Thanks again, folks, for the Newb replies last month. I've been busy dealing with some family health issues since then, but finally got back to my Great Digital Communications Exploration this week. Today I landed my first QSO! Got a 599 from Mexico right off the bat on my first attempt. Followed up with another from OK (from here at my QTH in northwest Oregon).
Lessons learned and changes made: 1 - BAD built-in sound card (or driver) in the laptop. My little Lenovo's built in sound card was not sampling at a high enough rate to get decent copy, even from pre-recorded signals. I updated the drivers with the latest from the mgfer's website, but no improvements. Solution: replace nearly new laptop (dual 1.6 GHz CPU) with old P3 900 MHz box sitting under the dust in the corner of the shop. Boom! It works! (total setup time from power up to operational HRD/DM780: 20 minutues) For future field day type stuff, I may add a PCMCIA sound card to the lappie and give it a chance to redeem itself. 2 - Hoist up that Dipole - I combined my two back porch 10M and 20M dipoles into a single 5 band (20/17/15/12/10) home-made dipole in the attic: still operating in stealth mode, but about 5' higher off the ground and away from the gutter flashing. And now I have 3 more bands to play with. 3 - Old cables need love, too! When I put my modest station together, it got a new IC-718, but everything else was "scrounged", including a little Dentron tuner I landed off of ebay for $15. I used an old stretch of RG8 from my CB radio days (circa 1975) to connect the tuner to the antenna. The SWR was just not looking right, so I took everything apart and found the ground connection on one side of my cable was decidedly bad. Resoldered the connector and SWR came right down (to managable < 2 levels). 4 - Shrink up that ground path. I moved my "shack" into the corner of the garage and shrank the ground cable from 25' to 6'. Noise level is down and there's no discernible RFI on my home media center anymore. I look forward to a rash of new QSO's in my future ... I am seeing 20M calls in from Serbia, European Russia, Costa Rica, and other points all around the US 1K miles away and more. Cheers and thanks again for the advice. - Doug / KE7SEI PS - Still trying out all of the various Windoze PSKware, including those suggested here, but HRD/DM780 is still my new best friend. Thank you, Simon! --- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, "doug_helbling" <doug_helbl...@...> wrote: > > Thanks for the welcome and the great advice and counsel, > Patrick/Andrew/Christian/Marc/Simon/Siegfried et al. > > I did some more poking around on my rig, and found that my audio input to the > PC was indeed the Mic input, not Line In, as suggested more than once. > Unfortunately, on this PC (a laptop), there is no Line In, only Mike In ... > but I think I found a different driver for the on-board audio that will allow > me to reconfigure the jack. I will definitely give that a try. If it fails, > I have an older / slower desktop machine and a drawer full of decent > Soundblaster PCI cards I can try instead. It's a 1GHz P3, but it should > probably be strong enough for this. If that fails, I've got a dual CPU 2GHz > P4 gathering dust in the corner that's just waiting for a purpose. ;-) > > I'll also follow up on your other great suggestions, including pointers to > other tools/modes and to specific bands/freqs. > > Cheers and thanks again. > > - Doug / KE7SEI >
