Logbooks and logging in the UK

It is no longer a requirement in the UK for a station logbook to be kept. There is a clause in the current license that states "12(1) For the purposes of any interference investigation, to determine compliance with the
terms, conditions and limitations of this Licence, or for any other matter concerning the
enforcement of any relevant legislation, the Licensee shall at the request of a person
authorised by Ofcom, keep a permanent record (a “log”) of such matters concerning the
operation of the Radio Equipment, over such period, and in such form, as the authorised
person may require."

Which basically means if Ofcom tell you to keep one on the basis of an interference investigation you must do so until they decide otherwise.

As an old hand in amateur radio, having held my license since 1980, I have always kept a log and always will. I know it is now voluntary but it's really nice to look back through the logbook and see previous contacts. I'm still on my first physical paper one as I did a lot of packet radio operation and that kept it's own electronic logs that I still have. However I have purchased a new one from the RSGB and that is on the shelf when the original is filled. I wonder what date that will be!

Logbook #1

2 Rigs 2 Antennas 2 Switches - Part 3

6m activity is very sporadic and as we are coming up to the Perseids maximum activity phase (August 12th 2015) then I have had chance to try out the switches in anger (so to speak). I heard a DXPedition station calling CQ on 6m from Aland Island (a rare DXCC island off the coast of Finland). I was on the dipole at the time and decided to switch over to the inverted Vee. Wow what a difference, before he was about RS52 perfectly readable. As soon as I threw both switches over to the Vee then he was coming in at RS57 occasionally peaking at RS59.

The new switching mechanism works a treat and is superb. Maybe my dipole is not that efficient!

I bet behind your computer and rigs it's a rats nest of cables like mine!

JT65-HF HB9EQX Edition

As part of my exploration into the, new to me, JT65 mode I have found lots of pieces of software written to make the use of the mode. One of which is JT65-HF HB9HQX Edition which is currently at version 0.9.98.0
Obviously a lot of work has gone into this and joy of joys it interfaces really well with Ham Radio Deluxe. When first launched it asks you for your station details, the rig connection, the sound cards and whether you are using CAT. It also asks you what form of logging you have. A lot of the extensive settings can be left at the default,

The main screen

If you are using Ham Radio Deluxe with CAT simply choose the "Cat is enabled via Ham Radio Deluxe.." option and, assuming you already have HRD working fine, it will work seamlessly. You do have to stop DM780 before you start JT65-HF however.

Choose HRD on the CAT tab

The screen shows the waterfall in the narrow portion and the dialog exchange in the main scrollable window. If you have CAT working successfully the frequency and band are in the QRG and Band boxes top left. Above the current date and time are the audio input level and a user defined output level.

Conversation buttons

The main buttons controlling the dialog exchange are on the right hand side and are arranged in a logical order. They conveniently change colour throughout a QSO which is useful if you are wondering what to press next!


When you have finished the QSO button you simply press the Log QSO button and a dialog box allowing you to customize any message appears. Clicking the next Log QSO button actually writes the entry to the logbook - in my case the HRD logbook.

Log QSO

What I have found though is if you have HRD to automatically send an eQSL to eQSL.cc it doesn't work when using this method of log addition. You have to manually select the QSO's in HRD Logbook and upload them to eQSL manually. Not a great problem but if you were waiting for that elusive QSL card and wondering why this is the reason. Also if you normally use QRZ.COM to enter the various station fields from within HRD Logbook you will find that the stations added from JT65HF will need refreshing to get their full details. Again not a problem you just need to be aware of it.

Simple QSO operation.

If everything has been setup correctly, the application communicating with the rig, the soundcard levels set, the rig tuned to one of the JT65 frequencies (you can select them from the QRG pulldown) and the antenna tuned you can just sit and watch contacts appearing on the Exchange screen.


CQs and DX calls appear in green, existing exchanges between stations are shown in blue. Your signals are shown with a white background. This is all assuming you use the default colours.

The exchange box

The waterfall shows a graphical representation of what is being recieved. You can also set it so it shows the callsigns of the stations. You current transmit frequency is highlighted by a red bar above the waterfall.

A typical waterfall display

To reply to a CQ request you simply left click (on a Windows PC) on the green highlighted entry. This automatically populates the "Generated Text" field with a suitable reply. This by convention is their callsign, your callsign and your locator square. Then at the start of the next minute the application transmits this message.

The reply to you showing the initial signal report -02 dB

Replies to you are in pink and you can see the 73 message

The station will then reply back with a signal report - the displayed colour is pink. In the meantime JT-65HF highlights the next appropriate button to press. In this case it is the R-db button. It then populates the Generated Text field with his station, your station and a R with a reading of the dB sent field.

