Lunch at Hunt's

It's a new location, on C30A just outside of Port St. Joe.  Fried flounder with coleslaw, fried okra, & hush puppies.  The flounder was perfectly fried (not my picture; it's shamelessly borrowed from the link below, but my lunch looked pretty much identical), and there was no detectable onion in any of the sides.  The other seven in my group were similarly pleased with their grouper po-boys, fish tacos, etc.  As the movie quote goes, I'll be back.

They don't have a website, just a book-of-face page, so here's the info at the Gulf Co. tourism site.

Bleah & Double Bleah

Bleah.

Bleah again.

Seems like a good Saturday afternoon for a nap.

Yaesu FTdx-1200 Ownership Post-Mortem

Having traded in my FTdx-1200 (along with an FT-891) for the new hotness, I have to say a few words on its behalf.  It was a damn fine radio.  All the controls were right there on the front, no fiddling with menus while operating.  The triple-conversion superhet receiver was a solid rock on which lightning crash noise could break harmlessly.  The display was functional and a joy to work with, whether for two-way or for shortwave listening, especially with its easy-to-use frequency scan scope.  A fine radio.  So why trade it in?

• The big reason: the digital input port had been intermittently going deaf for some time.  If you read this blog, you'll know that I'm a big fan of modes such as PSK-31, Olivia, etc.  Never could sort this one out.
• The radio was always a tad big in my little shack, and too big to haul to the field.  Not exactly deal breakers, but not always a comfortable fit.  This is a radio for someone who has the space to spread out and install it – once.  Definitely not one for the grab-and-go kit, or for Winter Field Day car camping expeditions either.
• Could've added the FFT board upgrade and had a sort of horse-and-buggy continuous band scope, but for the trade-in plus the cost of the FFT board it came to about the same price as a new FT-710, which has the band scope all built-in and well-integrated with the UI.  Much better specs and newer everything too.
• Which brings me back to a final point.  Yes, as I have said, this is a damn fine radio, but only damn fine by 2014 standards.  The world has moved on.

So it was time, past time.  I still look back at my time with the FTdx-1200 with great fondness, but after six-plus years it was time to move on.  If you're interested, here's my review from 2018.

Sunday Short: French Truck Coffee

Finished the pound of French Truck dark roast this morning The Darling Daughter brought from New Orleans a couple of weeks ago.  Very tasty stuff.  Thanks!

Truck's run out of gas for the moment.

Sunday Short: Roll Cage In, Installed

I'd previously mentioned getting a roll cage for the new FT-710 radio.  Though I'd considered that it might interfere with getting my hands on the buttons and knobs, I shouldn't have worried.  With the flared front it is completely out of the way for operating.  Here's a close-up of the right side, which by far has more controls.

Need to cut down the box now, to make a cap to fit over the entire front panel.  I won't be taking it to the field often, but that one more layer of protection is worth it.  Especially since the box the rails came in is exactly the right size (funny how that always seems to work...), and it's right here already.

WFD 2024 Results Up

Rainy weather and changes in rules kind of threw me for a loop this year, but it was still fun and I'll be back next year – January 25 & 26, 2025 to be exact.  In the meantime, here's the Winter Field Day site, and here's my wrap-up post from last January.  Lots of discussion on improvements for next year at that blog post, especially on the new "Objectives" categories.  Also, the FT-710 will be field-ready by then – it is the "Field" version after all, and it's about to get field-i-er when the roll cage arrives later this week.  That'll leave the FT-857d free to monitor VHF & UHF bands.

Well, in the meantime below are the results.  Not bad at all for four hours of goofing around at 5 watts.

Direct Current Recap

These questions have come up recently in a mobile install that I'm collaborating on.  Here are two links to old posts:

• Mobile Radio Power: One Fuse or Two?  TLDR: One.  Why?  Click through and read.
• The Right Way to Wire a Battery Bank  TLDR: see illustrations below.  Why?  Click through, read, & watch.  This makes way more difference than I'd have previously believed.

        Do:

         Don't:

            Addition 7/25: A friend in the electronics business advises that the chief source of resistance in the inter-bank jumpers is not the cables themselves, but rather the oxide layers that form at the connectors.  Makes a lot of sense.

Before we go, here's one more worth a read:

• How to troubleshoot a jumper wire, because even the simplest things sometimes break.

