Last week I bought a new footswitch at a nearby music store. It's a Roland DP-2 Momentary footswitch, normally used for keyboards.

The guy in the store told me that the footswitch will "close" when pressed. But it was just the other way around.
So I had to take my soldering iron to change connections on the internal switch. A few minutes later it worked as a proper Push To Talk footswitch. And that for only 13 euro.....

In combination with my Heil Pro 5 Headset it works great.
No unwanted transmissions as I sometimes had when operating on VOX mode with background sounds I produce sometimes.

It took a few minutes to get used to pushing the switch with my foot at the right moment when I wanted to talk on the air. But after that learning period I don't want anything else when using my headset.

After posting the video of the pile up Fred KH7Y had on tuesday morning I couldn't imagine working him.
But on wednesday morning just before the pile up started we had a QSO. It was very hard for both of us but we succeeded. Unfortunately I had to go away from the shack a little later and that was just before the signals and conditions went up.

I made a small video from the KH7Y pile up from this morning.

You can also watch my videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/PD3EM

Last weekend I participated in the IARU HF Championship Contest for a few hours.
For normal operations I use Ham Radio Deluxe but I decided to use a different program for contest logging: N1MM Logger. That software works really great for contesting!

I was in my shack for a few hours during the contest. Some nice conditions where on saturday afternoon on 10 meter when I logged D4C. I made a total of 64 QSO's, 132 points and 44 multipliers. That results in a score of 5808 points.

Well, not a great score but not bad for my first contest running on 25 watts. You might find me on the air more often during contests.

On the left you can see how my PC screen looked like while operating with the N1MM Logger software.

QSL PD3EMThere has been a problem with the Dutch QSL Bureau recently. They had a wrong callsign (PE3EM) registered for me. That could result in a few QSL cards sent to me via the Bureau coming back to you. Please give it a second change and sent a new card for me via the Bureau. They have my callsign PD3EM now correctly registered.