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Achmed Jones posted:What's the point? I don't understand what that gets you So, radios today generally have 0.5 PPM oscillator, that's a standard issue. which means for every million hertz any oscillator in your radio is working at, it'll be off by half a hertz. No big deal, right? But the problem is that when you mix and upconvert things, that error is amplified. the 9700 can operate on 1296 MHz at its highest band. Now let's take a look. Oh poo poo, that's almost 650 hertz error up there! There are digital weak signal modes (often used for moonbounce etc) that require _way_ more precision than that. The GPS clock gives the radio a signal that is way, way more stable than the internal oscillator so that even way the gently caress up there, you'll only be 1 or 2 hertz off tops.
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Jan 1, 2021 18:18
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Got it, thank you!
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Jan 1, 2021 20:27
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Coxswain Balls posted:To me it's the same thing as a lot of radio stuff, it's super cool to be able to pull stuff like that out of thin air. Not sure about availability in Canada, but the RTL-SDR brand stick gets you a hell of a lot of radio for a pretty small price.
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Jan 2, 2021 01:22
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Internet Wizard posted:Not sure about availability in Canada, but the RTL-SDR brand stick gets you a hell of a lot of radio for a pretty small price. I got thrown a link to this one which I think is the same thing except slightly more frequency coverage but lower quality and bandwidth? There's so many SDRs out there now that I'm not confident in my ability to avoid the lovely ones, lol.
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Jan 2, 2021 01:38
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Alright you nerds, we are making progress on this crazy idea of running a club over the internet. The ag0on call sign has been saved by our favorite sports audio person (W0CA/nnt) as well as the one that actually saved the call sign initally (N2KG0/Fordan), and we're moving forward with the next steps to make this happen in 2021. The club's charter/bylaws have been confirmed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o_kca7kA5E1Yffv5zS_No74jjarNTGnXFobrEwHKZCw/edit?usp=sharing If you have issues with anything in this document at this time, become a member and voice your vote. Our first order of action is to make sure that anybody wanting to be a member is considered as such within HCO. The next will be to vote on what DMR ID we will submit to BrandMeister to be our talkgroup ID. The club board roles will be initially provided to current active members, which will be announced at a later date.
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Jan 2, 2021 04:12
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Jedi425 posted:I got thrown a link to this one which I think is the same thing except slightly more frequency coverage but lower quality and bandwidth? There's so many SDRs out there now that I'm not confident in my ability to avoid the lovely ones, lol. If anyone knows how to get that working in windows 10 please tell me what the toolchain is? I've tried a few things and just cant seem to get it to come up
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Jan 2, 2021 04:19
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Someone local is going to give me a couple of these that he doesn't need any more so I can try setting up a WebSDR page. It's an older RT820 model but they should be good to learn with, and I can't complain about the price.
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Jan 2, 2021 08:09
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Does the online club only work for US licensees then? It’d be impossible to make a truly international club, wouldn’t it? Could I use that callsign in the U.K.? Don’t know too much about how clubs work elsewhere.
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Jan 2, 2021 11:21
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thehustler posted:Does the online club only work for US licensees then? It’d be impossible to make a truly international club, wouldn’t it? Could I use that callsign in the U.K.? I can't speak on the callsign usage outside of the US, but the way we're trying to structure the club allows international members. I'm sure we'll run into some questionable areas depending on what goal we're trying to accomplish, but learning what we can and can not do is apart of the fun (we're not trying to break any laws). A few months back we tried to hold a DMR net that included the EU but only a few of the US regulars showed up so we ditched the effort. I am more than willing to put it back on the schedule even if we just pick up one person (lookin at you thehustler). The best time we could come up with would be on Saturday morning as we can get some of the US regulars on and not have one of the sad one person check-in net (don't worry if it is this, even the Tuesday night net has had this issue). Best thing I can suggest is to hop onto discord and we can coordinate a time slot for it and hopefully get something going. Sniep posted:If anyone knows how to get that working in windows 10 please tell me what the toolchain is? I've tried a few things and just cant seem to get it to come up Are you having issues with the device not showing up at all, or issues with something like SDR# not able to use the device?
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Jan 2, 2021 16:31
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I’m all for arranging a DMR net on a convenient day. I do tend to ignore the internet connectivity side of DMR so it’ll be fun to switch the Edinburgh repeater to goonchat for an hour. A club that is no judgement, friendly, and encouraging to all levels is what this hobby requires. Reddit as a forum isn’t too bad and I think they may have a net as far as “international collaborations/clubs” go, but there are still some bellends around even on there.