Hurricane Information Links Round-Up

A handful of pointers and commentary from The Resident Biologist:

• National Hurricane Center for general storm tracking.  Has regular  updates when there is an active storm or likely-to-form storm being tracked.   https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
• Tropical Tidbits: a meteorologist's blog & vlog which posts about a video a day when there is an active storm.  Usually has a particularly good breakdown of what is likely to steer a hurricane.  https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/
• Weather Underground hurricane page for access to the individual computer models used in hurricane forecasts.  Gives a general idea of where different groups think a storm is likely to go base on the different models rather than the combined NHC forecast.  See attached image (way down at the bottom of this post) for the location of the links to the models on an active storm.  https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane
• Ocean Heat Content: from NOAA for how warm water is at depth for an idea of how much energy is stored there when there is an approaching storm.  In particular, it shows how active the warm water conveyor between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico is from the western tip of Cuba to just off the tip of Louisiana.  https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/ohc/
• Surface Temperature Contour Charts: from NOAA for the ocean surface temperature of general areas.  https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
• National Data Buoy Center for offshore weather conditions.  Has a very useful map to access other buoy data sets, but not all buoys are always fully operational.  https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=42036
• GOES Image Viewer for up to date satellite weather data.  Click on the map or use the bar of operations on the left side to select the region you want.  Will have a special selection near the top of the option bar when there is an active storm.  On the following page after the selection are all the different image/water vapor/temperature maps.  https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/

Whew, that is a lot, but keeping an eye on the tropics is a lot.  Good luck with the rest of the season.

Yaesu FT-891 Ownership Post-Mortem

Ugh, I hate to wade in on this, but perhaps it'll keep someone else from wasting their money, and more importantly, perhaps it'll spur Yaesu to fix the UI problems with their FT-891.  I had initially decided to keep it, despite some reservations, but after a year and a half of making excuses not to take it into the field, it had to go.  So, what are these problems?  Though there are many, here are the two big ones:

1. The digital signal processor resets with every band and mode change.
2. The digital mode option has a default offset that can be defeated through forcing an IF shift.  However, this cuts the top half off of the passband, and that cannot be defeated.  OK, so put the radio in SSB mode and pipe the data in and off you go, right?  Except that it's a deep-menu item to turn down the power to the 25w or so for these 100% duty cycle modes.  Either way, it's unacceptable.

There are plenty of other little quibbles about the UI, but those might be worked around.  These two however are complete deal-breakers.  OK, while I'm at it, here are a few more:

• The digital noise reduction is too heavy-handed, even on its lightest setting.  Can't use it at all when shortwave listening to music, and it's really even too heavy for most ham voice communications.
• The UI just stinks on ice, apart from the previously-mentioned dumping settings every time you blink.  Hey Yaesu, hire some ex-Apple people to help with a re-design, will you?
• Why even bother with the USB port on the back if it's only good for downloading half-baked firmware updates?  No way I'd risk bricking a radio for one of those.

Having said all that, what do I really, really like about this radio?

• The triple-conversion superhet analog receiver with its 3 KHz roofing filter is among the best out there.  It shrugs off lightning crashes and nearby transmissions like one of Yaesu's high-end FTdx line.  Five Stars!
• The construction and form factor are perfect for a field radio.  It could have been, should have been, the worthy heir to the venerable FT-857D.
• The big screen is most welcome – if Yaesu would put needed info like the operating voltage on it.
• The three user-programmable buttons are very useful.  Could you make the "CLAR" button a fourth?  Then people who need that function regularly could program it, and the rest of us have a fourth option here.
• The radio works great with an external tuner (in this case an MFJ-939Y), and it was very handy to have one of the afore-mentioned buttons programmed to activate the tuner.  Really nice!

But don't just take my word for all the problems with the FT-891, here's a recent review from over on eham:

