Monthly Archives: November 2023

Portable at the Beach

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As you may know I face a lot of QRM from home with usually around S8 of noise on all bands. This is why I try to do portable at the beach as often as I can.

The location is around 2h30 drive from my home QTH. The benefits of this location is that there is absolutely no noise when beamed towards the sea from around 80 degres to 200 degres.

The noise goes up to S5/7 while beaming towards Europe.

My working conditions when I am portable are:

  • Yaesu FTDX 10
  • SPE Expert 1.3K-FA (running usually around 600/700w)
  • BuddiHex Hexbeam @ 7m above the ground
  • Begali Sculpture Key
  • Heil Pro Elite 6

From this location I am able to discover real radio again, it is crazy to see how bands seems to be opened while at home it feels like they are always closed just because of noise. Without all this noise I can see that there is a lot of DX to work and it feels really like being in a different area. Pile ups seems bigger also due to the fact that I hear more stations with the low noise.

I will be portable again on 17th until 19th November.

Nano Keyer

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I recently purchased a Nano Keyer from Alibaba. It cost me around US$50 and was delivered after around 25 days from purchase in Vietnam.

It is cheaper than a Winkeyer or Microham devices which also include a Winkeyer.

After unpacking it I installed it, it is pretty straight forward. One USB-C connected to the computer and the jack 3.5 from the Nano Keyer to the Key plug of the radio and finally my Begali Sculpture plugged into the Nano Keyer.

To change the settings of the Nano Keyer it is a bit painful as we need to pass commands with the cw keyer but once understood it works well.

The only thing which bothers me a little is that the side tone is not really strong thus if a bit of noise around it is hard to hear the side tone. Anyway for the price it works quite well and is also having a very small foot print.

Happy with the purchase and using it quite often, for portable operation it will also be very easily transportable thus I recommend for the ones who want to operate portable with such a device.

I had no issues at all to connect to it with Log4OM, N1MM as well as Cloudlog but Cloudlog is still having bugs with the Winkeyer so it is not really usable.

The change of speed directly from Log4OM or N1MM works also very well.

Hermes Lite 2

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First of all let me say that I have two Hermes Lite 2, one which is used in reception only as a skimmer for F8 / FT4 / WSPR / CW.

Hermes Lite 2 is a QRP SDR which output 5 watts. It is very affordable with the main board adding also the filter board and the aluminum case you may be looking at around USD 400.

I usually use it with Thetis and the NR as well as NR2 are very very good.

One of the Hermes Lite 2 is having the normal firmware which gives you 4 slices and the TX while my second Hermes Lite 2 uses the firmware for having 10 RX slices and no TX, this one is used with CWSL Digi as well as the RBN aggregator and CW skimmer server. All of this is running on one virtual Windows 11 machine and spotting around 20,000 spots a day.

Here are some pics of the two Hermes Lite 2.

Cloudlog

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Let’s talk about Cloudlog. I have been using for a few years now Log4OM which is definitely doing everything I need. UDP in/out good management, labels printing, normal logging with good support for everything such as lookups on QRZ.com, HamQTH and so on…also all I need in terms of DX Cluster as well. Automated upload of QSOs in QRZ.com, Clublog, LoTW and eQSL.cc. It is also supporting TCI and Winkeyer which makes it perfect for all my needs.

One of the only issue I face with Log4OM is it is very slow especially while running a pile up. It cannot catch up when logging contacts very fast despite trying everything to optimize it. The computer I use is definitely not the problem as it is a very good configuration.

While looking for other logbook I came across Cloudlog. The good thing of Cloudlog is that it is web based. Developped in php/MySQL with CodeIgniter framework. But I also think it is one of the weakness as I think it becomes more complicated to interface with a lot of things.

For now I like very much the interface which is very nice and intuitive. I have installed the bridge for TCI which interface very well with SunSDR 2 DX but also Hermes Lite 2. I do not really like the management of cluster which uses a third party cluster cache and also one of my major issue is that when you click on a spot on the cluster it will not change the frequency on the radio which means the CAT on Cloudlog is basically one way only from the radio to Cloudlog not the other way around.

In the things I like though there is the management of different logbook as well as locations.

In Vietnam I use two calls: XV9BPO and XV9Q, I use XV9BPO from two different locations, from home (OK30IT) and from Tri Ann lake (OK31NC). While for XV9Q I can use from three different locations, from home (OK30IT), at the beach around 2h drive from home (OK30TO) and from Tri Ann Lake (OK31NC).

With Cloudlog it makes it very easy to switch from one call to the other or from one location to another.

All of the QSOs because they are made from same country are in the same logbook which makes it easy to check your DXCC with the two calls no matter which location. This part is very well managed in Cloudlog. You can do the same in Log4OM but I face a few bugs from time to time.

I am still testing Cloudlog and it misses a few things before I completely switch to it but it is promising.

If some ham actually check this post feel free to let me know which logbook you use.