After deciding last year to only concentrate on HF CW to the exclusion of all other aspects of amateur radio I enjoyed a happy few months over the summer of 2023 doing just that - using manual telegraphy on the HF bands. I became comfortable on the Vibroplex bug keys and had many nice CW ragchews.

Winter came and drove me indoors, away from the shack and since I'd vowed only to use CW I found I did nothing radio related for many months. I had a few brief sorties on 60m digimodes using VNC to operate the shack PC without needing to sit in a cold icy shed….

Now as spring approaches I find I miss the variety of other aspects of the radio hobby, and I can't always find the time to sit in a shed using only manual telegraphy (enjoyable though that is). I want to be able to do radio even when I'm not able to spare the time to do cw.

I've found my DMR radios and hotspots and resurrected them. I've had some DMR QSOs, and I expect to have more over the coming weeks/months.

I've had one (so far) SSB QSO on 60m, after finally locating a microphone for my IC-7200.

I've put a V/UHF antenna up, only 2m agl adjacent to the shack, and set up an APRS i-gate (GM4SLV-2) and (after repairing the fan control circuit and fitting a new cooling fan) installed my TM-D710G in my van - for APRS and to monitor other V/UHF activity.

I've decided not to be so narrowly focussed on one (fun) aspect of the hobby, and to stretch myself into other areas.

• DMR Dual-timeslot duplex hotspot
  • More participation in DMR QSOs
  • Take mobile hotspot most days in van and try to have a QSO when possible
• More HF CW, SSB and Digimode operation.
  • Try to have some/more 60m SSB QSOs
  • Investigate higher bands - 17/12/10m
• HF Portable operation with Xiegu G90 - kite, fibreglass pole etc.
• HF CCIR493 Selcall using IC-706 and Jenal SC2 mic
  • modify one SC2 mic to convert to RJ45 connector for IC706
  • Experiment with SC2 and Xiegu G90
  • - make some contacts with HFLink group(?)
• HF-VHF X-Gate - revist the project
• HF and VHF APRS - are they worth persuing, or is it rather pointless overall?

I had a 60m QSO with Stuart GM4WMM and Bob GM4VIK this afternoon on 5279kHz. I started by using the MK1 IC-706 at around 30W to get a few reports on the audio quality. The report was “it's quite thin sounding”. That's not encouraging. I seem to remember the original MK1 IC-706 had a reputation for weak audio. I'm not going to expend much effort investigating or trying to improve it. What should I do with the IC-706? It's a handy “standby” HF rig. It's not really for suitable portable use, being a 100W radio and quite thirsty on current, even on receive, and anyway I have a Xiegu G90 for that purpose. I decided to try digimodes using Fldigi via a Signalink-USB sound interface. A quick search of the web and I had the necessary pin-out of the Signalink's internal jumpers to allow a simple Cat5 cable to connect between the Signalink and IC-706 RJ45 Mic socket. A few tests and it all works. No rig control (frequency etc.) yet, but that's not really necessary for simple Digimode QSOs.

I'm making progress…