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Amateur Radio Station NI4S -- Raleigh, NC, USA

Station Information
Current operating equipment includes:

Kenwood TS-850 Transceiver After having run with the IC-735 for a while, I had an opportunity to upgrade and decided to do so. The 850 went in during late October, 2001, and I've thoroughly enjoyed operating on it. Not to knock the IC-735, which is one of the best rigs in its price range-- but the step up has so far been quite worthwhile.
10-15-20 Trap Dipole A homebrew trap dipole up in the top of the attic, radiating East-West. Built from plans found at John DeGood, NU3E's site. I'm continually amazed at how well this antenna works. I've been threatened by another local operator that he's going to have to come by and visually confirm that I'm not really running a tribander on a tower..
80/40 Attic Loop With some inspiration from fellow RARS member Kevin W4KJD, I've been experimenting with a horizontal loop in the attic. The antenna is up about 25', and measures around 40' x 25'. It's fed with open-wire line from a corner into the shack, and tunes up on 40 to cover the whole band. It will also tune up on 80, but it is very narrow. I have yet to try running it against ground as a top-loaded vertical.
Portable Verticals I constructed a pair of multiband (20 through 10) portable vertical antennas, based on ideas I saw at RARS Field Day 2000, shown to me by Chuck N1KGY. They sometimes get deployed on contest weekends in the yard just to test them out and see what they're capable of. Not bad for emergency readiness HF gear-- lightweight, and they'll strap down to the luggage rack nicely.
Logging/Digital PC An "old" K6-2 400 PC I've outfitted solely for radio operations. After hearing how many guys forget to change their PC clocks to UTC for contests, I'm thinking the maintainence of a separate radio PC is worth the investment for that sole purpose!

The software collection is constantly changing in terms of digital stuff, but MMTTY, HamScope, and Digipan have all made appearances.

TRLog Contest Logger "How did people ever log before computers?"-- since I'm a young whippersnapper, I'd never been introduced to contesting before about 1992, when computer logging was more or less the norm.

I really like TRLog's flexibility, it's simplicity of data entry (ie, not having to tab between fields for that darn Sweepstakes exchange), and its ability to drive all sorts of interfaced devices. I realize that interfacing has been taken to new levels by the likes of WriteLog, but think I'll stick with TR for a while.

PC/Radio Interfacing I constructed a switchbox to allow me to do the following:
  • Switch between a couple of different microphones on the desk.
  • Feed RX audio from a DSP unit's line output to the PC sound card for digital mode receive.
  • Alternately, feed microphone input to the soundcard for recording contest voice keyer samples. I use SBDVP with TRLog for voice keying, which provides a relay output line for automatic mic switching when recording.
  • Feed soundcard audio to the rig's microphone input via pads and isolation transformer, for digital modes or contest voice keying. Use PTT output from SBDVP to mute the microphone, as well as a manual override when I'm running digital to mute the mic.
  • Allow me to monitor the sound card output on the station speaker for testing or verifying voice keyer audio.
All in all, it works pretty well. There are, of course, more enhancements yet to make...