W1PAC and N3JEC playing radio at 2am in the morning.

The next day the contest got underway and we were off and running doing digital and voice as a 4 India station. At some points we had 3 operators at operating at the same time. There were also technical glitches at times, such as stepping on each other when transmitting resulting in one or multiple radios getting a lot of noise on HF.

Also, we weren't the only hams in the park, it turns out, that another group was at the other end of the cabin area playing around. We happened by chance upon them when we heard my Anytone 868 which had one of the VFOs set to 146.52 simplex and heard someone calling out! We invited them down to check out our cabin at some point, which they did. We also invited other Philly areas hams to join us of which only a few did, mostly because of the snowstorm (which was a blizzard here back in Massachusetts) left the roads a little less to be desired.

Not only did we have radios operating, but we held a Volunteer Examiner session that anyone could attend. We had at least one person upgrade to Extra! Congrats KC3SAI!

Anyways, I had an awesome time, and I hope to do it again next year! Here's the list of operators:

We took a break for a few days because it was muggy and humid and I had to work anyways. Then yesterday, after cutting the PVC pipe recommended by Dr. Fong that I picked up at Lowe's and piecing it altogether, it was time to go up in the attic.

Up until last week, there was an old TV antenna that was installed when the house was first built by my grandfather, we removed that and tossed it in the trash since it was of no use as this house has long been wired for cable. You can see the TV antenna in some of these photos.

My dad hooking the antenna into place.

I have owned a Yaesu FT-991A for about two years. I have to say that I really only use it on two metres. It isn't a bad radio, but it can be fiddly and you have to get used to going through lots of menus to do what you want it to do.

As such I tend to use my Icom IC-756 Pro 3 as my main HF rig (unless I'm using one of my QRP rigs like the Elecraft K1, YouKits HB1A, QCX, MTR etc). Use the QRP tag on the right if you are interested in reading about them.

Anyway, I recently tried to use Yaesu's Fusion mode as we have a new Fusion repeater (GB7NM) about 10 miles from me.

I wasn't impressed with the audio though. Half the time it was unintelligible and pretty awful to be honest. I did wonder if the signal strength is sufficient, but it is S9 +30db. Also, I live about half a mile from the police headquarters and do suffer some desensing on 2m if I use a cheap handheld like a Baofeng connected to my 2m antenna. Perhaps that's the problem.

However, I checked and found that the FT-991A's firmware (including C4FM) was out of date and thought that an update might improve things.

So, following the instructions, I first uploaded the main firmware - and this is where I came unstuck. Once I had completed it I rebooted the radio, but it wouldn't - all I had was the Yaesu screen.

Arrrgghh! Now what. Reading around the internet I found that you have to upload all four of the Yaesu firmware updates - the main, the TFT screen, the DSP and C4FM.

If you don't the radio won't work.

To be fair it does say in the instructions:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
MAIN Ver. 02-01 also requires TFT Ver. 02-00; also DSP Ver. 01-11 and C4FM DSP Ver. 04-15.
If your FT-991A does not have them already, please update all firmware, they must be used together.

Once I had uploaded all four and reset it all was fine again - apart from I had lost all my settings.

Another quick hint. If you have memories loaded use VK2BYI's FTRestore software before you start the firmware update and make a copy of the memories. Once you have made the firmware updates you can then reload the memories and save yourself a lot of time.

Anyway, after two hours of messing around I had the radio back the way I wanted it.

So is Fusion better now? I still don't think the audio quality is that good, although it my be a bit better. But at least the radio isn't bricked!