January 23, 2023
Today was a bad weather day for southeast Texas and other parts of the USA. We had lots of power outages around the Baytown and Houston areas combined with a tornado taking out the Baytown repeater. My ham shack got a lot of rain, but not a lot of wind and lightning. Once the storm passed, I decided to see if I could setup my FTM 300 into Wires-X Direct Connection mode. Things seemed to go well at first. I made my way through the Wires-X PC setup and got the radio to go into Wires-X PDN mode with Direct connection. I was unable to connect to the Texas Patriots room due to "busy error". But I was able to connect to a room in Maine that was having a net. I could hear the traffic ok, but then my radio would just reboot. The screen would go blank and then come up with the Yaesu splash screen and my callsign. So something isn't quite right. After talking with some other operators in the Texas Patriots room using my PiStar, I added ferrite chokes to my cable and set the timeout on Wires-X to Unlimited. I still could not connect to the Texas Patriots room on Wires-X. However, I was able to connect to and make a contact on the Kansas City link for America Link. They said my Wires-X traffic sounded great. Then I noticed the windows software flashed and the radio rebooted. So I don't know what is up. Something to work on in the coming days.