New beginnings, new things, more to come hopefully

Hey all! It's Ria here, and I'm going to be blogging about my ham stuff here. Stay tuned!

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LED lamp QRM - solved!

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Last week I became really scared because I turned on 40 meters and there was AC buzz all over. I have a relatively quiet noise floor which is advantageous for contesting and DXing, and my fear was that my neighbors had bought some cheap device with a switching power supply that would spew noise all over the HF bands. Or was it the new fridge we bought? Or was it something else? Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and I went about finding the noise source methodically. Watch how I got it done!

Troubleshooting The very first thing I did was to get a shortwave radio and verify that the noise was there. Indeed, a portable shortwave radio confirmed that it was there. Actiually, I used my Kenwood TH-D74A in general coverage shortwave mode. It works well for this purpose.

The next step was to shut off the main breaker in the house. We did that, and the noise was gone. This alone was a huge sigh of relief! The noise was inside this house, and this means I had full control over it, at least.

The…
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FlexRadio SmartSDR 2.1 is here!

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At long last the next release of SmartSDR 2.x is here.

You may download it from here.

As you may remember, Flex had released SmartSDR 2.0 in Summer 2017. This made the Flex-6000 series the first ever amateur radio transceiver platform that can become an internet remote base out of the box. Other systems have had remote capability but Flex was the first to do it without having to add firewall rules (for most people) and incorporated modern technologies like social login and multi factor authentication (MFA) for enhanced security. The backend for authentication is powered by Auth0, one of the leaders in the industry.

SmartSDR 2.1 is the next incremental update, and is mostly designed with new hardware in mind. That said, I don't have one of the new radios, but I do have my 6700, and for us with the previous generation of radios, we have inherited the new features that are non-hardware dependent. This includes visual enhancements like shaded panadapters and tuning guides. It also inc…
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3Y0Z - Bouvet 2018 Aborted!

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The much anticipated 3Y0Z Bouvet Island DXpedition has been aborted.

As reported on DX-World, there were issues with getting weather clearance to fly their helicopters, which would delay them for a week and more. The island is pretty, the weather is not. Winds of up to 80 knots and more caused the ship to bob up and down making helicopter takeoff and landing extremely unsafe. Basically as one DXer put it - "it's like a cork in a flushing toilet." 
Then came this update from co-leaders K0IR, K4UEE, LA6VM: During the last 72 hours we continued to experience the high winds, low clouds, fog, and rough seas that have prevented helicopter operations since our arrival at Bouvet. No improvement was predicted in the weather forecast for the next four days. Then, last night an issue developed in one of the ship’s engines. This morning the captain of the vessel declared it unsafe to continue with our project and aborted the expedition. We are now on our long voyage back to Punta Ar…
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