QSO RECORDED BY M0XMX Last weekend I had some great SSB contacts and unknown to me, one of them was being recorded by Mike Lewis (M0XMX). He posted a link to the YouTube recording, allowing me to hear myself on-air for the first time ever. I need to lose that Bolton accent, LOL.
Ray was transmitting remotely from New York, but his shack is in Maine. He was using a HUGE triple-stack antenna which was no doubt why I was able to get through to him so well. He gave me a generous 59 and said I sounded like I was local to him! Testimony to his equipment more than to mine, hahaha. Anyway, thanks for the recording Mike!
Anyone know where I can purchase a lead to connect the ELAD DUO-ART amplifier to the Yaesu FT-817?? ELAD show the 817 as being compatible with the Amp, but don't have any details of a lead as an optional extra.
The lead splits off from the 817's ACC socket to an RS-232 and a 3.5mm PTT socket on the DUO-ART as shown in the ELAD owners manual below....
If you have a Ham Radio Store in your town, you're very lucky! You can enjoy a short drive to the store, have a nice relaxed browse, have a play, chat with the helpful staff, have a brew and hopefully, find a great piece of kit, haggle on price and take home your dream radio that very day.
The rest of us reach for the computer!
No matter how good a business is on the high street, you can't expect a similar online experience it seems. Obviously they can't give you a coffee over the internet and they can't walk you around the store showing you all the latest goods (although ML&S and W&S do a some videos reviews). Some sites also have live chat facilities, but I've never found them to be particularly helpful. Fortunately, radio hams are a fairly intelligent bunch of folk and they usually do all their research before even approaching a seller. They pretty much know what they want and it's just a case of finding someone who has it in stock (the most important thing) and which reputable store is selling it the cheapest. I guess it's at this stage that the internet has a distinct advantage over the person who travels to a local store and lashes out whatever price is on the label in front of him/her. But there the advantage seems to end - or it does with radio ham stores at least! Many other online businesses give me no cause for concern at all - but more on that later.
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Now just let me clarify something - I'm not the sort of person who whinges for nothing. I don't sit at home moaning about stuff for no reason. I complain about poor service and I praise great service. I try to take everything into consideration and apply a dose of "$hit happens" to situations before reacting. Basically, I compare other businesses to the one I personally work at and to other businesses who provide good customer service.I don't expect Silver Service if I choose to eat at McDonalds, if you know what I mean.
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What I do expect from an internet-seller, is an informative, easy to navigate website with lots of product images and full specifications. In an ideal world, it would be nice to see links to reviews of the product too - either in text or video. The more expensive the item, the more information I expect to find. After all, spending £3,000 on a base station is not the same as spending £30 on a cheapo handheld!
Once I've chosen a product from a website, I need to know FOR SURE that the item is in stock! This is VERY important - no one wants to wait for their new radio and worst still, no one wants to believe something is coming the next day only to find that the seller hasn't even got the item to sell. I'd then like to be given the cost of the item and the cost of the carriage - with options for next-day delivery and options to pay by card or PayPal. If the price of an item is cheaper elsewhere, but I prefer to shop at a particular store, then I would like to be able to ring the company and get a price-match and a "voucher-code" to use on the website to reduce the price to the level agreed on the phone. Why not just pay while you're on the phone?? Because sometimes I want to pay by PayPal - maybe because I want to use PayPal credit or because I've got a lump of money in my PayPal account from the sale of another radio. Once I've paid online, I expect to receive a prompt email confirming both the order and the delivery date. Out of hours, one could only expect an automated response to confirm receipt of the order, but during business hours I would expect full details within a short space of time (depending on the delivery service requested). I would be looking for reassurance that my purchased item was being despatched that same day and would want a tracking number. It's worth mentioning at this point that many resellers send a tracking number with no reference to the shipping company, so a search through all the carrier's websites ensues until you find one which recognises the tracking number. Very annoying!
The very next day (or the day after if 48hr delivery was chosen) I would expect my parcel to arrive and proceed to enjoy my new purchase, patting the seller on the back for a sterling service.
IF ONLY!
An internet experience is a poor substitute for an in-store experience, but if everything goes well with your online purchase, you can at least, enjoy your new item in a relatively short space of time with virtually no stress. But in my experience, that's a rare occurrence. All too frequently, resellers leave their great customer service firmly planted in the showroom! Online customers are treated in a way that is almost dismissive! I won't mention any names here, but I will discuss some of the things that have happened to me when buying radio gear online. Of course I DO UNDERSTAND that some buyers won't be as 'fussy' as me, but if companies are serious about providing their customers with great service and a pleasant shopping experience, then they need to recognise that these shortfalls need to be addressed and a customer spending £1000 online is every bit as important as the customer spending £1000 in-store.
