Now I was finally ready to go! Here is a photo of my operating position during this activation. In the non-summer months, I activate from the driver’s seat of my Jeep. The photo below shows my whole station (minus the antenna) for this activation. heck, the battery is larger than the QCX-mini!
I made 34 QSO’s in less than an hour with the QCX-mini. Here is a map of the QSO’s I made during this activation using the QCX-mini.
QCX-Mini POTA QSO Map
You can bet there will be may more activations with the QRP-mini – I am very pleased with the results. As I move forward, I plan on build even more portable antennas so I can take the QCX-mini hiking.
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Tell me about the CW assist. I am fair at CW but an assist, that works well, to help decode and double check me would be very useful. Did it work? Thanks
Good question! I was going to talk about that but forgot to. I fiddled with it a little and was not real impressed. Maybe if I had spent more time with it perhaps it would have worked.
One nice thing about POTA, is their spotting page: pota.us What I encourage people to do when they are learning CW is to find a POTA CW spot. The spot has all the info to make a legit POTA QSO. So all you really need to be able to do is to copy your own call. So when you hear your call, just send his RST and your state abbreviation. The POTA rules for a QSO are very laid back.
Hope this helps!
— Mike
The CW Assist (decoder) works great, but requires getting it setup correctly. I am no expert at it at all, but I fiddled around with the settings on it and it works very well if everything is working properly. That would include band conditions being good. I know you have to set noise floor level, and wpm inside the decoder menu.
I have found out that you want your volume down enough that it mainly hears the CW tones and not all the background noises on the band. All the hissing and noise on the band the CW decoder tries to decode. But a good clean CW signal it does fine.
I have the original QCX in 40 Meter and just built the QCXmini in 40 Meter and I believe the decoder is better than what it was in the the original QCX.
Glad you had a blast with yours. I am now tempted to go out and try my QCXmini with my EF random wire antenna I built.
73 Juddie WD8WV
Hello and thank you for you input on the CW assist. Can you please share your parameters that you used to get it working properly?
— Mike