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Jan 2, 2021 19:07
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I ran wsjt-x for over 10 hours on 40m and i am pleased by the coverage with 15-20 meterish length of random wire. Tried to take a picture of my kx3 (RX IQ data)+Behringer 192k USB soundcard+HDSDR+Thunderbolt Gpsdo+Wsjt-x+GridTracker+ Lady Heather's Disciplined Oscillator Program rig (it took more resources to have a truly offline FT8/WSPR rig than i thought) but my cat got in the way  If you squint really hard you might spot my anytone DMR handheld that i WILL USE,INTERNATIONALLY EVEN, if someone can enter the site where the club wants to set it up. It was too much snow there last time  If i can i would like to join SAARS (from norway, as you can see) .
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Jan 3, 2021 12:34
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thehustler posted:I’m all for arranging a DMR net on a convenient day. I do tend to ignore the internet connectivity side of DMR so it’ll be fun to switch the Edinburgh repeater to goonchat for an hour. I am down for a DMR net too... but at the moment I only have a handheld that I need to go sit on my balcony to use. Which isn’t fun when it’s only 2 degrees outside. I’ve been mean to buy an antenna, but haven’t had the time to look into what to buy/what will fit in the limited space. Not to mention, when I did look there were 500 types of indistinguishable coax and connectors. I kinda gave up.
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Jan 3, 2021 12:43
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Horse Clocks posted:I am down for a DMR net too... but at the moment I only have a handheld that I need to go sit on my balcony to use. Which isn’t fun when it’s only 2 degrees outside. Well, don’t overcomplicate it. Get/make yourself a Slim Jim and hang one up somewhere. Coax doesn’t have to be top grade, you’re on a handheld so you’ll be gaining fractions of a watt back with each upgrade and it isn’t always worth the extra cost. If the connector isn’t SMA I’ll eat my hat. Get an adapter to BNC and you’re laughing.
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Jan 3, 2021 13:33
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thehustler posted:Some AM is carrierless so there’s more power to the side bands, aye? That’s another reason to regen it on the radio You can run reduced carrier AM, which can be received in a normal envelope detector (with some distortion) and works well for synch detectors. Another variant I've seen used for marine HF is single sideband with reduced carrier, one of my transmitters will only transmit in this mode when tuned to 2182 kHz for compatibility reasons. I actually built a DSP based synchronous demodulator for my communications receiver last year, it really shines when DXing short wave broadcast since multipath fading sometimes notches out the carrier and/or an entire sideband. Also made it possible to add AM "squelch", variable low pass filters, and selectable sideband in AM mode. 
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Jan 3, 2021 13:45
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DSB is a cool trick but it can piss people off on the air. there was a few month period last year where people were recommending cheap DSB transceivers to run FT8 on, which is extremely rude (14.074 zero beat frequency + 1500 hz audio tone - you're now making GBS threads out inverted FT8 down on 14.072.5 and annoying Olivia folks)
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Jan 3, 2021 19:58
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I’d like to bounce some ideas off of y’all on building an integrated SDR listening post of sorts. I have an RSP2, several of the rtl-sdr dongles and an HF>VHF converter. I’m trying to come up with a way to bring them all in together into one united system. I have a 4gb RAM pi4, but also a mid 2000’s core 2 duo workstation with debian that I decommissioned with no other use currently on deck. Goals currently are automatic reporting of wspr and jt65 type signals, and a web sdr for cruising around when I feel like it. Portability is a secondary goal, but I can give that up if it is necessary to use the beefier computer. Ideally everything could share one or two antennas depending on the bands. My current thoughts would be to dedicate an rtl-sdr or two to the weak signal reporters across the most popular bands, splitting an antenna input into the up converter and then sending that to the dongles. The RSP2 would be put on web sdr duty either through another antenna split ahead of the up converter to the rtl dongles, or given its own dedicated antenna. I think this could all run on the same computer using docker containers and passing the respective USB devices the the appropriate services.
