The adventures with the IC-705 continue!
This week, I installed the most recent release candidate for FT8. It contains a listing for the IC-705 so it doesn’t have to be spoofed. The application ran fine for me on my Windows 10 laptop. The radio did exactly what it should do and I got my first contact on 40m while set to 5 watts and running through my attic dipole antenna.
No complications. No fiddling. It just worked. And yes, that is a pleasant surprise!
I also got the latest release candidate for FT8 running on my little (newly) Linux WinBook. There was a bit more fiddling to figure out what the IC-705 comes up as in the audio settings. Remember, kids: arecord -l will list all recording interfaces and you can fake it from there. Kind of. In any case, I didn’t make any contacts, but I heard stations and I was heard over on https://pskreporter.info which means I’m getting out! I’m hoping that this combination makes an excellent field setup for FT8. I plan to test that assertion this weekend.
I’m not quite a week in, so I’m trying to save my impressions until I’ve gotten through enough of my use cases for the rig. I will say that it’s a challenge having this unit before many have had any experience with it and posted about it. The manual lacks actual sample configurations for some things and that makes it difficult to validate issues that I’m experiencing (especially with fancy things like D-Star). There’s a great mailing list over on groups.io for the IC-705, but again, the posts only go back so far and there’s not a lot of practical operating advice just yet.
To recap, I now have the following use cases checked off:
- Connect to D-Star HotSpot
- Complete a contact via RF repeater
- FT8 contact on HF
So what’s next?
- Get out in the field with the Super Antenna MP1C and try to make a contact
- Prepare for JOTA so that the Scouts can get on the air via UHF/VHF repeater, HF, or D-Star
That’s a lot of “experimenting” (read: playing) to do.