The next button to press is automatically highlighted

The other station then replies back with either RRR or 73. You click on the 73 button and again the relevant text is populated in the reply box and the QSO is finished.
Finally you click on the Log QSO button and it will make an entry in your log.


If you have enabled sound it will also sound a CQ in morse on your shack monitor when somebody has sent a CQ. You can also set the sound to warn you if somebody has replied back to you. I have mine set to G8YPH in morse. There are other sounds you can set too.

If you have already worked a station on JT65 before then their entry in the exchange screen is marked in a dark green colour and it says QSO B4 at the tail end of the entry which is convenient.

QSO B4

There are many more features of this well written program and I have found so far that it is by far the easiest to use. The only limitation is that is only 1 mode available and that is JT65 so if you want to use it on 6m with JT6M you can't.

HRD 6.3.0.410 installation

August 10th 2015 and Ham Radio Deluxe 6.3 was released. I downloaded it and tried the installation on a domain connected machine and the routine came up with the usual issues with registry keys as I reported on earlier posts for older versions of the software.

I logged out of the domain and then just logged in locally to the PC. I ran the installation routine again and everything worked perfectly. At the end of the installation I didn't run HRD instead just closing it down and logging off.

When I logged on as a domain user again and launched HRD all my old settings were still present, the logbook was intact and all the customization's to the screens were still there. I'm very happy.

Now all I have to do is operate the software in anger and see what issues if any there are. Straightaway I can see the previous problem with scrolling waterfall hiccups has been cured. It is now very smooth and judder free.

WSJT-X JT65 Operation using the Yaesu FT-450D

I decided to have a look at the JT digimodes to see if I decipher these strange tones I'd heard. For those people unfamiliar with JT these modes have been designed to allow amateurs to have QSO's using 13 character overs using very low power and hence very weak signals. A typical over would be:

• Call CQ with the Maidenhead locator
• Establish contact
• Exchange signal reports
• Wish each other best wishes and terminate the QSO

There are several packages available on the internet for transmitting/receiving/decoding these very weak signal protocols. One of which is  WSJT-X available from here that I for one have found very easy to setup and use.

WSJT-X wide waterfall

After installation of the software you go to the setup screen and enter your Callsign and locator square. Then you set the sound cards that you are using, choose the rig from an extensive database on a pulldown and then set the COM port settings and whether to let the rig CAT control the PTT.
All very simple to do and so much easier than the other popular program WSJT.

WSJT-X setup screen with specifics
for my FT-450D and the COM port configuration

However WSJT-X does have a limitation in that it currently (August 2015) encodes/decodes JT65 and JT9 protocols. Whereas WSJX contains all sorts of exotic modes - but I never managed to get the latter to key the transmitter so it is irrelevant to me!

I switched the rig on, loaded the WSJT-X program, set it to JT65 mode, got it to tune the rig to 14.076 MHz (the CAT control works well as long as you first set the Yaesu FT450D to VFO mode and USB/DATA) and just listened for a while to see what it would pickup.

WSJT-X showing typical activity on the entire portion of the band
(the equivalent of Supersweeper in DM780) in the left hand side of the pane
and a QSO received on the current receive frequency on the right hand side.
The receive/transmit audio frequencies can be seen on
their respective pulldowns

The receive (green) and transmit (red)
audio frequencies can also be seen in the waterfall

It seems that JT modes can be set to transmit on even or odd minutes and transmit 13 characters at a time.

Checkbox to set transmitting in even minutes

Musical notes

JT65 and similar modes sound like a piccolo flute to the human ear. WSJT-X has a waterfall display that shows the various signals in a graphical form that it is picking up. At the end of a transmission the decoder kicks in an a series of QSO's appear on the left hand side of the main display.

After a segment of listening a typical QSO looks similar to this:

• CQ G8YPH IO83    - A CQ call is made by G8YPH with the locator square
• G8YPH K1ABC FN42 - K1ABC responds back with their locator square
• K1ABC G8YPH -21  - G8YPH sends a signal report
• G8YPH K1ABC R-19 - K1ABC acknowledges and sends a signal report
• K1ABC G8YPH RRR - G8YPH sends an acknowledgement
• G8YPH K1ABC 73 - K1ABC sends best wishes and the QSO is complete

As this one station is set to transmit on odd minutes and the other is on even minutes the minimum amount of time for the QSO is 6 minutes. Of course you might both be on even minutes (I've seen some stations doing that for some odd reason) so it could take 11 minutes to do the QSO! You just have to be patient whilst operating this mode.