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Jan 4, 2021 00:15
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ickna posted:I’d like to bounce some ideas off of y’all on building an integrated SDR listening post of sorts. I'd suggest not using Docker at all and looking at something like runc/runsc/gvisor. The containerd daemon is heavy, and you're not going to need all the additional networking/swarm bullshit that's added. If you like the interface of Docker, use podman. It is literally the same commands, but skips the interaction with containerd and just loads up what ever OCI container runner you configure (I think default is runc). For the WebSDR side, it's interface is very limited (if it's the same one I'm thinking) and the way that it was developed doesn't really comply with easy scalability. It is great, but was a college kids project that got ditched and I haven't seen much development from additional forks etc. I only state this as it might be work you weren't expecting.
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Jan 4, 2021 03:20
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I'd just get it running with whatever's easiest to get set up before digging too deep into less well documented variants. I haven't messed too much with containers and USB devices, it's possible the containers will need extra privileges applied before they'll be able to talk to USB. You can just run them as privileged=true if you don't want to deal with assigning more granular capabilities, but privileged=true is a bit more risky in terms of system security. The above post meanwhile is confusing containerd with dockerd/moby, which have indeed historically been trash but not in ways that matter for a spare time project. containerd meanwhile is fine. The RPi4 with 4GB should be fine for running most ham software but you'll need to deal with cross-compiling things for arm7 or arm8/64, depending on which OS you've installed. I've had good luck running Ubuntu 20.04 with arm8/64, a big pain point is that cross-arch docker images are often unavailable, but I've been building images using img with qemu on my laptop and that's worked pretty well. But ultimately I'd imagine that just finding the signals consistently will be the bigger thing to figure out. Low signal modes like JT65 are intended to still work below the ambient noise level and can be difficult to find without foreknowledge of the frequency to be processed.
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Jan 4, 2021 03:51
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Thanks for the input. WebSDR is what I was thinking of initially, since I used to listen to a lot of different sites that were running on it when I first got my license. It looks like it has barely changed, and he still doesn't make it available for download either.. so scratch that one. I see that OpenWebRX was abandoned by the original author a year ago but has been forked with activity in the last few days. It includes support for multiple receivers as well as background spot reporting for JT65 and APRS, which certainly simplifies that goal for me. I'm going to give it a go this week.
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Jan 4, 2021 08:33
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i set up the openwebrx docker on my syno, jammed an RTL stick in the front port and it Just Worked. Very cute setup.
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Jan 4, 2021 18:08
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Have anybody used noise canceller devices? I was thinking of buying an active magnetic loop because they reject local noise and stuff but they are expensive. Or is a noise canceller used with my longwire simpler?
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Jan 8, 2021 18:02
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Big Mackson posted:Have anybody used noise canceller devices? I was thinking of buying an active magnetic loop because they reject local noise and stuff but they are expensive. Or is a noise canceller used with my longwire simpler? I've got a Timewave ANC-4, but I haven't been able to play with it much yet. They really work best with an external noise antenna, low to the ground near where the noise is coming from. I think they can be kind of fiddly to deal with, but I've seen videos of them working, but they are probably fairly situational and take some experimentation with a separate noise antenna to get working right. I got mine just as it got cold, so I haven't had time to experiment with an external antenna yet.. probably this spring.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:21
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In my experience Mini-Whips work better than loops, but probably depends on the exact noise type and source. Haven't checked recently but you can get active SWL loops very cheap off eBay, they're pretty mediocre in terms of build quality but worth buying to test if it's worth getting something nicer. I have a Sony AN-LP1 that I use as a travel-antenna, it's nice but apparently quite expensive now.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:27
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manero posted:I've got a Timewave ANC-4, but I haven't been able to play with it much yet. They really work best with an external noise antenna, low to the ground near where the noise is coming from. I live in a building with several apartments so there is a lot of RFI from electricity and tv's and such. 15m cannot be used at all longview posted:In my experience Mini-Whips work better than loops, but probably depends on the exact noise type and source. I had a mini-whip before i installed a longwire. Same noise, except with longwire the radio signals could now power through some of it. I am getting SMPS'ed. edit: that means SiMPSon'ed 
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Jan 8, 2021 19:11
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Big Mackson posted:I live in a building with several apartments so there is a lot of RFI from electricity and tv's and such. 15m cannot be used at all In that case, the ANC does have a built-in whip antenna you can use. It doesn't work in my case, but it might actually work for you.
