[TVARC] FT RUp ND4G SO Unlimited LP

[Rich Erlichman]

Wow. Nice going Rusty. I don't blame Pete for watching his Eagles. I'm that way as I am writing this while watching my Cowboys. Got to keep up with those nasty birds.

I discovered a weird issue with the Flex, and it seems it is not only with my unit. I have some intermittent glitching during the transmit cycle when running FT8. I also see a 1-2 second delay before the transmitter actually kicks in during the timed FTn cycle. This really is critical if on a 7.5 second cycle when running FT4. I was getting no answers and I was calling and calling (including Rusty). I rebooted the PC and it seemed to rectify the issue but not for the duration of the contest. I had to reboot about 3 times over the course of the weekend.

I did manage to work Rusty on 4 bands, and Pete on two bands. Thanks for the Qs, guys.
I never even thought about the online scoreboard. Didn't turn it on; sorry about that.

Using the definition of Insanity, I also kept trying to make the SO2R to work during the weekend. It works fine in non-contest mode, with HRD as my logger program. I will keep looking into the issue and research as best as I can.
Some of the things I found with respect to the glitching was that the PC was having interrupts that were trying to service hardware (somewhere), and thus interrupting the DAX audio stream. I found two articles on the Flex site that refer to the issue, basically saying it is not their fault, but hardware interrupt related. Flex recommends a special utility to download that is made to find the interrupt that is causing the hangup delay.
My answer to that is my PC is less than a year old, and is a power PC, with oodles and oodles of memory and lots of speed with a 11th Gen 8 core i7 CPU, running the latest version of Windows 11. There is no excuse for any interrupt to cause an issue with the DAX stream. The articles also mention one fix to close the DAX and re-start it. Did it, and no joy.

George/K2DM once challenged me a few months ago to make a presentation to the club on the integration of N1MM and WSJT-X. I never jumped on it, but considering the interest we have in the club with FT8/FT4 operations and contesting, maybe I will put myself out on a limb here and try to put together something for the club in a couple of months. But first I want to get the SO2R working, so that I can cover that as an option.

I agree with Rusty regarding the conditions. It seemed ok with the SFI barely over 100, BUT there were few DX stations out there. Even on 20m, I had only 3 DX Qs out of 56 Qs. Weird!

73, Rich, ND4G

                     FT Roundup - 2022

Call: ND4G
Operator(s): ND4G
Station: ND4G

Class: SO Unlimited LP
QTH: NFL
Operating Time (hrs): 7.4

Summary:
  Band  QSOs
------------
    80:    6
    40:   65
    20:   56
    15:   22
    10:    9
------------
Total:  158  State/Prov = 42  Countries = 23  Total Score = 10,270

Club: The Villages Amateur Radio Club

Comments:
FLEX-6600M -> MFJ-998RT Remote Tuner -> 20' Stealth vertical flagpole, + Cobweb antenna

Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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