ICOM to the rescue as Murphy strikes early
Posted: Jul 1, 2006 06:13 PDT

The anxiety is climbing as it's only 3 days until I depart for Florianopolis.

Emily contacted me about 3 weeks ago that while testing her Yeasu FT1000MP she noticed that her VFO-A went bad.

ICOM America had offered awhile ago to loan PRO III radios to USA teams for the competition. With so little time before the competition I crossed my fingers and emailed my friend Ray at ICOM. It wasn't 15 minutes later that Ray replied 'We would love to help'.

The timing couldn't have been more perfect as Emily was due to be in Miami in about 2 weeks. The arrangements were made to ship the radio and Power Supply to Miami. The package arrived as promised and we are good to go :). Emily has been spending time getting familiar with the radio so if our primary radio should fail it ahould be a smooth transisition.

Not being all that familiar with Writelog I have spent a bit of time getting familiar with the software and building/hooking up radio interfaces. I had problems with my parallel keying interface because using XP, Writelog would not recognize the LPT port. There is a utilitiy you can purchase on the internet but Paul, K1XM suggested using a serial interface through a USB to Serial converter. As soon as I plugged in the USB to Serial comverter XP recognized the device and installed the driver.

I never recorded the audio before but after talking to Paul, K1XM it appeared simple enough so I built a audio recording cable and got it working with Writelog. Taking the audio out of the radio and feeding it directly into the mic input of the laptop Paul suggested putting a resistor network to reduce the audio input to prevent any distortion. I had the resistors at home and found the isolation transformer at my local radio shack.

I'm looking forward to the competition. For those of you going to Brazil see you there and for the others if you hear a PT5? or PW5? call during the IARU contest next weekend work him/her.

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