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Jan 8, 2021 19:17
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manero posted:In that case, the ANC does have a built-in whip antenna you can use. It doesn't work in my case, but it might actually work for you. I have everything power supply and computer and radios in one location so there is definitely RFI it would remove.
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Jan 8, 2021 19:20
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hosed around with openwebrx on the pi4 this week. It's mostly stable with the RSP2, though switching bands sometimes seems like it doesn't pass a gain parameter properly. Even with 5-8 Mbps bandwidths and digital mode decoding, I was only hitting between 50% and 70% CPU use. I spent the better part of a day dialing in the RF and IF gain levels for each band segment, and during that time found some sporadic E that was bouncing a bunch of the CB channels from the west coast all the way out here to the southeast. Once the died off, all I could find were some FT8 signals just above the noise floor across the 30m and 40m bands, though I suspect that was mostly my terrible telescopic whip antenna and poor positioning next to the steel awning at work. I'm contemplating a semi-fixed install of the hardware at my workplace, and one of those PA0RDT mini-whip antenna setups for it. I could actually make use of that steel awning for the ground plane and mount the antenna on top of that. Has anyone tried one of the premade kits off of eBay or amazon? the RSP2 has a bias-t feature that could potentially drive the LNA, though all the ones I have seen for sale have an externally powered LNA so I would have to figure out how to rig it to pull the power off the coax instead. My other challenge is trying to knock out the ethernet and SMPS noise as well. I can't really eliminate the wired network connection since my testing with the wifi connection pretty much saturated the lovely router we have there. A 5v linear power supply that I could drive the pi with does seem like a realistic option though.
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Jan 9, 2021 09:11
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Would there be any issues with replacing the Belling-Lee connector in my SDR stick with an RCA jack so I can use regular AV coax cords as antenna cables? Using an adapter or replacing it with an F-type connector would be the normal way to do it, but I already have a couple of RCA jacks in my parts bin with no shortage of cabling, and a thinner cord would be much easier to run through the wall where my air conditioner is without letting in a draft. I'm thinking of just making the outside end a terminal block where I can connect whatever antenna I feel like using on a particular day.
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Jan 9, 2021 14:43
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Hey folks! I am in a bit of a lovely antenna situation. My 'Antenna tree' was sick and is cut down. That was at 18m distance from my bedroom/shack window, which worked very well on 40 and 80m. Now i'm really trying to get back on air on 80, and preferably also on 160. However, i only have trees at ca. 5m from the window, and ca. 8m from the window. First thing i tried was stringing up a wire to the tree 8m away. This barely worked. Never heard myself any further away than 300km, with 25w of input power on 40 or 80m. Now i'm thinking about stringing a wire between the trees. The distance between those is something between 10 and 15m. But i'm doubting what exactly i'm gonna do. I can do either a horizontal L-antenna, or turn it into a dipole. The most important band for me is 80m, and eventually also 160m. I realize that this is way too long of a wavelength for efficient use - but that doesn't bother me. My main goal is to get *anything* in the air on these bands. So, do horizontal L-antennas work? I highly doubt that a dipole this short (relative to the 80m/160m wavelenght) does anything at all.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:26
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Yeah, sure. I've done many an Inverted L in my day. It depends on how _tall_ they are. 160's probably a wash honestly. But if you can get at least 43 feet/16m of wire in an L (the more vertical the better), you can play on 80-10 with a few radials and a 4:1 unun (not balun!) at the feedpoint.
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Jan 10, 2021 23:03
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All wire will be pretty much at the same vertical level. Can't really go very vertical. Everything of the L will be horizontal, or at best a meter higher than the feed point. The total length of wire will be 15 to 20m. I already have a tuner that can tune just about anything. My GRC-9 has a built in tuner, for my ft-101 i use a diy external thing (that i gotta upgrade cause at 20w things start to get a bit sparky...) 160m is a bit of a stretch, yeah. But anything is better than nothing, and (if i get the 160m band on my yaesu ft-101 working) i have over 100w of cw or psk31 power at my disposal. Next question: my FT-101 works very well on 80 to 15m. But on 160m, output power is just 25 watts at best, and the cathode current very high. Does anyone recognize this kind of problem? It does transmit on the correct frequency when i tune it to let's say 1850khz, but the cathode current is ridiculous - with the same current on 80m, it would put out something like 100w. Tested in a dummy load, of course.