Power settings

The power settings of the rig are normally quite low - initial contact could be 20 watts dropping to 5 watts. Worldwide communication is possible using these modes with quite modest power settings and antenna setups. I'm going to investigate the modes more as my first contact was on 20m with a station in Moldova. This was a country I hadn't worked on any mode despite it being in Europe. I left the rig on just listening and Chinese stations were clearly seen and worked - another country I had never been able to work on fatter bandwidth modes. China is some 8000 miles away from this station QTH and both this station and the Chinese station were running just 5 watts.

Unfortunately this particular piece of software will not work with Ham Radio Deluxe yet so I have to unload the HRD rig control and DM780 software module. You can still have the HRD Logbook module running but have to enter any QSO's manually. I suppose it's only a matter of time until the JT modes are integrated.

Future operational details

I'll report on the various aspects of this software in future posts as I find out how best to operate it.
Watch this space....

73s de Terry G8YPH

2 rigs 2 antennas 2 coaxial switches - Part 2

The Diamond CX-210A switches arrived along with some high spec 0.5m long patches leads terminated either end with PL259 plugs.

I cut a small piece of plywood on the table saw and mounted both switches side by side with the supplied screws. One of the patch leads was connected between the switches as per my circuit diagram outlined in Part 1.

The other two patch leads were used to connect to the two rigs. The antennas were then connected to the switches output as per the photo.

I placed the switch assembly board behind both rigs on the desk. In operation I just exercise a few muscles and get out of the shack chair to throw each switch! No need for it to be in finger tip reach.

The insertion loss for each switch is 0.05dB from DC to 500MHz and I have not noticed any issues with loss of sensitivity of either rig. I just worked a couple of stations in Argentina and Brazil (about 8000 miles away) on 35 watts PSK31 so neither transmission nor reception have been impacted. VHF/UHF on the FM transceiver is ok too with a distant repeater in Birmingham (about 72 miles away) still being workable on 2m.

2 rigs 2 antennas 2 coaxial switches - Part 1

I have a couple of antennas and 2 base station rigs. The FM transceiver is quad band and is attached to a tri band antenna covering 6m/2m/70cm. The HF antenna is connected to a multi band antenna covering 40m to 6m including all the WARC bands. It is supposed to be able to resonate on 80m band too but I've never had any success with this.

With this in mind the 6m portion of the VHF/UHF antenna (Diamond V-2000) is an inverted Vee that is directional - despite "visually appearing" to be part of a vertically polarized antenna system. The VHF and UHF portions of the antenna are omnidirectional vertically polarized. I have the 6m portion pointing eastwards.

At times of 6m activity it would be nice to switch between the conventional HF antenna to the W-2000 on the HF rig to see if there are any differences. It is very inconvenient to reach around the back of each of the rigs to unscrew the antenna plugs and swap them over so I came up with this idea.
Using a pair of Diamond CX-210A 2 way coaxial switches I designed the circuit shown below.

There is no interlocking so there can become an issue where rigs are connected to nothing on occasion. However the good news is that the output of one cannot be connected to the output of another! As this is going to be used just by me I see no problem. I just have to remember to throw both switches at the same time. 

The antenna switches are connected the conventional way (the HF rig feeding the common connection) of the HF switch. The FM transceiver is connected to one of the switched connections of the VHF/UHF switch. In normal operation each rig is connected to its respective antenna. When I want to use the HF rig on the V-2000 I have to throw both switches to their other positions. I would also switch the FM transceiver off as it wouldn't be connected to an antenna at all.

There doesn't appear to be anything relatively cheap on the amateur market that can do this so in the spirit of ham radio I'm doing it myself. The switches and connectors have been ordered - watch this space!

Daytime HF band working - July/August 2015

I've found in the last few weeks (July 2015 to post date) that the HF bands have been very flat during the day. I used to hear the Worked All Britain (WAB) net on 40M (usually around 7.160MHz) most days prior to this from around 9AM to late afternoon when tuning around the bands. The net has been very infrequent of late.

I hear similar reports from other amateurs and 20m is fairly flat too. The one saving grace has been some fantastic activity on 6m occasionally, as is expected at these times of the year, with quite a lot of continental contacts on digimodes.

Of course the evenings and early mornings on 40m have been sensational of late. I don't get up that early but a few days ago, July 31st, was really good with USA to Europe and middle east (Israel in particular) coming through with 40db over 9 contacts. It's just a pity most of the dark hours are spent asleep by me!

73 de Terry