JT-Alert

I know conditions on 10m are going to be good when I turn on the Albrecht 10m handheld and can hear activity on its 6 inch antenna. Sure enough when I turned on the K3 the band was alive with wall-to-wall Russians at S9 plus.

I made some QSOs on SSB including one with Vadim UA1ZFG from the icy wastes of Murmansk. The nice thing about eQSLs is you don't have to wait long to receive them.

I also heard two stations from Thailand HS0ZEO and HS0ZJS, probably the first time I have heard that country on SSB, but I could not work them because of pileups. I curse the person who invented the DX Cluster as it has taken away the chance for weaker stations to work a DX just by luck tuning across them and turned it in to a contest where he who has the biggest power wins.

I switched to PSK31 where I made several more Russian contacts. Then I decided to try some JT65. My first JT65 contact of the day was with UA3TN whom I had worked before. I only found this out after logging the contact because my JT-Alert utility seems to have stopped working.

After lunch I continued with JT65 and found that all I could now hear was US stations. The first contact of the afternoon was with Tom K4AFR, then I made three other Stateside contacts all first time QSOs.

I downloaded and installed a new version of JT-Alert which is supposed to alert you when someone calls CQ or replies to your call. It also flags stations you have worked before, which I find very handy as I have a poor memory. But this feature is not working. It's probably some stupid setting I've got wrong, but I'm darned if I can see it.

A nice new facility in the new version of JT-Alert is the ability to log contacts to a third party database such as MixW. This just happens to be the log format KComm uses. It's very handy, avoiding the need to import contacts from an ADIF file one at a time, so it is worth running JT-Alert for that reason alone. But I really wish I could get those alerts working!