VE3RZ and the AU-520 CQWW CW

Hi All

Tony, ve3rz, used my AU-520 remotely for the entire CQWW CW contest. He sent me this writeup on his experiences. If you worked me (va3mw), it was him. CQWW rules say he must use the station callsign (weird, but those are the rules). Feel free to reach out to Tony directly if you have any questions as he is not part of the FlexRadio community.

1081 CW Q's and a 1.5M score is impressive. (Tony is not a FlexRadio customer but has operated my station a bit from time to time).

Murphy did strike, but all in the station control stuff. Those were on my and I took 2 trips up to the remote to fix them (90 minutes each way).

* A USB/RS232 adapter on the RPI actually failed and had to be replaced. It was the one that controls the steppir tracking from NodeRed (yes, it was a hardware failure).

* The AlphaSpid rotator destroyed its drive gear and according to my contacts at AlphaSpid, this really isn't repairable (good thing I have a spare). I did drive up to the remote (90 minutes each way) and climbed the tower in a snowstorm Sunday morning to see why it wasn't turning at all. This looks like a December repair job on top of the tower.

* I should have gotten a flexcontrol knob for him. He has a Maestro I lent him but he didn't think of using SmartControl. We didn't use the Maestro for the contest because it wasn't set up to work on Alpha test versions of SmartSDR.

Tony's comments:

Band     QSOs     Pts   ZN  Cty  Pt/Q

         1.8      68     143    8   18   2.1

         3.5     137     314   13   55   2.3

           7     210     569   22   89   2.7

          14     229     575   30   91   2.5

          21     207     542   24   91   2.6

          28     230     611   25   90   2.7

       Total    1081    2754  122  434   2.5            Score : 1,531,224

Ant:  160m Inverted L

80m inverted vee

40m two phased verticals NE/SW

20-10m 3 Element SteppIr at 40ft. (Unfortunately, the rotor stopped operating on Sunday morning so was limited to having it pointing 100deg.  Thankfully the 180 degree switch on the SteppIr saved a number of contacts!)

VE3RZ's Comments:

I was using the Flex Aurora (AU-520 #4) in this contest.  I was using it remotely (thanks to Mike, VA3MW).

This was the first time in using a remote setup for CQWW, and more radically, no CW key! I had programmed N1MM to use the Function Keys and thought that if I had to send something that was not there, I could use the CW keyboard in N1MM.My thoughts on using the radio are definitely positive. 

There are a few areas that I need to understand things a bit better, primarily in reading the manual for SmartSdr!  I did not have much time before the contest to try it out (my bad). The receiver is very good on the Aurora, I had no issues with the radio receiving any signals - even very strong signals were received without any noticeable degradation in any way. My setup was very minimal with respect to the computer. 

Just days before the contest, my laptop - an ASUS Rog Strix with Ryzen R9 CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU, decided that it was time to act up.  It would not go through its boot up sequence and despite all my efforts, I believe I may have a bad SSD drive. So, I had ordered a mini PC from Amazon and this arrived two days before the contest. I had purchased this particularly for POTA and VHF/UHF roving and this had an N150 CPU and supported 2 4K 60hz hdmi monitors and a 4K 60hz usbC monitor. 

I already had the usbC monitor so that worked out well. It has 16Gb of RAM and 512Gb of SSD. I had purchased it on Amazon during the Black Friday deals.In using the mini PC, I had SmartSdr running on the smaller USB C display and the remote desktop on my larger 32" Hdmi monitor.  It worked well, although the CPU did have some issues in managing the display updates from SmartSdr. 

Mike was able to advise me to reduce frame rates and shrink the SmartSdr screen.  These both made it very workable and the mini pc performed satisfactorily.I had a couple of occasions when I observed high SWR alarms with high current alarms but was gratified to see that the Aurora immediately reset itself and was back in operation almost instantaneously, I would say that it is just about bulletproof in this respect.I did find out a few areas that for CW Contesting specifically need to be observed - at least for me. In running, which I enjoy, there is no problem in using this setup. 

The main thing is that I ignored SmartSdr except for monitoring the Aurora information and for switching rx beverage on 160m. All other actions were performed with N1MM.  I was very happy to see that the sidetone on Cw was perfect with SmartSdr and made the operation with N1MM seamless.

One thing that is really necessary for CW contesting is to have a vfo knob.  Selecting spots from the bandmap was no problem, however, there are many times that stations are not spotted for some reason (probably filter selections from the skimmer) and especially later in the contest, it is good to search the old fashioned way (spin the knob). I know this can be done with the mouse on SmartSdr and with the up/down arrow keys when in the entry window of N1MM, but both of these had too fine a granulation so it took too long to move any appreciable distance.

I can see that operation as SO2R (which I did not try) would be pretty simple using additional slices though I am not sure how the Aurora would handle that. (Mike will no doubt let me know!).

Overall, as mentioned above, the experience was very positive and I thoroughly enjoyed using this radio.  I can certainly see the benefit of the light weight, power output and receiver performance being of great value when operating from a DX location. 

I have operated from a number of locations for CQWW, including J3, TI, 6Y, VP5 and VP9. 

Carrying the Aurora would be a breeze!73 Tony, ve3rz