KB3NWU	Rating:	2023-07-24
Could be SO much better with so little work!			Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Yes, a zero. No, I am not a fan boy of one of the other Big 3 who hates Yaesu but never owned one. Almost all of my radios have been Yaesu. I have owned the 817nd, 857D, 897D, & the FTDX-3000. I bought this radio because my FT-857D died. Sent it off to get fixed - still dead. I wanted a radio that worked with my ATAS 120A antenna for mobile use. It was bad enough loosing V/UHF going to the 891 but, hey, I get the awesome 32 bit IF DSP (which works great in my FTDX-3000!), right?. OMG what a step DOWN from the 857D! This radio is a perfect example of a product designed by people who never have to use it. The team who put this together knew about computers but were obviously not ham radio operators. As mentioned by other reviewers many times before, the menu is a bit convoluted - but it is not as bad as some say. The 32 bit IF DSP is awesome. It is rugged and compact. TX audio reports are good. So, why the big, fat zero? Simply because everything that makes a ham radio a QUALITY ham radio (DNR, DNF, CONTOUR, SHIFT, NOTCH, RX BW) ARE TURNED OFF & YOUR SETTING ERASED every time you change bands, hit A/B VFO, or go to a Memory or QMB channel; and, you have to go back into all the menus to reset your settings - all while trying to watch the road while driving! This is supposed to be a mobile radio. These settings should not only be saved but saved PER BAND! The 857 could save settings 20 years ago. It's as if the 891 wants to be a $50 CB radio static box. Many of these adjustments require looking at the screen to adjust as there is no audio or "click" feedback. With the 857D I could adjust the band, mode, and all 3 DSP without looking at the radio. Not so with this 891. It's hard to believe Yaesu discontinued the 857D because they had this. All they had to do was to put IF DSP in the 857D and it could have sold for another 30 years. The only thing this 891 does better than the 857D is that it has a temperature sensitive fan - it doesn't come on every time you touch the PTT. Also, the scope is a little better. No, it's not color. It has no waterfall. No averaging. Silent when active sweeping. But it is a little better. Some have recommended this 891 as a great starter HF radio for those entering the hobby. No, they will soon get frustrated and pick up golf or pickle ball or something. Perhaps these shortcomings could be fixed with a firmware update but this radio has been out for like what 7 years now? It either can't be done or Yaesu is too lazy. IMHO, the only thing this radio is good for is a cheap, portable, 100W POTA or SOTA radio where you can take 10 mins to set your menu options, pick a frequency, and stay on that frequency until you "activate" your location and go home. I can't wait to get my hands on a used 857D in good condition.

Harsh, even harsher than I'm putting it here, but well-deserved.  Zero out of five stars?  Eh, I'll give it two.  Not good enough to actually be worth buying, but I still have a lot of respect for that triple-conversion superhet and those other points I made above.

So, is there a way back for this beautiful trainwreck of a radio?  I think so.  Re-engineer the UI and related controls to fix those first two problems.  Back off on the DSP, in much the same way these were recently revised in firmware updates for the FT-710.  Then TEST TEST TEST the result.  Send prototypes out to some trustworthy beta testers.  Get feedback, revise.  Then and only then re-issue it as the "FT-891A" with a list price just under $1000, which would be a 50% increase but for that triple-conversion receiver it'd be worth it.  (NB: This is still about $100 less than a good used FT-857D is going for these days.)  Hell, burned as I am by all this, I'd buy.

But after a year and a half of trying to like it, I kicked my FT-891 to the curb for a reasonable trade-in at Main Trading Company towards an FT-710 (which is not perfect, but is perfectly good; review/comments here).

Gah.  Hurry up and get on this and take my money (again), Yaesu.  That decade-old FT-857d isn't going to last forever.

A Better Day

With everything else going on in the world, hey, I got my mountain bike back out of the shop yesterday.  And now the Atlantic basin is clear of storms – for the moment:

Hey, I'll take it.

More on the new Yaesu FT-710

A couple of weeks ago I posted about getting a new FT-710 radio.  After getting a little more time on it, yes I am a fan and yes it is a keeper.  There are a bunch of reviews and commentary and exhaustive in-depth detail showings of features on this radio, especially on youtube (I'll leave the searches to you).  Here though, I'm just going to put out what I like and don't like so far.  Likes:

