[PVRCNC] K3KO DX TEST + SKIMMER

[Guy Olinger K2AV]

Are you using winkey to send your code?  If you are using a serial
connection to key the K3, that uses up a lot of CPU on any box.  CPU drain
from MM is hugely less if you are sending CW with a winkey device.

73, Guy.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:20 AM, Brian Alsop <alsopb at nc.rr.com> wrote:

> 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
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