[PVRCNC] K3KO DX TEST + SKIMMER

[Brian Alsop]

832 X 361 = 901,056 all band SOA

The above subject line is misleading.

It should read K3KO + a hair's breath of having a local SKIMMER working.

Anybody know how to share the K3 across PC's using physical and or 
virtual ports?

On contest machine SKIMMER +K3 IF Softrock IF SDR worked fine.  N1MM 
worked fine.  Combined spots from DX cluster and SKIMMER could be 
imported to N1MM.

Put N1MM and SKIMMER together and SKIMMER decode becomes useless.
Not a sufficiently fast PC.  Not enough tick's/second of the CPU.  Too 
bad.  SKIMMER alone was decoding 80 calls/minute accurately by itself. 
It was amazing to see such closely packed stations detected.  I'm 
convinced of the usefulness of locally generated SKIMMER spots. This is 
especially true on 15 and 10M, where propagation tends to be spotlight 
in nature.  Having spots from hundreds of miles away aren't always useful.

During the test, I tried running SKIMMER on a second machine.  I was 
able to export spots to the context machine from it over the LAN.  I was 
unable to figure out how to get LP-Bridge to share the K3 across 
machines. SPOTS with no frequency info aren't useful! Tried using com 
ports with a null modem and LP-BRIDGE.  I could get K3 frequency info to 
the second machine but SKIMMER must also be able to poll the K3.

If anybody knows how to get the K3 shared across computers over physical 
ports/virtual ports, please let me know.

During the above, I also found out the second PC only has USB1 ports! 
Didn't work with available USB-SERIAL port converters.  So sharing will 
have to be over a com port to it.

It is clear that S&P with SKIMMER offers the possibility of mitigating 
the Sunday afternoon SS doldrums.  SS&P (skimmer + search and pounce) 
anyone?

On the station side.  The snow storm fallout dropped big trees on the 
two RX antennas and downed the 80M antenna.  Fixed these before the 
test.  However, the 80 M dipole became a half inverted VEE.  (couldn't 
get a line up high enough using my usual fishing pole technique).  Odd 
thing, it seemed to work pretty well netting 53 mults.  The K3 and 
ACOM1000 worked without a hitch.  At times, I got the odd feeling that I 
was the only station on the band.

73 de Brian/K3KO