[digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
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
[digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
Doug, You can find HF Slow Scan TV at: 3.730 LSB, 7.033 LSB (rare), 14.230 USB, 28.680 USB. These are calling frequencie. So +/-3KHz you'll find SSTV. Marc - PD4U
Re: [digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
14.230 USB is very active... Simon Brown, HB9DRV www.ham-radio-deluxe.com - Original Message - From: marc You can find HF Slow Scan TV at: 3.730 LSB, 7.033 LSB (rare), 14.230 USB, 28.680 USB. These are calling frequencie. So +/-3KHz you'll find SSTV.
[digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
--- 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 Hi Doug, Alot of good suggestions you have received; also consider using: http://www.obriensweb.com/sked/ 73, Bill N9DSJ
[digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
Doug, poke around the laptop a little more and see if there is boost on the Mic input. On my laptop, turning off the boost turns the mic input into the equivalent of a line input. 73, Skip KH6TY http://kh6ty.home.comcast.net
[digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
-Welcome Doug, it will eventually get easy to recognize most common digital modes, by eyesight. Lets start with the basics... If the signal is in USB mode and around 7070, 14070, 10140, 21070 and 28120 it is almost certainly PSK31. Park on 14070 or 10140 USB during the day, turn on the Super Browser in DM780 and you WILL decode PSK31. There is an small chance that one or tow signals in that range will be PSK63 not PSK31, but that will be rare. From a visual perspective, the signal will appear (depending on you eyesight and the claity of the signal being transmitted) to be two tram lines scrolling vertically and about 31 Hz wide. Some people cannot discern the two vertical lines, instead they see it as a narrow solid line about 31 Hertz wide. The above will apply to about 90% of the digital signals that you will see during a typical weekday , the other modes are just not used as much. Using the 20M band as an example (same on 40M) If you move up the band , away from '070... to around 14075 you will run in to a few tougher ones . If it is a SLOW warbling sound that always transmits for a full minute , and is also very narrow in your waterfall, it is almost certainly JT65A or WSPR. Your DM780 software does not support these two low power modes (but with an Icom 718 you will have a LOT of fun with these modes, let me know when you want to try these modes ) As you go further away from 14075, towards 14077 for example, you will run in to two modes that are harder to figure out. The most common ones are Olivia and MFK16. 3581 USB at night is also where these modes may be found.Both of these modes can take a little time to lock on to a signal and start decoding. Let it run 30 seconds or so before giving up and concluding it is a different mode. If it looks 500 or 1000 wide in you waterfall and has a musical type sound, assume it is one of the Olivia modes. If not, try MFK16. As you get to 14080 to 14100. You may hear an old mode called Radio Teletype (RTTY). On the weekends, when there is a RTTY contest on you will hear hundreds of RTTY signals. In your waterfall , the RTTY signal will be roughly 170-200 Hz wide. Almost all common digital modes are tuned in USB, RTTY traditionally is tuned in via LSB. You can tune it using USB. If you hear a strong signal and get jibberish, press the REVERSE put on DM780 and you will get a decode. If u are around 14075-78 , sometime 14068, and hear an odd CW sounding mode that appears much wider than CW should be , it is mostly likely Feld Hell. There is one more that can be all over the bands, a odd pulsing mode than is very wide , it will pop up for a minute and then stop. This is likely Pactor. Your software will not decode this. Give it a week of playing around and I bet you will be able to use eyesight to recognize 90% of the signals Andy K3UK -- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, doug_helbling doug_helbl...@... wrote: Greetings, all. I'm a rather new ham and very recent General class licensee who is very interested in digitial modes. I've acquired a RiggBlaster, fabricated a second computer-to-tranceiver control interface (home brew version of CT17 from N9ZLE) and have got Simon Brown's HRD and DM780 (awesome software so far) apparently working with my little IC-718. I've begun surfing the bands (mostly 10M and 20M) looking for signals. But I am having trouble audibly recognizing the sound of the various modes, however. I get some reasonably good signals from my modest little stealth dipoles (combo 10M/20M), but can't seem to get clean copy ... I try switching through the various digital modes, whether RTTY, PSK31*, or whatever. It could be a noise level thing. I am scratching my head at this point. I have a smattering of sample audio files of some of the modes on the disk that came with my RiggBlaster, and found a few more on KB9UKD's site here: http://www.kb9ukd.com/digital/ http://www.kb9ukd.com/digital/ . Anyone have suggestions for other sources? (yeah, I can spell google ... [;)] ... but my finding so far have not been that good ). To my admittedly inexperienced ears, most of the signals I stumble across sound like like packet modes that use proprietary hardware solutions. Any other suggestions for the Newb Digital Moder looking at sound card modes? I've tried a few of the other digital mode Windoze programs, with mixed results, none as good as HRD/DM780. Should I be trying any other specific software? I've done a little homework, including reading Ford's HF Digital Handbook. I am probably doing something patently wrong. It could be as simple as my stealth antenna is too dang low to the ground and I need to get it up in the air higher to catch a decent signal. It's probably time for me to drop into the local area HAM club and pick a few brains, but I thought I'd start with ya'll here first. It's easier to appear clueless behind an email.
[digitalradio] Re: Newb digital mode guy with Newb questions
Hello, Doug. I have to keep stealth dipoles up as well, and I find that two regular Slinkies, with a 1:1 current balun in the middle on the ceiling of my second-floor shack tune up very well on 40, 30, 20 and 10 meters. I'm sure I'm just warming the clouds, but have made contacts on PSK31 over 1,300 miles away. I use little plastic clips that attach to my wall with 3M Command strips. These are white strips that hold things on the wall, and you can take them off without hurting the paint. I paid $6 for the Slinkies, about $25 for the balun and $6 for the clips. I got the clips at Target, look for the ones designed to hang Christmas lights. With four slinkies and some room I can talk 600 miles on 80m. Forget trying to communicate with anyone close Good luck, and don't let the need for stealth get in the way of fun! --- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, doug_helbling doug_helbl...@... wrote: Greetings, all. I'm a rather new ham and very recent General class licensee who is very
