ATU100 Killing FT8 on 15m

Yesterday was a bit of a broken day with appointments around work, lack of sleep and my shoulder giving me a fair bit of grief. 

Having a moment of distraction I decided to fiddle with the radios. The G90 using the vertical was seeing a bit of early afternoon traffic, so I decided to kick the IC706 over with the flag pole dipole to compare. Massive difference - I was seeing a lot more than I was with the G90, and from a lot further away.

Time to throw a line and see what I could catch. 

The first thing I did was turned on the tuner and tuned. Then the waterfall was nearly blank. I turned off the tuner, and the waterfall went back to its busy shades of blue, yellow and spatterings of red. Turn on the tuner again.. a couple of yellow boxes. Turn off... lots of yellow. Turn on without the USB charging cable.. a couple of yellow boxes. Turn off.. lots of yellow again.

That was frustrating. 

A quick SWR check without the tuner and I decided I wouldn't waste my time. The SWR was coming in around 2.5. At 10w, I'm not going to get much out of the antenna and I'm far more interested in DX. 

I could have done an antenna swap over to the G90 as I haven't seen its tuner cause such silly issues but I had wasted the 5 minute break already and had to get back to work. 

Still, I've managed to get 8 FT8 contacts in the log this month with Asiatic Russia being the greatest distance.

I do admit I haven't jumped into it too hard, I've been more interested in looking at the PSK reporter site to see where I'm being heard at different times before I start trying to reply to CQs. I'm always keen to see if I'm being heard in North America and Europe, especially on 40m. Going back over my logs I've managed Canada and Baltic nations on 15m (though its been rare). Getting them on 40m would interesting. I have also managed Hawaii on 10m. Getting some contacts on 40m and 10m further away is high on my agenda. Europe on anything would be nice. South America, now that'd be something.

I've been slack on the study for the license upgrade these past couple of months. Juggling other interests, going back to work and life in general seem to be getting in the way. One day I will get further. 

Even the RC Nitro car has taken a backseat this week. I've bearly been near it, and it's about the first week since I was given it that I haven't had parts arrive for it. 

I did replace the throttle servo, so that's made some difference. It's put some time in on both grass and bitumen with it. Both are fun, but crashes on bitumen were expensive. I wound up with a head of screws loosing their heads that required a fair amount of effort to pull out threads and replace. I also managed to destroy the bumper bar.

With a bit of luck I might get back out with the little fella later this morning and give it another run. 

Since my last post, I also managed to do my best smoke yet - ironically with the cheapest piece of meat I've ever thrown in it. A $20 pork should from the butcher.

About 2 hours into the smoke.

It was a 1.5kg cut with bone in that I took about 300g of fat off. It was injected the night before with 1 cup of apple juice then rubbed. 

Entire smoke took 11 hours - a long time for this weight, but it was hardly warm outside and the cut stalled twice - the second being just below "cooked" temperature. It should have taken around half the time. 

11 hours low and slow, an hour resting, then I pulled it in the same tray I cooked it in, making use of all of those lovely juices. 

It pulled incredibly easily as a properly cooked pork shoulder should. The flavour was amazing. The XYL doesn't generally like the meats I've smoked - complaining ironically that she dislikes the "smoke" flavour. See did however love this. The smoke was there, there was some good flavour on the bark, but none of it was over powering. While it was fresh we consumed about half of this without any sauces as the flavour was a real stand out.

I had another two meals out of this meat after that, mixing in a little BBQ sauce just to spice it up a bit. 

This was my first attempt at pulled pork, and I think it was reasonably successful. It could have been a little more juicy - the extended cook time probably didn't help this but still, this was an enjoyable result.