What have I been interested in and learning about this week? Pretty much my attention has been on ham radio again. Making good progress with some things.

Let’s see, ARISSat-1 was launched despite one of the antennas being broken / missing. So far it seems to be working and people are picking up it’s telemetry, voice and SSTV signals. Should be a couple of good close passes next week so I’m going to try making contact and capture the voice and SSTV pic.

I’ve decided to try one of these audio interface cables “Icom IC-Cable-8″ from xggcomms.com to finally starting playing with some of the many digital modes.

Spent some good quality with HDR over the past week or so and it’s interface with my Icom IC-7000. HDR makes accessing some of the many features of the IC-7000 very easy. Been playing around with various settings and filters and really starting to learn my way around things. Now I can hear a conversation, fine tune and really clean up the audio pretty nicely. Really loving this radio and HDR.

Came across some really neat stuff for tracking or visualizing openings and propagation. One of them is a web tool called “DX Sherlock” which can be found here: http://bit.ly/qG1ykz

Also some software called “DX Atlas” which works in conjunction with “IonoProbe” to show you F layer’s critical frequency in areas along path. Still have a lot to learn with trying to understand and leverage propagation mechanics. http://www.dxatlas.com/DxAtlas/

Really looking forward to getting into the digital modes. Also hoping to start making real contacts soon and get to work on earning my WAS award. Fun times ahead!