rag chew type qso with it, it seems to have a buffer of 256 characters and up to 25wpm I could type faster than it could send. That meant I could send cw that is nearly always decoded correctly at anything from 12 to 34 wpm, usually 16wpm which I can just decode by ear.
72
Dom
M1KTA
Good evening John, well who would had thunk eh……that is great you were able to have Dom over to the shack!! It sure is a small world for sure. Nice to see the KX3 in action…oh and you did predict on my blog a few short months ago that I would end up having the KX3……….your a prophet it is here in the shack and getting ready to go live!!!
A small world – my thoughts exactly at the way things turned out. I’ve been following KX3 threads more closely on the Elecraft reflector lately – glad to hear that you got your issue sorted out. I’m looking forward to your video.