Okay, so some examples of my experiences.... 1)You buy an Elecraft KX3 after looking at the resellers description and images. You add the internal ATU, battery pack and 2M transverter. You opt for express delivery and it comes to approx £1,800. The company email you with delivery details and the gear arrives just in time for a weekend of fun - great!! You've already got the shack prepared and then whoa, there's no microphone!! You ring up angrily and they nonchalantly tell you that you don't get one with the KX3. You explain to them that the main image on their website shows a microphone with the radio, but they just repeat that the KX3 isn't supplied with a microphone, grrrrr. Well my response to that is - Why didn't you ring me or email me to say, 'thank you for your order - can we point out that the radio doesn't come with a microphone but you can add one to your order'. Apart from massively helping the customer, it also benefits the seller by giving them a chance to upsell. 2)You order an item that is "In Stock" and the next day you get an email from PayPal to say you have a refund. Hmmm, that's odd. The full amount has been refunded and you have no idea why. You search your Inbox for an explanatory email from the online retailer but there's nothing. The next day there's still no email from the store, so rather than sitting there waiting for them to do their job, you ring them and ask why you've been refunded. They explain that the item isn't in stock. Okay, so the website isn't up to date with stock levels - mistakes happen! But why not contact the customer and say 'thank you for your order but the item is actually out of stock. Do you want us to refund you or do want us to put it on back-order - they're due in next week'. To just refund with no contact is ridiculous - dare I say ignorant! 3)You order an item that is "In Stock" and the next day you get an email from PayPal to say you have a refund. Hmmm, that's odd. The full amount has been refunded and you have no idea why. You search your Inbox for an explanatory email from the online retailer but there's nothing. You think I'm just repeating myself don't you? But no. After seeing the above item was in stock some weeks later, I order it again and get another email saying I'm being refunded! It beggars belief! It turns out it was a clerical error and I was going to get my item, but what a wind-up! 4) You order a £1,000 item at 10am on a Monday morning. You pay an addition £17 for EXPRESS NEXT DAY delivery. You receive an automated email saying your order has been placed. The next day you don't receive your order but you do get an email saying 'Here's your invoice'. You email them and ask them for a Tracking Number so that you can see what time it's going to arrive and they email back with a tracking number. You use the tracking number and find that the courier has not even collected the parcel yet! You email the Store and ask why the parcel wasn't sent out on Monday by Express Delivery? They tell you that they don't work weekends(?) and apologise for the slight delay. After another email, I get a refund for the carriage charge but when the parcel arrives, there's no mains plug in it. Good Lord!! Now just let me explain why the Store mentioned 'weekends' in their email even though I ordered on a Monday.... Online retailers arrive at work on a Monday morning and (like my wife's workplace) walk in to find maybe 300 online orders that customers have placed over the weekend. They have to process all these in addition to the orders they receive on Monday. One can understand that they might not be able to get through such a huge quantity of orders in a single day! Personally, if I left my shop open 24/7 over the weekend (online) I'd make sure that I had the resources to deal with the resulting barrage of orders which had to be dealt with on the following Monday. If it's a Bank Holiday, the situation is even worse! Basically, the huge backlog of orders are processed in Date-Order. That seems fair IF you explain all this to the customer while he/she is in the "Cart" and IF he/she hasn't paid £17 for Next Day Delivery!!
I could go on and on,
but it would just get
more boring than
it already is.
My point is, you are a second hand citizen if you're an online shopper with most of these companies. And what annoys me the most is that these professional high-turnover businesses are being beaten by blokes drop-shipping on eBay from their back bedrooms, when it comes to customer service!! I can order a £2000 radio from a Ham Store and a £20 lead from eBay and the lead will arrive the next day with a thank you note and the radio will arrive a day or two later with an invoice! Is that not crazy????? I’ve spent thousands with these big retailers. I can order 10 quids worth of crap from a teenage eBayer and get better service than I can get from some of these companies. So what's the answer? I'm not here as a Business Consultant - I'm here to provide valuable feedback as a customer. If these businesses choose to take heed and improve their processes to provide customers with a better service and make them feel valued, then they will be the beneficiaries. The business who does something about this state of affairs is the one who will discover loyalty and increased market share.
