Some repairs to the skimmer station set up have been made after losing the 20m and 10m softrocks. Â Both were probably damaged due to modifications I made to the voltage regulation circuits. Â That appeared to eventually fry the QSD chip, which is the heart of a softrock.
The 20m skimmer was replaced completely with a new softrock lite. Â 10m is pending re-work, but replacement would probably be the best bet.
So for WPX 2013 there are five bands available, 160m through 15m. Â These will be active during WPX intermittently. Â I intend to bring them up and down based upon my own operating. Â The skimmer will be down when I am operating.
Other changes made to the skimmer station include loading windows XP onto the Optiplex 360 that had been running windows vista. Â Vista was able to run one instance of CW skimmer, but was not able to support two instances simultaneously due to sound card conflicts. Â Windows XP does not seem to have a problem with the two sound cards, and is an OS supported by CWSkimmer(Vista is NOT supported by skimmer).