In the thread: Re: [WriteLog] Auto-CQ'ing in SO2R operation? At 11:05 PM
9/30/2001 -0500, martyt@pobox.com wrote:
>I think you'll find it difficult if not impossible to run on two
>frequencies at a time.
>
>Call CQ on one radio, search & pounce on the other radio.
>
>-Marty NW0L
> martyt@pobox.com
Actually I found it surprisingly easy unless the QSO rate was high. I did
SO2R RTTY for the first time this past weekend, but used two computers, one
dedicated to each radio. It was working so well during the low rate times
that I started wondering how this could be done with only one computer + 2
radios and couldn't see how it could be set up - hence the question I
posted last night.
I set up a 4 second CQ in a 10 second repeat cycle on each machine and then
started the second one 5 seconds late. It worked well - the only difficulty
was that one machine's timer would sometimes mysteriously take an extra few
hundred milliseconds in the cycle, so eventually they would have gotten out
of sync. Usually, I had to break the cycle anyway to answer a CQ before
this could have happened. When someone replied to either CQ, I just hit
both esc keys to cancel everything (two separate keyboards also).
Initially I wondered how I would deal with two simultaneous replies, and
actually did miss the first two (sorry, guys, and thanks for returning
later) but then realized I could just interleave my report and confirmation
on one radio with his report and confirmation on the other with only a
couple seconds delay on the second QSO. I was fortunate to have zero
crosstalk between the radios, so near-simultaneous QSOs like this were
possible (I strictly observed the "one transmitter on at a time" rule).
When things got hot I simply didn't re-start the auto-CQ on the slower band.
One problem I ran into was being unable to distinguish the radios by sound.
I was using the same high tones on both and was unable to always "hear"
calls with the radio's monitor features on. I had to watch the MMTTY
waterfall constantly, on _both_ monitors. This also kept me distracted
while trying S&P on one radio. Next time I will use low tones on one of
them. I was using external speakers and had placed them to the far right
and far left, but there was not enough directionality to the sound.
I was only using low power because I had smoke-tested the radio crosstalk
only at the 100 watt level and was concerned that full power might damage
something. I will have this all checked out next time and, with full
power, I _hope_ to be too busy then to do two-radio CQ'ing.
If anybody is interested, the antennas were about 150 feet apart, one
horizontal (40+15 multiband wire dipole) and one vertical (20+15+10
multiband wire dipole). I had put a crude 40+15 band attenuation stub on
one and a 20+10 attenuation stub on the other. Radio A was restricted to
40/15 and radio B was 20/10. Measured RF on the rx antenna was down in the
millivolt range at 100 watt tx on the other on all 4 bands even without the
stubs (probably didn't really need the stubs). No filters. Computers were
peer-peer TCP/IP networked and WL was maintaining interleaved logs OK, but
sequence numbers got out of whack.
Jerry W4UK
>At 10:31 PM 9/30/2001 , you wrote:
>>How do you set up an "timed CQ" (automatically repeating key macro) when
>>you have two radios on one computer with one copy of WL?
>>
>>Can you set it to repeat on both radios, alternating, or only one of the
>>radios?
>>
>>Jerry W4UK
|