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Jan 10, 2021 23:09
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Just popping in to high five FT-101 buddy. I've not had mine out for a couple of years and never tried it on 160 but if it comes down to it I'll pull that thing out and see if we can duplicate results.
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Jan 11, 2021 00:32
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I'd check caps. Looks like this is a known issue, maybe a bandpass filter has been knocked out of whack https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/power-loss-on-160-meter-ft101e.628281/ (sorry for linking to The Bad Place but, you know)
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Jan 11, 2021 01:13
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Jonny 290 posted:I'd check caps. I've replaced most of mine but.....drat it's so nasty to do work on those things. The traces are lifting before you even touch them with an iron.
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Jan 11, 2021 04:07
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Jonny 290 posted:(sorry for linking to The Bad Place but, you know) Heh. I changed my avatar to some equal rights icon that went around the world a few years ago. Don't recall exactly why, but pretty much in response to a whole bunch of posts like "it's discussible that LGBTQ+ people should have rights'. I haven't been there in a long time (well, i just posted the same question there). I am now a bit lost. It seems to not go above 40w carrier power anywhere now on tune or CW. On CW it should put out 90w, right?! I'm tempted to open up my dummyload and measure voltage directly on the resistor with my scope and calculate power, because i am starting to worry if my swr/pwr meters are displaying power correctly... Dummyload does get nice and toasty, but that's a little 50w CB quality thingie not rated for continuous use. I don't remember if i've ever seen 90w on my own meters - i did get the thing to another guy who did see that it put out in the area of 100w on 80m. Bear with me while i figure out if the meters are reliable, before everyone starts to put in effort for something that's just a lovely meter. E: Connected scope over dummy resistor with 1:10 probe. TX set to CW. Full power tests for *very* short periods. Tuned to max output (first dipped, then tuned to max output according to manual) 21.100 - 75v = 56w = meh 21.250 - idem. 13.9 - 80v 14.000 - 80v = 64w = meh 14.1 - idem 14.2 idem 7025khz full power = 100v (p) over 50 ohm = 100w, great. I(c) 320mA 7100 = 90v 7200 = 90v 3525khz full power = 110v (p) over 50 ohm = over 100w, correct. I(c) max 325mA on built in meter. 3800 - 100v, totally fine. 3900 - 90v, fine. Below 1750 - not tunable, preselect doesn't go low enough. 1750 - 65v = 42w = too low. I(c) 220mA. 1800khz - 60v = 36w. Way too low. I(c) 200mA. 1850 - idem. 1900 - 60v, I(c) 180mA. LimaBiker fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 12:38
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Yeah, you're way low. I was peaking above 120W on 20 and 80 at least from what i remember from the last time I used it.
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Jan 11, 2021 16:26
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I found a cheap noise cancelling device from here https://www.ebay.com/itm/QRM-Eliminator-X-Phase-Noise-Eliminator-1-8-30-MHz-PTT-VOX/284138605298?hash=item4227fb0af2:g:ZXUAAOSwDnpf9Kt2 I think it is worth a shot, it will at least show me if phase cancelling have any effect on noise where i live.
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Jan 11, 2021 16:47
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Motronic posted:Yeah, you're way low. I was peaking above 120W on 20 and 80 at least from what i remember from the last time I used it. I haven't checked peak power on SSB. Undoubtedly that's higher. But 90w is the rated power for CW, so i think it's fine on 40 and 80, too low on the rest. Re: X-Phase noise canceling - i've heard good things about them. I'm planning on making one myself.
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Jan 11, 2021 18:25
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LimaBiker posted:I haven't checked peak power on SSB. Undoubtedly that's higher. Ahhh, okay. I didn't remember that - it's been a while.
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Jan 11, 2021 18:34
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Big Mackson posted:I found a cheap noise cancelling device from here https://www.ebay.com/itm/QRM-Eliminator-X-Phase-Noise-Eliminator-1-8-30-MHz-PTT-VOX/284138605298?hash=item4227fb0af2:g:ZXUAAOSwDnpf9Kt2 I got the MFJ version of one of these for a buck from a hamfest, "broken". MFJ's RF sensing T/R switch circuit is notoriously lovely and the previous owner blew up the last transistor in the amp. One 2n5109 later and it worked fine. Definitely use a hard PTT switch line for any of these type of boxes, don't rely on any RF sensing hijinks if it's got em.
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Jan 11, 2021 19:39
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