• Sherwood Engineering ranks its receiver as #4, on a very long list and way ahead of a bunch of crazy-good other radios.  Listening in, I can believe it.
• The user interface is good.  Yaesu has tamed the UI beast a fair bit, and while it's not quite Apple-easy, it is certainly not user-hostile. (ahem, FT-891, I'm looking at you)
• The multi-function knob is on-the-fly programmable to put things like RF Power output right up front on the panel where they are needed, as needed.  This seems almost like an evolution of the old "Custom Switch" of previous Yaesu UIs, and useful as those were, this is way better.
• The Step/Mem Chan/DSP knob works great for getting around the IF band width & shift functions, but it has taken a little practice.  A dedicated concentric knob for these functions would've been better (then you'd have to pack the AF & RF gain onto a similar concentric knob to fit everything on the faceplate), but this is the next best thing.
• The FFT scope is awesome!  I like the waterfall display.  The 3D display seems kind of gimmicky, but whatever, maybe somebody likes it.  The Multi-scope display is too cluttered, but I may play with it some more.  In the meantime though, the waterfall display works like gangbusters.  Or more like "pile-up busters."
• Digital mode doesn't have any weird offsets or other issues that have plagued other Yaesu radios.
• While the USB port was a simple plug-and-play to get useable output to the Linux laptop, and it displayed fine using fldigi, I still haven't gotten the USB port interface to key the transmitter and send data out.  Works fine with a SignaLink box to the serial data port however, and I like having the extra RX & TX level knobs.  I may eventually return to the direct USB cable connection, but for the moment I'm happy using the SignaLink.
• As others have found, the FT-710 tuner control doesn't work consistently with the MFJ-939Y auto-tuner.  That's OK though, it works well enough with semi-auto "sticky tune" control.  Here's how.  Others have had better luck using the control cable though, and I may revisit this.
• The internal tuner is good, though a lot slower than the MFJ-939.  Mostly I just use the 939, it's so much faster even with having to use the sticky-tune work-around.  Though for 30, 40, & 80m I still have to use the heavy-duty MFJ-948 external manual tuner to bring that mini-W3EDP antenna to heel.
• All three tuners are in series, and all three have a bypass mode, so any one of the three can be active with no interference from the other two.  With the MFJ-948 in the middle, the forward & backward power and SWR are all there on the crossed-needle gauge, leaving the FT-710's select-one-meter for anything else.  This is particularly handy for monitoring the ALC when running a digital mode.
• Even though the internal tuner only tunes the transmit path, this is not a big issue for the receive path.  If the SWR's < 3:1 having no tuner is perfectly OK for RX, and if the SWR's > 3:1, well, you're using an external tuner anyway and that's going to cover both the TX and RX paths.
• The digital noise reduction (DNR) is amazing, and is completely adjustable from minimal-but-nice to more than you'd ever want.  On its lower settings it's perfectly fine for listening to music on MW or SW.
• On a fading digital signal while using the DNR, it's kind of spooky how the noise is gone and the signal just fades into... nothingness, with no residual static to reassure you things are still working.  The first time this happened I thought the receiver had died.  Then I flipped off the DNR and heard the world of static it was removing.
• The noise blanker works and is otherwise fairly unobtrusive.
• The size and weight will make it easy to take car camping.  It'd be a stretch to take it backpacking, though I suppose that could be done too.  I'm looking forward to using it up at Wright's Lake, where there's not a lot of noise, but a little more than the FT-857d was comfortable with.

So far, the only real downside is that the direct-conversion SDR receiver doesn't handle lightning crashes quite so gracefully as the FTdx-1200's triple-conversion superhet on the low bands, especially broadcast AM.  Meh, that's not really what this radio's for anyway, and on 40m and up lightening noise isn't much of an issue.

After that... would it be too much to ask for simultaneous meters for power output, SWR, and ALC?  A triple bar meter would fit into the same space that pseudo-retro curved select-one meter takes up.  But with the external tuner's crossed-needle meter this base is covered, so it's just a quibble.

The verdict?  It's a keeper.  Now I've got to go buy a roll cage for it before next camping season.

Please Stop Butchering Your Palm Trees

I won't go into much more detail, but I'm getting tired of seeing palms around town chopped down to a half-dozen fronds sticking out of the top.  Bronzing disease, among other things, is now a major problem, and stressing trees through over-trimming is only making matters worse.  But don't take my word for it, here are two articles from the University of Florida's experts on the matter:

• Over-Pruning Harmful to Palms
• Thielaviopsis Trunk Rot of Palm

Please.

Dirt Rag's Afterlife

Sure, we all miss the late, great 'zine-turned-magazine Dirt Rag that called it a day back in '20.  It seems that one of the DR founders has moved on to The Church of the Rotating Mass with its web site.  It's kind of sparse, but interesting, and there are a few bits of the old soul still flitting around the place.  It's something, so enjoy.

Um, yeah.

Taking a few days off after having 27(!) relatives in town over the Fourth.  Expect blogging to resume later in the week, assuming enough coffee can be located.  Lots of good things to say about the new FT-710 radio.  In the meantime, here's a fun bit:

Yeah, it really does kinda work like that.  Explain why and win an expenses-paid trip to Stockholm.

Unearthly Scenes Inside the Earth

I mean, just look at it, because it is pretty damn weird looking:

Visited Florida Caverns State Park near Marianna with family today.  The 65F inside the cavern was a welcome relief from the 90F+ with serious humidity up on the surface.  Really interesting down in there, and the staff, tour guide, and fellow visitors could not have been nicer.  Here are some sites with more details to help you plan your own trip: Official State Park Site | Wikipedia article

If you're anywhere in the area or just passing nearby on I-10, make time for this one.