The First 100 Years Are The Hardest

The CQ Worldwide WPX CW contest was this weekend.  I made just over 100 contacts and 43 countries in the first day, including many new ones that will help my progress for the DXCC Century Club Award for CW Mode. I made the first 10 contacts using the Log4OM Contest Mode, which was very painful.   At the recommendation of Jon NN5T I decided to bite the bullet and dig into N1MM+ Contest Logger.   Boy and I glad I took his advice.  Not only did I learn how graceful a contest logger can be,  I was able to operate most of the day using the “Single Operator 2 Radio” Mode which was very easy to set up.  It took a dozen or so QSOs to figure out exactly how N1MM+,  FlexRadio, Slice Master and CW Skiumer worked together, but all I can say it that it was seamless once I had all the ports configured correctly. N1MM+ is the worlds most popular contest logger, and there is a ton of documentation on the web, unfortunately most of which is dated,  I found a prett...

Elecraft’ s choice to use of NiMH (nickel-metal-hydride) batteries is really the only complaint I have about the KX3.  It probably made sense at the time, but even the KX2 and the ICOM 705 use LiFePo4 (lithium iron phosphate).  The original NiMH batteries provide exactly 12v which limits the power output to 5 watts or less.  Also, the internal charger takes 8-12 hours and isn’t all that precise.   Which in practice means I typically use an external LifePo4 battery like the Bioenno 12v 3Ah battery which enables me to run at full 15 watts. When I travel, there are times I don’t want take an external battery so I found a KX3 LiFePo4 internal battery conversion project by Howard K4LXY.  The project consists of rewiring the battery holders into two parallel packs each holding 4 3.2v AA sized (14500) LiFePO4 batteries to create a 4S2P configuration (4 Serial, 2 Parallel).  Rated at 3.2v and 600mAH, the new batteries generate 12.8v and 1.2Ah of power, enough to p...