Hi Oleg, group.

Some updating to V0.19 I have been having a lot of difficulty in getting CW decodes working with any reliability. ini V 0.17 the decoder was an outright awesome improvement of the stock one, but I am really struggling to get the new one to play ball.?

I often need to restart the radio to see any decodes after making any adjustments to CW settings (like the stock firmware used to just stop decoding for ages unless you restarted it)?
The decodes are sporadic for me.

Does anyone know what CW peak and CW noise BETA are? How to set them up?

Thanks
Scot

Yes - that's right. ?Definitely important as someone mentioned earlier.
Tnx
Howard K4LXY

Howard, make sure you’re not charging the radio while using it. The main menu has a charge on/off choice. ?

Mars. Kc3jjh

On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 10:40 AM, John - KZ4AX wrote:

I use end fed random length, not resonant on any band. ?I need to get a 9:1 unun to see if that makes ol’ random wire ‘work’ better.?

It may or may not work "better", but here's the theory. With the right random wire length (kind of an oxymoron, if you ask me), the impedance ends up being close to 450 ohms on the bands of interest. The awesome tuner in Xiegu rigs can go ahead and match that just fine. But a 9:1 unun will bring it closer to 50 ohms. It'll be a perfect match on a band or two, and often 3:1 or less on all the others, making the EFRW a great antenna for rigs regular tuners.?

Here's how you test the theory: attach a 450 Ohm resistor across the antenna and counterpoise connections of the unun (no wires attached) and check the SWR with a NanoVNA or your favorite analyzer. If the unun is made with iron core material, you will see a steep drop just before 40M down to nearly 1:1 to 10M and beyond. The iron core's efficiency drops off quite a bit below 40M, which is why the EARCHI design rightly states that it is for 40M - 10M. Does it work on 60, 75-80, and 160? Yes, but the losses increase exponentially.?

You?can?make one with type 43 ferrite cores like the FT82, FT140, or FT240. Heck, you can liberate toroids from old monitor or power cables and use them too. Your subsequent test will show a much flatter SWR down to 2 MHz.?

So, back to the question about whether it'll work better, yes - it will in cases where you want the antenna farther from the radio, like up on a pole or attached to a building. Coax losses begin the enter the equation, so quality coax is better than RG316 or RG174, but anything will work, and the improvement from greater height will almost certainly be far greater than any coax losses.

In any case, though, a counterpoise is highly recommended. You?can?rely on the shield of the coax to do this, provided it's at least 16' long. Some common-mode currents will be present at the transceiver. They may be trivial, or they may cause weird, wonky issues. For that reason, using a 1:1 common-mode choke at the rig-end of the cable is a good idea. It can be as simple as 12 turns of coax through a type-31 or 43 mix toroid.??

I encourage?all?hams to experiment with antennas like this, and also to build their own transformers. Look through your junk box for laptop power bricks or old VGA monitor cables and carve out the suppression core. Check it at two points with an ohmmeter. If it shows no continuity, it's probably type-43, which is perfect. If it shows?some?connectivity, it's probably type-31. It will not work great for antenna transformers, but you should save it for a home-brew current balun. Save the wire from the cable to wind the transformer.

with the plans. If you build it correctly, it will pass the 450-Ohm resistor test. Head out to the field and try it with the recommended wire lengths. IT WILL WORK!. Frankly, you will love it, and you'll get a tremendous boost of satisfaction from having done it yourself, especially if you use scavenged wire and cores. This is one of the most satisfying aspects of our hobby!
?
--
73 de K9NUD

I'm largely CW. ?I do have a heat sink on the back, but the critical issue to keep the heat down seems to be keeping the voltage at around 11V so that the regulator doesn't have to dissipate so much heat. ?I sometimes power it with ?a power pack and a USB-C 12v trigger dongle with a diode in series to drop the voltage. I have also used a buck converter with no problem. There is some info about these things on my blog in case you are interested.


73 Howard K4LXY

I use a cheap USB powered fan from Amazon. It will last for 2 days on a cheap small power pack for phone charging. Keeps it cool doing a couple hours of FT8.

I use fishing poles with wire antennas, I get annoyed trying to string them up in trees. A fun vertical kit antenna that works amazingly well is the DS1 antenna. It is light compact, and works much better than I expected. The wolf river coils are US made, and reasonably priced. Gabil antennas on Amazon are Taiwan made, and well built. A 17 foot whip and a CB mirror mount attached to a long spike will get you 20-6m.

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 12:24 PM, Lisa WO?L wrote:

I echo that, I use Sandisk exclusively and I’ve never had any issues with any card I’ve owned.? I know of several instances where people used off brand cards and had trouble until they switched to a quality card.? I’m sure other name brands are fine as well but stay away from the cheap ones.

?I'm using MicroCenter "buy at the register" cards and it boots fine.? Will not boot from a Kingston.

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 08:24 PM, Lisa WO?L wrote:

I’m sure other name brands are fine as well but stay away from the cheap ones

Not everything is so simple. I have several very cheap Chinese SD cards in my work. And everything works flawlessly. As for the X6100, there is a suspicion that there are peculiarities in the implementation of the SD interface. It might make sense to try to programmatically limit the speed of working with SD, maybe this will help. But this needs to be explored.

开云体育

Oleg,

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 05:23 PM, K4FMH wrote:

is your STL file for this available?

Until I posted it, I didn’t think that anyone would need it. I'll post it if you're interested

I was very skeptical of the posts about different sd cards brands being the problem with startup. Now, I'm a believer. I was using samsung, which I thought was very good quality, and was having a lot of trouble getting a bootup. Switched to sandisk, and it's working like a charm.

Oleg,

is your STL file for this available?

Frank
K4FMH

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 04:32 PM, Michael VE3WMB wrote:

The big one is remembering to plug the GPS in before powering up the rig and if you don't do this then there is no way it will work.?

It's not obligatory. If you plugged in the GPS after booting the device, just restart the program by long pressing the Lock button. A little later I will auto-detect the connection of GPS and external keyboard.

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 04:37 PM, Andrea Salvatore wrote:

And if you want to go the extra mile, you can buy (always from Aliexpress) a 17 feet (5m) telescopic whip with 10mm thread and you can do from 40 and up without any "extension" rod and it becomes even more portable ;

I bought two of these whips and printed the center unit myself. It turned out to be a good dipole.

Wow thanks for the very comprehensive guide to X6100 and USB GPS Jerry. This should help anyone having issues getting a GPS to work under the R1CBU firmware.?
The big one is remembering to plug the GPS in before powering up the rig and if you don't do this then there is no way it will work.?

I just wanted to add one more thing, that has previously been discussed but I think merits a repeat. I noticed that with the "mouse-style" USB GPS that I have the noise floor on my X6100 goes way up when it is plugged in. My solution was snap-on chokes on the USB cable or a USB isolator dongle inline. Both solutions worked for me.?

Cheers

Michael VE3WMB?