Some JT65 activity
Lately I've been doing some JT65 activity on 20m band. Mainly short skip propagation during the first days of this month.
Here's a very nice contact with VK7XX, John in Tasmania! First one with Australia in my log!
John completed this QSO with 5W only (but a great quad antenna) against my 20W and a poor short vertical antenna on my balcony.
Since I always keep multidecoder on in JT65-HF, you can also see my brother IS0BZR in the waterfall, in QSO with an american station.
And here's something strange:
I guess our fellow didn't realize that OY3JE was already in QSO while calling him. Anyway, I completed a great QSO with OY3JE at 21:40-21:46 UTC! First one with Faroe Islands, of course!
My first QSO as hamradio operator
Finally my first QSO as hamradio operator (and the second one too). It may sound strange after so long time, but I still have to complete the tuning of my homebrew buddipole antenna. So I really enjoyed a very nice propagation on 10 meters, on Apr 2, 2011.
For the records, #1 is R4IO Sergey on 28509 SSB at 11:57 UTC, #2 is RX4HZ Vlad on 28470.5 SSB at 12:19 UTC. Both in Russia.
My working conditions were: 25W out, magnetic base antenna (about 150 cm) on my balcony.
Unfortunately, I couldn't work 4X4FR Rafi from Israel (on 28515): his signal was very strong for more than one hour in the afternoon.
LOTW under Linux Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid)
I installed LOTW under my Linux Ubuntu 10.04 desktop (Lucid Lynx) building it from source code, available for download here. You need to download both tqsllib library and TrustedQSL Applications.
Unpack source code in a temporary directory. Go into tqsllib-2.2 subdir (name depends on actual version number of the software) and compile libraries:
./configure
make
sudo make install
Now go into TrustedQSL-1.13 (or so). Make sure to have installed all required packages in order to satisfy dependencies (read the documentation). In my case, I had to install libalien-wxwidgets-perl to satisfy wxWindows dependency. Then, compile the source code. Again:
./configure
make
sudo make install
If all goes well, new tqsl and tqslcert applications are now available.
Last tweak: as root I had to create two symlinks to let tqslcert start without errors (again, file names may depend on actual library version number):
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libtqsllib.so.1.0.2 /usr/lib/libtqsllib.so
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libtqsllib.so.1.0.2 /usr/lib/libtqsllib.so.1