73 de M7MCQ
UPDATE : I'd just like to point out that MOONRAKER and MARTIN LYNCH both contacted me personally to say that they'd seen this post and appreciated the feedback. The guy from Moonraker actually printed out a copy for each member of staff and asked them to read it. It's good to know that some companies have reacted positively to the post and are taking the feedback seriously. UPDATE : 2 I ordered a V2000 antenna and I'm pleased to say that after paying £12 postage, it arrived the very next day. I contacted the company and thanked them for doing a great job. UPDATE : 3 Just when I thought it was going good, I placed an order for a Morse Code Training Oscillator Key and paid the usual (overpriced) carriage fee, expecting pretty quick delivery considering that it was "IN STOCK". Sadly, it took 12 days to arrive and in all that time I received zero communication about the order. It just arrived in a flimsy jiffy-bag and upon opening it, I found that it hadn't survived the journey 😡😡
This unit is packaged for retail-display shelves in a vacuum formed bubble and it's easy to see that this will offer virtually no protection to the device while in transit across the country. As a result of it being poorly packed, the key was completely detached and the jiffy-bag was full of black splinters of plastic. I immediately returned the item - not because it was broken, but because I'm just sick of shit service and non-existent communication. I'm no longer going to accept it and have decided to vote with my feet. From now on, I refuse point-blank to buy from this (unnamed supplier) unless they have something which is absolutely unique to them and can't be purchased anywhere else. I've spent over £6000 with this company and despite bringing all this to their attention previously, they continue to work at a sub-standard level of service and communication. I did receive a telephone call a few days after returning the item, apologising for the fact that their website had shown an out-of-stock item as being in-stock and I did receive my money back the next day. What I didn't receive was my wasted time waiting 12 days or my valuable time going into town to post the item back at a cost of £3.70 to me (plus the cost of providing adequate return packaging)!
One of my other loves is Flight Simulation and in particular, I love 'Combat Simulation'. In 1999 I formed an online-squadron called the 185th Reservoir Dogs, flying Microprose's Falcon 4. The membership quickly grew and we regularly flew "virtual missions" together against other squadrons across the world. All great fun! That squadron is still going strong 20 years later!!
I started off, of course, with Microsoft's FlightSim but quickly grew bored of civil aviation simulation and moved to various combatsims including the very original FALCON in 1987 which now looks shockingly poor but at the time it was groundbreaking (he says laughing out loud)....
A year later, Spectrum Holobyte updated their software and dropped FALCON AT onto our floppy discs....
But it was the 1991 introduction of Spectrum Holobytes' FALCON 3 that really caught my attention. Back then it was incredibly advanced! The graphics and sound were massively improved and so too was the gameplay...
Spectrum Holobyte Packaging
Falcon 3 was beautifully presented with 5 floppy discs, maps and a 'proper' printed manual, brimming with information on how to fly the Viper. It was a very exciting time, but if you look back at it now, it seems laughable. Here's a video of Falcon3 from startup to completion of a mission...
Spectrum Holobyte Falcon 3
Microprose bought out Spectrum and in December 1998, they launched Falcon 4. It was mind bogglingly advanced! Again, it included a superb printed reference manual. I still have my Falcon 4 CD-ROM along with the original box, manual, maps, etc. The very fact that this sim is still widely used across the world is testament to just how fabulous it is.
Microprose Falcon4 packaging
Microprose Falcon4 Intro
Microprose Falcon4 CockPit
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I used to love Microprose's Falcon4 but when LOCK ON arrived with its amazing graphics, I quickly migrated. I used to love making missions in the comprehensive Mission Builder, which I then shared online for others to download.
UbiSoft Lock On
LOCK ON : Modern Air Combat
(Excuse the advert at the start)
Lock On was pretty much all about the A-10 WARTHOG and as much as I adored flying the plane, I did miss the Viper. When DCSWORLD took over, I was really hoping that they'd introduce one, but they spent years developing anything but!
Then this year they eventually announced the Beta Release of their new F-16C Viper! I was thrilled and quickly pre-ordered. The graphics are simply out of this world and the level of realism is dazzling!!
DCS WORLD F-16C Cockpit
To see just how STAGGERINGLY GOOD this new sim is, take a look at the video below and bear in mindthat this is all 'in-game' action, not a computer-generated movie...
I was playing FT8 again today and realised that the contacts on-air were pretty much the same that have been on-air each time I go on! Occasionally there'll be a new individual, but in the main, there's no one new to work.
The other night I got a Cuban who I've been chasing for ages and I got a Turkish operator who had been avoiding my logbook, but other than that, I couldn't find anyone new.
