The first was with Fred, KI4XH. Fred was operating his Collins S-Line gear, and keying it with a bug. About halfway through the QSO, he switched over to a VibroKeyer single-lever paddle, keying a Hallicrafters HA-1 keyer.

The HA-1, or T.O. Keyer, was a commercialization of the vaccum-tube keyer designed by W9TO. in the 1950s. It occurred to me that maybe building one of these things is something that I could do with al the tubes that I have. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the schematic on the Net.
There is an an article in the May 1959 issue of QST by W9TO, but this is for the first transistor keyer. If any of you have a schematic and can scan it for me, or can point me to where I can find it, I would appreciate it.

Titanic Duo
After making a couple of CW contacts, I thought I’d try making a phone contact. Tuning to 7220 kHz, I found our favorite frequency occupied by W0S, a special event station commemorating the sinking of the Titanic. W0S was operating from the Titanic Museum in Branson, MO. According to their website, “This event will commemorate the heroic efforts of Harold McBride and John ‘Jack’ Phillips as they sat at the Marconi radio in the Titanic sending the first ever SOS.” They’ll be on the air until 2200 UTC Sunday, April 11.

My last QSO was with W1T, a station that was also commemorating the sinking of the Titanic. I made the contact on 14.050 MHz. W1T was operating from somewhere in Maine. At first, I thought that perhaps this was a CW operation from W0S, but it was a completely separate operation. I was unable to find any information on the Net about this station.

What I did find, however, was a third special event station commemorating the Titanic. This is an operation of the Titanic Historical Society, which is located in the Springfield, MA area. If I’d known about this, I bet that I could have worked them. Maybe next year.

• Dan, KB6NU
• Jim, K8ELR
• Eugene, KD8HSU
• Susan, KD8MZR
• Richard, KD8MZS

Susan and Richard were two of the students in our latest One-Day Tech Class. They’re planning to take a six-month cruise down to the Caribbean soon, and are planning to use ham radio to keep in touch with folks back home.

After answering a bunch of questions about ham radio in general, and trying to figure out how they could use the marine radio that they currently have on their boat on the ham bands, I got Susan to sit down and make a couple of contacts. I wrote out a simple script for her to read to call CQ, and on the second try, she got a reply! So, now, we have another new ham with her first contact under her belt.

We also had quite a bit of visitor activity. We had a group of kids come in, and four different adults signed up to be on our mailing list for the next one-day class.

We were so busy that I wasn’t able to actually get to the “hands-on” activity that I’d planned. Make: Magazine recently posted a new video by Diana Eng, KC2UHB, that shows a very simple way to visualize radio waves. Rather than describe this more fully, you can just watch the video:

Cool, isn’t it? Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this next week.

Shortly after, Jim, K8ELR, and Ovide, K8EV, showed up. Then, Quentin, KD8IPF, and his kids arrived. A little later, Ralph, AA8RK, came for a visit, and Mike, one of the students from last week’s class arrived.

K8ELR, who is now our “digital modes specialist,” got all set up to do Hellschreiber. He called CQ a couple of times, and got a few responses, but apparently the band was a little up and down, and was never actually able to complete a contact.

At about 3 pm, I sat down to demonstrate CW for Mike. After QSYing to 40m and calling CQ a couple of times, we connected with Roger, W1OJ. After a nice QSO with Roger, we got a call from Lynn, NG9D. I think I appropriately impressed Mike with my CW skills.

We also were visited by a couple of museum visitors who turned out to be hams. So, overall it was a great day down at the museum.

• Friday: I did a bunch of housekeeping. I logged in our recently-received QSL cards and replenished our brochure supply.
• Saturday: Quentin, KD8IPF, and I figured out how to use the SSTV feature of Ham Radio Deluxe. This was surprisingly confusing. We expected to find SSTV as one of the items in the drop-down menu of the DM780 program, along with PSK, Olivia, and the other digital modes. Instead, to receive SSTV, you have to click on a separate menu item.
  Quentin and I didn’t make any SSTV contacts as band conditions were really poor, but we did receive a couple of pictures. Next, we have to set up a couple of our own templates and then actually make a contact.
• Sunday: Jim, K8ELR, and I were there, ostensibly to operate Kid’s Day. Unfortunately, there weren’t very many people at the museum, nor could we find any other stations on the air working this event. So, we ended up not making any Kid’s Day QSOs.

On Saturday, January 9, Les, W8LDS, and I met for breakfast before heading over to the museum. There, we met Jim, K8ELR.  After turning on the rig, we heard Tom, K5IRH, Shreveport, LA calling CQ on 40m CW and quickly established our first contact. When we mentioned that we were at a local science museum, he quickly told us about Sci-Port, a science museum there in Shreveport.  I told him that every science museum should have a ham radio station and have e-mailed him information on our operations.

Emboldened by our success with SSTV the previous week, Jim and I decided to give RTTY a whack. Fortunately, there was an RTTY contest last weekend–the Mongolian RTTY DX Contest, no less! Again, band conditions weren’t the best on 20m, but we managed one contact apiece. Mine was with P4OYL in Aruba, Jim’s with EA5FL in Spain.

After that, we decided to pad our QSO statistics a bit, so made a bunch of CW contacts in the North American QSO Party. That was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, so we quit pretty quickly and wrapped up ops at about 1:30 pm.

What’s not shown in this video are the number of calls made before the contact was made. We must have called a dozen times, and it didn’t look it was going to happen. Then, all of a sudden, the ISS came booming in!

The first thing I did today was to upgrade the firmware in the TenTec Omni VII. I thought this was going to be a lot more difficult than it turned out to be. All I had to do was download the package and run it. Worked like a charm.

I don’t recall what version we were running, but I can say that the new version does make the rig work differently. What’s most noticeable is that the filtering seems sharper. The TenTec website has a complete list of all the modifications they’ve made to the firmware, and it’s quite extensive. It makes me wonder how much better my IC-746PRO would be if its firmware was upgradeable.

Ovide then arrived and we were able to put a couple of kids on the air. Jeff, W2FFQ, was gracious enough to allow us to put junior operator Eve on the air. Eve, as it turns out, was in junior kindergarten, and Jeff has a daughter who is also in kindergarten. He got her to come into the shack and the two kids talked to one another. That was cool.

Finally, we tried installing EasyPAL on our computer so that we could try some SSTV. I say “tried” because the anti-virus software said that it detected something and wouldn’t let the install proceed. Consulting the EasyPAL website, it said that this sometimes happens and to disable the anti-virus software during the install. We did that, and it looked like the software was installed, but the program never got copied to the disk. We tried this a couple of times with the same result. By that time, we both were ready to close up shop, so we just gave up on that for now.

Then, we connected with Bill, AA2YV. Bill is a history professor at a college in Rochester, NY, and was just great with the kids. We managed to keep him on the line long enough to talk to Marion, Celeste, Henry, Quinn, and Cameron.

After that, we made a bunch of Canadian contacts with stations working the RAC contest.