Tuesday, May 26, 2009

RxTx receiving!

A few days ago I finished the 30/20/17m PA Filter and so my RxTx board is all complete. I put on the connectors and powered it up and plugged it in and... nothing. I got noise and the same stuff if I had the board plugged in or not. Bummer. However the frequencies in Rocky didn't jibe with what I was trying to listen to and after some help over on the Softrock forum (or email reflector as the Hams seem to like to call it) I was on my way. Seems you need to run Rocky once, then you get a Rocky.ini file which you can then edit to have the frequencies you're interested in. I was also a little clueless about the dip switches on the board (which you don't need if you're using an I2C controller like I am, but I finally found this page:
SW1 Settings which helped a lot. Anyway here's a copy of my Rocky.ini file in case it helps anyone else out.

Armed with all of that I fired up the RxTx and my crappy old windows laptop running Rocky and I heard stuff! I was able to make out some voice (although barely copyable) and also heard a lot of CW (Morse Code) which I'd expect on this band. Sadly I can't understand CW yet and I haven't worked out how to have it automagically decoded by the computer. Searching for PSK31 signals didn't yield anything legible.

But it worked and that's the big deal!

Next up is to either set up a proper enclosure with real connectors on it so I can use shielded audio cable, or try a little harder and try and make a contact on it. I'm loathe to try and put it in a container without testing transmit unless I can take it out easily!

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