Keith, KC1IMK and Abby, AB1BY operated remotely from the AB1OC/AB1QB station during Summer Field Day as part of the AB1QB entry. They also operated as K2K during the recent 13 Colonies Special Event.
2020 13 Colonies Special Event Certificate
Student Teacher Contest Update
With a great entry from the 13 Colonies Special Event of 281 non-duplicate QSOs in 3 hours, Keith, KC1IMK has pulled ahead of Abby, AB1BY. The competition is still neck and neck – Keith has a score of 1208 and Abby’s score is 1180.
The contest score is the sum of QSOs made in a contestant’s top 4 entries. Both Keith and Abby have reached more than 4 entries with the latest entries. Now each of them needs to improve on their previous scores to pull ahead. Full results and rules for the competition can be found at Student-Teacher Contest Series.
Next Opportunity
The North American QSO Party (NAQP) – SSB is coming up on August 15th, With its 100 watt power limit, it will be a great opportunity for contestants to increase their scores.
Don’t miss our June membership meeting, where we welcome Tim Duffy, K3LR who will speak about the K3LR Super Station.
Tim’s station is one of the top Multi-Multi Contest Stations in the world. He is also the CEO of DX Engineering. Tim’s accomplishments in Amateur Radio include the following and more:
Founder and Chairman of Contest University
President of the Mercer County Amateur Radio Club
Active in RACES, ACS and ARES
Hosted Youth Contest teams at the K3LR Super Station for major contests
Member of the CQ Contest Hall of Fame
Was on Team USA for the World Radio Team Championship (WRTC) five times.
Chairman of the World Wide Radio Operators Foundation (WWROF)
Recipient of the 2015 Amateur of the Year Award presented by the Dayton Hamvention® Awards Committee and the 2016 YASME Excellence Award.
K3LR Super Station Photo from QRZ.com
The meeting will be held on Tuesday, June 2nd starting at 7:00 pm and will be held online via a Zoom Conference. You can find the Zoom link on our main page, n1fd.org. Scroll down to the meeting announcement to see the link. If you have not been on a Zoom meeting before, I would recommend joining at least 15 minutes early.
Join us on Tuesday, June 2nd to hear all about the K3LR Super Station. Hope to see you on Zoom!
When the Nashua Area Radio Society’s Student/Teacher Contest Series was first set up, Fred and Anita (AB1OC/AB1QB) offered up their station to my son Keith (KC1IMK) and other students that do not have a station at home. Fred and Anita have an amazing station at their QTH and you can find more information on it here.
Then COVID arrived and sharing mikes, headphones, and keyboards at other people’s houses are no longer acceptable. We cannot risk getting each other sick. Another way is necessary. Remote Operation is here!
Fred (AB1OC) and Jamey (AC1DC) worked out the kinks for setting up Remote Operation first. Then Fred invited Keith and me to try it out. After a couple of hours online with Fred to set up, we were on our own. Contest Calendar showed the Helvetia Contest that night so we pointed the beams toward Switzerland and called CQ. Several stations pounced on Keith at once. He worked hard with the mouse, bouncing from the radio PTT button to logging in N1MM. Once the pile-up was cleared, he pulled off his headset and said “I really wish I had a footswitch like Field Day“.
Remote PTT Switch for SmartSDR
Driven to maintain my “Super-Dad” status, I went to work. I found a few references at the FlexRadio site:
Looked pretty straight forward to build a Remote PTT Switch. Configure a SmartSDR CAT interface to monitor hardware flow control pins in a standard serial port. The hard part today is to find a serial port. They have all been replaced by USB.
I dug out a 15-year-old Belkin adapter from the back of my shack and installed it. A new Com3 port showed up in Windows 10 device manager.
USB to Serial Adapter
SmartSDR CAT will detect if RTS is shorted to CTS in a Com port.
This is a very standardized interface and it was easy to find the pin definition.
Pin 7 is RTS
Pin 8 is CTS.
Easy to spot as they are the center two pins of the row of four.
I also had the mating 9 pin D connector in my bin of parts. One could probably solder to the pins of the adapter, but I would recommend a connector. I cut off the 1/4″ plug from a footswitch I bought from Amazon. The two leads were soldered to pins 7 & 8.
To test it, I downloaded ComTestSerial from Microridge https://www.microridge.com The test software confirmed the hardware worked. Each time I pressed and released the footswitch the CTS light in the top right corner changed between Red and Green.
Configuring FlexRadio SmartSDR
Now to configure the software. Open SmartSDR CAT and add a port. Give it a name. Set Port Protocol to PTT, set Port type to Serial, set Serial Port to Existing, and set CAT COM to your new Com port. Mine was Com3. Set VFO slice A. Select RTS. Hit save.
CAT settings
I found some open spectrum on 20m, crossed fingers, and pressed the switch.
Voila! It transmitted!
With prolonged use, I found my old adapter was not up to the job. The drivers were not meant for Windows 10. It missed about 1 out of 10 switch presses. I have since upgraded and the new Remote PTT Switch works great.
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