And what puzzles me a little is that the same people appear when I change bands. I don't understand that - unless they've got multiple radios working.
Glynn Wolfe was an American Baptist minister who was famous for holding the record for the largest number of marriages (29). His shortest marriage lasted 19 days, and his longest lasted eleven years. You gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your princess.
What I'm really trying to say is that I've had a lot of radios in the shack and I'm not afraid of changing them in order to find the perfect match for my requirements. And I'm talking about my current requirements and those of the future (what future I have left at 60yrs old, lol).
I've just sold my recently acquired FT-DX3000! She was beautiful and she was good in the shack but sadly, didn't satisfy my every requirement. That wasn't her fault - it's mine. I keep lusting after pretty young things which I know aren't right for me, but nonetheless, I get caught up in the moment and before I know it, I'm walking down the sales aisle. People are always saying that I need to keep my wallet in my pants!
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QRP is my main interest and always will be, no matter which licence I go for, so I'm naturally attracted to that type of radio. And I'm very interested in radios that ALSOgive you the ability to extend their abilities by connecting to a PC. For that reason I am attracted to SDR radios. Additionally, I'm looking to find a linear amplifier which will not only work with my SDR radio, but also with any other radio (and in particular, my Yaesu FT818ND). I nearly got it right with the Elecraft KX3 and KXPA, but of course Elecraft had no PC software and when using standalone, you have no panadapter or waterfall. So which combo would give me everything I want? Well, I think I've found the love of my life at last - the ELAD FDM DUO and the ELAD DUO ART 120A. A match made in heaven? We'll see.
For a start, the FDM DUO is a high-spec, fully standalone, compact QRP transceiver with 5W output. It is big enough to be used as a base rig in the shack and small enough to be used outdoors. When connected to a PC/Tablet and running the amazingly good software which ELAD has provided with the radio, you really start to benefit from the power of SDR. The DUO ART 120A amplifier seamlessly connects to the FDM DUO, taking care of band-changes, etc, and providing up to 120W of power in a beautiful package which includes a colour screen to display a multitude of information. It also has a built-in ATU which makes for a very compact and convenient shack. That's further enhanced by the fact that the DUO ART can power the FDM. In fact, it can power the optional speaker too! So just think about that - instead of a PSU, RADIO, AMP and ATU, you have all four in a compact, two-piece package! And it doesn't end there!!The screen on the amp can be changed from a PSU-Info page to a scope and waterfall!! How cool is that?
But really, the biggest attraction for me is the FDM-SW2 software. It's amazingly good and like I pointed out in a previous post, the software gives you a staggering amount of control over the radio - much more than any other SDR software out there! And another plus point about the Elad combo is that unlike many SDR's, the dependence on the PC to do all the processing is not there, because most of that is done in the radio itself, which means that the PC is under a relatively light load and occupies very little of the CPU's time. The DUO ART amplifier will also work well with my FT818 radio and that's a real bonus because I've been looking around at amps for the 818 for ages, but they all seem to be risky purchases in that they are often unbranded or little known bits of kit from China.
Like I said, I'm BIG into low-power operating, but in order to future-proof my purchase, it makes sense to have the provision to operate QRO if/when I decide to upgrade my licence. It also makes a lot of sense to use an amplifier if you do a lot of digital operating (as I do), because you're not punishing your QRP finals - you're passing the job over to the much beefier transistors in the amp, which would allow you to run 25W digital all day long if you so desired. So there you have it - I think I might (at last) have found my perfect partner. Let's hope we don't end up in the divorce courts again!
1 - Main power supply Power switch, fuse holder and 100-240Vac power supply connector. 2/3 - PTT in/out - 3.5mm jack connectors. PTT in Input for transmit control, connect TIP to ground to put the amplifier in transmit state. PTT out The TIP goes to ground while transmitting. RING connection is not used. 4 - RTX connection SO-239 connector. Transmit path with the FDMDUO interface. Reception and transmit paths with the other interfaces (Generic and FT-817). 5 - RX connection SO-239 connector. Reception path with the FDMDUO interface. 6 - Antennas SO-239 connectors to connect up to three antennas. 7 - RS-232 port DB9 connector for the FT-817 interface acting on an RS-232 serial link. 8 - AUX USB port - Reserved for service. 9 - USB connection - USB type A female connectors for host type connections. 10 - Output power supply - Allows to power other devices without the need of other power units. Max 2A. Powerpole connector type. 11 - LAN connection - RJ45 connector for LAN connection. 12 - EXT I/O - connection t0 external hardware such the FDM-DUO. 13 - Ground Connector
