WA6VNN - on N1MM Logger

From Zerobeat

[Elecraft] K3 SN31's first contest

AJSOENKE at aol.com AJSOENKE at aol.com

Sat Nov 24 20:40:21 EST 2007

Hi everyone -

One main reason I got a K3 was to be more active in DX and Contesting, now that I'm semi-retired. I used to be a very active contester in the late 70s early 80s and stayed in it mostly as a club activity since. I was introduced to logging software with CT in it's early days and still have a CT V10.x on the computer. I truly became tired of the amount of time I spent getting a rig ready for interfacing to a contest software etc. lot of rigblaster and other stuff laying around to help out, but never much satisfaction. With a working schedule it was too much and mostly went by the wayside. My K2 was an improvement and made the listening a lot easier. Interfacing was somewhat easier but still required a lot of homework and interfacing. At least with the K2 it was worth the effort.

Ok, This weekend I had a choice of working in the orchard, with the fall cleanup and yet another Santa Ana wind condition - or - taking a two week old K3 and bridging the gap to get it set up for contesting in CQWW CWDX. I had become tired of CTs endless menus and tricky help files, still stuck learning CT. With CT if I don't use it 4 times a year it's a whole new learning curve each time. I started in earnest Friday about 2pm and decided to try one of the softwares in the Elecraft Web Page. I want to try all of them, but had seen a lot of reference to N1MM and chose that to start with. At first glance I was overwhelmed with the amount of info, but followed the getting started and Quick start guide to installing and upgrading the latest version. I was really nice to see that the K3 had already been formatted in the boilerplate. It gives you a sense of confidence it might work sometime this week. So, given about an hour to get the software installed and read the basics, I gave it a shot.

The rig was already connected to the computer and had the latest upgrade installed. The RS232 cable I used is a standard 9 pin interface with all 9 wires hooked up. I set the K3 CONFIG: PTT-KEY to rts-dtr, set up the software config to match ( I changed data rate to 38400 and port to 8N1 for the K3 )

It took less than 20 minutes to get the rig on the air with a contest logger. What an improvement!

CU in the contest, break time is over.

Al WA6VNN