Morsle - the daily Morse Code challenge

 

Yet one more CW practice tool. this one can be found at morsle.fun.  Yes, its a little like Wordle but helps with your CW receiving.  

Better-ICR for practicing you CW reception

I'm still plugging away at my CW.  There are good day and bad day, I guess that is to be expected. One of the keys to good CW reception is what is called 'Instant Character Recognition', or ICR for short. I have previously posted about this and included some websites that have been helpful.  

There is however, a new kid on the block (or maybe I have just stumbled across it).  It is called 'Better-ICR' and it can be found at https://better-icr.herokuapp.com/.  Firstly, you enter the sound card setting and then press 'Start' it will send a character, and then time how long it takes for you to say the character out aloud.  Once you have done that you then enter the character using the keyboard. 

So it is, hear => speak => type, and then repeat.

It will then produce a graphical representation of your response time and accuracy, see below. 

The aim is to get your response times down below the dotted green line which is set at 600 ms.

For a full explanation you can read the 'Student’s Guide to Using Better-ICR' by John Merkel AJ1DM, published on the May 9, 2025.  So I suspect that it is a new website (or at least recently updated)!

This is a good way of checking progress (or regress, for that matter).   I think I will stick with this site to see if I can make some headway.

Enjoy!

It's Official - The QMX now includes SSB.

 

QMX SSB functionality has now been promoted to official version 1_02_000

 After six weeks of Beta releases, the QMX is now officially a CW, Digi and SSB transceiver!

 

On the 2nd of May, Hans made it official. This small pocket sized radio is feature packed, and the feature will, no doubt, still continue to be rolled out. 

 

This major update relates to both the QMX and the QMX+.    

I wonder of the fun in Amateur Radio is inversely proportional to the the amount of money spent on the gear.  The QMX would have to be one of the cheapest investment in AR that I have made, and yet seems to have provided me with the most fun.  And we all need a bit of fun in our lives, don't we!

 

 

The QMX Resurrected

Well, after a well deserved break in WA I'm back home, and the QMX 3.3 Volt buck converter module that I ordered has also arrived. After some quick resistance measurement it was installed. With the supply voltage set to 7 volts and current limited to 200mA, I gingerly switched the QMX on. Oh the Joy of resurrection! It's alive again.

One Dead QMX :(

Well after the high of loading the beta firmware and getting the SSB calibrated and working on my QMX, a downer was bound to follow.  The other night I was listening to some CW and the QMX was decoding this reasonably well too.  (Better than me, actually!)  But I decided to connect the PC up and use the IQ output to get a waterfall display up and running using the NaP3 software. I plugged the PC in, using the USB-C connector on the radio, and then went to power it up.  Nothing.... no initiated boot up sequence....  dead!  

On inspection I could see that the 3.3v regulator was getting hot.  I switched over to another power supply so I could check the supply voltage and current, and I could see that the there was lots of current, so much so, that the voltage protection on the power supply kicked in. There was a short.  I removed the 3.3volt buck module and repeated the exercise.  This time their was just a few milliamps draw on pressing the on button.  I measured the resistance between the 3.3volt line and ground  on the main board and this seems normal.  These factors are pointing to the 3.3v buck convertor as the culprit.  But I'm still not sure why this failure occurred.  Was there some voltage differential between the USB-C connector and the 12 volt supply? Not sure.

Be assured an update will follow.